Between here and there

As I lay upon my back beneath the stars that night, the space beside me on the rug was cold without her there to warm it. But i was content. I knew she would come when all the animals were fed and put to rest.

Upon my chest the shard of my mother’s dagger lay. It glinted up at the stars and the moon as my chest rose and fell, slow, like dreaming. Sometimes this new turn of my life felt like a dream. I was no longer horse but human. It had taken months to learn to walk upright and to use my hands. Apsara had not been the only one to touch and feel everything. We would bring each other new things to touch, to hold, to turn over in our new hands: A swatch of silk, the sharp edge of my dagger shard, the needle of a broken badge. And clothes… they were strange and hot and itchy. What I would have given then to be back in my own skin!

The more I grew up, the more I grew into my magic too. For all the world had become slow to me by then, painfully slow. My magic is always begging to make things run, to chase the future, to become it. I moved fast and time tripped over itself as I caught the slow motion bun out of the air. I grinned at her, it was a cocky, playful thing, and pressed my fingers into the warm bun. I should have said thank you. I knew she would expect me to. So I didn’t.

I thought back over my day as she lay down beside me. (Our elbows nearly rubbed, but didn’t. We were becoming skillful at the near-but-not touches). I thought of a pretty girl who gasped, her smile lighting up the small tent as she brought a flower to bloom from just a touch upon its sleeping a bulb. It was my magic, not hers, but that was the deception of the gypsies we travelled with. They brought their magic and charmed anyone, who paid them, into believing they were magicians. I had watched that girl from where I stood, my dark hair and golden eyes hidden in the shadows of the candle lit tent. Her smile had enchanted me like my magic had her. “Good,” I said to Aspara as a small smile curled my lips and a blush warmed my cheeks with spring heat. “You?”

But the truth was, our days were never good. We both thought it as we fell into companionable silence. “No they aren’t,” I responded when she speaks at last. Still I did not look away from the map of strange stars above us. I missed the woods, (I sleep outside as often as I can, but the nights are turning colder and I am not what I once was…) but I was with Aspara and we could not go back anymore. We would not.

I had known Aster was not here not long after our arrival in this world. My magic had continued galloped on and on like a planet spinning into space. Gathering momentum. I wondered if it was like a star, gaining speed and energy. I was no longer immortal, I was aging, faster than I should. Every day was worth two to my body. I needed Aster’s magic to stop me from exploding or dying. I did not know which would come first.

When Aspara rolled onto her side, the smell of lavender and wild herbs in her hair sent me tumbling back into the woods. Still I didn’t look at her, not even when I felt her gaze like fingertips trailing along the line of my jaw. Instead I drowned myself in stars and memories of woods. They were easier to think of than lost sisters and girls I didn’t dare touch. My jaw clenched, I needed to buy a sharper razor; she made me self conscious, the way she gazed at me with her wide, stormy-blue eyes.

I was glad when she rolled over and away from me. Only when she sank her face into the grass did I finally look down from the sky and across to her. I know how she felt as she smelled the sweet grass, it made my heart clench like a fist. I stopped breathing, just for a moment. Apsara spoke in a rush, her voice muffled, but I heard it all, of course. I didn’t say anything, but my hand was reaching for hers, until it remembered and it closes into a fist back at my side. I often wondered of her sadness, when mine grew raw and bled anew. I thought it was likely easier for me, I had spent more time alone than her. Aster had returned for only a moment before she left again. I was used to solitude. But Aspara less so. I watched her sleep when I could not, the way she’d rub at her forehead the same way I would rub the crown of my head and my shoulders. We were both missing so much. And then I would make her hair grow, watching it fall across her shoulders, black as a waterfall at night, soft as silk. It was just to frustrate her, knowing how much she liked her hair short. She would cut it in the morning, of course. I enjoyed irritating her, it was better than the awkward touches, the blushes and misunderstandings. They were like torture.

So I didn’t touch her that night. Instead, I curled my hand into a fist and grinned at her, wild as any young man of the wood, “I think our time of eating grass has passed us by.” I make the grasses grow until they tickle her brow, her lips, her nose. And laugh as if assured that one day we might find our siblings again.