"I hadn't thought of that," she replies, a little surprised it hadn't consciously occurred to her to wonder what it must sound like under the waves. The blue roan has been submerged in full on a handful of occasions, delighted each time but focused, always, on keeping water out of her nose and enjoying the way the waves tumble her where they will. It can be a dangerous game, and more than once she's been rolled onto a beach choking on the sea. When she thinks of listening underwater she mostly recalls the way her ears fill with it, muting everything to an uncomfortable murmur, and how for hours afterward she imagines she can hear sloshing in her head.
Reef gives her head a small shake and looks out over the foam-capped waves. The wind feels good up here, fresh and clean and strong, heavy with brine and carrying to them the cries of the gulls bobbing out at sea. A whole flock of them floats between the great spires, a great white colony full of diving, shrilling birds. "I wonder if fish make as much noise," she says, amused, watching some of the birds swoop between sea and sky. "Or if they feel the earth shake, when it quakes, or have any idea what rain feels like."
She is encouraged to muse out loud because he didn't laugh outright at her mermaid tale, and in fact shared his own 'what-if' with her. Reef appreciates that. It prompts her toward another question, something she has learned from her younger years not to lead with when meeting someone new, but also something the world, with all its derisions and heartbreak, hasn't quite beaten out of her yet. "If you didn't have to be a horse —if you could've chosen, somehow, before being born— what else would you choose to be?" She doesn't quite look at Jabari as she asks it, eyeing him in her periphery so that if he does react with mockery she won't have to see the full force of it, won't have to see herself in her mother's place— her dam trying to unravel the mysteries behind what made each horse's heart pump and enduring the cynicism of her peers, the occasional sneer, but worse by far was witnessing the pity that clouded their face when they looked at her mother, pity for a horse unburdened by the drudgery of life, pity because she saw magic where they only saw bland reality. |