held on tightly, anyone

[basilica]

It sounds different coming out of his mouth.
Because the child has only heard it out of her mother’s mouth, her father’s mouth, her grandmother’s mouth. It sounds like a song and she delights in it. It makes that heart swell to fill up all that space at the base of her throat and she swallows and grins and tries not to let it choke her. She wonders how it feels in his mouth, if the edges are sharp or soft. If it fits neatly on his tongue or if it takes some effort to hold its shape.

And the child wonders why she wonders these things when she has certainly never wondered them before.

He shares his name and she holds it like a marble on her tongue. Rolls it against her teeth. Tests its weight and its shape before she repeats it back to him, too. “Aureus,” she murmurs and her grin deepens. She presses it against the roof of her mouth and prays that her tongue will remember the shape of it, the specific way it felt.

The child is shy, certainly, just as he is shy. But she had walked miles and miles and miles alongside her mother only to be introduced to new faces, virtual strangers, and perhaps that has given her an edge. Because her pulse is thrumming wild in her veins, the heart beating so hard that it makes her head swim, but she feels no trepidation.

She shakes her head in response to his question and then laughs, one peal of bellsong laughter, quiet. “I’ve never been here either,” she confesses, a secret just between the two of them. And then the child ducks her head and whispers across the distance that separates them. “I think it’s really scary.” And it’s true, certainly, but perhaps there is more to it than that. Perhaps she admits it because she has sensed his discomfort, the way he averts his gaze and digs a toe through the dirt.

“I’m glad you’re here,” she adds, just as quiet.

heaven's gate had such
eloquent graffiti

basilica