Static

The propensity of Anthy's body is to stay slender-hipped and fourteen forever. The internal organs of her body do not know time or change. Like mechanical parts or plastic pipes, they pump her blood and feed oxygen to her heart, blissfully the same.

Her fingernails have always been a uniformly unchanged length. They are never dirty, despite daily toil in the soil. Her burnished bronze hands never are snagged or bloodied-- as if they were made of real metal, like the skin of a statue-- though they are exposed to tangles of thorns often. Her hair, like the vines of her charges, is the only thing that seems to lengthen. She hides it as best she can and severs those vines, because growth is a difficult, foreign concept for the little gardener.

Insects trail her. They sense that this body, like a taxidermist's project, is neither live nor dead. They listen to the words that follow her clacking heels on night-black pavement home-- words like corpse and witch and bride; words from brothers and lovers. Too-trusting moths bed down in the tight nest of her hair, and crawling, many-legged organisms-- those that favor the rotting flesh of the dead and those who prefer the newness of rosebuds alike-- get trodden under her heavy crunching footsteps.

Utena does not believe in fairy creatures or enchanted spells that could preserve a person in an ageless half-life. She tells herself, as she picks tiny winged animals out of her hair, that the insects only follow the pervasive rose scent.

(She is half-right-- the flowery perfume covers another aroma. This scent underneath is not the peculiar peachy bouquet that belongs to teenage girls-- of lipgloss, party dresses, and the red stain of failed math tests-- that should cling to Anthy's body, but instead the stench of decay.)