« don't die so far from the sea »
Orestes knows both the ecstasy of the shark and the panic of the seal. That is why when she says finish it with her horn against him, he thinks of death and all things bottomless, like the way the sea opens up endless in the trench. Boudika had once asked him how deep he had to swim before the light was gone and he had thought, and thought, and thought but had no answer. The answer is here, now. The answer is that you do not have to swim at all. The dark is all around; and the only thing that is bottomless it the aching of a lost soul in a lost world.
The Prince of a Thousand Tides, the Prince of the Lost People, turns his head into her horn and lets it prick blood against his skin. His eyes are heavily-lidded against the glaring brightness of the sun, against the heat, against the way everything is salt and sand and the weight of eons. He says, “It is a great stag running and running in a beautiful forest, with dusk fading upon the horizon. Everything is blue, soft, cold. Everything is still except the deer that is running, so fast, so elegant. There is a wolf at its heels but you hardly see it against the foliage; it is a blur, not a shape, as the stag bounds endless and graceful. The wolf fades back, away from the deer’s heels, and as you watch the sun edges the end of the world and the stag leaps toward safety—“
Orestes narrates it with a voice that matches the tempo of the run he describes; he fills his tone with tension and a strange hardness. His voice does not sound like his voice. “—but as he leaps the forest comes alive, and a wolf that was in the shadow leaps to meet the stag just as he believes himself free from the jaws of death, just as the light of the fading day fills his eyes, just as he reaches the brilliant pinnacle of survival, of tomorrow, of life.”
He closes his eyes. He wonders what she will do; the wondering fills him with a bit of life that he has not felt in many weeks, in many months. He says, “It feels like the moment the stag leaps and sees from the corner of his eye his own death; he thinks, I made it, but even as he feels the truth of that thought he knows the truth of his fate.”
There is a part of Orestes that wishes to touch her breast with his nose; there is a part of him that wishes she would do the same, just to tell him that he is, indeed, alive and in the moment alongside her. He cracks his eyes open. Orestes asks, "What poem would you write?"
@Thana / speaks / notes: text text
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