The Sandbar Mermaid
Faith is found in a clutch of human flesh.
Staring into a flute of champagne, the color of mellow sunset skies, I raised my eyes, looking into hers where I found clouds beginning to form. Laughing, each syllable hitting me like rain , she pulls away, spinning on heels so high they made me dizzy (imagining looking down from such heights). The lights caught in her hair turned it to gold, and I could see how it was going to be, how the summer was going to be; one day melting into the next as another season fades away, leaving me memories of a girl who danced as if she could walk on ocean waves, and whose laugh still fills my heart with water.
I met her when I was 10, still laughing, yes, and still at me, on a day the sun was just about finished with its noonday course. I had built a sandcastle of such melancholic design, that even the turrets drooped, heavy with the weight of barely repressed tears. I was confounded with what I had come up with, searching deep what error in architecture brought it about, when I heard a giggle drop quietly behind me. I remember turning just as quietly, my eyes glancing across a sea of gold and topaz, before settling on a girl about my age, whose hair mutedly recalled to me the same metal and the same stone. She was looking at me fixedly, a smile dangling at the corner of her lips, drily clutching a coral in one hand, and my heart, beating fast (a frightened bird), in the other.
"Are you Thomas."
Taken aback, I wondered what sort of faerie-kin she must be, absently fishing my name out of the air, her voice, lilting, sounding low and deep (telling me to be still), when I realized she must be the landlady's granddaughter my mother had told me about. Had told me to look out for.
"Yes, y-yes, I am. Are you Heloise?"
"That's a pretty castle."
Her eyes, I could see, were the color of watery sunrises (sun-irises), played lightly with sarcasm and amusement, before amusement finally won out. I felt safe enough to trot out an answer by then:
"It was. In my head."
"Then your hands may have had a different idea."
This time, she smiled, taking the sting out of words I knew she had not meant unkindly. It slowly broke through her lips, and began to rearrange the lines in her face into even more agreeable patterns. All this time, we both stood still, as if afraid to disturb the silence that lay like settling pigeons across the sand.
Staring into a flute of champagne, the color of mellow sunset skies, I raised my eyes, looking into hers where I found clouds beginning to form. Laughing, each syllable hitting me like rain , she pulls away, spinning on heels so high they made me dizzy (imagining looking down from such heights). The lights caught in her hair turned it to gold, and I could see how it was going to be, how the summer was going to be; one day melting into the next as another season fades away, leaving me memories of a girl who danced as if she could walk on ocean waves, and whose laugh still fills my heart with water.
I met her when I was 10, still laughing, yes, and still at me, on a day the sun was just about finished with its noonday course. I had built a sandcastle of such melancholic design, that even the turrets drooped, heavy with the weight of barely repressed tears. I was confounded with what I had come up with, searching deep what error in architecture brought it about, when I heard a giggle drop quietly behind me. I remember turning just as quietly, my eyes glancing across a sea of gold and topaz, before settling on a girl about my age, whose hair mutedly recalled to me the same metal and the same stone. She was looking at me fixedly, a smile dangling at the corner of her lips, drily clutching a coral in one hand, and my heart, beating fast (a frightened bird), in the other.
"Are you Thomas."
Taken aback, I wondered what sort of faerie-kin she must be, absently fishing my name out of the air, her voice, lilting, sounding low and deep (telling me to be still), when I realized she must be the landlady's granddaughter my mother had told me about. Had told me to look out for.
"Yes, y-yes, I am. Are you Heloise?"
"That's a pretty castle."
Her eyes, I could see, were the color of watery sunrises (sun-irises), played lightly with sarcasm and amusement, before amusement finally won out. I felt safe enough to trot out an answer by then:
"It was. In my head."
"Then your hands may have had a different idea."
This time, she smiled, taking the sting out of words I knew she had not meant unkindly. It slowly broke through her lips, and began to rearrange the lines in her face into even more agreeable patterns. All this time, we both stood still, as if afraid to disturb the silence that lay like settling pigeons across the sand.
posted by The Devil's Little Helper at 3:38 PM
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