“Because, Isra says as she drapes her throat carefully across his spine.
“everyone deserves kindness.” The words feels sharper for the way they echo off his horn and off the boughs of branches over their heads. Every edge of her is warm where it presses against him, knees to rib, hip to tail, hock to hoof.
It's almost peaceful here as the moonlight flickers between the branches and the shadows of the ivy look like butterfly wings as the breeze dances between them. If not for the rattle of his lungs and all his shallow sighs, the night would be perfect. And so she inhales, exhales and sets to drowning out the rattle of his chest with story-song.
“There was once, in a sea far, far from here, a whale who was not very much like a whale at all. He was a dreamer who saw not schools of fish when he swam but stories written in the glitter of their scales as the fish swam in their circles and played all the games that fish are oft to play. He was a lonely whale at the bottom of the sea where the moonlight reaches further than the sunlight. All of him hated all the silver of ocean, how it made even sunken, golden treasure look gilded with chrome. He wanted gold, that whale. He wanted the sun and the warmth. He wanted to never swim in the deep again and feel salt in his teeth.” Her voice rises in pitches like the wind and almost glitters in the moonlight when her words echo against their makeshift forest-floor nest. The next breath of air she takes almost feels as weak as his when she pauses, and blinks back the creeping exhaustion from her eyes.
“And so one day he followed a current that smelled like sulfur instead of brine. The current went on for miles and miles and months. He lost track of the time he spent swimming, the time he spent dreaming and the time he spent wanting things so much that his heart ached. He swam for two seasons, until the cold winter-sea warmed with spring. And before the seas heated under a summer sun the current he was following ended in a marsh.” Isra blinks again and thinks about how heavy her head feels (as heavy as a whale heart). Empathy and fear are heavy things, heavy enough that her unicorn heart almost stutters under the weight of everything this night has brought to her.
These mountains feels like a trial instead of a salvation now, but she still loves him.
Her eyes grow heavy, and she closes them before continuing.
“And if you know anything about marshes you know that the thick, brackish water is shallow enough for cranes to walk though. There is hardly enough water for a whale to swim in.” She yawns,
“so that dreamer of a whale thought his journey ended and his heart shattered in this mighty rib-cage.”
Behind her eyelids her eyes flutter in dance in that strange between world, where the real is dream and the dream is real.
“But there is something strange about heartbreak---”
And then there is no more story, for Isra is asleep, tangled together with the desert-boy who aches with pain as much as she aches with sorrow.
ISRA OF THE WHALE-SKIN;
“Those who live by the sea can hardly form a single thought of which the sea would not be part.”
