"But there is no point to it, this wanting."
Isra wants to feel rage. She wants to crack herself wide open like a geode until all the sharp, shining bits of her are blinding and bare. The grass beneath her quivers like a tendons plucked free from a harp and each turns to strings of pearls. They make a lovely bell-chime sound when each string clangs against her rusty chain. And when she crests the sloping land and sees Michael waiting ahead, like a tree that has only now decided to grow roots, all her rages smolders.
She smiles at him because she cannot help the way his hair is always in tangles and too long. She wonders if it's the weight of it that presses his spine down instead of sorrow. She wonders a thousand thoughts like....
Why here? Why now? Why after the taste of blood has long sunk into my dreams? Why does he come home now that I am a killer?
At her back, in the tall blooms and pearl-grass, her children laugh at some new wonders only they understand. Isra can hear Fable's enchantment with her wild star-sea twins and how even so far from the shore he can hear the sea roaring in each space between the girl's words. The tide of it all dulls her rage to a low sea-roar on a full moon night.
Over and over she tells herself-- I am content now.
Over and over again it feels like a lie.
Michael looks the same, all sorrow and heaviness that hangs on his like a skin of stone instead of fire. The sight of him presses against her throat like a fist made of dusty butterfly wings. Her voice cracks when she speaks. “I came home because you asked it of me.” She steps closer because her skin is tingling like sand beneath a wave begging for something hard to land on. He smells like summer grass and daffodils. Michael smells like sunlight (like home if she's didn't love the moon so much).
Isra breathes against his cheek, and she wonders if he can feel her magic pressing in like heat, like promise, like life. Her children frolic closer, headless of the adults, or anything that is not a dragon or the glass-smooth lake. “If I asked it of you now would you stay?” When she looks at him it is with some great need--
And if she knew how she looked at him like a monster looking at the salvation perhaps she would have turned away and forgotten all about questions like why.
@
