LITTLE GRIM

ACT ONE HONEY TEETH

It is warm but faintly chilly under the canopy of trees that stand unsullied on the marketplace. The wind blows so freely it dances, softly, but entices her silky hair to move along. The branches of the trees are gnarled and chime amongst with the mellifluous melody of the natural movement of air, echoing against a sky so, so clear. The sun dances in the middle of an opaque expanse of blue and it appears the few clouds that surround it have emerged solely to witness the suns pulchritudinous performance.

And there, by one of the stands, a girl. Imagine skin like milk and the apples of her cheeks slightly reddened because of the toe-curling but comforting wind that brushes past them. When we think godlike, we think her - other words than divine do not suffice to describe her, whose gaze is slightly dazed as she takes a pink peach in her small hands. But look closer: somewhere in those dousing eyes rests diabolical that only few manage to see. Passer-by's cannot help but turn their heads when they see her amidst the chants of nature, birds singing their greatest song, and the acoustic string medley an old man plays from afar. Right then, she is a picture of calm and serene. Her gown is the cheapest she can find and weary, torn at the seams, but she looks like the fairest princess of all with those kitten-like features.

Eyes large and curious as she looks around herself, standing peaceful under the blue clouds that drifted overhead, the familiar twigs and leaves, divine girl swears that she can feel the life. It makes her flutter and feel ebullient, beautifully alive, when she hears the earth crunching under her footwear (that, and her arms and legs aching in warning of her body lengthening).

Pearl De Bulles is her name, and she is sun-kissed where she stands; the sanguine rays of light of the coruscating yellow creation leave honey in their wake like like teardrops from ones eyes. They are dripping like honeysuckle nectar. Those who stand close to her can hear her produce tunes of beauty, roses, petals, can see heaven and that it is even more divine than those of pious platitudes preached. In her hands she takes one of the fruits and pierces her teeth in the raw pink flesh, fingers sticky with the juice that tricked down her chin. It's sweet, it's gentle.

But a brush of something entices her eyes to widen abruptly.

"

GIVE THAT BACK, HAROLD

!"

She chants mellifluously, a few men and women alike turning their head upon the sudden hoarse voice that seeps from the honeyed girl and the controversy, when a boy takes something that isn't his from her stand, her eyebrows slightly furrowed but an upward curve perking her petal lips. Oh, if you think you can vex me, you do not yet know me! She runs after the mischievous boy clumsily, like a little lamb having just learned how to stand atop four feet. Oh, boy - it seems the sun is out, Harold is, too, and if it appears so, often times, so is the wrathful side to little Pearl. Pearl De Bulles, the girl an ounce of ichor short of absolute serenity, could only - to the eye of onlookers - be stirred by one: that thief with the enamoring smile and the green moss still lurking behind his large ears. Pearl De Bulles had loved to say that she hated him so much, him and the saccharine long fingers he possessed of, but truly, Pearl adores him. And so she no longer bothers to engage in pointless cat-and-mouse games with him.

Pearl sighs, so deep it entices her silken hair to move along faintly, when she returns to her stand, but her demeanor manifests when she sees a familiar pair of brown orbs. Blooming, her friend, given the name Juliette, suddenly stands next to her, suddenly, and those long and slender fingers of hers - heavily contrasting against Pearls, whose digits are short and chubby, much like herself - reveal a golden necklace. Juliette had been one of the very few people who knew Pearl well. Like a pirate his honorable ship, like you know each and every little detail of your hand, Juliette knows of every minuscule crevice and flaw of the De Bulles girls being. She is a willowy, lithe girl, that looks as though she has been lured out of a fairytale, possessing a heart bedazzled with the fairest diamonds - yet she, like all girls who possess of good money and looks in equal measure, so has Pearl come to know along the years, has always faintly believed she is above others.

Juliette tugs delicately at the sleeve of her friends dress, pearly eyes large and wholly absorbed by zeal, and it is only then Pearl spares her comrade a glance.

"Good morning, baby face," Juliette speaks slowly as she permits a dashing smile to push past her lips - a grimace that so far, could have any sane man right on his knee(s). Pearl, too, lets out a soft, soft smile at the little name of adoration her friend uses, and there stirs warmth in her chest.

