05-21-2021, 05:57 PM
“Can I haunt you if I die?” He asks his older sister, his head cradled on her shoulder as if he can no longer hold it without the strength of his sister there to catch it. HIs ghost talking sister sighs. “I don't want you to haunt me,” she says in a way that is neither gentle nor harsh. “Okay, then I won’t,” he says in a way that is neither sad nor angry. Elli placed a kiss on his shoulder. “What I mean is, I don’t like thinking about that, James,” she tells him with a solemn look in the shadows of her face. “I wont haunt you,” he says because he suddenly realizes, he doesn't like thinking about that either.
James doesn't know this, but Elliana, she looked for him, high and low. Through every shadow cast by tall buildings, inside every shadowed tree, even in the shadows of rolling waves off the sea, but she never found him. Would never find him.
Worlds away, James grew up on the same stories as Nashua, as Yanhua, and all the rest. He knows about Paraiso, could tell anyone who would listen about those weeping willows and how they cry tears of joy and not sorrow. Could tell you about the thundering falls and how the mist it creates carries whispers of ancient voices, ancestors past. Like Nashua, James has never been there, but it doesn't make it any less magical or the stories any less real. Paraiso in written in his blood, as it is of all legacy children.
The feeling inside his chest is buoyant as he stands before Nashua, it floats on the surface, almost lifting him up and off the ground as if he too had wings. Wings of a falcon he watched fly as he stood beside his father. “I knew it,” he says in quiet victory, and maybe it was, but how could he lose? Armed with Marcelo’s vision and a boyish confidence that belong to the young and the stupid.
“Benjamen,” he says, reborn. “James is what my family calls me,” he says. “So you can call me James,” he hints with wide blue eyes that disappear for only a moment in a sweeping blink. Once more he moves his gaze to the elegant wings that sit quietly at the stallion’s side. “I think…I was supposed to find you.” A quiet smile that is quiet and gentle like starlight, like his father. “I’m Elena’s son.” And it is evident in the blue of his eyes and the marking upon his forehead that with a quiet breeze is revealed, and is in the shape of an ivory heart…
never gave a single thought to where it might lead
image by Gary Bendig
@[Nashua]