June 12, 2017Sometimes the slithering song of the siren would suddenly wake me from a feverish dream, calling from beyond the village; summoning softly at first, then beckoning with brute force, her melody a murderous madness pulling me from sweaty sheets. The ocean in the distance sighed like an exhausted god. Glowing and watching, the moon with its battered countenance, would light the way outside my window. Hands lured me out in the shape of flowing curtains. Seagulls faintly screeched in the distance, reminding me of the sensation of sand between my toes.
I awoke naked and nervous, feeling as if someone was watching me, quietly, in the shadows of my room. Beads of sweat trickled down the center of my chest, and my feet cold and numb. I wanted to stand and run away, and quickly chuckled at the juvenile thought. I walked towards the window and wedged myself between the two curtains of my only window and beheld the night in all its glory. A gentle breeze lapped against my clammy flesh and a cold wave ran through my back down to my ankles.
“I see you,” I said quietly into the night.
“And I see you, ” she replied like the sound of creaking ships.
“Have you pulled me from my slumber? I was longing for your call.”
“I hear you.”
“Will you sing me back to sleep?”
“I feel you.”
“Should I bring more than this aching body into your embrace?”
“I mourn you.”
“Why do you foreshadow signs of me forsaken?”
“I pity you.”
“But if pity arouses such sentiments with me in mind, shall I avoid this feigning apathy?”
“I need you.”
Wailing wraiths and witches raptured, the fowl of the air, the crashing of half-awaken confusion, my skull, like sand beneath the beach, shifting its rippled shape as if another set of hands did call. An enticing elegance of all the things behind those shadows–shadows that must surely sing our deaths.
“I am coming to you,” I bellowed as I pressed on naked on cool sands.
“I know you are.”
“Will you envelop me between the rocks again?”
“Why would tonight be any different?”
∞
