There is love in your body but you can't hold it in,
It pours from your eyes and spills from your skin,
Tenderest touch leaves the darkest of marks,
And the kindest of kisses break the hardest of hearts

”Father, why do you choose to be unhappy?”

He stared at the filly, stare rigid, threatening, eyes narrowed to a poignant, perilous juncture. There was no return from her blunder, from the words that had been tossed from her lips haphazardly. She looked at the ground so she wouldn’t have to peer into that harsh, unrelenting gaze, the same ruthlessness that ran in her blood. But, stirred by something deep inside, a brazen audacity beating, fluttering strong, butterfly wings, she continued.

“I could never be so miserable. I could never make my herd miserable in turn!”

Her words ended on a strong, vicious yell, a torrential inferno built inside a tiny body for too long. She still slid her eyes to the hardened terrain, the dank, soil that couldn’t grow anything, afraid, hesitant to glance upwards and watch his reaction.

But all she met was silence. It took her a few moments to hasten that bravery again, instill another insurgent fortitude – and when she raised her head, she met nothing. He was gone again.

She was left with only the strange thought that this had hurt more. Not only did the cadre ignore her, but now, her father did too.


She returned to the elements. Like a forgotten castaway, she was seized in a mellifluous chord of beneficence and harmonic finesse, the yearning earth reclaiming its nymph from scorching alms and rapacious heat, placing her in the arms of the sea. And there, she began to move as the water, silken and contorted, became one with the swirling, rhythmic tides, rejoiced in the candor of the spirited gulls. She drank in the salty air and exuded its cool, passionate grace, flew into the ardor of the winding, blue tapestries, the walls of ocean closing in on its swan drowning in reverie. A rhapsody of peace, she drove onslaughts of terror away from scuttling crabs, pranced across hot, meddling sand, tore into the vibrant, tenacious gulf and exuded rapture, bliss, elation, feverish fervor at the glorious hands of divine gods, spinning, coaxing with their vestal pride. At the height of immaculate grandeur, droplets of cascading morality assuaging her sienna hide, she plunged her soul into the depths – submerged her body in the precious, celestial ebb and flow, surrounded her warm gaze in the deepest blue until her lungs relished for air. When she resurfaced, she drank in the sun’s touch and hastened the warm breeze to take her away again, into the strength and diligence of benedictions, of covenants lost and found, of seraphic wonder and beauty, of adherence and perseverance. Pillars executed harpsichord delicacies, silent and muffled along the molten dunes, but then a dulcet elegance in the tossing, irreverent waters – all at once an ardent oeuvre, offered to the gods as penance, a mermaid waltz, a siren courting reveries in the haze of another abyss.

Then, she danced. It was a solo performance, a recital for nothing and no one, a living, breathing testament of ethereal existence, intangible threads of otherworldly possession made from air and rain. Made for the earth and the wind, obscure, enigmatic, alluring and beguiling in the entrancing, enchanting fixture of bewitching shifts and captivating conveyances. To the hushed gales, she pervaded the scenery with intoxicating euphoria, carried away in the boughs of ensorcellment. To the vivid terrain, she surrounded the rigid strife with composed, lissome schemes and motifs. Abstract, almost spectral, her movements cascaded in a ripple of fine flesh and undulating muscles, shoulders maneuvered in an artful, ballerina brushstroke, petaled and honeyed, flicking one limb outward, into the unabashed waters. Another followed, sanguine and divine, flourished with sacred steps, and the rest smoothly thereafter, illuminated danseuse of the sands. Pristine, the motions wove archaic, refined prayers and ardent sacrifices, told a story on duned, damp canvas, whispered hymns and hummed croons, wrote passion and strength, conveyed beauty and breakdown. A laureate’s sonnet, a lyricist’s song, a lover’s kiss in the open sun, it fluently emanated freedom, indulgences, sacrifice, and the winsome, whimsical finery of innocent lost, regained, then torn again from the open plains of a long-lost, misguided heart. Dreams reborn, hopes revived, and wonder placed in the boughs of summer, of withering glades, and of beatific odysseys.

When her nurse came back for her, Lena too, had left.