In the end though, the ocean couldn’t hold him. Water spouted from his lungs. (“See that water, James, those are whales!” It was the first sentence he recounted when he was made anew.) He watched them pull a body from he water. It was his own, water logged and limp. And had he not been a child, maybe he would have thought it to be strange.
Had he not been the son a dreamer and his golden wisher.
And he runs on limbs reborn not from ash, not from earth, but from waves. It is seen in the way he rocks and glides and rolls. If you look to Nerine’s ocean and to the little boy, you will see it. He stops his dance (“You look like your grandmother when you do that—dancing is in our blood,” his mother used to say) only when a flash of gold kisses the corner of his eyesight. So brief and so small a glance, if anyone older saw it, they might not have truly seen it.
But Benjamen, he saw it.
“Mom?” It’s a question as much a statement. A question because he is still small, a statement because he grew beneath those waves.
But be weary of the woman spun from gold, she is not who you think.
“Wait, wait, wait.” It looks so much like her. The waves are forgotten. The death is forgotten. He is no longer running along the cliffs of Nerine, scampering over loose rocks, but he is prancing along the cliffs of Terrastella, wildflowers kissing alabaster ankles. And that is not a stranger he follows, but his mother. And they are not walking into the unknown, but going to their very-secret-Elliana-doesn’t-know-about spot.
And he is not Benjamen, reborn from water filled lungs and salt ridden hair, but— “It’s me! James!”
never gave a single thought to where it might lead
image by Gary Bendig
@[Aela]