“The dawn was breaking the bones of your heart like twigs.”
The earth drags in a breath that burns its throat.
A hush falls over the coast.
Michael's mind is a mess of disjointed and arrhythmic poetry, some thought that went skittering across the waves the second it entered his head. He has not felt chaos like this in a while but he could walk its streets if he wanted, darting through alleys and nodding at every stray cat on the sidewalks. Sometimes all he is is chaos. Sometimes Michael is not himself but what he used to be, a sturdy rock against which the waves break. More often he is the waves, breaking.
It is a gray day but Michael is still dappled sunlight and contradictory things. The gulls land, hushed, and most things Michael remembers are turned to dandelions that are in their turn pushed out to sea:
The ground beneath him, pushed out;
the dark sand clumped in his feathers, pushed out;
the breath in his lungs, the breath that the earth had been holding, pushed out.
Maybe the magic that used to pulse from him in rings of things unthinkable is what plants him firmly in the sovereign's plane of dandelions. He recalls he could never do something so tangible but each second in her presence is a dreamscape born over and over again and he thinks that if there is nothing left in this world that he knows the name of he does know, intimately, what it is like to live in someone else's dream. Michael goes cold under her touch.
"Me too," he almost whispers. There in the distance is the dragon's head, the dragon's neck, and Michael cannot see that he too hums with this energy like gnashing teeth and a night with no stars. The golden horse plucks a dandelion from the wet sheet of his mane and holds it up to the light.
"Isra," he begins before blowing the seeds into the gray afternoon sky, "are you okay?" Now, finally, he turns to look at her, a sizzling pool, a geyser bubbling just under the water's surface. It is these times that Michael seems callous, lost to some far away time that has no connection to their present and certainly not their future. He is thinking of the dragon in the surf. He is thinking of Isra's city on the hill. He is thinking of her and there is a rock in his stomach because he does not know her well at all but he worries, still. "What are you going to do?"
@isra
