and he told me i was holy; falla

[Falla]

Not this troublous 
Wringing of hands, 
this dark Ceiling without a star.

She could feel it – him or her – moving impatiently there, in that final crook of their inside home. 
And though she had never done this before, she was impelled to lay and rise and walk and finally nestle onto her side and straighten her legs out, by something beyond deliberation. 
And heave, putting everything into those long pushes, in symphony with the vice ache of her birthing muscles contracting.

It did not take long, or so it seemed to her. 
The preparation had been the hardest part.
This had been easy. It was warm muscles and cold earth, 

When she peered over her ribs at the damp place behind her, there was bright red and green. She smiled, shifting to her belly and forelegs, tucking her knees in and pressing her hooves into the ground. ‘Hello,’ she cooed gently, shaking to her legs, and turning ‘round to finish off the membranous afterbirth.

But it was gone. He or she. 
Falla blinked, panic clenched in her gut. ‘Baby?’

Through the trees and oceans of grass and winter’s melt, flashed red and green.
Off and on.
Red and green.
Moving away from her and their nest.
* * *

She slides to a stop, breathing hard. He, or she, could not have gone far – not on those young legs. But the forest is vast and dense, and the meadow is wide, and somehow she had not tracked her child down, yet. Her wild morning had been spent delivering and searching every nook and cranny of the woodland for a newborn. Tirelessly.
Then she remembers – flickering in and out, like a shadow in candlelight… 

Like something that barely exists, so she begins to doubt it all… 
But she had felt every tight muscle in her abdomen. The dilation and the relief thereafter.
(– but… She had seen. For a second, and then another. Red and green.)

So she searches on, because the exhaustion in her muscles and the grass and dirt that still clings to the sweat on one side says she is a mother. She moves from the white birches and into the sway of grass. “Baby!” she calls out, because she has no other name. 
That is the deepest cut of all.

The pink and green mare draws the concerned and disturbed stares of those mulling about, their own children stuck to their sides as if glued to place, or sleeping by their feet soundly; someone stops and asks her if they can help, but she can only say she has lost a child she cannot see, and with pitying clucks they let her be.

When she hears the calls – shrill, small yelps, fumbling to make contact with someone she hardly knows and yet needs so fundamentally – Falla reels around, her eyes wide and bloodshot. She knows the tone and pitch as if it is an inborn song. When she finally gets near enough to touch her (red and green – her now, she can see) she stumbles to her knees, ripping the skin, her legs shaking as if just now realizing the strain of their own exertion.
“Why would you..? Where did you go?!” she breaths out, raw-throated and angry, pushing her nose into the girl’s neck.

“Don’t you do that ever again! You scared me to death.”

Falla