Divine girls lips part a little, "Beautiful, beautiful," and it is unsure if girl of curls and milk skin is speaking of the golden jewelry or her friend - it is the latter, for she finds the necklace rather insipid. Juliette knows this. She does, too.

"Oh, no," there is orchestrated a beautiful chorus of vivacious, vivid, beautiful, giggles from Juliette, who glimmers in the quaint illumination the sky has to proffer that day, "it is absolutely hideous. Though very costly. A present of Oliver. He's still convinced he can win this romance-yearning heart of mine by investing in presents of all kinds, the fool."

Pearl lets a knowing grin peek. It amuses her so how Juliette feigns to be so unimpressed by Oliver, when in reality, the girl has for years ached to be with him. It is a beautiful something Pearl can not relate to - love. The girl of seventeen springs had never allowed herself to spend days idly daydreaming of lace doilies, tea parties with other pious women. No, Pearl was, in that sense, much like her father - a hard worker. She worked from the early rise of dawn 'till the vivid fall of a rosy dusk, for she had been obliged to since the barely blossoming age of thirteen.

Her father, though far from being an insolent or incompetent man, could not partake in heavy labor. Half crippled and too much invested in cherry liquor - liquor that, according to Pearl, was to fear more than the devil - all uncanny father De Bulles did during the day was sleep and drink - which caused the De Bulles' to be plagued by ineluctable debt, too. Thus little Pearl has taken it upon herself to travel by foot to the rural town next theirs, to purchase fresh pears and the purest grapes from an overwhelmingly kind-natured farmer and then sell them for faintly more.

"Nonetheless, back to the reason why I came here - sullying my most precious shoes in pursuit," Jules, pouting a little, interrupts the thoughts whirling (oh boy, they're dancing!) in Pearl's roseate mind, "I've heard quite pleasant news from Elliot, who, by the way, has solemnly vowed to his friends - those insolent fools who roam the marketplace and think they're entitled to everything - that he will wed you one day..."

Juliette trails off a little, confirming that she indeed was many things, but most of all: the reigning queen of hearsay. Curiosity beams from Pearl. (Though she will never admit.)

"He says that the very good friend of the prince, a handsome man - golden-haired with peckish lips and nearly as much a reigning conquerer by posture as the prince. Tall, broad of shoulders - anyway, it is rumored that he will seek a bride upon the maidens ball..." Juliette gropes her chest as she speaks so expressively, as if she has seen said imposing man and can confirm he looks an angel of the most beautiful sort. Pearl scowls slightly. Not upon the - to some - foolish rambling Juliette proffers, but upon the mentioning of the prince. Darkness clouds Pearl's otherwise light, gentle irises, and Juliette sees - shivers only a little - but she thinks it is but her imagination.

"Ah, ah, come on now," Juliette rolls her eyes prior to Pearl instantly telling her no in the most coruscating hues, "I know that you're not looking for romance in your life, but you're seventeen, Pearl. Perhaps love isn't your cup of tea, but some amusement or adventure aside from working so hard... I'm sure your father would agree."

Juliette, for a moment, gazes down upon her as if she had been the most precious — yet the one most woven into her own oblivion, her own naïveté — individual to grace the earths, and Pearl looks down by the speed of thunder. The compassion, pity, that envelopes Juliette's demeanor crawls deep inside of every murky crevice of the other girls being. She doesn't like being pitied - she needs no mercy, no pity.

But the De Bulles girl knows Juliette is right, for all her father does - when in right of mind, uncorrupted by the countless bottles of sweet cherry juice - is tell her to flee from time to time. To seek where her heart lay truly, where she wishes to spend the rest of her days, rather than rotting behind a stand of sickeningly sweet fruits, as he once did. Oh, Pearl loved her father so, despite the way the scent on his breath frequently made her stomach twist in askew. Her mother, on the other hand... she truly had always been and would 'till henceforth a peculiar creation.

