HERE IS THE HOUR THAT HAS FORGOTTEN THE MINUTE
though the minnow remembers the stream.
The static tingles against my skin. The world is all light, then all dark – violet-stained, and then white. I twist through dark clouds, half-wondering at my own bravery, half too enamored by the wild and dangerous beauty of the storm swirling around us to care about things like caution. I remember, innately, being a blade. I remember being a conductor, metal-bound. I remember my swing through the air, each arc of my blade, and it guides me as I cut through each ridge of cloud in his wake, following this strange, magical boy like the gold dust that trails from his wings. I feel the hot sear of lightning striking too close, and then the chill of the wind, the wet pelt of rain. It is too much to consider. I don’t. I just feel it, try to feel each passing moment, to imprint it in my memory – so, after my next death, it remains.
(It is futile to try to impress particulars. This much I know. Still. I think that my first storm should be significant, that it should matter enough to stay, but- but I don’t even recall any of my other names.)
I can’t catch him until he lets me. He is swift as a rabbit, even in the air, swift as a stag in the thicket; but he lets me, eventually, and I come to him. I am shivering – and I am not sure if it is from the cold, or the electricity, or the anticipation, the way that the wind calls to me in a language that I can almost, almost remember (the almost is agonizing) and tells me to dance, to return to the currents that once bore me.
This is the only dance I know, he says, bridging the gap between us; he reaches towards me, and, though I wonder at the motion, I don’t pull away.
Whatever I am expecting, it is not for his teeth to catch in my chestnut curls and tug on them. I blink at him, and then a smile – almost mischievous, almost provoked - begins to curl its way across my lips. I always knew that long hair would be trouble; the other lives I’ve lead, the real knights, always had the good sense to keep it shorn. Show me, he says, then, and I make up my mind to do just that, even though he pulled my hair.
Two can play at that game.
I lean in close and snap my teeth right by his ear, grinning broadly. “I will,” I say – and then I dance away from him, coasting on undercurrents of breeze, writhing a bit like the wind. I tell myself, down to my bones, to remember what it feels like to be something else. I know I will never remember right, but I try regardless; I know this heavy, clumsy body will never be able to capture for an instant the grace of a falling leaf, or a bobbing firefly, or the wind, or any of the separate, wildly different ways that they are graceful, but I try. I try, and there is a moment when I think I have it, when I think – feel – like I am a part of the storm and the great, wide world around me, not just a creature inhabiting it.
I am still laughing, maybe. It’s hard to tell; the wind swallows up my voice as soon as it passes my lips. Still, as I twist in the air, newly unafraid of the way it pulls and buffets, newly unafraid of the thing that used to be me, my bird-of-prey wings shift and twist with an agility that I did not know I possessed. I dance for him. I dance with him, but only if he can catch me.
Oh, I dance with him – and then, when the storm is gone, so am I.
@
"Speech!"
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
