02-17-2018, 01:23 PM
Reality comes back to her in fits and starts. It comes and wrests her from her sleep, an unwanted and unwelcome bed-guest.
It is cold and clear – like ice water or a bitter lover’s silence.
(Like a mother’s touch. If one’s mother is distant and fleshless as a moon. Some mothers are.)
It is not kind – but perhaps it is necessary. She is a child, unborn, in a womb of soft, pastel light and long, agitated whispers. She is overdue, bulging at the seams of her suspended gestation. ‘It’s time to come out,’ she might hear, blinking through the heavy slumber gumming her eyes. Or, ‘you are home.’ The voice – if it is a voice – a mixture of mother and father and sister; the string-quartet drawl of the manticore; the gekkering of springy foxes and the trill of chickadees. Everything, churning like the heated heart of a star.
Calling her.
(Onwards and upwards.)
Nyxia blinks, once and then twice, the blur of grey and green becoming solid in that slow and agonizing way. (Reality.) The softer-skinned trees seem cold this morning – like long, elegant ladies striping to their skin – loosing leaves to the forest floor.
The evergreens, like so many armored soldiers, hold fast.
A squirrel, bushy-tailed and angry, natters from a throne of high branches. Deer, passing like ghosts in their remote and handsome way, try their best to fatten up while the fleeting chance is here.
Behind and between, in slants of young light holding motes of dust, she can see flashes of colour – like sparks spit from a fire, hot and aroused.
Lions – or things like lions, but with wings made of fish scales; hawks, with diamond eyes, hard and glittering. Peacock-blue gorillas, standing to pound soft baroque music from their chests.
Colonizing things. Foreign things – invasive species from universal rifts. (Reality.) ‘Home,’ they say, in many languages at once. She wonders, shifting to her feel to follow them through the morning, if it it a statement or a longing.
It is cold and clear – like ice water or a bitter lover’s silence.
(Like a mother’s touch. If one’s mother is distant and fleshless as a moon. Some mothers are.)
It is not kind – but perhaps it is necessary. She is a child, unborn, in a womb of soft, pastel light and long, agitated whispers. She is overdue, bulging at the seams of her suspended gestation. ‘It’s time to come out,’ she might hear, blinking through the heavy slumber gumming her eyes. Or, ‘you are home.’ The voice – if it is a voice – a mixture of mother and father and sister; the string-quartet drawl of the manticore; the gekkering of springy foxes and the trill of chickadees. Everything, churning like the heated heart of a star.
Calling her.
(Onwards and upwards.)
Nyxia blinks, once and then twice, the blur of grey and green becoming solid in that slow and agonizing way. (Reality.) The softer-skinned trees seem cold this morning – like long, elegant ladies striping to their skin – loosing leaves to the forest floor.
The evergreens, like so many armored soldiers, hold fast.
A squirrel, bushy-tailed and angry, natters from a throne of high branches. Deer, passing like ghosts in their remote and handsome way, try their best to fatten up while the fleeting chance is here.
Behind and between, in slants of young light holding motes of dust, she can see flashes of colour – like sparks spit from a fire, hot and aroused.
Lions – or things like lions, but with wings made of fish scales; hawks, with diamond eyes, hard and glittering. Peacock-blue gorillas, standing to pound soft baroque music from their chests.
Colonizing things. Foreign things – invasive species from universal rifts. (Reality.) ‘Home,’ they say, in many languages at once. She wonders, shifting to her feel to follow them through the morning, if it it a statement or a longing.