a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred.
oil on canvas.
oil on canvas.
A
gull is devouring the belly of a crab. His sister is trying to pluck out the stomach of a clam and only getting a heavy pearl in her mouth instead. The gull, the one with the pearl, is too hungry to pause before swallowing the treasure down her throat. Danaë watches it slide down her throat, so heavy that it ripples below her feathers like a snake moving into a dean. Her own tongue presses against her teeth, against the back of her throat, as if by willpower alone she might save the gull from her greedy death. But when the gull starts to scream as the pearl lodges between throat and stomach, and as those scream turns to shrill knells of death, Danaë discovers how frail and useless a thing like hope can be.
She’s moving towards the gull, towards the arcane display of wing sprawled haphazardly across the sand where the gull choked, when the pegasus joins her. For a moment she looks past the girl instead of at her, for the brother gull is curling over his sister’s body as if he’s considering how like a crab she might taste. Her attention waivers there, as if she is the gull looking downward with both sorrow and hunger.
And how easy it is to feel both those things at once!
The gull, the brother gull, turns away and the pearl that had been in the belly of a clam weighs down the throat of a gull. Danaë turns her attention away too and shifts it (still fat with sorrow and hunger) to the girl as she bows. A smile catches on the backs of her teeth, like a pearl, and she cannot make her face do anything but shift as impassive and as bright as they dawn haloing them.
“I was dreaming.” She does not bow, or dip her horn, and she has no feathers to flutter teasingly. There is only a lift of her head, as regal as it is warning, to show that she’s accepted the company as all. Because just as the gull has paused, she had too as she decided if the mare was to be food or sorrow.
Danaë settles on sorrow. “I had thought I was late.” Late, late, late. Late as greed and early as death.
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
« r » | @Aster
