Little waves our bodies break - Cordis

[Alight]

She opens her bright, hot wings like a peacock does his tail. She flaps and swishes them in the cooling, dusk air. They snap and hiss ferociously, so at-odds with the secretive smile that brightens her pretty face. She giggles lightly – a girl’s giggle – and against the mauve-and-dark sky, by the flame lighting from left and right, it is almost unsettling

Maybe not for this stranger. This stranger who has been through so much.

This stranger…

—but an outsider looking in would see that the girl mutates, as quickly as day hurtles towards night, like a comet to earth. An evolution, fed on the power she suddenly feels she holds, as the silver stranger feeds at the bait she dangles; she jerks and bends out of shape, as the sadness and loss feeds that greedy, wounded animal.

(Those wing are a byproduct of a perverse subconscious; they are the reaping of a galaxy push off-kilter.)

Suddenly, she wants to know what troubles this stranger’s queer and lovely face. Where before her own twisted gut stayed any sense of genuine curiosity, now she draws closer, flitting like a lightening bug, those soft brown-and-fire eyes prying gently. “Indeed.”

She giggles again, “gone.” It is a sharp, smarting answer. Gone. Of course, Alight could not say where that flower-haired mare (if she was mare at all) had gone to, but when Alight had returned from where she had intended to nest with death, still partially raw and teary-eyed, to the center of that great, blood-fed coliseum…

Gone, with not a petal left to show of her own salvation.

“Why?” The golden-and-indigo girl settles (as much as she ever can now, those dreamed-up wings in constant, sparking animation), “do you need something? Because, you see, she gave me more than just my healing back,” her eyes are impossibly wide and glossy, for a moment she considers letting the stranger urge her for more, but even children understand when to play their cards. “I can do the same for others.

If I want to.” She wants to look cool. Collected. But night swoops low and she remembers darkness so utterly devoid of anything, instead she shifts ever closer to this stranger her breaths coming fast and excited. (She remembers that dead, grey-skinned moon. This is what she had hoped it would be in the flesh. Bright and silver... sad and romantic.)