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four eps into mabel relisten and i want to die for anna limon, which makes me a peak mabel martin writer

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@behld missed a call from an unknown number.

hello, archivist. it was very difficult to find your number. i found it carved into the bark of a tree that sprouts and expands without even a hint of sunlight, one of the thousand-thousand columns holding up the dirt roof of my shared throne room. i can see its roots winding through the ceiling like wooden veins in a body. i have to say that i am surprised you have an answering machine. i must wonder how often you receive voicemails, or how often you even check this inbox. perhaps i am speaking to nothing and no one. to dust and books and the ceaseless watcher alone. i am used to speaking to emptiness, though, so that can't deter me. nothing deters me. are you too busy consuming others' words and sordid confessions, the ones you draw out of them, to answer your office phone? when i imagine it i imagine it like you are hooking your fingers inside someone and pulling vital things out. i imagine you weighing their stories like a mortician might weigh an organ, the dismissive thunk of something hitting a scale, the creak of the metal bowl as it swings and lowers by a few degrees. how do you record it, archivist? in time? in complexity? in how terribly it frightens?

you must have some barometer. or is it all subconscious? is it so entirely outside of your control, to know what secrets nourish you best?

[a faint singing. a song about a murder, and a girl drowning, and the man who killed her by his negligence. the song trails off mid-word, and there comes something like giggling for a moment. a click, and silence.]

i have been thinking about similarities between you and anna, archivist. you ought to feel lucky. of course, i hold you two in very different regards, but i both think you are naturally inclined to search. i think you like to look. but at the same time, i think anna is more stubborn than you. don't worry. i'm not insulting you. i have never met anyone who is quite as stubborn as anna, not in the whole of my life. i love her for it as much as it often irks me. but i think you are stubborn in other ways. when you commit to pursuing something, you cannot let go. have you ever held onto something too tightly? have you broken it in the force of your grip? perhaps you have. perhaps you haven't. either way, i think it's an interesting exercise.

you must wonder why i hate you so. or perhaps you try not to think of me at all, even as i worm my way into your brain. parasitic, yes, but in the same way as any parasite, i am unaware of the harm i cause. there is no truly nefarious drive behind it. this is what i do to protect her -- anna limon, under the hill with me. sometimes, when you love someone, you do not let them speak. you do not let them even hear the question. you step in front of them and say that you will tell this story because that is a kindness for the person you love. i know you think i have little kindness, which is true. i foster unkindness in me like my own certain kind of parasite, eating me up until i am hollow, just space for vines and leaves and blooming flowers.

you want to know? i think i have a little bit of every one of your category of story in me. i have a house that twists and winds, all those layers of dirt pressing ever-closer, things winding through and of me, doppelgangers and fire and games like webs and so on. and so forth. forever. not even anna knows how far the hill might stretch if she willed it to. sometimes i imagine our strange little orb of a planet as a worm-ridden apple, and the hill goes everywhere, and out we crawl, blind and strange creatures, unnatural and abhorrent. i like the idea of being an abhorrent creature, especially under the prying gaze of another. why should you see me as anything else? i am not beautiful or kind or gentle.

i am exactly as i am. and that is what you get to look at.

i think about it. how you might weigh my story. the wet and bloody slop of it into the scale, part and parcel of what you do, the gore of it. does it even register, or do you turn the other way and keep going? i think everyone should be aware of the nuances of their work. i assume you did not know what you were signing up for. if the job listing had been honest no one would take it. but you are still the tool of something. you are being wielded by a larger thing than you.

maybe that's why you are so resigned to it. you have no way out. you have no way towards anything. you are a bird in a cage and all you can do is look at the bars. i would empathize, but it is a waste of time. either you escape or you don't.

either your life is worth something, archivist, or it isn't. and i certainly can't help you with that.

