Topic: Parades for Maia

Oja Huy

Date: 2007-05-20 03:11 EST
He tipped his hat forward and removed it. The air was humid. Insects buzzed and the horses were restless. The weeds were overtaking the wagon and pain his heart.

There had been no drama. Nothing necessary. Just fact and accepting.

He sat down at a crooked angle on the top stair of his back porch and watched his property melt in the hot sun. He didn't care in that moment whether the horses had enough water or oats, that the wagon's paint had peeled, that he'd not built a wagon nor a fine coach in a month. It didn't matter. He, didn't matter, when the other half of his insubstantial self was astray. Gone.

Maia.


He leant forward, spready long sad shadows along the broken concrete at his boots. Little flowers, little yellow weed flowers rose up, waving, smiling, "HELLO BERNIE, SMILE SMILE!" and they giggled and tossed back and forth in the wind.


He wanted to step on them. He wanted to be bitter, to be mean, to be angry. But he hadn't it in him, and despite the rage at the world, he went on a gentle man with patience. He had no toll to bear, no war to wage. He would wait. Hail and sunshine would pour, and he would wait. Open arms. Little celebration. But he was there. Echoing. Wordless. Ghost. Shadow. Man. Half of everything. Parades for Maia. He'd have her back. He sensed her in the breeze. A bridge between them. Shaking wood. Naked ravines. They'd cross. They'd find one another. Braile to each others shredded hearts.

Spirited Corsair

Date: 2007-05-21 03:20 EST


You need to forget you know me. Forget we met. Forget my name.

She would have easier endured a knife's blade driven into her, but she said the words anyway. Someone, something was coming for her, and the crossfire would burn her world to the ground, that strange dusty place, with long shadows, that place that smelled like no home she had ever known. Maia wanted to know it, more than she had wanted almost anything in a long time. Certainly more than she had wanted anyone.

I can't forget you, woman.

To leave him there, with such uncertainty ate at her in a way few things good. He was part of a beginning she had not expected to find upon her return to this cursed realm. It had managed to steal from her again, piracy of hope, to deface and defile what little she had left. Bernie had refused to accept it.

Then forget me not, as I shall not forget you. I keep you with my best secrets, where none may find them.

So many secrets. Her life was full of them, always had been, always would be. Secrets like her name. Secrets like her heart. And now, him, a secret she kept so well that she never laid eyes or ears on him. She never mentioned him, and she did her level best to keep anything but a ghost of him from the forefront of her mind. This would be sacred. It would be unspoiled when she, at last, would be free to leave the shadows where they belonged and live as she would like.

Did she love him? Maia would not say. Not in her thoughts, not out loud. She knew that it was possible, that it was something to live for, and something to die for. Possibility. Hope, with long, dear limbs and a shadowy smile, the smoulder of his eyes as they drank her in, the comfort of being with someone who didn't need her explanations and demanded nothing. He was comfort in a world that would deny it. Maybe that was better than love.

She was nothing but shadow, no starlight, no sunshine. Darkness and blood, to slumber when the sun was its brightest, to find distraction in ways that she preferred not to think on at length. He would never see her, and she would never be seen, but Maia had to let him know that she did not forget.

Monday morning: On the driver's seat of the coach lay a single daisy, blazing orange, purloined from some flower seller, or a window box, or an obliging field. It waited for him in silent, cryptic reminder.

She thought of it there, and she knew that he would understand.

Best of all, she knew that not another soul in the universe would.

Oja Huy

Date: 2007-06-14 23:42 EST
Weeks had passed since her visit. Since the shadows grew long in the summer street and he spent hours in his now overgrown yard.

He'd been content for so long to have just this. Horses. Wagons. A big sky.

But the view was half full since Maia. He didn't dwell on his loss. His knowing she may not return.

He didn't see Rhy'Din as a magic place. It was a rough place, a place to survive but a place where far from his trail he felt comfortable. Perhaps it was for his anonymity. No one knew him here anymore. Not Magenta. Not Sakura. Wyheree was the only other that called on him. That sought him some nights, where he visits, in his red and black, he would come, a manitou whispering by her ear.

