He thinks her a mirage, at first.
It’s not the first time, and doubtful that it will be the last. By all rights, she should be some sort of a mirage, a spirit on the horizon, untouchable. It’s all he deserves – a glimpse of beautiful things before they’re gone.
He looks at her pale form as she emerges as if she’s just that, and when it comes to him that she is real, and not some pain-born figment of his imagination, the emotions that follow are muddled and pounding. There is excitement and love and hope because she’s here, she saw him and she did not tun.
And there’s a sort of strained, hot shame, because he is here in this strange position, vulnerable in yet another new way before her, still down in the grass with a newborn son, a child she’d had no knowledge of. What would she think of this? Would she find it a betrayal, turn on her heel from him?
She comes closer, though. She looks at his son – at Bad – and her words melt him. He smiles, still drunk on the pain and endorphins of childbirth, almost laughs.
“Like the stars,” he says, then, “and something else. I’m not sure what yet.”
He thinks of that brief shift, how the lips had curled into a snarl. Maybe he’d imagined it. His son has not yet tried to stand, but it will come soon.
Garbage stands, now, his own legs weak as if he were the foal. He breathes deeply, trying to steady himself.
“I think so,” he says, then, “are you?”
Will you run? is what he wants to ask, but he is too afraid of the answer.
@[Agetta]