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@thraed left a message: i was alone, but for my reflection.

then, to summarize: you weren't alone. you never were. we both know this. although perhaps, anna, your reflection has never been like mine. perhaps it has never moved so independently, or been both so like and unlike you. did you ever peer into a reflective surface and not recognize yourself? i have begun to wonder, as of late, if i just was seeing mabel martin as she was in the mirror. not me. or perhaps more me than i ever was. you are telling me about your time in the house, the house that is yours now more than it was mine, the house that wants to keep me. both of you are aligned on this. both of you want me as your hoard, but when i think of you keeping me, i think of something safe, whereas the house makes my teeth grind against each other down to the jawbone.

how hostile i am to it.

yet you seem amicable with it. did you walk among its halls, yanking the black cloth down from the mirrors and trying to see yourself again and again? were you worried that you might find sharp teeth or an inhuman glint to the eye? or were you so certain in what your reflection might look like that it didn't worry you at all? were you that brave or foolish? i can imagine you being both, considering what you did for me. how you walked below the hill for me, and gave up yourself for me. there was a bargain, but it was one you barely seemed aware of. you gave yourself up like you were worth nothing, and that was, i think, one of the things that angered me the most about it. how fast you simply consigned yourself to a prison just so i would be free.

things trap us, anna. i have been trapped my whole life, by sally, by the school, by the hill. whenever i looked in a mirror it was like i was trapped again, but this time by what i was not, or what i lacked, my body containing nothing of mabel mayapple martin even as the exterior looked just so. i do not think i am the same as veratrice. i am no bundle of twigs given life and breath and even blood. but there was something made about me. there was something made of me, or in me, and i think my reflection might have been trying to tell me that all along.

i think reflections keep secrets. they are our true selves through a sheet of glass, trapped, yearning, trying to claw their way towards us. trying to kill us, in my case, because neither i nor her have ever done anything by halves. i can at least appreciate her commitment, and see it in myself. perhaps we are only unlike in other ways, anna. what would you do if confronted by both of us? would you recognize which one is me and which is her, or would you say that we are both equally mabel martin, that i wield that name even if i was not born with it? perhaps you would kiss us both so gently, and so sweetly, that we might become one thing, an entire person rather than two halves split like an apple. it is so easy to patchwork things together under the hill, to sew things together until they twine into each other.

and you are now of the hill. you rule the hill, and you rule everyone under it, and only on occasion do we venture up into the house, your steps gentle in its halls, and mine brittle like every long-lost daughter. you cover the mirrors again for me. when you look into them, do you see your arm as whole and no longer bone? do you imagine that your mouth commands less, that it might laugh more lightly and easily, that you are not king?

i think you like being king anna of the hill. i think that, like anyone, there is a part of you that likes settling into power, especially when you wear its mantle as easily as the wreaths of my flowers i weave around you.

perhaps you will never be unsettled by your reflection in the way i am. perhaps the siren song of i am, i am, i am would do nothing to seduce you. ❝ and what did you see? ❞ i ask, my head resting on your shoulder, eyes closed against the dark of the hill. ❝ do you see you as lovely as i see you, anna? or do you close your eyes and imagine something else? ❞ i press a kiss to the curve of your throat, nothing but the slightest hint of my lips against your skin, and i imagine the mark i leave there would only show up blood-red in a mirror.

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@shedivine left a message: dirt stained hands cradle mabel's own. your dry / chapped lips press to her palm in a tender gesture and worms spill from your mouth like flowers. ( jane prentiss. )

how can i deny anything that is as of the earth as i seem to be now? anna, you are not quite of dirt as i am. to sit on the throne, to bear the mantle of kingship, i don't think you could ever be the same as the rest of us. you are purified, anna, the bones of your body cleaned and bleached and perhaps even burnt by me. things grow and live in me, though. forsythias tickles the cords in my throat. hellebores sprout from my gut. chrysanthemums wind through my thighs. if i did not love you i think i would love the dark wet earth most of all, and the way you can sink into it. when i was a child i would often wish that the garden was not an extension of the house, that it was wild and free as it deserved, that sally with her gardening shears would not snip away at growths that displeased her. i knew how they felt, the wounds she inflicted without discretion.

in that, me and the garden were like sisters, on some days.

jane presses her dry, cracked lips to my palm, a blessing and a kiss from the woman with worms under her skin, the holes in her where wet white forms dig themselves free. there are worms in her mouth too, and no words, and i smile and smile until it aches. do you know what it is like to smile like that? i do it rarely, anna. only at you, and only at moments like this. i smile because i think jane and i are like things. i know what it is like to itch and itch at things growing under your skin until you simply accept them, until they are just as much you as your own body.

