---
It's strange, he decides, that he still remembers the woman he called 'mother' as a child, but she cannot.
Tell me what you remember, she tells him, strumming at the folds of his tunic with a detachment that is fierce and tender and almost a dream in itself.
Tell me what you know.
But he does not know anything, no, he does not know much, save what the wind says to him when he stands on yonder hills; what he's learnt from sitting and watching flocks pierce both sky and rain cloud.
-What he's seen on fields of said glory; of men and beast and the colour that blood turns after it has soaked into the ground and mingled with the fruit of the vine.
I remember her
hands, he says at last, and he takes up her own fingers within his
own. They were very long, and very tight at the folds, and she used
them to hold my fear at bay.
As you do now.
The most important part! He thinks, and she brushes it aside and lights upon what interests her:
Your fear?
She combed my hair
with those hands, she kissed me with those fingertips.
I never felt her
lips.
She thinks this through, and stretches alongside him to touch his mouth with her own. Her lips are dry and grate against his own rough chin in the dark, and he closes first one eye, then the other. Darkness has never felt so even; so well spaced out and comfortable.
Did she sing to you?
Yes. He pauses, No;
I… don't know.
Maybe.
She bounds up suddenly, and towers over him on bent knees. Odd, that she seems so far away now, though in truth she is only an arm's length from his upturned face.
Why don't you imagine, she says at last, Why don't you pretend that she did?
She is awake, as he is himself, but her breath is racing quicker then his, and he imagines that sleep lies over in the next room. He listens, but all he can hear is human life.
Because. He says out
loud. I am tired.
I can not.
Why?
He feels as though he has already answered her, so he speaks no more; pulling her back down and holding her close. Silence fills the knot their bodies has made, and her heartbeat skips strangely; he listens to see if maybe it is his own.
Yes, he says at last, breathing into the white expanse of skin that stretches from shoulder to chin, Why don't you pretend?
But now it is her turn to be silent.
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