06-11-2021, 12:39 PM
The voice is not what she had expected it might be.
She had anticipated smoke, charcoal. Ash, maybe. The charred remains of something that had once been but no longer was.
She smiles at the sound of it. She cannot help herself. (Will she always react this way to surprise? Like a reflex. Will it always delight her?) She smiles and she moves closer still. Not because he is a thing to be examined, a specimen meant to be studied, but because perhaps she might find in him a friend. Though he is looking at her in such an unsettling way. Though the heat of him is gathering sweat along her flank and the flowers that had reached for her have wilted in his presence.
At first she thinks the stars are sparks, but they wink as they ascend and she sees that they are not flames at all and she wonders how she might have convinced the night to lean down and kiss him in such a way. She feels foolish for asking the same thing that everyone else has asked, she feels simple for being the same as everyone else and her nose wrinkles with distaste. She wants to assure him that she is not the same, that there is so much about her that is different, that she was born from the root of a tree, that she crawled her way out. But she doesn’t because that would make her a fool, wouldn’t it?
“What happened?” she asks and tilts her head, wondering if it would burn should she reach out and touch him. “Do you remember what happened to make you like this?”
But she is only a child, just as he is a child.
How does she explain what it is to hurt?
Something that she only knows inherently.
“Hurt feels like… your body is crying.” She, too, shrugs. “Sometimes it feels like you couldn’t possibly survive.”
She had anticipated smoke, charcoal. Ash, maybe. The charred remains of something that had once been but no longer was.
She smiles at the sound of it. She cannot help herself. (Will she always react this way to surprise? Like a reflex. Will it always delight her?) She smiles and she moves closer still. Not because he is a thing to be examined, a specimen meant to be studied, but because perhaps she might find in him a friend. Though he is looking at her in such an unsettling way. Though the heat of him is gathering sweat along her flank and the flowers that had reached for her have wilted in his presence.
At first she thinks the stars are sparks, but they wink as they ascend and she sees that they are not flames at all and she wonders how she might have convinced the night to lean down and kiss him in such a way. She feels foolish for asking the same thing that everyone else has asked, she feels simple for being the same as everyone else and her nose wrinkles with distaste. She wants to assure him that she is not the same, that there is so much about her that is different, that she was born from the root of a tree, that she crawled her way out. But she doesn’t because that would make her a fool, wouldn’t it?
“What happened?” she asks and tilts her head, wondering if it would burn should she reach out and touch him. “Do you remember what happened to make you like this?”
But she is only a child, just as he is a child.
How does she explain what it is to hurt?
Something that she only knows inherently.
“Hurt feels like… your body is crying.” She, too, shrugs. “Sometimes it feels like you couldn’t possibly survive.”
Fractured moonlight on the sea
@[drakon]