They aren’t friends.
Melanie tells herself this each time she thinks of visiting Liril. They are not friends.
Not really.
They can’t be.
There’s just something inside Melanie, she tells herself, that has trouble letting Liril go.
The nephilite haunts Melanie’s thoughts, and she keeps finding reasons to go and talk to her, and pretending that she doesn’t love her and she doesn’t hate her and she doesn’t want to own her or be owned.
And also, they’re not friends.
It’s really … Liril and Melanie, that is … it’s not really a big deal at all.
Liril hasn’t cried. She isn’t sad. She hasn’t cried since that first day.
And Melanie, mostly, she’s OK too.
//You will drown in him forever.
You will never die.//
It’s a little hard, sometimes, because she really wants to have the upper hand over Liril’s mother, she finds herself craving it sometimes, like a spider might crave blood, and she can’t, she can’t even really look at the woman any more without seeing those billowing clouds of violet, that indigo, that green, that sick sensation of the words like wind beating from every direction against her soul.
But she’s OK.
She never cries, not where Liril can see.
She reminds herself that she’s cunning, and she’s strong.
//This is a thing that comes to pass.
There’s nothing I can do.//
“She hasn’t aged,” Melanie says, one day in 1988, to her first and fairy lover.
This person who is not my friend.
“She’s maybe even lost a year.”
Not that it matters, or anything.
“Isn’t that really kind of strange?”
David Goldfarb on March 28, 2011 at 12:17 am said:
she really wants to have the upper hand over Liril’s mother, she finds herself craving it sometimes, like a spider might crave blood
I find myself with a definite feeling of schadenfreude that Melanie doesn’t get to have that.
The big question of course is how all this history is going to affect things once the two of them meet again at Elm Hill. And with Tina in the mix. (We have foreshadowing of a “siege”, which certainly doesn’t sound good.)
Xavid on March 29, 2011 at 9:22 pm said:
I do look forward to things coming together at Elm Hill, if for nothing else than for the presence of Truth. And hopefully it’ll show us more of what’s up with the Place Without Recourse.
Also, I hadn’t really thought about Liril not aging before. I always think of her as parallel to Jane, but Jane has a particular excuse, and I don’t recall one for Liril.
Xavid on March 29, 2011 at 9:36 pm said:
Oh, actually, I guess it refers to The Old Man of the Sea (1 of 2) (http://imago.hitherby.com/?p=390).
David Goldfarb on March 30, 2011 at 1:33 am said:
Well, Jane and Liril face some of the same problems with aging, and for the same reasons: what the monster did to them. The monster’s methods have not been made explicit, but it’s been more than hinted at that his abuse includes the sexual.
Jane/Martin and Liril/Micah make an interesting compare-and-contrast. In both pairs it’s the male half who has the power, but the female who has the control. (Which reminds me of that old saying about “behind every great man there is a great woman”, which in turn reminds me of how when Mylitta met Nabonidus, she ended up in a palace and placed, as it were, on a pedestal…and utterly disempowered.) In both pairs, neither member ages in what we would consider the normal way. Jane and Martin are trying to change the world, while Liril and Micah are just trying to find personal freedom.
I find Jane and Martin the more interesting pair, precisely because they have more power. That may just be me.
In “The Old Man and the Sea” Micah steals some milk and leaves it in a place without refrigeration, and it goes bad. Martin takes bad milk to Mei Ming. I wonder if it’s the same milk?