Wayward dreaming.

Calloused wind on the body – ebbing ridges of sharp intangible picture. Glistening peaks writhe in their own salinity: writhe with smallish tantrum. A child. Forsaken, though destined.

A mere child drowned in his questions. His body lay gaping in the salt, invisible if it weren’t for the stirring of something on his gut – the mirrored reflection of sky peeling with such ripples. Thought. That was it.

He hungered there, breathing shallowly across the sky-mirror, sending gentle waves from his chest but these sounded with reality. He was water lying in water, a stagnant wave-face caught up in time and frozen with illusion. This was the reflection of arousal, a single flicker of disturbance that wound tight circles around the first. He thought of questions: the sinking pebble.

I’m alive?

No, no. I’m dead?

He battled with it for a while. Consciousness bled in and out like moisture on sea sand. This was coming to. This was waking from a dream deep and dark enough to cast a shadow over the eye forever. This was waking from the dead.

I should be dead.

And finally there was a statement: a clear image painted itself across his body, a crest of finality rushed into whitewater. The break. Yes the final realization of surf and shore. And with that break his body opened into sweat. His eyes closed to picture it. The death. The near-death. 

Do I remember?

Thoughts tricked with frustrating lethargy. He remembered the feeling. A soft, heavy, and black concussion from behind. A fight, perhaps. But then his eyes saw and felt drowning. His body fed to the swallowing. And then it was the back of his eyelids. 

Now, the sallow sun. Not afterlife. Not deliverance.

What was a world when it was born in peril? It was white. It was so bright that he could not manage to open his eyes, so bright that he feared everything outside his own body. When light is the thing making you run for dear life, your entire understanding of morality flips into something entirely alien. It makes you think that this light, this heaven, might just be hell. 

The intensity alter-eclipsed and burned right through the black of his dilated pupil, stung him right down to the darkest depths of his night-cloaked heart. It was violating.

Euphrates could only lay there writhing in the salted world. His skin puckered and pinched from the heat of it, from the swelling and bloat of the brine. There wasn't enough energy to vomit the residual slurry that rest in the catch of his throat. He could just sip the air and it's sharp texture, feel the cold water raise his skin even higher as it brushed against his ribs. His wings made their way over his eyes, to shield them from the light. 

A soft quake in his lips revealed one trivial word:  "help."

A RIVER IN A TIME OF DRYNESS, A HARBOR IN THE TEMPEST