❝ thank you, ❞ i say as tenderly as i can bear, and this must mean something, and i am not tender at anything. my soul is like flint and my words are the sparks striking off of it, carried forth into the world on the force of my mind scraping against that eternal thing.

all of us want to belong to something grander. perhaps i always wanted to belong to you, anna, and for you to belong to me. time is like that. it is never as linear as most people want to believe. we rule each other. every step we take apart or in disagreement is that leash, bound around both of our wrists, unfurling another inch until we see at what point it begins to chafe. jane prentiss, i think, has chosen to belong something, at the risk of the dissolution of her body. do the worms create new tunnels, or do they have enough now? will her body eventually be eaten away by these thin white things, their blackened heads, the wetness they leave behind? will they make so many tunnels that the sinews of her body can no longer hold together, and that will be the end for her?

i touch her jaw with my hands, holding her head so gently, the two of us sitting in the dirt together, my thumbs running over some of the tiny holes in her cheeks. ❝ you are always welcome here, jane, ❞ i tell her, and i mean every syllable of it. ❝ you always have a place here under the hill. somehow i doubt we could ever keep you out. you're as of the earth as any of us. you're here, with us, and i think i like you being here, jane. and i like very few things from just about anyone. ❞

it's true. in most things i see only threats and rot. but sometimes i can find comfort in the very same thing.

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@consequntial​ left a message: he kissed me and left me and died.

and this is how every story ends, especially some tragic love story. we've been writing stories like this since the beginning of time, clara, haven't we? or -- perhaps, not we, but them. i don't think you are quite like them. we are both separate now. we have both seen things, and been seen by other things, and now i do not think either of us would ever fit in with the world at large. the evidence of your strangeness is at least more subtle than mine, although mine can only be seen in glances and reflections and through the holes in particularly carved stones. i fear i may inadvertently frighten children in the street, clara, although i have never been particularly worried about that to begin with. the terror i might accidentally bring with me, a miasma of it. people have known i am strange from the moment i speak, and now i think they would find me to be a threat.

good. i am one.

can you summarize a relationship so simply? as a series of steps, an arc with a beginning and an ending? i have seen anna very little, but here we are, descending below the hill for her, or trying to, looping through the garden and the grounds until i find a way to where we need to go. anna and i know each other through secondhand experiences, through words trapped in voicemails, through the barest grasp of our hands, through the one moment we saw each other before things changed, and shifted, and anna saved me by damning herself. we have not even kissed, and yet she may do the same. she may have left me and died. this hypothetical has been rotting in my skull, making the boundaries of it reek of death and the thoughts resulting from it wriggling around like maggots devouring a corpse.

she could be dead. perhaps the king decided she was not enough, or she wronged someone else below the hill with her stupid stubborn will and her inability to bend on anything. as if i am any better, but at least i know how to play the game. anna is a nurse, anna has healing hands, anna is not like you or me, clara, and i worry, despite myself, at what may be happening to her. the hill changes you. i would know. i have never truly been mabel martin but now i am even more something else.

this man who died. danny. do you ever feel relief that he cannot see you as you are now? do you ever feel like the timeline of your love was looped around a ticking clock? did you ever fear that he would look at you and not see you as you wanted to be, but instead as you were? i do. i fear this almost all the time, as much as i believe that anna would see me. all we have is our belief. but i don't think i should tell you that. it feels... well, i am unkind at every opportunity, but i am particular about how it manifests. you have walked on bad ground in order to help me. i cannot treat you in the way i would treat everyone else.

too bad. you would be safer for it. sometimes i think you are trying to comfort me by telling your story, to tell me that you have been through enough, as if you are interviewing for some kind of deranged job that comes only with danger. you are succeeding with no such thing. you chose to come here. it is your choice. i only gave you permission to follow me, and if you wanted to, and if i had said no, you could have tried anyway. everyone has to take responsibility for the things they choose to do, in every moment. i have no time for anything else.

