and i must pour forth
a river of words
a river of words
T
he tease in his eyes as he stares at her through the window, with rainwater dripping down his face and plastering his hair to his skin, about makes her heart stop. She can feel it beating, aching, can feel the heat rising in her cheeks when begins to step forward again. She holds her breath, as if any movement might scare him off, as if he might disappear the moment she blinked -But he doesn’t. When she opens her eyes again the smiling boy is still there, breath fogging up the glass that separates them. Her heart sighs.
She presses her face against the wind when he spins around, but it only takes a moment for him to disappear into the rain. Somewhere a tree branch is tap, tap, tapping against a windowpane, begging to be let in - she almost does, this time. She almost flips the latch on the window and lets the wind and the storm rush in, so that she might lean out the window and see the boy standing in the rain once more. Already she is creating the scene in her mind, words spilling like an overflowing river -
He coughs from behind her, and Maret spins around. Her brown-and-blue-eyes widen, something almost like relief rising inside of them when she smiles. It falters only when he begins to speak
“My parents have told to stay inside. They say I’ll only get sick again, like when I was a baby.”
She wonders, when she tilts her head to look at her hooves, if her two-toned eyes do anything to hide the emotions that flash like lightning through them. Her magic tightens like ice around her heart, freezing her from the inside-out. It makes her want to leap and dance and blow away the frost like dust, but her legs only tremble at the thought. So she smiles instead.
The black feather swings from her neck when she looks up at him again. “I’m Maret.”
There’s something different about the boy, about the ease with which he spoke to her and the soft lapses in between his words. He reminds her of herself - a little bit quiet, a little bit pensive - and Oliver, too. Maret wonders if the otter is his best (only?) friend. She would understand if he was, she didn’t have many friends, either.
In the momentary silence, when a hundred questions rush like a river through her mind (most of them which she discards quickly for being too simple, too childish), one seems to stay stubbornly in place.
“What does the rain feel like, in summer?”
{ @pan "speaks" notes: }
