The children are playing.
 
Florentine never considered it before, but already she knows how the twins’ feet sound as they go running over damp, damp sand. The sound of children running, laughing, shouting… it is all sharp and so very real.
 
Leo calls and it sounds so loud in this world where nothing moves. Florentine steps toward the sea, to where it rears and tumbles forward to meet the sand. Yet it is frozen there, in an eternal diving wave. The wave never crashes and the sun never moves. Her lips graze over immovable water, they taste salt and nothingness.
 
Slowly she returns to Lysander’s side, her gaze tipping up toward the sun, “It has been hours.” She whispers, though she need not, for their children are playing as if their world is a normal place, as if everything always came to rest like this. As if days stretched on like weeks and the sun never moved.
 
“Nothing is moving.” She whispers again and it is so like a hum, like a laugh, like wonder. She cannot help but relish such strange moments as these. “There is something about this island.” Florentine murmurs gilded words into her lover’s ear before her teeth nip playfully at its shell.
 
“I say we let them exhaust themselves and then nap under that tree.” Her wing points to a tree reaching out over the beach, where shade rests, as it has for hours, as it may do for an eternity. “Any frozen day is an opportunity to catch up on sleep, don’t you think?”
 
Then more softly, as she leads Lysander over toward her chosen tree, “I have asked Asterion to come with me to see Daddy. I want to take the twins to see him too. Maybe we should all go together, one day…” Her side rubs against his, intentional, coincidental, whatever the reason her heart steadies and that small pang of unease unspools. She think she might take on anything, if Lysander is beside her – even eternal days, if this should become one. And if it does, will time mean anything at all, then?

@Lysander

florentine
rocking your pretty flower world