Jude looks and looks and looks. Sees only clouds. Not elephants or castles or pigs with wings. Just clouds. Grey and white and shifting.
"Tell me," she says. The girl beside him with pieces of the sky in her eyes, and flecks of amber, like bit-gold in a bed of blue water. And Jude wants to tell her.
"I see the flicked tail of a mermaid," he says, "just the flick, and the mermaid gone and the water and the memory that she was there in that flick-tail disturbance she has left behind her."
"You see that?" she says.
"Don't you?"
Jude lies on his back, close enough he can feel the nearness of her, close enough they are almost touching. He turns his head and is looking into the shell of her ear, the perfect curl and coil of her shell-like, and her hair fallen back from her face, and one hand to her brow, like a salute.
"What else?" she says.
Jude draws breath and looks again.
"I see the feather of an angel. No wings or halo or angel, just a feather that she dropped, and it floats, this way and that, on the air, on the breath of everything. And the angel is called Samandiriel, and she leaves behind stories, everywhere she has been, and if you listen to the wind, and the held breath of no-wind, you can hear those stories she made."
She reaches for Jude's hand, lying there beside him, looking up at the sky.
"You're good at this game," she says.
And it is a game. Only a game. One that children play. And lovers play, too, wanting everything to be child-like and easy, wanting this thing between them to be innocent and honest.
"Listen," Jude says.And they do. They listen, to the wind or no-wind. Listen and listen. Eyes closed, as if listening could be distracted by seeing. Somewhere, a dog barks, far off, and a child laughs, and there is music someplace too, all brassy and blown, and the thump thump of a drum.
"Tell me," she says at last. "Tell me what you heard."
His eyes still closed, his hand holding hers, Jude speaks slow and slow. "I could not hear anything," he says.
Maybe she sighs. Maybe her disappointment is audible.
"Except the sound of a heart beating, and I thought it must be mine. And there was dancing, I heard that too, though I don't know how that can be. And the child in you was laughing, and throwing sticks for a dog to fetch. And a voice in me saying, please do not throw them so far."
She curls into him then, fitting herself to him, closer than close now. And Jude cannot believe what is, for he expects the flick-tail and gone, the dropped feather and flown, the far-flung stick, and somewhere the child in her grown.
322 Review publishes provocative emerging and established artists. Conceived and operated by former Rowan University graduate students of the Master of Arts in Writing Program, 322 Review is aggressively seeking the best fiction, creative nonfiction, poetry, and mixed media works of visual art.
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