I'm at home and I'm sitting with my family at the dinner table.
Poppy is next to me, and we're holding hands under the table. She has her hair pinned up into a pretty bun with a diamond ribbon wrapped around, and a sparkly dress that is almost just as shiny as her skin in the sunlight. My family has set all their forks and knives down and are looking at her white hair and her blank eyes like animals assessing danger. Poppy smiles at them uncomfortably, brushing hair out of her eyes and waving as a black Lumière heart rests on a plate in front of her.
I can tell she is visibly upset from the white hearts that adorn my family's table. There's one in front of me. She lets go of my hand, and kicks me in the ankle.
I cry out.
"YOU IDIOT!" Ash yells at me. "YOU TRAITOR! YOU MONSTER! YOU SAVAGE! YOU DEVIL! YOU BLIND INSECT! YOU—" My mother tries to rip him away, but he's bolted up from the table and he's crawling over our dinner for me.
Poppy screams as he flips the table on her, and a white Fos heart splatters across her pretty dress. "No! Please! Please, can't you see my face?!"
Ash is shaking my neck and I feel my seven hearts fluttering all at once. My hands flounder around at all sides of my body for any sort of object. Anything to get by monster of a brother off! A fork... that's it! As I feel the heart in my neck slowly beat to a halt, I find a fork and slam it into my brother's neck.
He screams.
"No!" Poppy yells. "Couldn't you see?" She's crying. "Couldn't you see I was human too?!"
My brother's dead. My only brother! Dead!
Poppy slowly squats and picks up a black heart between her fingers. Gingerly, she swallows the Lumière heart.
"I'm sorry," She tells me. "But I'm hungry."
YOU ARE READING
Tatemae
Fantasy"Death, I think I could handle. It's the waiting that kills me." Humanity is no more. Struggling out of the rubble are the Lumière and the Fos, two races whose only edible source of food is the hearts of one another, and no matter how much they eat...
