drink the bones
Rule of Rose // Love Letter
Meg and her letters - a confession, a plea; a collection of childish hopes, perfumed with foolish devotion."O Diana, Diana! I love you with all my heart."
Diana scoffed, repulsed by the very notion. What did that pathetic peon know about love? Nobody had ever loved her. Diana doubted seriously that anybody ever would. Meg just wasn't all that likeable.
What was she even expecting, giving such a childish thing to her?
Had she thought Diana might like it? That Diana - a Duchess, for Heaven's sake - would gaze upon Meg’s scrawled handwriting, the smudged letters and crinkled paper that Meg had mistaken for acceptable stationary, and… what, exactly?
Love her back?
She tore the letter in half.
"O Diana, Diana! I love you with all my heart."
The blazing goat would not be coaxed. No matter how Diana shoved the now tattered paper into its stupid, wretched face, it would not eat.
No matter how she struck it, it just kept turning up its nose. Kept trying to retreat.
But there was nowhere to go.
Eventually, the anger subsided, and she felt better.
She stuffed the letter under Mary, who gave no response, and went to tell Wendy that she’d found the goat.
"O Diana, Diana! I love you with all my heart."
Meg was crying.
Her face was hot, and damp and unpleasant against Diana’s bare skin, but Diana held her close, anyway, stroking her short blonde hair. Resisting the urge to tangle her fingers in it and pull, to snap Meg’s head back by the roots.
But only just barely.
It was a terrible mess. The letter Meg had worked so hard on, torn in half. Her precious notebook that she labored over, ruined. Pages scattered, crumpled and ripped.
Diana couldn’t help but smile, just a little.
“Mary and Sally must’ve ate it,” she said softly, petting and coddling the younger girl. The frames of Meg’s glasses dug into her as Meg pressed herself even harder against Diana, trying desperately to derive some comfort from the charade.
Eleanor watched from the corner of her eye, her blank and vacant face stubbornly pointed at the wall. Did she disapprove of Diana’s behavior? It was always hard to know with Eleanor, but what difference did it make? Diana outranked her.
"O Diana, Diana! I love you with all my heart."
Diana rolled over, trying to find a comfortable position on the thin mattress. Her leg was bothering her again. Clara had changed the dressing that morning, and she’d done an absolutely rubbish job of it. Diana wondered why Mr. Hoffman kept her on; she was useless! She was much too old to be so clumsy; to be crying all the time. Diana was a full two years younger, and she never cried unless she had to.
She rolled onto her back, and then, finding no respite there, onto her other side.
She sighed, her thigh throbbing. If she didn’t get to sleep, she’d be every bit as useless as Clara in the morning.
The mattress beneath her squeaked and shifted. If she looked over the edge of her own bunk, she’d see Meg looking up at her, the words already on her lips: can I sleep with you?
Diana didn’t move. A moment later, the mattress squeaked again, and Meg sighed. A short time after that, the ghastly roar of Meg’s snoring.
A short time after that, Diana’s eyes shut, and she was gone.
"O Diana, Diana! I love you with all my heart."
That night she dreamed in slivers and fragments.
She dreamed of wings, and scales, and rain.
She dreamed she was on an airship, swimming through the stars.
She dreamed of red crayons that wrote in all the wrong colors, giving birth to words and shapes her hand hadn’t meant to write.
She dreamed she was in the garden, surrounded by roses.
Her mother was there, with seashells in her long red hair, and her legs knit together in a long, shimmering fish tail. She was singing a song Diana couldn’t remember when she was awake, no matter how hard she tried. She was waiting for Diana to bring her flowers, but Diana couldn’t seem to collect any. She picked and picked, but the roses withered and died in her hands, leaving her with a handful of thorns.
She went around to the other side of the garden to try a different bush, hoping that a different bush would offer better results, but found that the other bushes were broken and bare. She turned back to the first bushes she’d tried, and found them equally barren. She turned to her mother, who was growing impatient.
“It’s much too late now,” Mummy said, sadly. Diana thought she looked much older than she had when they’d first got there, and there was seaweed in her hair. “I’m afraid they found me first.”
Mary and Sally had appeared on either side of her long, glittery mermaid tail.
"This is your fault!" Diana cried, throwing the rose-less stems she'd been holding at the black and white goats. "I can't find any flowers for my mummy now, thanks to you!"
“Sorry,” said Sally, her mouth filled with a waxy mash of petals and scales. “We must've eaten them.”
"We love you with all our heart," said Mary, her own mouth filled with paper.
Diana watched in horror as Mary lowered her head, and tore off one of the silvery fins with a dry, papery rasp…
"O Diana, Diana! I love you with all my heart."
The letter was long gone, but the words Meg had written were like a curse.
Every time she saw Meg, she was reminded of them. She began to avoid the library, the cafeteria, the attic, anywhere she might be obligated to interact with the other girl.
It was not an entirely disagreeable arrangement.
She was even feeling a great deal better about the entire situation when she found it, carefully taped back together, at the foot of her bed.
There was a peculiar tightness in her chest this time as she tore it into so many pieces, it would never be put back together.
"O Diana, Diana! I love you with all my heart."
Oh, sure. Love.
Diana knew about Love.
She hadn't really cared for Daddy, he was loud and cruel and smelled like the cage Wendy kept her rabbit in. It wasn't until he got sick that she really got to spend time with him, and she had loved those hours beside his bed in the hospital. Watching him wither and grow frail, the way his skeleton had emerged beneath the skin. Bruises that mysteriously appeared on him, as they once had on her.
"I love you with all my heart," he'd said, that last day as his eyes had fluttered shut and his mouth had struggled to form the words. He really thought he'd made things right. She'd reached out and pinched his nose until mummy had swatted her hand away.
Mummy had been quite the opposite; Mummy had loved her. Just not as much as she'd loved Diana's new daddy. Her new daddy hadn't loved her at all, and so mummy had brought her here… so a new mummy and daddy who both loved her would find her.
Only nobody had come looking.
"I love you with all my heart," she'd said, her face hot and damp against the top of Diana's head. Diana had tried to hold on to her, but Mummy had gently pried her arms apart and stepped back, out of her reach. Mr. Hoffman had held her close to him until her mummy was well out of the door.
She had hurt so much, she thought she might die from it.
But she hadn't died.
She had grown older.
Nobody had loved her for a long time, and the pain had dulled and gone finally numb.
Then, slowly, Mr. Hoffman had come to love her.
"I love you with all my heart," he said, leading her into his bedroom. Pulling her into his lap.
He loved her, and loved her and loved her, with one hand over her mouth, and the other binding, bruising her wrists. He loved her, oh, he did, he loved her so much it hurt.
Love, Diana was quite sure, was not a kind thing.
It was something that happened to bad girls who deserved it.
"O Diana, Diana! I love you with all my heart."
Meg gasped, her eyes wide with hurt surprise, and the rose fell, forsaken, to the dirty tile between her knees. She clutched at her finger, where a perfect bead of blood bloomed on the tip.
“Why?” She asked.
Diana smiled, and tilted her head.
“Because I love you with all my heart,” she lied, and lifted Meg’s injured finger to her lips.