the birdsong might be pretty,
but it's not for you they sing
↞• ‒ •⤛☀✿☀⤜• ‒ •↠
but it's not for you they sing
↞• ‒ •⤛☀✿☀⤜• ‒ •↠
His voice brings her back like a noose. It drags her from the tides of her own soul. The sound of him is all dark wood and dying trees. She remembers that she is a girl now. And he, she pauses to run her eyes across the wide, fearless space between his eyes, is no shark in the black water. Below her the earth is a comfort. Between them, the path to her home, and the old roots running in highways below them, she tries to tell herself that she is safe.
She's still thinking those thoughts, closer now caught in the loop of his voice, and they do not settle completely when she steps closer. The sound of her hooves is an answer to a dare she did not realize she read in his body. Or maybe it's all challenge when a coyote cries in the distance and she closes her eyes like the sound is something holy. “You are not lost.” She says and the words are part regret and part thrill running below her young skin.
Red wonders at the thrill she feels. She wonders how it might feel to push him off the cliff instead of turning towards her house looking at the sea, and the lighthouse, and the slumbering vineyard. But she only wonders in a way that leaves nothing but spring green sorrow in her gaze.
Horace was always better at this part. She is too hungry to be alone, and found, and everything all at once, to remember all her social graces. They call her the witch of the vineyard for a reason. No horse is made to look into the eyes of a seal and name all the things living there like flotsam.
“Follow me.” It hurts every inch of her soul to turn her back to him. It emboldens every other inch of her to demand instead of ask like she's the only god this piece of lands knows. The ground softens with the promise of spring where she walks. Any leaves clinging to the vines turn belly-up towards her like she is the rain and the sun.
Red notices none of it.
All she can see is the house with a golden-glow leaking into the almost twilight. And all she can hear is the air the stallion's lungs and the way his hooves cannot fathom how to move over the ground in the same pattern of hers.
It's another things horses are not made to understand.
↞• ‒ •⤛☀✿☀⤜• ‒ •↠
@Sarkan
