the colours of the morning

Monica's an early riser. Always has been. Always will be. Not like her daughter, who hangs onto her teenage beauty rest, slovenly as it might appear, chipped tooth and short-trimmed nail. Of course, there's an obvious reason for that difference, but even so, proper soldiers reveille.

Flora's never been a soldier. Flora never will be a soldier. Flora isn't even really a person, as far as Aionios is concerned, or at least as far as Monica can tell that it (where here "it" is probably Z) concerns itself.

She's just a helpful, sane-minded person who seems, in her unexistence, to have aged into a similar flavor of not really wanting to do much of anything at all. A perfect caricature of a vintage rose-patterned vase.

But in the mornings, she wakes. Maybe she likes to take cue. Maybe she feels guilty, and maybe those are the same. She wakes, and she makes herself busy doing what she knows how to do: keeping house, checking lists, brightening eyes. The gothic horror of a doll that forgets what its purpose is when its owner has stopped playing with it.

They're fighting a war, and Monica is rebuffing others' advances to harbour time's favorite winsome pink-toned fugitive in a holding pattern.

It's sad. Really, it's pitiful. But there are worse ways for lost souls to go, aren't there?