[P] til the day you cast a shadow;

[Sabine]

Sabine,

Like hands on a sundial they tick toward the city, each stride drawing them closer to a fate they cannot escape; do they know every second will always strike twelve? Sabine knows. She knows too well. The minute will close like a lion's jaw and she will find herself snatched between its teeth. 

The sun beats them with a hot belt that so viscerally reminds Sabine of her mother. The buckle and the sunlight fuse into an entity she cannot pick apart - an entity she knows only by the blisters it has left upon on her back. Even now her skin vibrates, welcoming the lesions that bedeck her pale skin. She feels Rhoswen's hand upon her cheekbone, bruising the blood beneath her eye and ripping the smile from her lips. Once more she glances up toward the sun, feeling suddenly that she is not catching a glimpse of a vast alien star - but the very woman who had brought her, shaking and hollow, into this world. And just like the sun, Rhoswen is too cataclysmically bright to look at for longer than a heartbeat.  

The boy's voice breaks her memory; it falls from a small pocket she had sewn into her skin and it scatters like a wind-torn flower across the desert. Sabi can only watch as it drifts farther and farther out of reach. What hope did she have to gather it close again to her stupid little heart? Why, even, should she want to bear it against her breast as though it was not a callous thing but soft and tender? It is with violent self-hatred stinging the roof of her mouth that the girl feels something like a scrunched up note being pushed into her small, clammy hand. 

His name. 

Abel. 

And it is a gift; it saves her from herself.

The pocket sat empty and bereft upon her chest is suddenly filled with every trace of him. His black-rainbow eyes, the surprising smell of wild gardens upon his pelt, the way his voice sounds like a street that had felt the heels of strangers. When Sabine looks at him again, she does not see a coyote: she sees a child. A child almost as young as she. A pang of guilt bursts up through her lungs as she sees the film of sad emptiness slip over his wiry frame as though it were alive. More alive than the boy it had been feeding from. Sabine has not wondered what pain he carries: is it hot? Is it heavy? Is it a gun against his temple?

She stops, quite suddenly, and the words come tumbling out from beneath her teeth, "are you okay?"

(sad birds still sing.)

@abel | "speech" | notes: ly

rallidae