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There is paper in her chest folded up into the shape of a heart. It flutters like a frail scrap of poetry begging for wings and storm winds. She trembles at the feel of it cutting into the insides of her. She shivers for the way his voice breaks up the silence and the sound of clouds shifting out above her head in colors just learning how to be tragic.
The whisper of her tail against her hocks makes hardly a sound in the pregnant pause. And all at once she's aware of the itch of her skin pulled too tight across her ribs, the creases of her face that are more gaunt than beautiful. She's aware of each and every crack racing across her sinew like lines in ice come the spring. And she tries to regret it, the horrid shape of her form, but nothing comes when she looks at his face and traces the scars there like ink lines on a white-paper heart.
Nothing comes.
But she touches him anyway, her nose to his cheek. She inhales like she's forgotten how to breathe.
And all she can taste is winter.
“I'm looking for the promise of rain.” Aridela tries to smile, but it is nothing more than another tragic twist of her lips that have always traced themselves into lines of sorrow and entropy. Her paper heart flutters in her chest again as she looks back at the clouds with the crying crow still vibrating in her ears. It begs again for air, and a storm, and a sharp cliff from which to plunge into the sea. She shifts her weight towards him because she does not know how to do anything else.
Air stutters through her bird-lungs as she tucks her nose up into a breeze promising seed, and pollen, and joy she does not know the flavor of. “But if I were to see anything but a storm in the clouds it would be that.” She points her nose towards a cloud just ahead of them. It seems like a great jaw full of teeth that is opening up just below the bottom curl of the dawn sun. It looks like a thing brave enough to swallow rock, and fire, and beg for more, more more.
Aridela was like that once-- a great thing full of hunger, and the wanting of fire, and air, and the black bottom of the earth.
But now she only looks away from the thing of cloud-teeth and traces again the brutal map of his scars (and the sight of them settles a feather on her paper-bird heart). She only gives him another tragic almost smile as she asks with a scratch of her tide-song voice, “What is that you would see?”
The crow stops singing it's screaming cry, and the falls settle back into the roaring song of water in spring. And below that there is only the soft hush, hush, hush of air between their lungs like a distant sea.
* * * * *
nothing can breathe in this space
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