01-25-2020, 06:57 PM
She likes the happiness the best.
The soft, sudden way it swells and bursts in her throat, skates across the surface of her tongue and emerges as laughter.
She likes the way it pulses at the center of her like a second heart.
How fiercely it glows, how brightly it burns, when her mother kisses her downy head.
She is a strange thing, she’s heard them say it. Mama and papa, wrapped around one another when they thought she was sleeping, murmuring about her spotted sides and her funny feet and the little nubs that had emerged from the tender plain of her forehead that would someday turn into antlers (at least that’s what mama said and Dear had never had any reason to doubt her mama). She is strange, they’d said, but then she could hear the happiness in their voices when they’d said that she is perfect, too.
She is small and the legs are thin as spindles as she emerges from the forest. From a distance, she looks like any other freshly born fawn. Deep red and spotted, blinking imploringly into the sunlight, thrumming with delight. Upon closer inspection, though, it is easy to see that she is no ordinary fawn at all. No, there is something in her face that is distinctly equine.
Her heart beats fast as a hummingbird’s as she ventures a few steps further, leaving her mama and papa behind. Mama tells her not to go too far and Dear knows that she won’t. She won’t go too far, she’ll go just far enough.
So, she teeters into the meadow, grinning madly. The birds sing, swinging just low enough for her to study their fat red bellies, and she laughs long with them. She is young and so impossibly small and she doesn’t know any better when she ambles, concentrating hard on where she puts her cloven feet, up to the nearest solitary creature and grins up at them. “Hello!” she cries, giddy.
The soft, sudden way it swells and bursts in her throat, skates across the surface of her tongue and emerges as laughter.
She likes the way it pulses at the center of her like a second heart.
How fiercely it glows, how brightly it burns, when her mother kisses her downy head.
She is a strange thing, she’s heard them say it. Mama and papa, wrapped around one another when they thought she was sleeping, murmuring about her spotted sides and her funny feet and the little nubs that had emerged from the tender plain of her forehead that would someday turn into antlers (at least that’s what mama said and Dear had never had any reason to doubt her mama). She is strange, they’d said, but then she could hear the happiness in their voices when they’d said that she is perfect, too.
She is small and the legs are thin as spindles as she emerges from the forest. From a distance, she looks like any other freshly born fawn. Deep red and spotted, blinking imploringly into the sunlight, thrumming with delight. Upon closer inspection, though, it is easy to see that she is no ordinary fawn at all. No, there is something in her face that is distinctly equine.
Her heart beats fast as a hummingbird’s as she ventures a few steps further, leaving her mama and papa behind. Mama tells her not to go too far and Dear knows that she won’t. She won’t go too far, she’ll go just far enough.
So, she teeters into the meadow, grinning madly. The birds sing, swinging just low enough for her to study their fat red bellies, and she laughs long with them. She is young and so impossibly small and she doesn’t know any better when she ambles, concentrating hard on where she puts her cloven feet, up to the nearest solitary creature and grins up at them. “Hello!” she cries, giddy.
careful, child, light the fuse and get away 'cause happiness throws a shower of sparks
Dear,