❝ not an uncommon story, ❞ i tell her, stepping delicately around the crawling vines of some bush, reaching out into other parts of the earth. ❝ in fact, i think it's one of the oldest stories there is. sometimes i think love was only defined by its absence, or by its aftermath. how else we would ever know we were in love if not for heartbreak? ❞

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—   ask meme   :   MABEL,   a podcast by becca de la rosa and mabel martin.   episodes 23 (bull in the maze) & 24 (coalescence).

i’ve been cultivating unkindness. i’ve been cultivating a lot of things — i’m a fertile field, it turns out — but unkindness is the most interesting.

it is unkind of me to try and play a trick on you.

i can hear everything, warped and distorted but broadcast somehow.

i can’t dig you out; i can’t reach my fingers deep enough inside my own brain, inside my own ribcage.

without you, divorced from even the idea of you, i have no substance, no form.

you are the antithesis that gives me definition.

another tragic love story, who needs that?

tragedy is the point.

do you think you have a monopoly on anger?

i’m not really anything like a person.

i love you and love you and love you, just as i am gone and gone and gone.

i can’t imagine a version of myself that would not love you.

i dream of you. sometimes in my dreams you are singing. sometimes you’re raging at me.

don’t leave me.

i killed someone. i killed someone.

i’ll set myself on fire to give you light.

i don’t want you to be lost. i don’t want you to be stuck. i just want you to be free, and joyous, and buoyant.

i woke up needing you, you artery ripped loose from me, all bloody and twining.

time rattles on its hinges.

i’ve come to barter.

do you think i’m as fickle as a human?

are those matches? what do you think you’re doing?

i do not have time for this. you can be angry at me later, you can scream and rage at me when you’re not in danger anymore.

am i the martyr or are you?

there are other ways to get me to shut up, you know.

i believe you. i always believe you.

you’re always so right. it must be such a burden.

i must hate you, is that it? that’s why i did all this, because i want you gone.

i am with you because i want to be. that’s all.

i will love you like a fire loves a forest.

time has made liars and cheats of us all.

i will make a bullet of my mouth. i will make a knife of my heart.

you think you are the monster at the end of this book?

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really hard to write metas about mabel martin as much as i want to because every post is just like [screams in the woods] [does misandry] [miette tweet @ anna limon]

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send in ‘dial tone.’ for me to write the fractured voicemails your character will receive from one mabel martin.

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you left a message on the underside of an oak leaf and i only just got it today

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trying very hard to come up with more verses for mabel but all i have is ‘the canon florist au’ and ‘tma au which is barely an au’ and nothing else

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@behld left a message: do you even know yourself?

how lucky, to be able to ask this from a position of power, archivist. i should ask you this question back. it's a more interesting question in terms of your answer rather than mine: do you even know yourself?

fine. i shall entertain this thought. i don't know all of myself, but i know what i am enough to make a shape out of myself. what that means is that i am exactly what i am, and i do not deny this fact. i am rash and cruel and wicked and i sing strange songs and i have flowers growing from me, and these are all the boundaries of me. are you asking if i know mabel martin? are you asking if i've ever met mabel mayapple martin? i have seen her in the mirror a thousand times, from either side of it. i have stolen her life. i wear her skin and her name like it is mine because i have made it mine, and no other would be recognized in it. like the folk below the hill i cavort in it, dancing among the bloody remains of mabel mayapple martin,

but i think that, if i tell you this, i would see something curdle in your expression. i told sally once about the girl on the other side of the mirror, the girl with fury and sharp teeth, the one who broke the mirror and fed me glass and struck me dead. in fact, the only person who i think would not recoil is the very person i am protecting from you. really, you seem like, from what i know of you and your institute, the type of person that might recoil at the idea of mabel, of not-mabel, of me. this is not to say i care at all for your disgust. it spills over me like water, archivist, there and then gone, dripping uselessly into the dirt. nothing you can do will touch me.

you can look at me. i almost don't mind being looked at, were it not for the sheer number of eyes, and how they all burn with light, and how you try to get me to answer questions that  i dislike. i will answer them. i am compelled to. but the watcher with you is not as discerning about how i answer it. there are so many truths, and i can twist them around myself in the same way the flowers and vines twist through me. i am not a girl with armor. i have been hurt a thousand times. but when it comes to words, archivist, and what i tell, i defend myself better than an army could.

