"I think we deserve
a soft epilogue, my love.
we are good people
and we've suffered enough."
a soft epilogue, my love.
we are good people
and we've suffered enough."
Tell me what you've written.
Michael's heart beats a little faster, in time with the near-winter wind blowing off the mountain, in time with the scarf that taps at his cheeks and his eyelashes. He is watching a plume of smoke rise from the bakery's chimney, curling as it casts itself up. He doesn't want to tell her. Doesn't want to tell anyone. He isn't sure why he mentioned it at all.
At first the gold horse is balling up his piece of paper, folding it into smaller and smaller pieces until it is as hard as the rock in his stomach. Somewhere her dragon is flying, circling the mountain, and if Michael sees him at all it is only for a moment, one blink before he is buried in the canopy of pine trees that rattle with his passing.
"It's not very good.
And it's not really a story.
And it's also not done."
Michael says this, one on top of the other, until they all fall out of him at once and crumble down the slope with the pebbles rolling in from uphill. He can feel her weight on his back and Michael is thinking of white giants with ache in their step and laughter so sad and so nervous he wonders if that's what it's like to hear him laugh. He has many apologies to offer and he plans to offer none of them.
Tell me what you've written.
It rings in him again, sharp and hungry - and Michael smiles against its rough edges. He has seen this in her, scuff marks on her bones that mark her as something more, something special--or something terrible. And Michael has smiled against its sharp edges, still.
He shifts his weight, swings his eyes from the plume of smoke to the unicorn with the fist around her heart, and draws in a breath to speak--but, instead of opening his mouth, Michael simply unfolds the balled-up piece of paper and hands it to her.
His handwriting is neat but simple, looping only where it has to, and half of the page has been crossed out, beyond recognition. If Michael is embarrassed, or worried, it shows only in the way he holds his breath, giving her a time to read:
When the sun came up
we took our hands to the water
and our hearts to the water
and fed them to the sea.
I remember the light
on your jaw,
on your ribs,
on your mouth,
on the pieces of me going out with the tide.
--before pulling the scarf further up around his face, burying the heat in his cheeks under the thick blue fabric. "Anyway," he says, "Were you going somewhere? Why are you here in the mountains?"
@isra
