A pillar of salt! It doesn't surprise her,
This slow dissolving into tears.
“Not me.”
She stares at him then, mouth agape, as if inhaling in order to continue a very long scream. She thinks: No. And then: No. And furthermore: NO.
“It’s okay. What happened here? Can you remember?”
Saphira closes her mouth, lips trembling. She shakes her head, just a little, and then harder, until she takes in a grating gasp and says: “I only wanted them to listen.” She looks at the horizon then, at all the corpses and their houses, and says, “But the ocean is gone. Where is the ocean?” She looks at the one living man in the world and asks, “Do you think it dried up?” But she knows the answer, very suddenly, though when her dream had started there had been no questioning of the ocean, because its concept did not exist. This world did not have an ocean. Now it had the absence of one.
Saphira starts to cry. Sparkling tears trickle down her face, prettily, and she only whimpers quietly. It is as one wishes they could cry, but they are also the tears of someone who is just a little tired, or just a little embarrassed, or just a little afraid. It is nonsensical, dream-sorrow. Should she not be wailing? Great sobs, lamenting countless deaths, the destruction of an ocean? Of a civilization? She asks herself these things, obsesses over them, and wonders if the last living man in her dream is asking them, too. “I don’t even know what I was trying to tell them.”
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