It was easy to pine away in this world, this world of shadow and secrecy and black needles. Swathes of snow lingered in white fringe on the ground, while the evergreen trees sang and pounded like drums. Birds flitted to and fro in the canopy. From their beaks came rivers, streets, pathways. The woman stepped through a loom of sapphire and into a world of other.
Rain slammed windowpanes, streamed against the glass. All around her, images shifted. She remembered when she was a baby, with soft, dark skin and brimming eyes. She remembered her father singing to her about the ocean, and how she longed to see it one day. She remembered her mother settling her into padded blankets, their fire lit and lazy.
Flashes: The plaintive tone of a cello. Aspen floorboards. Floodwater rushing down to the maws of street drains. Gnarled fields of scotchbroom. Snare drum edicts. Hawks, crows, gulls, songbirds, all ascending into clouded skies. A spotted turquoise egg. The warmth of her mother's arms.
The assemblage of birds opened their beaks.
Up, up, away, they sang. Follow us away.
They led her to a land of visible birdsong and amethyst mountains. They preened their feathers and swooped and dived, and from their throats came a wondrous melody, one of vibrant sprouting things, and cherry blossoms, and silver fish fighting upstream.
The woman awoke.
She coughed dirt from her mouth.
After a moment, she stood, and she began to make her way back to the river in a daze. She walked with bare feet through the fields of graves and poplars. She gazed at the entangled web of branches above and at the fractals of pale sky beyond. All thought fled from her head.
She called out for her mother and father. She called for the life she had known, the life where boulders were stones, stones which she threw into the gorge beside her house.
That gorge stretched on forever. Down, down.
"Mom! Dad!"
She remembered waking up and going to the gorge to sing. She liked swishing saliva around her mouth, then spitting, and watching it fall until she couldn't see it any longer.
"Dad! Mom!"
The woman finally reached the river, where she knelt on the embankment and wept. She dipped her hands into the river and lifted them to her face, staring blankly through glazed red eyes at the water streaming through her fingers.
YOU ARE READING
Aeolia
Ficción GeneralA woman runs from everything. A songbird joins her from nowhere, singing colors and images. A whisperer finds the pair among a field of poplars and graves. A dark and vicious viper stalks them from deep in the earth. They must flee from the Viper...