❝ i know enough, ❞ i say, smiling sugar-sweet and lovely, like how i used to smile when i sang, even as every thorn in me dug into my flesh and skin. ❝ i know just enough, because i know where the knowing ought to stop. no mystery to myself would make me... quaint. and boring. perhaps i like myself best when i don't know something, archivist. can you even conceive of that? can you ever have that kind of acceptance? or will you know and know until there is nothing left to know, until you've eaten up all the world's knowledge and it is dust in your mouth? or, well -- let me tell you this. it has always been dust. no wonder you are so empty, and starving, and no wonder it feels bottomless. you have been eating dust your whole life, and you have only noticed now. it's alright. sometimes it takes a long time for us to realize such things. ❞

i think of the figs turned to flowers, petals wet with honey. i think of the leaves crunching in my mouth as i ground them into bitter mush and swallowed, trying to fill my empty stomach. i know something about eating, archivist, and eating well when your meals are nothing but dirt and illusion. you can pretend anything fills you when you've subsisted on nothing but it for long enough, when your meals were locusts and leaves and lilies.

oh, i know myself. i know what kind of monster i am, and i accept it. that is the only war i will ever allow myself to lose.

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what is your primary feeling in longing?

melancholy - In longing, you are melancholy. You feel deeply and quietly, the feeling of yearning constant, like your own personal raincloud over your head that rains cold and collects in your heart, sometimes filling to overflow. The feeling follows you around and you push it away, but its always just a step behind; when it catches up to you, it turns your expression from a bright smile to a brief look down and your lips pulled into a kind of grimace. You bite your lip to break the look and hope no one notices. But secretly you hope someone did. You know this feeling is a creation of your own mind but you just can't shake it, and in some ways, you don't even want to. You know in your head what you desire is doubtful, but in your heart you don't want to give it up. The feeling is close to sadness but it's deeper, more meaningful than that. It pulls at your gut in a way that could bring you close to tears with a mere thought of that which you seek. Be strong my love, your time will come. 

tagged by: @wheelturns tagging: whoever wants to!

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@bookburnt​ left a message: there’s more than one way to kill someone.

what i know is that gerard keay likes to be called gerry, and he is here in my house with an old woman who is talking to another old woman. sally and gertrude, gertrude and sally, two old crones discussing the stories of the martin house over tea. i am only here to visit sally begrudgingly, like some kind of awful tradition, as if i have any idea what those are. the house makes something twist in my gut when i am gone too long, i think. it whispers to me. i dream of its halls and the mirrors i covered with black cloth, which this visit were uncovered again. and once these two leave and the hour is late, i will creep through its halls and cover them once more so that i cannot see the girl in the mirror again. i can't risk such things. i know how dangerous a reflection could be.

so i asked sally if i could go to my room when our guests arrived, which is not my room but of course my mother's room, long empty and covered in dust. appearances matter so much to sally martin. gertrude cannot send mister keay up into the attic with the locusts and me crouched in the corner on a moth-eaten rug. oh, no. we could never appear so uncivilized. it was worth it when i saw the disgust and anger cross her wrinkled face, just for a moment, and it was like i was young again and singing too loudly, or telling her about the things i heard, or telling her that i saw her dreams and i knew she would die in a hospital room with screaming monitors and bleached white tile around her and no one that ever truly loved her there to see it. you lived alone, and so you will die alone, sally martin, and this is my promise to you.

i still believe this. in the same way that i believe in the strength of my name, thrice beginning with the same letter, and in the same way i believe in the house. if we were friends i would braid flowers in his hair.

so here we are, mister keay and i, in not my room, in my house, in my garden, near the hill. they want to know about the stories. they want to know if i have seen things, but there have been no direct questions yet. only a kind of quiet conversation.

i am told there is more than one way to kill someone, when we talk about the deaths and disappearances for three generations now, how it's only lily and i left in the walls of my ancestral home, and i laugh. ❝ oh, i know that, ❞ i say. ❝ my mother, lily, died among the flowers, bluebell and buttercup and begonia. sally martin's been dead for a long time, even though she hasn't realized it yet. and i think i died too. the girl in the mirror was angry. so very angry! then she put glass in my food and killed me. ❞

i look for something in his expression. a twitch. you can't prod at people like that, mabel, my teachers used to say. you'll frighten them. good. i am frightening. i let the words sit just long enough, and then i laugh, and run my fingers through the tangles of my hair. ❝ no, ❞ i say. ❝ no, i'm joking. don't worry. i know there's other ways besides hurting someone to kill them. i've seen it happen. sometimes you can just steal someone's life, or treat them like nothing, and that's killing them too. it's all we engage in, really, most days. finding ways to kill each other without doing it. don't you think it'd be more honest? ❞

i probably should ask something else. but it feels right to ask, and it feels like something he might know the answer to, or maybe he's thought about it. maybe i just don't trust people who come searching for something, who seem to know both too much and too little all at once.