A creation of wealth, which is why she chose not to care for the child she had drunkenly conceived upon a shameful evening upon which the odds were not so much in her favor, with a much younger - and much poorer - man. Pearl did not know her name, of the bone-stricken lady that carried her inside for such long time. But from the tales her papa tells her upon the most fortunate evenings, Pearl knows she was once beautiful - with a face shaped like her own, body a mixture of Venus and Sappho and so, so feminine, so delicate, not even the costliest silk could compare to her. Pearl wishes she would have been more like her.

"I would ask," Juliette looks a little wary, for she reckons what happens most times when her friend speaks such words, and a faint frown taints her features when Pearl continues, "But I don't have anything to wear - I can't attend a ball wearing dresses like this one."

Juliette smiles brightly, "Oh, Pearl - don't you know your girlfriend possesses the grandest wardrobe of all of the town? I'll lend you one of mine, baby face, don't you look so concerned. Corseted, pink, blue, yellow, anything. Except for red. I solemnly claim red - red, the color of love, lust–"

"Alright, alright, Juliette. I'll go with you, that is, if my father gives me the permission," Pearl tilts her head, "But only if you promise, on the soul of your unfortunate coming lover, that you won't attempt to set me up with some snob of a man who can't keep his paws to himself."

"No worries, my love. I'll focus on myself. For one night, that is."

And so it begins.

ACT TWO ROTTEN HEART

The sweet girl sits before a mirror a bit worn from scurrying from left to right and occasionally chasing behind a certain no-good child. Her gaze is stoic atop the juvenile drawing she once made as a mere child, one of her family, and she feels flowers bloom in her chest while her papa brushes a comb through her hair.

"Pa', can I ask you something?" Pearl begins softly whilst her father combs gently through her thick curls of silky hair, and she feels at home all at once. To her, home is not particularly the village she houses, where the flowers bloom unrealistically sweetly and where the largest amount of people are cold as ice, much like their hands - care more for money than that what is right and possess hatred for what is beautiful, but home, to young Pearl, is her father. She gazes mesmerized over her delicate shoulder to see her papa as she once knew him to be. Unsullied, soft-spoken, beautiful.

"Anythin', dolly," he replies to her, slender and long digits taking the small blossoms - that had in some manner unbeknownst to Pearl, ended up in her hair - from amidst her gossamer-like mane. She raises her hand in a light movement for her papa to hold, blinks lightly, dusting the barely visible roses that dust atop the hairs of her eyelashes.

"The maiden ball is in a few days, if I'm not mistaken," her voice quivers slightly, as if she feels almost guilty for even daring to ask a half cripple man for such thing, "and Juliette is going. I was wondering - perhaps, if that's alright with you, if I could go with her? If not then that's not an issue, papa."

Her papas uses one of his large hands, a few scars littered across the rough expanse, to give her shoulder a little squeeze, "Pearl, sweetheart," he shakes his head, curls of black hair, tainted grey here and there, moving from one side to the other, "there is no need to ask such an old man for anything, anymore. You're almost eighteen, dolly - you do as you please. And as you do, I will support you. If you wish to go to the ball, do make sure to have fun, yes, sweetheart?"

"Thank you, papa," Pearl embraces the old man so warm, so good, it is as though they have returned in time and everything is all well again.

"I love you, you know that, right, my little girl?" Her father says like he never forgets to, even when he is near unconscious - and Pearl nods. She feels so warm, she's unsure if she is merely experiencing a superluminal series of illusions, of phantasms. The way her papa kisses her cheek softly tells her she is far from amidst a beautiful abyss of sleep.

"And I love you, papa." She says. What she tells him is true.

And that evening, when she lay in her bed, clad in least costly nightwear and her little head peering out of the window to her bedroom curiously, the stars come to her. And they defy her fathers words. Whilst the moon taints her skin the softest shade of lavender there is and her hair is spread on her pillow like a halo above her head, the stars speak to her. One, two, three... thirteen, she counts. They tell her in the softest of a whimper that it is never a good idea to place the kitten near the milk whilst forbidding it to drink, they tell her that it isn't her priority. And for the stars only speak once in a lifetime, they do so in the most clear manner they can.

She doesn't listen to them.