01-27-2018, 02:40 PM
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane; She is brightness and heaven’s light and he fears it as much as he reveres it, because he was reborn but not remade, the same mechanisms of his heart malfunction. It’s an old story and one he’s lived a hundred times before but he doesn’t remember those except in a distant sort of ache, the longing for a home that’s no longer home. She laughs, which is worse – which is better – and tells her story. I came from the ocean, she says, and a memory crosses his mind, a lightning strike of recollection. A gulp of water in the lungs. Following a girl down, down, down, and then nothing. Blackness. But he’d woken on the beach, had he not? Woken there with a wet coat and salt-crusted mane and no memory of what had transpired. He laughs, again, this time in a sort of disbelief. Her story mirrors his, though he doubts the circumstances are much the same. “I know the feeling,” he says, then confesses, “I woke up on the beach myself. No idea who or what I was. Things have come back, since, but not…not everything.” It’s too much, what he tells her, even though there’s handfuls of secrets beneath that, secrets like I think I might have died and I think I’ve done terrible things and I don’t entirely know who I am. And -- the way I want to look at you frightens me. “Well,” he says, the beginning of a sentence he shouldn’t finish, “I could show you my favorite part of the meadow.” Until he says that, he didn’t realize he had a favorite part, but as soon as the words are out of his mouth he realizes it’s true. There’s a place not far from here, full of wildflowers, close to the river. And why is it his favorite? He doesn’t know. But it is. In that place, once, he thinks he might have been happy. Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. |