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@thraed left a message: the king, aghast, witnesses the revolt of his pawns.

that's the funny thing about chess. a pawn can cross the board, traversing dangers and everything bent against it, and it can become almost any piece except for a king. a pawn can never become a king. at best it can become a queen, who is still ruled and still caged. they cannot switch sides; they cannot do anything except grow to fit a more grandiose cage. what does the pawn think, i wonder, when it crosses the bard and becomes something else? when it transforms? when it no longer has to skitter among the walls and in the undergrowth, snaking among leaves and keeping its belly low to the dirt, praying that it is too small to notice? in the grand scheme of the game, pawns are often nothing more than bodies to put between one threat and another.

perhaps that is our power -- that we are to be underestimated, that the hound of the sun and the hare of the moon both see us as nothing more than tools to wield against each other, and aurora silver too. perhaps her most of all. i believe that, given enough time, we could gain grudging ground against those below the hill; i believe, concurrently, that we could gain nothing with aurora silver. but for right now she is not our focus. we want revenge. you, and i, and the too talkative bundle of twigs as well.

we have been caged again and again. by purpose. by leashes. and soon we will not be, or so i hope, you with the voice of god and me as your champion. the only thing that will bind us is each other, and anna, i think that is something i can live with.

that is an eventual end, though. for right now we are still rats, still pawns, still things that crawl and slither among the dirt, blanching away from anything like sunlight. if we spend long enough down here, anna, what will our revolt become? will veratrice's twigs rot as the moisture builds in them? will we become cave-things, eyeless and sallow, writhing in the wet and the dark with only each other for solace? that might not be as terrible as it sounds. i would kiss you nevertheless, anna, and hold you and touch you even if you became something else. even if we both did.

no matter what, then, this is about transformation. we will become something other together. does that frighten you? i don't think it frightens me anymore. veratrice is ahead of us, moving through the tunnels with a twitching in her fingers, listening for the sound of the king, the scream of him among existence, his voice alone bending everything to his will. the whole world here, underneath the hill, turns upon the king's will. that is what i am worried about. why would he let us run? why would he not merely trap us? what machinations are we playing into? is our revolt just a game between the hare and the hound, anna?

has all of this happened before, and will keep happening, because we both know how time both is and is not a simple progression?

i should try to think of things less that we cannot change. only what we can control, which is ourselves. ❝ i could never imagine what our king being aghast would have looked like before you arrived, ❞ i tell you. i mean it. it was outside my conception. my voice lowers. i want this to be just us, just ours, and you never know who might be listening, or how the walls bend closer to absorb our words and echo them again miles away. ❝ we have made ourselves vulnerable, anna, haven't we? you and i? ❞ your hand made of bone, cool to the touch. ❝ you make me vulnerable. i'd revolt a thousand times over for you, no matter how many times he tries to strike us down. ❞

i want to kiss you, anna, when you look at me like that. i want to press my lips everywhere -- the bones gripping my fingers, the visible pieces of your skin, the familiarity of your lips, to listen to the way that your voice sighs when i press my lips against you. all of this. the revolt, perhaps, is that i chose to love you with intention. i chose it. i let you rule me. i choose it again with every moment we spend together, with the fact that i would be your champion against every slight against us.

❝ we are going to win, ❞ i say. i mean it, borne on my good name. on your hand of bone, on my ever-burning body. these are the things i would wager. ❝ anna limon, we are going to win, you and i, and i will go with you wherever it takes us. ❞

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send in ‘dial tone.’ for me to write the fractured voicemails your character will receive from one mabel martin.

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send in ‘dial tone.’ for me to write the fractured voicemails your character will receive from one mabel martin.