02-17-2018, 04:22 PM
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane; He’s made many mistakes in his life, and this had been yet another. He shouldn’t – Shouldn’t have left her. Shouldn’t have touched her. Shouldn’t have spoken to her. He knows all this, the way he knows he shouldn’t have done a hundred other things, but logic is a poor barrier to the memory of her skin and her eyes, their brightness when she looked at him. She had looked at him and hadn’t seen the sins, she hadn’t seen the proverbial scarlet letter in his eyes (orange, not scarlet, but the meaning was the same, the warning was the same). She had seen – what? Someone who might make her happy. He wouldn’t, of course – who has he made happy? He is nothing but a harbinger of misery, of misfortune, he is a black spot, damning them with his presence. But she had believed. And her belief had been enough to make him believe for a second, too. He hadn’t looked back. This is what haunts him. He had left and had not looked back at her. What if she had watched him go? If he had looked back – what? Might she have spoken? Asked him not to? (And what would he have done, if she had?) The meadow feels strange now, so he goes elsewhere, to the darker realms of the forest where moss and lichen grow and he moves in the shadows like some wraith, and he does not look for wildflowers. The babble of a river intrigues him, he follows the noise into a place he has not been. He wonders what the moon looks like on the river, if the reflection appears at all. But he stops. There is no moon on the river, but there is a galaxy, starlight in the shape of a horse. Of – He inhales, a sharp gasp of breath, as if he is suddenly drowning. “Saedis,” he says, before he can stop the word from leaving his mouth. Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. |