lesson #37: it is sometimes difficult to be happy with another person's happiness
i. she had a smile like a toothache. it began at the lower-right edge of her vermillion: she'd poke it with her tongue, a maneuver that paralyzed the right side of her face while the left angled for the floor. her lips would begin to quiver from the tension of twisting in opposite directions. an invisible force gripped her neck and her head blurred like a church bell; the reverberations massaged her face into a more uniform composition, but her lips still quivered, could no longer conceal her dull agate teeth, the bursts of air that leapt from her throat like abortive fireworks punctuated with tongue flicks and spittle.
ii. shimmering ligaments have been raining for days. i keep beneath trees and impermeable things, pray hephaestus forge a blade of gravity and i will teach the void to scintillate in your name. he sends no reply. his forge must spark more brightly, though his passion is an avalanche. i wonder if his hands would soften with aphrodite's attention, if he could have won her pity, at least, had his past been wrought more delicately. but no, his soul is true: it is clear, even if only through metal and hammerfalls, that hephaestus has known love--far more than most olympians can speak of; and he has parted with so much. i shall retract my prayer, then: brave the cascade of hands, the knee-swells flecked with oil; purchase some heavier boots, perhaps, and a steel umbrella.
iii. there is a terrible serenity about her, an aquiline hush that suffocates the air itself; yet she laughs with the ease of summer honey and exhales memories light with oxygen. when you breathe them in, the rain in your eyes forms a pellucid shell. she delights in tapping at the crest, flicking droplets at your iris where they coalesce while you're too giddy to see her storm is endless.