02-28-2016, 02:45 PM
my friend makes rings, she swirls and sings
she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things
she’s a mystic in the sense that she’s still mystified by things
She is a sweet, untouched thing.
A face that has never been creased or careworn, save for moments at night when she is wrested from sleep by strange images brought on queer, dark wings. These last for a second or so, as she blinks and breathes; reality hastily pares off the skin of illusion – and there, all around, is all she knows. The soft touch of moss and the brush of air, like fingers intertwining with a tingle; the convivial gathering of animal friends.
She knows dreamlike things, though barely and only distantly. Like something that has been but is not anymore. Perhaps never was. Perhaps she doesn’t know them at all; knew and know have been violently rived from one another and all her memories of that womb shaken loose.
She knows her father’s voice and for a short time, she has known the warm yield of sand.
She does not know war, nor tidings of war.
She squints, peering past singed blue sky into the bright, white of the sun and its companions… Lightening. Her brow furrows and in her mind she goes over all she knows of the sky. That mauve, orange and pink can mean either the head or tail of a day; that bright red means good promises and darkness in day means ill winds.
But clear and clement skies, those do not often beget lightning…
* * * *
Tears find their way down her cheek, leaving damp and darkened stains. She presses her lips to the Oak and stifles a sob, her body wracked with a shiver. She cannot bring herself to mouth the word again. Father? She closes her golden eyes tight.
Faraway, over mountain spires and badlands, angry cries came from lungs, the likes of which she cannot even imagine. Dragon’s lungs; great, ironclad organs. Vengeance and anger had roused her muscles and sent her stoking her belly like a furnace and bellowing inferno. Across Beqanna, a hundred souls reap the harvest of their chaos and dragonfire. The sky filled with caustic, dark ash and it looked as if it could have been early evening, how darkness ebbed out light the way storm clouds do sometimes; a sort of violent kind of sundown.
And when the wind had brought the scent her brain had squealed in white hot panic.
For a long time she waited. Frozen and smelling the faint scent of singed horsehair and sand. Waited among a herd of dorcas gazelle, nervous and pacing. Waited for the yells to die down and then waited a bit longer still. And then she had tiptoed, quiet in the give of sand, to the place where she thought the first spark of electricity must have been conducted.
She had seen only the briefest glimpse of lifelessness. One body, slumped like a rock or felled wood, but flesh and bone like her. And she had run to the Oasis. Run past beautiful pricky pear, orange like a sunset and passionate paintbrush, red like good promises.
She hears a stirring and her head jerks up, she turns to the noise and sniffs. “Father?” There is relief in her voice, thick like honey.
and I pray to blades of grass to find forgiveness in the weeds.