Put Out The Stars [Pollock]

[Pollock]

I called you to announce sadness falling like burned skin
I called you to wish you well, to glory in self like a new monster
And now I call you to pray

He is clean now. Washed through by a dip in that salt water.
The sun was split in slivers on the surface like a ripe fruit (tangerine and pink, vibrant; his head pounded mightily when he looked up or down, so for a time he kept his eyelids tight together). He had gone one way and Chessur the other, both bound to their own version of a memory made of sand and brine. Unlike his baby brother, Pollock had the courage to face it head-on. To find the place, the exact place, and imagine it real again—her like a snare, the colt trapped inside…
He laid his head low, pressed into the roily water until he could hear nothing but the muffled whooshing of sea spray and the claws of the ocean on the damp sand, pulling them all together.

He stayed below until he could no longer, and came up sputtering.

And clean. Horns and nose and cheeks, split hooves and knees. The tides pushed in, pressing it all closer to him for a moment like a quiet goodbye. And then, pink and violent, the ocean yanked the sanguinary wash back into itself. 
But horses like him wear uncleanliness like a king wears a crown or Pale Death wields his scythe.

She is angry. She coughs it out like hot steam from a broken pipe. That rouses him. He is moved by the way these negative things (fear, anger, jealousy) clog like tar. Or maybe they corrode—caustic, like the way hard touches long ago turn all the soft ones rotten now; the way a mother’s madness can work like a pathogen sent to nibble at the tender meat. So he follows her, quiet and unseeable, for some time. Watching as she weaves, green on green, through the forest, caught in the quagmire of her own inane little problems. Until he knows she is marked, indelibly.

Until he knows that she is his and he moves closer… 

He he begins to imagine her… differently.

The palomino shows himself to her. A kind of… intimate gesture, perhaps. He stands for a while, his brown-black eyes examining the smooth canvas of green lustily. He moves forward, closer, to check the way the roundness of her belly meets the turn of her hip and haunch. “Who is Dacia? Hm?” he says, finally, gravelly and slick, now meeting her eyes. “She sounds like she could use some discipline.” He flickers out, moving between that plane of senses and creeping forward to stand nearer to her still, his breath warm and mixing with hers. “I could do that.” He twists his head, his great, curved headgear making gentle contact with her cheek. The soft stroke of a painter's hand.
He flickers back in, eyes locked to hers and he gives her fear, generously. Watching her face for the way it might turn from him reflexively, or her eyes for their whites. It doesn't matter what she fears—this is fear, simply.

Even if she tries to run, he is faster than her. He could outmaneuver her as if she were a child on new legs. He could hunt her down far longer than she could ever give chase.
Sometimes, paths simply lead to dead ends.


POLLOCK
Lone Artist and Phina's