Gale
01-24-2020, 07:49 AM
The image of the buckskin pegasus in front of him is flawless. Details that Gale often forgets to include – the casual shifting of the body rather than stillness, the rise and fall of the lungs, her appearance downwind of him, even the way the long hair of her black mane lifts as if buffeted by a faint breeze. It’s a perfect vision, really, and it is only where she happens to appear that gives away the fact that she is not truly there. Blue is standing knee deep in a brackish, low-water swamp, and so is the buckskin mare. But the ripples of his movement pass through her, and the long white stocks on her legs remain pristine.
Blue had stopped moving the moment she appeared. The branch he’d been shaking falls from his teeth but his mouth remains open, headless to the persimmons that slowly bob away. He’d been shaking the fruit loose, knowing that the overripe fruits would sink, the underripe remain on the branch, and the just right snacks would float until he was able to gobble them down.
But he’s not looking at the little orange fruits anymore. He is looking at his sister.
Womb Sister, he calls her, to differentiate from Pied Sister. Though memory has come back to him slowly, it comes always without sound. The brindle stallion has named the family members much as he had named himself, choosing an obvious attribute. Cloud Brother and Womb Brother, Blue-face and Scarred are his parents, though he knows they surely have better names, names that if only he knew he could ask others about.
Even though he knows she is not real, he reaches toward her, barely registering the shift from grown woman to the child he better recalls. He would have known her as a crone, he thinks; he would have known any of them. And then she is gone, and Blue is left standing in the middle of the mangrove, reaching toward something that had never been tangible.
“Sister?” he calls out to the empty shoreline. “Sister?!”
@[Eyas]
Blue had stopped moving the moment she appeared. The branch he’d been shaking falls from his teeth but his mouth remains open, headless to the persimmons that slowly bob away. He’d been shaking the fruit loose, knowing that the overripe fruits would sink, the underripe remain on the branch, and the just right snacks would float until he was able to gobble them down.
But he’s not looking at the little orange fruits anymore. He is looking at his sister.
Womb Sister, he calls her, to differentiate from Pied Sister. Though memory has come back to him slowly, it comes always without sound. The brindle stallion has named the family members much as he had named himself, choosing an obvious attribute. Cloud Brother and Womb Brother, Blue-face and Scarred are his parents, though he knows they surely have better names, names that if only he knew he could ask others about.
Even though he knows she is not real, he reaches toward her, barely registering the shift from grown woman to the child he better recalls. He would have known her as a crone, he thinks; he would have known any of them. And then she is gone, and Blue is left standing in the middle of the mangrove, reaching toward something that had never been tangible.
“Sister?” he calls out to the empty shoreline. “Sister?!”
@[Eyas]