from my current work in progress, Lost River:
I had been small once, with all that wild and green.
But she disappeared one night, as blood pooled along the edges of the crags.
Replaced by a small bundle of light, she was shrouded in moss, and yet the light still peeked through.
Green as the shadow of the bootsteps that trailed behind me.
Green in colour, as all was.
Her light.
Lingering above the mist of the water that had surrounded me all of my days. Throwing tiny, wet pebbles at my window every morning, until the moon dipped into her home and then again.
Yet I had feared her, this whole time. She was right there.
Right through those man-made walls we stacked with our tired hands, as if trying to keep her out.
Perhaps I had known a mother's grief long before today.
The good man. He had not feared her,
He just stood behind my left shoulder as he always had.
Since we were light ourselves.
We already knew what it had meant to bleed together, flowing through rivers in this life and the last.
He was pulling me out of the reeds. He still saw that small girl I had lost again only hours before.
I told him no, it was not me anymore. I pointed to the wisp of light over the loch. "I am not her," I told him, "she is right there."
As he looked over towards my pointed finger, she was gone.
He whispered to me not to worry, because he never saw anything but green when he looked at me.
Nothing but green and the wild.
When he was gone, he did not become a small green light like she did.
He became the way the word green fell from his lips the last night I saw him. In the frogs, in the land, in my head and my gut.
I thought the oath would wash down the river along with his body. But he kept it, even in death.
This time, I did not fear the new sounds, nor the light.
He whispered that he could not leave, not when parts of his soul swelled in my arms and in my belly. He told me that his soul was already carved into my own long before we created the new pieces.
When the other man took him, three was all I had left.
Just three.
But the other man found himself a god. He was only its vessel, mocking the earth, expecting me to kneel, picking us away little by little.
Our sweetest three.
With them, I could touch the green with my own two hands. They were me, and they were him, and I loved them.
Then came the croaking warnings. I could not run. I could only listen.
The false god sent two men this time, one for me, and one for him.
One final debt.
And now, there is only one. And I am the only danger to him now.
Yet, the other man did make one mistake. He gave us all back to the water.
(throwing up posting this)