Isra of the rusted flowers

“I was misplaced air that cradled all around you, ”


She can feel, she can feel, she can feel.

And she has not felt in so long anything more than sorrow and the icy kiss of fate.

There are a million sparks of light running across her flesh and a hundred embers of fire sparking on her soul. Isra feels like she' breathing out smoke across his flesh and lighting up the night more then the stars do with the flashes of electricity cracking down her bones. Can you feel it? The spirals of smoke and bits of spark burn the words into that strange place between their minds. She speaks in smoke signals and the drum, drum, drum of her heart between this weak cage of bone. Can you feel that we are space and we are dust and we have never been ourselves.

Isra doesn't tell him that she has been the sea and blood and death. She doesn't tell him that she has died. Her soul keeps her secret, swallows it like bile between the drapes of smoke and beat of heart.

“I have forgotten.” She says and this time she lets her teeth scrape along his ribs, as if she can taste how it feels to be unbroken (and it tastes like sun and sand and heat). “Sometimes it feels like dying and other times..” Isra can feel him, wrapping up her roots and wire against some part of his insides and she lets the wire bloom, flowers of blood and rust made lovely by the way they fold around his ghosts and his sand and his fire. “Other times it feels like this.” It feels like being space where planets roll between her lungs and star-dust flows in her veins instead of blood.

Her bones feel right where he touches them and her skin feels like perfection when his breath washes across it in waves of recreation.

But Isra has not forgotten the dawn for the bison sigh in their clusters of hair and heat and she pulls away from him. Her horn dances like a wish when she presses her lips to his brow. It glitters in the moonlight and her teeth look like pearls where they briefly peak through the dark shield of her lips.

The cold settles in almost instantly and she wants to dash herself on the shores of his dunes, let herself be swallowed back up in whatever this secret thing is between them. “Give me your name.” Her voice briefly remembers she is a unicorn and her bones swallow up the slave soul and she tosses her frosted hair back from her eyes.

Oh! Oh how those eyes devour him, knowing now bits of the endless sea that hides inside him.

Isra takes another step from him and those wire roots slice at her insides in complaint and she sobs with the suffering of it. The flowers still bloom though, dragging between them like something stronger than wire and chain and want.

Show me who I could be. Her sea eyes are fire eyes, blue enough to build stars around the heat of her flames. Until the dawn comes for us. Those petals between them unfurl a little more before they start to wilt and die and fall from the stem of her soul.

And when she walks toward the herd of bison she looks back at him, daring and wanting as a unicorn should. “Until the dawn.” Isra pleads as only a being that has pleaded for their life can, as only a ghost can. She would gladly sing to him the song of their secret, their sorrow until the sun stole from her the very last melody from her heart.