Spellbound and liquid she cuts through the thickening night.
So still the night. So sleek and throbbing. So quick the night with scents of rain.
The clouds gather and pile, involving her: exigent and sparkling, in waves, blushing, rippling in the flux, then still, then teased with a risen blue hush.
Something moves in the sway of silence: the residue of the man's pain, lowly echoed. It's going after her, reaching out to fill the impression she let him stamp inside her.
Whirling and pressed she's moving for the urging sea, magnetized by its ripplings. Gently now in the darkness, in the mist, silky strobes of loneliness (fervent snares), bound and strayed and bent on her, study their reflections in her hair.
The sky flashes crimson like a scream. She's swooning. She can't hold on. She puts her suitcase on the beach and sits on it.
Her eyes fuse to the scene: the sky, spending and twitchy, sends slender metallic flashes (sweet release) to flit on the edgy sea.
The brewed storm is wicked and cool, urgent, hard for her to bear.
Swirling mists blend with thundering directives (extreme caresses), and a little bursting sound flings out of her.
Trembling, she throws herself on the sand, her head on the suitcase. Her toes face the sea, and she opens her mouth (lifting her face, arching her back) and lets in what's after her.
Her throat is scorched, the pain recurrent. Pressed and dawning, spread and hooked, the long ache of loneliness floods her. Watch her writhe punishing against the sand, razed and relishing the anguish.
The clouds burst; the spins drift.
Liquid snakes, unstrapped, fitful and hazardous, forcing, twisting, coerce the steam from her body.
So wet the night, the storm devoted. Ideas inside her evasively bloom. She's reaching to entangle them, extending herself to view the visions held on the verges of her shadowy affliction.
The sky flashes lime.
Derelict glints of hope and trust flood her with the blind reek of promises, the ravishing lure of lies.
The waves crash over her. She's reeling, indentured, trying to hold on.
Dilated, her pupils glow against their jade triangles as the storm grips and gathers her, evaporating the visions, defining the burn, the heat of the slip, the weight of the crush.
She's high now, too high, lost in the break, washed and tumbled. And she wants to see what she looks like now.
Some kind of dawn is breaking, and the storm falls away to deposit her, with her suitcase, into the deep.
Drifting, drifting. The deep has her now, spins reflective tunnels for her. Lulled by her reflection, I watch her shudder to sleep. This is what she dreams:
She's standing in a clear, gray, wavy place surrounded by blurring images just out of her reach. She feels her throat smoldering: reality inserting itself in reality. She sees the blue loneliness (that certain shade of blue) rushing through her veins like water, her skin undulating. She sees her body twitching. She stares into her mirrored wristband. She dreams about me. First she dreams my hand on her other wrist. She rips her gaze from her own reflection, to look at me.
The air is charged and flimsy when she looks at me. She has her eyes on my uncovered eye, a dark eye, sharp and crucial. Now she has her eyes on the left side of my face. The eye on that side is bad. Better to keep it covered. The patch is made out of a thick, cooling, gray fabric, supersoft. The clinging nature of the fabric makes straps unnecessary.
Her tremors start to break down into smaller shocks. She feels some loneliness sucked out of her while I'm touching her; my reciprocal waves transfuse her, replace one burn with another.
The air around us is misty and translucent; she suspects some implosive device of lurking behind it. She reaches, with her free hand, to touch the face of this man.
And then I seem to fade away, to become a series of doubles retreating, each disappearing into the other until I am invisible, my vital transmission muffled, but lingering, the mutual dread of loss ripened, tethered, lowly fondled. I'm here, but not here. Panes of glass shoot down from above her and impale themselves in the ground around her, forming a hexagon some five times her height, and wide enough for her to stretch out her arms without touching glass. Now I'm back, standing coolly, barely visible, outside these walls. She squints to try and see me better, then puts her hands on the pane between us.
Water begins, like tears richly hatched, to creep down the glass.
I make a sound, a plaintive and guarded and intimate sound.
Its impact rocks her riven. She feels a surging crack of rage, a constriction.
A pause. Whirring. A switch. For moments she's outside the walls, and I'm inside them. And this is worse! So much worse.
We switch again.
I put my hand against the glass and smile.
She stares at me and is mellowed and hopeful and warm and cool like rain.
Then she slips into a dreamless state.
After some time she wakes to find herself resting on a sandbar, her head cushioned by her suitcase, clear blues and greens surrounding her. She doesn't remember the dream, at least not yet, but she has a sense of me now, feels me on her skin somehow.
