“Well, uh, y—your brother, he gave me some papers and they’re not really for me. The ones I’ve read—I haven’t translated them well, really—they’re poetry—but they’re for…not me. For you or for Night, I think.”
I sighed. “Fine. Let me see them.”
Koi smiled with a nervous duck of hieh’se head. “Okay. Here. I wrote the translation of these two pages here. I couldn’t figure out how to keep the rhymes though…”
Koi handed me three papers. Two of them were covered in muddy fingerprints and grease stains. Clearly they had been handled often, folded and unfolded so many times that the pages, though made of thick canvas, were half-torn along the crease lines. The last was a piece of ruler lined paper ripped haphazardly out of one of Koi’s notebooks.
Though I could not appreciate the rhyme scheme directly, I skimmed the yellowed pages and then read the neatly scribed translation.
It is like the difference of day and nighttime
How your name,
The Sky,
Is so better than the tragic phrase
My mother calls me.
She calls me ‘My Repent’
Because I am her repent for letting my father die
And now I am older and have his face
To look at her and remind her why she is a person of darkened soul
She thinks that if she remembers her faults every year
On Jacalynn’s birthday
That maybe I will go away with my face of her shame.
This is only true because of you, The Sky,
Not because you are less than My Everything
But because that time she mourns, I mourn too:
Our leaving day.
When Jacalynn becomes the age of autumn,
I bring us three back together at the Mountain’s feet.
Mother won’t miss me when I release her
From me, ‘My Repent’
But I will miss being a father to Jacalynn
When her sire cannot do that
From his spot under the wing of Sweet-Death.
My overlord, Sweet-Death.
She holds all I do want captive.
And My Everything, you are dead soon
Knowing Sorrow-Love as I have.
The Sky,
I wait for when you call me ‘Annie’ again.
I folded the page back up.
“‘Sorrow-Love’ is the translation for Dote and ‘Sweet-Death’ is Asphyxia, by the way,” Koi murmured.
“Yes, thank you, Koi. I inferred that.” I rubbed my eye and reevaluated the harsh tone in my words. “Genuinely, thank you,” I said, looking up at hieh, softly.
Koi smiled sweetly back.