any; i'm gonna make you mine

[paralee]

She shivers; Hates the cold. (Why can’t it be Spring?) (Because the seasons take their turns, as the sun and the moon do in the sky, Paralee.) (I know, she tells herself, I know.) Paralee exhales a slow breath and opens her eyes. She looks at it as it hangs in the air, like a ghost. Ghosts are memories and metaphors, but she cannot think of what for. The importance of it escapes her - ghosts, memories, steamy breath in the cold air, and she finds herself staring up at the interlocking branches of the Forest. Here, she gleans small scraps of heat from pockets of moss and lightning-blasted tree trunks, wherever she can fit her small lean body into. The one thing the cold cannot touch is the orange blossoms in her creamy forelock; they remain bright and cheery. She inhales their intoxicating scent - green and fresh, but somehow slow, honeyed and fecal too. It reminds her of sunshine and earth, and Paralee smiles rather dreamily in the wintry gloom of the Forest. The little palomino felt more like an orange tree than a horse, searching for a place to put down her roots. (You are uprooted, Paralee.) (I know… no mother, no sisters, no orange blossoms but those in my forelock.) (They’ll think you strange Paralee, to be seen talking to yourself.) (But no one can hear us…) She isn’t talking aloud; isn’t crazy, not really. She’s lonely; has only her loneliness and the bits of green growing things that she can find in the Forest that resist the withering hand of winter. She is glimmers of honeyed skin and creamy hair that darts amongst the dark shadowy trunks of the trees, and the next time she is seen, there are smears of lichen-dust on her shoulder and cheek. (Paralee, you look a mess.) (I know, I know.)