Greatest Fear

In the search of the thing that separates me from you.

"Every snowflake is unique.
"But who ever notices the difference?"
"Blizzard's coming."

Lines from a play written for an audience. But it's true. In the blizzard I constructed the thing that separates you from me. That's not what I wanted. It's the pride in distinction/ignorance of the lack, that prevents me from tearing it down.

A plumed hat exclaims, "How deep!"
"My, yes," costume jewelry sparkles out of melting cleavage, "This child appears to know all the proper footfalls."
"It can pontificate!" The senile old heiress knows. The scent of mothballs is ripe on her paper gown, but her decayed brain still holds a sharp intellect. The one she tried to blunt. Grey glue stiffening around a glittering blade. Anyway, what good is a blade without a hand to wield it? And what good is a sword stuck in stone? And what good does it do to be a unique snowflake in a blizzard, and especially when snowflakes don't have eyes?

Such a question is enough to make the glue around her sword quiver and crack. Meaningless, two-dimensional question presented on an ocean platform. Any diver off this platform will break their neck in the chlorinated wading pool below. A legion of paraplegic recruits to follow me into the underworld. The plumed hat dives. The melted cleavage dives. The heiress frowns. She knows she has to dive with me. Because her blade is encased in polymer glue, because she used it to chop off her right hand, because she chose to do these things. The quivering polymer irritates her brain, makes it feel unwieldy and unreasonably heavy. The scowl on her face as she poises, arms raised, is the last sincere expression she will have access to. She is irate over her descent.

There is some twitching of limbs, some spasmodic nerves resisting sway. Then my disfigured legion rises, drooling, and zombie-like.

You beckon to me with wide open gestures. "Help yourself darling," you have abandoned your paper gown. I wish I had not done this.