“ What does he see and what does he know that the rest of the world is missing?”
Isra's eyes, for a moment, darken as the breeze sings through the owl feathers tickling their bellies. The darkness of her eyes when they turn away from the horizon and look only to Florentine seem to be a voice of their own. Oh, greedy queen, those pits of dark sea blue chide. Are the feathers against your legs not enough?
But Isra blinks away the darkness and all the starlight returns when she says, “I suppose it is in our nature to want. I will try to do the old, twisted magic of your world justice.” Perhaps her words sound a little sharper when she inhales and asks, “Shall I continue?” She has no intention of waiting though, for the story is banging against the back of her teeth like a hammer.
And so she exhales and the words pour out like rain and like a flood form her lips.
Each of her words begs the grass to change, the soil to become and the air to dream of winter and snow and color. “It was at the highest hour of the day that the rains stopped and the black clouds rolled back like the tide. Across the sky a rainbow arched and cut through the blue-sky like a blade of color.” Around them the grass turns from feathers to stalks of blue, red, yellow, purple and something that seemed almost like sea-green. The soil beneath turns to silver-dust and gold-dust and all the colors seem a chorus of rainbow light when the moon shifts through a cloud above them.
“When the saved prey looked out from their walls of rotten, dying leaves they sung in joy to see a rainbow instead of a sea of rainwater and silt. The mice chanted of utopia and the chipmunks of bounty. But the young owl saw only a rainbow and none of the wonder. He saw not a pathway to some other world but just color. He turned to the mice and the chipmunks and said, “Why do you sing? It is only a shimmer of the sun through the lingering moisture of the air. There is nothing for you there and in a few minutes the rainbow will be gone.” His new friends that owed him so much, knew then what give they could exchange for their second-chances
And so the small prey animals smiled at the owl and their lips started to part from around those smiles and magic started to pour out like the now gone rain.” The moon shifts back behind a cloud but the stars and the wild-light flare brighter in that burst of darkness.
“Has anyone ever told you, Florentine, that owls have always been the most scientific of all the nocturnal birds? Did you know that when they sleep during the day strange things happen to their dreams because the sun rules the sky instead of the moon?” All the stalks at their feet turn black as a moonless night. Isra tucks her legs beneath her, beds down in that darkness and her eyelids flutter like hummingbird wings.
Around her the black stalks bloom with soft silver seeds that shift between looking star-silver and moon-silver. Isra closes her eyes and when the night breeze comes again the paper-thin seeds let loose from their black-wheat beds and drift away like a million tiny wishes.
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