“She chuckles to her self thinking of all the exploits outsmarting lusty pirates, sinking armadas, rescuing seals and lost mariners, 20 questions with Cephalopods, racing orcas and dolphins, dueting with Whales, -and yet- the thing she favors most…”

The sunlight kisses her cold cheek and impossibly, he dances upon the tips of her eyelash before being beaten back with a furious splash! "Please! no more sunlight today!", cries she. And he retreats back into his cloud, dimmed, and confused.

“Yesterday there were duties. Last night there was pain. This morning there was heartache. An hour ago there was listless wandering. And a moment ago, she was enshrouded by a tangle of shadows at the end of her loneliness.”

"HISSSSSS!" came the sound of his closest eye-lash just before it connected with her exposed waist.”

“O! And that slightly painful yet massage-like- 'pulling' feeling where her shoulder blades met her wet membrane wings which were a bit heavy with wintery water…”

“…wrapping about her skin like the vines of the strangler fig on these hapless trees, like his insatiable hands and arms, like his greedy western thoughts…”

“Perhaps it was his room-shaking laugh or that twinkly smile which shone to her like a sun through the snow…”

And the door opened to a darkness all too familiar as it were the very same pitch as would greet me any other such evening. And tonight with muted olive painted walls and mahogany furniture lining the hallway I should have felt calmly enough-- aye-but...

To be told by the cawing of the crow, the breathing of the distant sea, and the soft kiss of the breeze upon his naked bald pate, "You are now and have heretofore been still more than all of this. Keep existing my friend and lover."

It was the last Full Moon of the warmest months. It seemed to take over the sky with a deep yellow glow of a hue which seemed to race out in all directions and flake golden light on countless orchestral legions of the dark symphony that was the evening countryside.

“He held the shield upon her as though saying “I want your shadow as well” and somewhere in the gentle darkness he had cast upon her, he saw her undone locks. And here as she lay upon his dark jacket on the old mattress they could be the incarnations of Queen Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh.”

“…That firecracker of a child came to me in the time of red pistachio leaves. She loved reaching this part of the book…”

It were as though the seat was a'glow with the ghost of that all-knowing Woman who, once upon a cool September day, bought him this very suit in which he now shrank year after year. And a Golden Grin bubbled up to his time-tattoo'd face. 

She closes her eyes to the feeling of her fingernails underwater. She doesn’t see the black of eyelids but instead- the deep green of quiet air under the pond’s surface.

“And suddenly, these most petite of little performers scattered, aghast in a flurry of membrane wings and tutu's as if in a melodrama at the sight of a looming figure approaching…”

"The lore says her husband buried her beneath a nameless pile of stones. The Earth swallowed up her wants and dreams as it did her remains. And all there be of her is a strange legend in these, the woods of her daughter's son's cousin's step-mother's property..."

"The roiling currents wound about her amphibious feet like a gleeful symphony for a new Queen..."

"She sees him bow his smiling craggy face down so his lobe meets her lips. The way he does this- one would think he is smaller than her..."

As the years stacked upon one another they traded every kind of laugh- from giggles to raucous ha-ha's over how she had to keep shushing him that day...

"She can't see the pigeons anymore. But she hears them take to the sky in bursts. The sunlight breathes on her knitted skin. She can't see the tower anymore..."

"...and whence the little children see this dark creature soaring toward them in the twilight with a wing span of five feet to two meters, the winds blowing through her reddish mane and the sound of those great leathern winged membranes violently beating away the serenity of village life... their tiny screams grow like a wave..."