a portrait of a princess, drowned. year six hundred.
oil on canvas.
oil on canvas.
T
here is a hill fat with heather, and vervain, and sycamores spit out from the forest, hidden in the outskirts of her city. Beneath that hill there are slumbering stones through which she can feel a heart-beat each time she lays her cheek down in the heather sheets whispering in the wind. And she had wondered, as she does now when leans into the gilded girl so her ear meets a throat, if anything in the world could sound like that hidden, slumbering hill (before she had known it was not the earth breathing but the things buried in it). She can hear another thing slumbering now, louder even than the sea roaring a lullaby to dead night. Almost, almost, does she listen to the instinct in her telling her to step away and crack open her jaw so that the girl can hear her own song. Almost does she sing into the whipping wind as her horn does.
But, just like the earth and death, she is a greedy unicorn.
And she had been dreaming that she was the sea. “Then I shall be like the sea instead of a dream of it.” Her smile goes as quickly as it comes, a flash of teeth that is nothing more than another curl of frothing waves in the sun (blinding and then black). “I will not apologize when I keep all that I find.” Like the sound below the pegasus’s pulse. Like the sleeping stone. Like the hill fat with heather, vervain, and sycamores spit out like the night’s stars.
Like the weeds of the sea curling around her ankles when she starts to walk across the waves. Like the oyster shells cracking open around pearls underneath her weight. She has no reason not to keep them all now, not when the cracked shells start to bloom fresh-water lily pads that break up the crashing waves.
She thinks it looks like the sea is breathing just like that hill in her city when it breathes.
“I think maybe,” The looks in her eyes begs the pegasus to follow, to follow as the sleeping stones follow the beat of her magic, and as the foxes run upside down through the dirt to follow her shadow as it trails through the forest. “I dreamed of the sea to find you.” Because what doe, what predator, what thing of gold and air, does not long for the wildness of flowers that no city, no wall, can give?
“And we, from within the sigh of the trees, and the soft moss underfoot, and the calling of night birds, watched "
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