wingborne | is that my name in black and white;

Prompt

something broken, something lost

Flies die by the dozen, and England feels nothing. They throw themselves into his single light bulb in the library, and he sweeps their tiny black corpses into piles by Shakespeare and Byron. They must scream, but he does not hear them. His perusal of Keats is unharmed; they are nothing.

He cares about cats, though. Sometimes they wander close to him, and he feeds them treats because he enjoys the sandpaper tongue against his fingers. They are strays, like him, and so they come to him with missing eyes and torn ears. But he has a smell of immortality, and those only with nine lives are wary about those with ten. They rarely linger long on his porch.

America likes cats. He likes dogs far better. Dogs are handsome beasts, shaggy golden hair and bright eyes, always grinning for a well-thrown tennis ball. They never tire. America rolls around with them, and they jog together in the mornings. Man and dog. Dog and man. England can hardly tell them apart.

England doesn’t know if he likes America. He thinks sometimes he does. Monday mornings, he doesn’t, but Tuesday afternoons, it feels better. He likes twisting his ear and yelling at him, but sometimes his heart beats too fast for his old body. It’s “special” because he wants to be on good terms with America, but it’s really only “complicated.” He thinks about America sometimes when he shouldn’t.

America used to be smaller. He used to fit into England’s arms, and he used to be heavy. He’s heavy now, with the pudge sticking over his belt. But he used to be heavy with emotion, and England held a life in his arms, breathing only in whispers. America loved all things. He petted his bunnies roughly, but kindly, and gave sloppy kisses to England. He used to love fairies, too.

Or so England likes to believe. Because America doesn’t believe in fairies now, and he says it often. Sometimes his words turn into arrows and pierce through the fairies. Every time he laughs and says it, burger in his mouth, England watches as a fairy halts in mid-air, and then drop to the ground. He nearly went mad when he realized it. He screamed at America. He begged him, raw and meek, to stop saying those words. But he didn’t, so his fairies flutter to the ground.

England likes fairies. He thinks they’re small and good. Their hands are tiny, and they are nothing but emotion. When he is cold and lonely, a small hand pulls at his hair. They would bring him to a forest and he would drink dew water from leaves. He knows it’s a dream because he doesn’t have many forests anymore. Sometimes, he isn’t sure if he has fairies anymore.

Sometimes England wonders if he likes fairies more than America, or America more than fairies. America doesn’t give him sweet water, America doesn’t kiss his pain away, America doesn’t tell him that it’s fine to cry when he digs tiny graves. It shouldn’t be a choice, liking one or the other, but it feels like betrayal when England sits in McDonalds with him, and sips a soda like everything is fine as fairies scream and die.

Fairies are important to him. He loves them, with a too pure strain of love. But his heart grows old, and his hands feel numb when he buries them into small mounds before having lunch with America. He loves them until he feels like he's going mad, but there are so few of them now. His fairies die by the dozen, dropping like flies, and he wonders if he will one day feel nothing.