Falls

A crack, a sliver of light, and spring slowly descends upon them. A stain of pink and orange dances across the sky, a cool light that glows through his eyelids. It is a gentle reminder that the world turns on and on, while winter remains forever in the cold hands of the Cove- the world continues.

There is a bitter roar in the air, and a cool mist that springs away from the water, dancing across the skin of a stranger that swims there.

Like a white shadow, he watches, lingering in the trees and turning his head to stare. Nothing calls to him, there are no tasks at hand. Simply waiting for something to happen. The world would be rife with war, and he prayed to be in the middle of it. The metallic stink of blood and the twisted dance of battle.

Yet, he lingered here, his skin still dripping with salt from the swim.

The stranger is an odd one, wading through the waters and dismissing the change in the season under her feet. Where snow once lay, like a thick white blanket, now there was a great green rug. Women would grow fat, and children would suckle at their teats. There was something tender and sickening about the coming of spring.

He made a poor father and son.

Where the stranger is brown, he is white, and where she is white, he is black. They are like yin and yang, and that drags him from the shadows, casting a cool, blue eye upwards to the sky she studies. There are no bunnies or birds there, painted in the clouds and twisted into familiar shapes. Instead, the silence is cut by the cawing of a crow, hanging close over the head of the woman and giving him the stink eye. “What do you see?” He wonders aloud.

As if she could see something more wonderful than he, and as if he too could imagine the painted sky and the clouds that skipped across it in the forms of animals and trinkets. Yet he saw nothing but great puffs of white, dragging themselves carefully across the slowly blueing sky.