07-18-2017, 09:23 PM
Here, indeed.
Home, indeed!
Here and home, where father browbeat tawny whitetails into letting her suckle by their fawn’s sides; from whom she had learned the high and careful step that makes her more graceful than her size should allow. Where she had made friends with red-pelted foxes, mimicking their chortling with her herbivore’s lips. Here, where she nestled in her babe-crib of windflower and ground-vines, watching spider’s webs shimmer in morning’s slanted sun.
How long ago was that?
So long ago.
A lifetime ago. A death ago. A dream ago. Worlds and worlds ago. “Hmm?” she tones soft and absently, turning her head—half the golden-eyed and high-cheeked loveliness made possibly by brutal intrusion, half the skewed and bludgeoned work of some Picasso, eyeless and ugly—to find him.
Stranger.
But then, what is left but strangeness? Geometric and law-abiding space, colonized by beasts of unknown wilds. She cannot tell one from the other—native and colonizer—but now she craves them all, no matter. Needy for closeness and the nosiness of mouths to break the stagnant quiet, she had breached the divide that once kept them all at her periphery—clasping necks with vermillion-scaled wyverns; touching ears with jackalopes as black as the universe.
His body smells of some places she has been—here, to be sure. Perhaps places in between, places neither of them can recall. He looks solid, lacking the airy way those specters pass through her own flesh. Substantial. Male. ‘Welcome back,’ he says and she dips her head, blinking at him, tears gathering along the single lash-line left. “Where have you been?” she asks.
Perhaps, to an outsider, they might sound like childhood mates reconnecting.
If it were only so simple for the two of them.
Home, indeed!
Here and home, where father browbeat tawny whitetails into letting her suckle by their fawn’s sides; from whom she had learned the high and careful step that makes her more graceful than her size should allow. Where she had made friends with red-pelted foxes, mimicking their chortling with her herbivore’s lips. Here, where she nestled in her babe-crib of windflower and ground-vines, watching spider’s webs shimmer in morning’s slanted sun.
How long ago was that?
So long ago.
A lifetime ago. A death ago. A dream ago. Worlds and worlds ago. “Hmm?” she tones soft and absently, turning her head—half the golden-eyed and high-cheeked loveliness made possibly by brutal intrusion, half the skewed and bludgeoned work of some Picasso, eyeless and ugly—to find him.
Stranger.
But then, what is left but strangeness? Geometric and law-abiding space, colonized by beasts of unknown wilds. She cannot tell one from the other—native and colonizer—but now she craves them all, no matter. Needy for closeness and the nosiness of mouths to break the stagnant quiet, she had breached the divide that once kept them all at her periphery—clasping necks with vermillion-scaled wyverns; touching ears with jackalopes as black as the universe.
His body smells of some places she has been—here, to be sure. Perhaps places in between, places neither of them can recall. He looks solid, lacking the airy way those specters pass through her own flesh. Substantial. Male. ‘Welcome back,’ he says and she dips her head, blinking at him, tears gathering along the single lash-line left. “Where have you been?” she asks.
Perhaps, to an outsider, they might sound like childhood mates reconnecting.
If it were only so simple for the two of them.