What have you done to the game?
She looks up puzzled, more
puzzling than the set of pieces moving before her. Chess piece or my
eyes deluding my foresight? Heavy thoughts are bearing on the horizon,
like torn sails on ships as empty as rotten planks, drifting, the wood
continues so, to be drifting on the horizon. And my mind won't clear.
What have you done to me?
The sun, hot and swell, pierces this
old house of brick walls and even more brick walls. I am standing
between what may once have been kitchen and living room, where I now
make out the silhouette of a wall. It's ironic, but to me it feels like
nothing short of stupid. Like the last rusting nail in that damn rotten
plank. And something that may have been chess, being played less
carelessly than felt.
We are pieces in her hands, I muse. We are
idle little strings along birds' chests, painted red or orange, or
maybe blood-orange. My chest is now closer to blue, but that's a faint
murmur of something else, besides, irrelevant. Not spoken of. The blood
of the nobles would have no colour, she muses. If I were less
faint, I'd hear her speak, but I don't. My eyes are like dust on the
wind, the outskirts of a storm. She is rather caught in the eyes of a cat,
gracing feline steps along the windowsill, moving gently from the
surface of the ocean. While I cling onto the plank in the water, she
must not even float.
And they don't believe in miracles; I laugh.
I, scorn inside, feel crude at the tip of the sword, moist around my
soul, slumping down with my heart. People fade out and in to be
shadows, to be silken touches of a world unreal. I try to fade and she
reaches out, touches my bones with her fingers. What doesn't frighten
you may let you feel alive. Little more by little more. I want to be
scared, but I am not even less.
The game, that is, needs nothing
of this. But adding something brings to light what we bring to empathy.
The chess pieces move, but they turn blurry before my eyes. My skin is
glistening with the blood of stars, I'd say she'd say this. What are
words, I muse again. I know the question isn't the answer, though she
surely is the ocean, the sea. That vast, wonderful expanse of nothing
and more, casting no shadows and moving but itself, slowly, about my
neck. My skin vibrating with touch.