04-20-2021, 06:29 PM
NEUNA
The child had recoiled from the light and the way it burned, the way it set everything ablaze.
The way it cast everything in a soft, haloed glow.
(Too young, too sheltered to know that it was not the light that did this but something wrong with the eyes. Born too young, perhaps. Or skin too white, too reflective. A child born for a world gone dark, not this brutal light.)
She finds the father once, tucked away in the shadows, but the love that pulses outward from the center of her is not enough yet to counteract the rage that radiates off him in waves and she does not seek him out again.
The pup crafted from shadows follows her as she explores the light and even this dark thing is ringed in a soft glow. The pup grows as she does, nipping sweetly at her heels, burying its nose in her tail and tugging. Sometimes it wrestles with her sisters’ pups while the girls nap under their mother’s watchful eye.
But their mother is gone now and the third daughter, Neuna, is alone, too. Maurtia is gone to the Playground and Decima has wandered off someplace and Neuna is thinking about the fog their father had wrapped them in the day he’d been afraid to touch them. (And she does not know it but the thin markings draped between her bright white eyes glow brightly when she thinks of her father and the fog and the way he had looked at them and whispered so softly to them.)
There is such a thin wisp of fog that tangles itself around her ankles and she thinks that he must have sent it, that it must be an apology for the way he had sent her away the day she’d found him in the darkness. The pup at her feet lifts its shadow head and looks at her curiously.
“Hush, you,” she tells it, though the pup has not said anything.
The way it cast everything in a soft, haloed glow.
(Too young, too sheltered to know that it was not the light that did this but something wrong with the eyes. Born too young, perhaps. Or skin too white, too reflective. A child born for a world gone dark, not this brutal light.)
She finds the father once, tucked away in the shadows, but the love that pulses outward from the center of her is not enough yet to counteract the rage that radiates off him in waves and she does not seek him out again.
The pup crafted from shadows follows her as she explores the light and even this dark thing is ringed in a soft glow. The pup grows as she does, nipping sweetly at her heels, burying its nose in her tail and tugging. Sometimes it wrestles with her sisters’ pups while the girls nap under their mother’s watchful eye.
But their mother is gone now and the third daughter, Neuna, is alone, too. Maurtia is gone to the Playground and Decima has wandered off someplace and Neuna is thinking about the fog their father had wrapped them in the day he’d been afraid to touch them. (And she does not know it but the thin markings draped between her bright white eyes glow brightly when she thinks of her father and the fog and the way he had looked at them and whispered so softly to them.)
There is such a thin wisp of fog that tangles itself around her ankles and she thinks that he must have sent it, that it must be an apology for the way he had sent her away the day she’d found him in the darkness. The pup at her feet lifts its shadow head and looks at her curiously.
“Hush, you,” she tells it, though the pup has not said anything.