He sat on his porch as he had the day she had left. He stared at his big feet and long hands and sighed. There was no shoulders to massage, no hair to touch and feel, pulling through his fingers, coffee brown and that lightning strike through the front. He closed his eyes like a defeated man and sunk forward.

In his bedroom, in those lonely corridors, gray and shadowed, was emptiness now. Not a place for him.


He stood up, wiping off his pants and stared at the sun. Burning burning. Telescope to his heart. Fires dancing the bare junctions of his love. What an unlucky man, sometimes.

And sometimes, he wanted to Seek. To Find. He thought of Viki, his little singing friend, in all her colours, all her mysticism and riddle. He let out a breath and walked out through broken fence palings and into the field. For a long walk. Maybe he would not return. Though likely he would. The Kallow as empty as his home.

In a pocket, tattered and torn, was a single flower. Magic seed, because she was not really from here. It smelt of her, and of the sea.

Spirited Corsair

Date: 2007-06-21 10:29 EST


Morning broke, and as the rising sun cast long shadows on the world outside, it heralded a new day, a new time. Hope, in long blue angles as the light reached for every corner of the world. Hope, in the morning yawn of summer flowers that stretched eagerly towards the warmth of that star. Hope, in the songs of the birds and their blatant refusal to fall from the sky. Things were looking up for those once called down to the depths.

A call of a different kind had come to her, the old pull of her oldest love. The tide came in, and when it went out again, she would be on it, gone for months but better for it. Each day she thought on the Ghost, even at times that it seemed, to the outside world, that he would be the very last thing on her mind. The night before, as she chased away the dark things residing in the alleys of the West End, she made one important stop at Orror and Skint, stealing in and out of the yard as though she had never been there (though the horses knew a different tale).

He was a strange fellow, stranger than most, but she knew that he had sense where sense was needed. Maia never felt all that good with words, and she was still loathe to connect the dots between them until she could be certain that she no longer needed to sleep with one eye open. Still, that morning, when we went to the stable to greet his trio, he would find her own cryptic version of a poem, composed for him, left in hopeful reminder.

Settled on a stepstool: a small bouquet of daisies surrounding a single peacock feather all bound together with a simple leather tie and an elegant knot. Beneath that, a copy of a curious paper, somewhere that he could see and watch and know. It was precious little, but it was still a connection, a source of communication, a way to her.

It still was uncertain whether she would find her way back to him, but at least he would know that she thought of that path. She thought of it even as she sailed away from the city, from the call, and from all that troubled her. She thought of it everytime she thought of him.

Oja Huy

Date: 2007-06-25 05:07 EST
He unfolded the paper in his hands so use to being empty and found that they were full with a weight that sunk, that crinkled the paper. A captain at sea, she was. A sorceress who came with the moon and left with the sun. Flowers in her wake. A magnetic Ceres. A twilight surprise for a stranger. Men with torn hearts, her bloodied, fearless lovetwine would stitch back together.


For the first time in his life, in an honest moment that he would remember for each day on, he felt a dull, thudding ache swell in his heart, in his groin, for he longed. There was a sharp, recognition of his Place here. And maybe, with hope, and flowers that smelt of shorelines and old wet wood, he would stay. He said for her to be where she had to, that he would understand another man's arms, but he never would understand her in the rapture of the sea. It was foreign, where he was sand and ash and woodsmoke. She was a siren, a swoll-bosomed beauty, cast rigidly on stone. Some catlike creature, immersed in the coloured tableture of an ancient music these earthy soulmate beings know. Making love naked in a backyard, overgrown with knotted thorns and honeysuckle, enflamed on some tired lore that they burnt anew like brontide made toward the horizon, to remember, to remind.

He swallowed, locked up stiff in this moment. A waft of air, her scent, the horses twitching, tails swishing, a gruff whinny and a foot stomp. He turned over his shoulder, hunched in the sun, hat askew and throwing light where ashen skin shone, and he grinned at Ko Baris and he knew.


His Captain was riding the waves. He knew, by all means, in ordinariness, he should be glad it was indeed not another man.

A dirty chuckle and inside he went, to make a tea and place the elegant token from his love on that bare mantle piece. Maybe even pray. To some lesser god. Some outlaw deity. To bring home the fire. To burn this damned world down. This shamble house, shack of shadows. To shower this corner in stars.