and i must pour forth a river of words
or i shall suffocate.
or i shall suffocate.
S
ometimes she wonders what it would be like, to live all the stories she creates. To be the one racing through the garden, to be singing, screaming, sobbing, dreaming — to be the heroine of the story, or the monster. To be something, someone, anyone other than the girl with the frostbitten heart too afraid to beat for itself.
The thought makes her blood begin to feel more warm than cold, like everything in her is chanting yes, yes, yes. And when she tilts her head back to look up into the statue’s roaring eyes it seems now as if the stallion is screaming not at her — but to her. Maybe he, too, is screaming yes, yes, yes, maybe his tears are an invitation.
Maybe he, like all living creatures, wants his story to be told.
She smiles up at him, smiles at the antlered boy, and her smile says I could tell it for you if you’d like.
Leonidas calls her his ‘Secret Keeper’ and oh, Maret thinks it might feel just as good to be that as to be the story maker. And even before he is finished talking she is pulling out her notebook of tangled verses and woven secrets, the pages fluttering open like butterfly wings preparing to take flight.
“Of course I have,” she tells him with a laugh that sounds like water spraying from a fountain. “I could not forget” you “them even if I tried.” And she wouldn’t try. Of that she was certain.
Oh, foolish girl.
Foolish girl with her heart on her sleeve and her dreams in her eyes and a thousand different wants beating in her chest, who loves too deeply before even knowing its meaning.
She takes a step closer, close enough to see the flecks of gold in his eyes when the firelight catches them just right. She wishes she were gold like that, that her eyes could be the same color of sunlight. But she only smiles again, even as a golden horse gallops through her mind and leaves streaks of poetry behind in its hoofprints.
“Will you tell me where you’ve been?” she breathes, and her heart leaps a little bit higher in her chest, high enough that he might see the way it’s reflected in her eyes.
And the pages of her notebook spill open, ready to turn his words immortal.
{ @Leonidas "speaks" notes: }
