Giselle, Third Act
Myrtha’s ghost-skin tastes like petrichor and peach.
Myrtha is everything Giselle never was: stoic, controlled, demanding. Each extension of her wrist, each hop, each twirl is calculated and quiet. Myrtha is breath and rain, that warm darkness of the thickets at night, and Giselle wants her so badly it hurts.
Giselle used to think ghost was another word for gone, that gone was the smallest anyone could be. Giselle does not feel small. She feels herself everywhere: the rings of tree trunks, in branches and leaves and the wind seducing the leaves, in the willis, in Myrtha. The way their fingertips brush over and through each other and each touch is inside and outside her, and sadness is yet a bird caught in her ghost-ribcage.
Albrecht loved in flowers and picnics and promises, in stolen glances and smirks, in lies that pecked at him like scavenger birds, truths he could not act on. Myrtha loves in quiet, tracing the curve of Giselle’s ghost-jaw with one slender ghost-finger, with ghost-eyes that map Giselle’s ghost-body with such care she weeps. Myrtha loves in dance, in the way she pulls Giselle’s ghost-back flush against her ghost-chest, lets her go, spinning, as she moves back to their prey.
Want is a wicked animal. That is what Giselle had been taught. And it killed her, hadn’t it? Now she hears coyotes languish prayers to the full moon, and she doesn’t know what she believes.
She knew Albrecht so well. She had. The way his fear colored his eyes, how his smiles never reached there. After sparing him, Giselle wasted the first few nights in her ghost-body angry at herself for not putting the pieces together sooner.
Giselle does not know Myrtha. She has felt her exhalations at her ghost-nape, lipped letters over her ghost-collarbone, seen a fondness in her dark, watery eyes that Giselle could not name. Many of the others shared their stories, spoke of love and loss, want and grief, what comes after. Myrtha did not speak of before, nor did she speak of after.
Giselle wants Myrtha so badly it makes her ghost-teeth ache. Myrtha’s ghost-skin tastes like petrichor and peach, feels like peachskin, too, the soft fuzz of ghost-hair, Giselle thinks, or else that electric blur where ghost-flesh meets. Myrtha tangles a ghost-hand in Giselle’s ghost-hair, pulls her back to meet her gaze, and Giselle sees ghost-pupils blown wide, and Myrtha wants, too.
