Burning Muse

Kat's Kradle: He kept me in a jar on a high shelf to collect dust and get bleached... Link post

Staff note: Got to me.

katskradlexx:

He kept me in a jar on a high shelf to collect dust and get bleached colorless by the sun’s rays. Or, that’s how it ended up. At first he took me out to look at me every day. He asked me to dance and I did and I kissed his fingertips and he smiled and he promised to see me again tomorrow. But as time passed, he forgot about me and I was just a part of his normal scenery. He passed by me every day like he didn’t even see that I was there. Sometimes I knocked on the glass to try and get his attention, but my small knuckles couldn’t make enough sound for him to notice. Eventually, I stopped trying and just watched as he walked by. Every now and then he would take me down when company came over and pointed out my presence. I danced on their palms and tugged teasingly on their fingers, hoping that if I performed well enough, they would let me out for good since I was no longer loved here. But all the others were just like him. They laughed and grinned at the wonder of me, but I was only a novelty. Soon enough I was back in my jar, back on the shelf to be forgotten again.

I made friends with other things he had long forgotten: a faded photograph of a smiling girl, a tiny stuffed bear, and two dead flies. I talked to them through my jar but they never talked back. Maybe they couldn’t hear me through the glass. Still, I talked for sunset after sunset until I had said all the words that anyone could ever say. And then I was quiet. For a long time. Sometimes I tried to dance, but I always hit the sides of the jar and had to just sit down again. I waited for the day when he would take me down again and maybe I could persuade him to let me loose, but that day never came. The last time I saw him, he took me down from the shelf and looked through the glass with a disgusted expression. I was gray and limp and covered in cobwebs. A useless, forgotten thing. I couldn’t hear his last words through the thick glass, but it probably wasn’t anything I wanted to hear anyway. Because the next thing I knew I was tossed into a bin with a faded photograph of a smiling girl and a tiny stuffed bear. My jar shattered at the bottom and speared clean through me. I felt bad for getting blood on the smiling girl’s face.