FLORENTINE
always one decision away from a totally different life
Oh the festival falls away in laughter and music. The jovial song of a violin, a trumpet (and others whose names linger just beyond her reach) fade into the quiet. All that consumed Florentine is soft skin and softer breaths. The spirits of the festival, bright and merry, twirl around Soleil’s voice as she hums music Florentine does not know – has never known.
The world shrinks, until this tent, with its intoxicating aroma, its enchanting smoke, is all Florentine knows. She breathes a ragged breath and opens her eyes wide, wide to the shadows that swirl. They move and they dance, they form shapes that shift and swirl and morph in eternal circles.
Beneath the blanket of her wing Florentine curls, the gold of a feather brushing along the curve of her cheek. It rouses her mind and it ascends, piercing the veil of drowsiness like fingers from the surface of a lake. Ah, Florentine is drowning, sinking into this pool of delirium and opium pulls her deeper, deeper.
Her name drifts, unaccompanied at first. Still, her amethyst eyes stray to Soleil, over the gold of her skin, the curve of her slender limbs. “I need to forget.” So many ghosts lie behind her lashes. They haunt her dreams, her waking hours, but here, here they are banished. Here they too are drowning, pulled from her mind like smoke pluming idly from an extinguished candle. Ah, if only they too would fade into nothingness.
Her lips tip into a smile as her name falls from Eik’s heavy tongue. The twinges of her heart are no more, the flutter of butterflies in her tummy are lost but she remembers and she clings to that memory now. Opium comes, with its sweeping fingers, to erase her thoughts but of she grips him tighter and, desperate to keep him from erasure she murmurs thoughtfully, “I like a boy.”
A final shred of rationality has her lips pressing tight, a whisper of regret stealing its way through her mind. In the darkness of the tent she frowns, the twist of her lips lost to the kiss of smoke and shadows. “Is there anyone you two like?” The girl asks, too slow, too lazy, too tardy a deflection for it to ever be effective, yet she tries, with her tongue as heavy as lead.
@Soleil @
★ She is clothed with strength and dignity,
and she laughs without fear of the future ★
