Light Fiction

He kneels above her back with sweat beading on his elbows and knots in his palms. Silhouettes in a well-lit room, the world flickers and whirls around them. Conversation goes as it does, in ebbs and flows of insight and sympathy. Touching on deep muscles and cold winters, past and memories and not those things as well.

There is a knot on her left shoulder.  It reminds him of that time at the beach. A short sunset, waves forever, sand in sandwiches. The sand-castle builders had been out, there must have been a contest because there were so many and they were so big. And some of them had people inside. Always happy people; some with feathers and wings, others with scales and fins, smiling and waving or laying. And there had been that volcano, it was huge with rivers of sand-lava and forests of sand-trees and cracks of sand-destruction. And the real wind had been at it. And the forests were collapsing in on themselves. And the rivers of lava were shallow and ignoble. And after minutes of scrambling she had climbed it. The sun had just gone down for him, so he imagined that she could have seen it had she turned around. She looked at him and smiled at him, and he smiled at all the smiling sand-faces and the ruined sand-trees, at her footsteps ruining the volcano, and at her butt that he thought was enjoying its own sunset. He was smiling at her and at her sand-future, thinking of the ways they were, together. He let out a laugh and ran towards the volcano, jumped the moat of mud-lava, crushed the town at the base, tore through the forests and the trees and the rivers of molten rock. Tore up the earth in his rush to get to her while the volcano grew active again and pushed up tons of rock and grew with greater speed and furor the more he rushed. And he couldn’t get closer no matter how he tried, but he couldn’t give up and he knew that he would never stop and the moment was over and he reached her in his embrace and the volcano was dead again. But he knew that the sand and cold of sunset was an illusion and that he would never reach her, that she would be dancing while the earth carried her away and the wind ate her and time turned her into birds and fish, giving her all their trappings. He could see that her eyes were already scaled over, and that the magic of the light bouncing out of them was really the reflection from the reptilian patina blocking her sight. But she wore it well. And they collapsed together laughing, her left shoulder tucked in his right armpit, her head on his chest, knees intertwined. And they watched the clouds being ruined by the wind.

There is a knot on her left shoulder. It has been hurting her for days, only she didn’t know. He gets to it; she sighs. Her mind is all blackness and warmth.