07-13-2015, 04:26 PM
He sees something flicker across her face, something dark and unreadable. His head tilts, just slightly, as if it would help him decipher her, as if she was simply a language that could be decoded. She was not, of course, she was inherently more complex than that – a woman touched by the sky, a warrior, made strong and steely.
(He doesn’t know that she’s also touched a god, that there is something canine about her now, a wickedness he has not yet delved the depths of.)
He is complex too, in an entirely different way. A boy made of glass, who exists, impossible, in a world of stone-throwers. His existence practically begs to be broken, and he thinks (when he in a more morbid state of mind) that it’s a miracle he’s alive, that any day now he will fall victim to a hungry beast, a wicked wayfarer with a taste for blood. Or even something simple, something foolish – he will slip and fall, and watch his life bleed away.
He shakes these thoughts off, quits trying to decode her, quits plumbing his own depths where the macabre thoughts sit perched like gargoyles.
“I’ve been well,” he says. And he had. Time had passed. He had been alone, but that was not any different. He’s grown used to the sound of the water, finds comfort in the noise, the constant of it.
“And you? You seem…different,” he doesn’t know how to explain, that something touches her, a shadow to her face that was not there before.
contagion
be careful making wishes in the dark