Fairytale

"I'm a story," he said. "Could you love a story alone?"

"Yes," I said, because that was the simplest and truest thing I knew.

"Ah, but no matter how much you loved me, you'd eventually try to dissect me. You'd attempt to understand why I am, and how I was formed. You'd try to give me meaning. You'd never let me alone."

"What do you mean?"

"I'm a story," he said, "to get to the beginning and the end, you'd have to pluck my heart out to see how I work."

So I did.

I plunged my hand into his chest and words flickered to life on his skin. I tugged at his heartstrings and ripped his heart from its network of vessels. He bled blue ink.

I carried his heart. I carried his heart in my hands, but it crumbled away until all I held was a twig in a handful of dust.

He looked at me sweetly, with his eyes like sea glass, clear and green. But they turned to black and his skin flaked away like burnt pieces of parchment. "Use me," he said.

This is how a story begins and ends: with one's heart and a twig to scratch in a handful of dust.

So I picked up the stick and wrote him again, but this time I wrote me in too.