"Promise me you will be mine."

Her body became a song. With her harmony of laughter and sun-dappled smile she was lured from dark morning into Grey Company, where the sky was cracked into the maybe storm colors and the definite warmth of a blossomed summer's day, though that season had not arrived, it was hinted at in pleasure, in weather coming over the great hill. He asked for her and she gave it. "Will you linger in the clouds with me a while?" And how could she deny this scarred stranger" "Yes."

And days passed and she began to feel the crescendo of guilt. Every day, it built & built. It was a travesty. Her skin did not fit her right. Was she the same girl" In Halloween tones, tangerine and ebon, she danced off into the lonely hill where the thunder struck and awaited some Sign. What had she done, letting herself fall beneath a wayfarer's charms, nude with the grass and the leaves. Was this her first true Spring"

"A sign, please", her paper thin voice folded like origami and flittered to the branches, to the atmosphere. "A sign, a sign, maybe a little one, just for me. What have I done?"

Silhouetted in razorblades of rain, hugging herself, she, waiting, all night long, soaked to the bone with the promise of that storm and her undoing.

She had gone Beneath the Tides.

Oh the air feels heavy Everything just passes by And I think that I'm a little shy

Silver eyes wide as she hid in the heart of a Friday night. Rain sputtered along the eaves and into forgotten puddles by her feet, her plastic purple rain coat tickled with droplets and her shoulders kissing the wall behind. The market was busy no matter the excitement of rain and all the smells and sights held her rapt from her little view in the alley. Beside her fluttered the rainbow streamers wrapping crutches and litter that drifted up in whistled currents from the deeper part of the narrow lane. Above the sky was a bright white. No haze. Just a fearless, crisp, blazing winter-reminding sky. But Spring was upon them. And she was careful to pay attention to it.

The more she watched she saw that the season awoke people. That their faces changed from passive to expressive, as gestures and hands and shoulders loosened and flew like birds of descriptions as conversation quickened and laughter could not be in containment anymore. It was if all Winter the world held it's breath and come this sunlight all could let it out, and the gusts of relief she felt, she quivered with, her smile holding.

She had come out into the mad throngs for a present, something to mark the occasion. She did not believe in anything but the body and the soul and touch as ownership, everything was perishable and abject. And yes we die too, we can be nothing, but we leave an echo, our song plays on somewhere, in an orbit not our own but our tune nonetheless. Ravens wheeled and fluttered and parted the sky into a black curtain and their kiting shadowed her face like a bad dream. What to buy to say she was now a woman' What to say she was ready? It was not the first of times nor the last that she would succumb to the stranger, but she felt that in giving not only a gift of her flesh but something that represented, she may be able to feel less odd and more accepting. To give the Act another face, another name, to see it alone and from a distance.

Like the streamers on her crutches as she hopped-walked-hopped toward caravan, her stomach swirled with new colors, ones that there was no name for her yet in her world. Scarlet and bronze. And there they were shining inside, for all the world to see. Scarlet and bronze.