ultima

Her past life could be compared to a pea. Small. Green. Insignificant. And smothered under a hundred mattresses, cushions, at the summit of which she perched sleepless and fretful, bursting with potential energy. 

Goose-down could not save her from reality, as much as she willed herself to forget. Chamomile and vervain couldn’t either, though she chewed so much of it the air around her beautiful head was colored by the scent. And how she wished she could be a girl with her head in the clouds again, beautiful clouds made of candy-floss and promise – she wanted the part enough to become it, trotting after the Doctors toting baskets of herbs and laughing gaily at half the things that caught her eye, sneering at the remainder. But that was only a transfiguration of daylight; the moon reveals all truths, and by night she was a creature other than Alph, who lived only for earth.

Ultima, Dearest Ever Dreamt, Crowned by Nightingales, For Whom Dawn Breaks in the East, was a girl with dreams, and they were not the sweet kind. Not for a year now. Not since the desert glass, and the crocodile who ate her heart and spat it back a different shape. (She remembered the way it looked, steaming in a red cradle, raw and hissing where teeth had broken the membrane. She remembered the way it felt to lift it, to carry it; set safely back in her chest it kept a broken rhythm, like a clock too fast or too slow. She kept crocodile time, now. She had carnivore dreams, toothsome and sharp, and she feared them.)

Down from bed she came, her wings half-flared, the young muscle protesting from being held so long in one position. Orangemoon smelled perpetually of rain, and a faint tang of ozone that promised a storm by sunrise. She got the feeling she shouldn’t go far, but it kept to her gut; in her heart was a frenetic abandon that pushed her tired limbs far, far and hard, harder, until she left the woods and her wings snapped out full and long, unhindered by the close-grown trees. 

The night was deeper as it stretched over the meadow. In the dark her eyes were bright, the long lashes opening and closing like moth’s wings. To look at her was to feel a buzzing in your head, a tightness in your chest; she leaned forward as if to counter a strong wind, her wings held aloft and trembling for take-off, her entire posture yelling: I am ready! But there was no wind. Her wings trembled because they were weak still, too weak to fly even a mile, and her posture unwound quickly with hoarseness. 

The moments that passed then were like straws, set one by one across her slender back. As she counted them, they took new weight, and the night’s negative space filled with an insurmountable dread. Once upon a time, the stars twinkling through the crosshatch of branch and bough, the moon’s light littering the forest floor like silver leaves – that had been a comfort. Staring up at the sky now, though, she didn’t recognize those stars, and that moon seemed too callous to be the one that had fallen so whimsically at her feet in a bygone age. They would not guide her home.

She sank to her knees unbidden, her long, stiltish legs folding gently into the tall grass. The ground was springy beneath her shins, half waterlogged, and a soft wind picked up from the east, ruffling her pale, waving hair. Her wings were the last to relent, quaking violently, burning with the effort to remain high and proud. One moment. Another. And then they lowered, gentle in their defeat; and there was only the girl again, neither Ultima nor Alph, nestled in the grass like a baby bird.

She was ready, but had nowhere to go.