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

From the subtle reality of that single word, Euphrates woke. Bilge hurled from his gut and his breath shook into haggard choke, blown to rasp by the end of it. The cough furled wet and streaked with mucus, and even silt bounded forth from ballooning lungs. The excrement made a slick, green pool in the crunchy brine. All he could taste was salt.

Holy shit.

Withered eyes made out the shining puddle through disgusted slants. He moaned so softly that only threads of sound surfaced in the whine. His ripples settled into a steady chop, torn open by whitewater. His body darkened. He could hear the sound of his own waves, the miserable slap of water on water - the delirious pounding in his head.

His eyes moved wearily from the shiny vomit. With every breath his colors moved a little more methodically, his brain pounded a little more evenly. Pounded out some thoughts, some associations. He could see the sky was a little whiter than the land, which was also white. He could see his own legs and feathers were just a pale, animated gray. He was the darkest thing in sight. He looked like a fluorescent shadow, something two dimensional; pinned and wriggling like a sun-nailed specimen. 

With more time, his eyes could make out little beads of dried seawater crust forming on the face of his hooves. He toyed with movement, making gradual realizations of his body, waiting to come across the fierce pain of a dismembered limb or, hell, a newly grown one. His wings were the first things to unfold, and they did so one ligament at a time, each feather meticulously inspected by unthinking eyes. He wasn't surprised about fatigue or the soreness, but his sustainability. His means to survive that swallowing and turn up on some salt flat, vomited from the goddamned ocean, in one cohesive piece. It amazed him.

What the fuck happened to me?

Did it really matter?

But suddenly the sun faded over his eyes and something (the land?) sung some distant song with the voice of a virgin. He still couldn't see anything but himself and that mucus he purged between his forelegs in the salt-sand except that everything had grown more dark, more gray and eclipsed. The haze shook him, caused his heart to throb and his body to roar whitewater waves, almost like a shaken bottle of ocean. He'd heard about the sirens, but he didn't believe in them.

Until he saw her. Cloudy eyes fought the light and their stinging to find the source of the shadow beam, a winged head and moving, desperate lips. Words he could not process. They were too fast. Everything was still in the waking.

I can't understand you, the wind is too loud.

Now he wished his tongue hadn't dissolved in his own mouth, turned slack and silver still.

The ideal scenario would be that she was indeed a siren and she came to coax him, then kill him.

He inwardly prayed that she had a starving family and he wouldn't go to waste.

But the woman appeared frantic as the mists of time gave way to revealing her innocence. He made out a single word insistence... No that wasn't it. Assistance?

So you're not going to kill me?

Well fuck.

What the hell was she thinking, asking him for assistance? He could barely move; just shitted from the bowels of the ocean, shivering and quaking with all the symptoms of dehydration and anemia and every other terminal illness under the god forsaken sky that just wasn't nice enough to do him in. If there was enough time for him to think about this, he'd probably rouse the last few pulses of adrenaline that kept him beating and shout fuck you Jesus at the top of his lungs. One because why not, and two because he was probably Jesus anyway. (Water walked his ass into the flats with pure grace. 

Just like that.)

It was just that this beautiful woman was standing over him while he writhed in his own element with wings spewing from behind her ears, like some kind of bird-deer. 

God send his angels.

"Please just kill me," he whispered, "I'm begging you."

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

He couldn't understand why death wasn't negotiable. In what other ungodly place could life be so reconcilable? It wasn't his perspective, or the unfortunate angle of his eyes in the slant ray of the light beam of truth or anything. This wasn't some god awful swell of terrible luck that had ruled against him in every aspect of his life - he'd be lying to himself with modest optimism then. This life was supposed to be an eternal nightmare for him: not the slim odd of a thousand accidental ricochets, where life ended up apologizing for the bullets - no, this was a series of straight shots, aimed left-on for his heart. 

How haven't they killed me?

It was purely a torture, to live.

When he rolled his cloudy, slurring gaze back to the dim silhouette of his unbeknownst savior, he already knew, and held with great, ever heavy reluctance that these breaths would not be his last. He could feel it in the way she saw through him like seldom could. She saw right down to the briny sand beneath his clear, flickering surface that there was a beating heart within him that she felt she owed empathy, compassion, and whatever other garbage these poor blessed daughters of the world could believe. He felt her sharp pupils swimming deeper and with every passing grain of time he wished he could be opaque, so dark, so treacherous. So perilous, that even the ocean receded.

But everyone wants to feel the warmth of soft shallow waves, intangibles, rolling from sight, from feel; they want security: the water-source of all life. They want the promise of a good body of water but not the truth of it. They want to wade in the umbilical fluids of company. They'd substitute anyone.

They all want the same nurturing.

"Please, I cannot kill you..."

Her voice could not completely penetrate him, but rushed through the cracks in his delusion. Begging was not a force of nature, it had to be reasoned with.

"Please... don't ask for such a thing..."

Euphrates was always too kind to demand, to force a knee-high tsunami on anyone's moral consciousness. But living was drowning, to him. Each breath was a deep gut-full of fear: the trauma that lingered somewhere, silently scouring for the moment his eyes closed, breaching when they opened. In these moments he couldn't tell if fear was still chasing him, or if it was simply the will to die.

His lips weakly parted, revealing surprising silence. "No really -" a coagulated cough broke free for a moment. "I've had enough, I want you to." His voice bled crisp lines into the air, the most certainty he'd possessed in a long time. This was the best he could do. The best he'd spoken in his entire life.

But her voice continued on, suggesting they find a place where the world was drier and darker. A place where they could reason with a drop of time. Euphrates scoured her voice, but she only spoke of better places - places he knew were temporary. He wanted permanent. He wanted to see and feel nothing for the rest of it. He wanted nothing more than anything.

When she mentioned finding a piece of driftwood to drag him with he could only shake his head, sending sharp-capped ripples over his face. He blinked twice at her. 

"Help me stand."

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