Firebird

An incomplete telling, a tasty tease,

to be completed… some other time.

written by Theodore Ross

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

            Summer would be wet.  Summer would be raining.  Summer would be cold.  Firebird was grieving.  Grieving and since still in her youth: controller of the elementals through, most wholly unintentional denials...  excuse me, desires.  The only way the summer would shine would be if and when, she was returned to flight.

            There was nothing wrong with the rain.  Rain was, after all, the keeper of solitary.  The master of alone.  Rain did not challenge nor diminish. It knows it’s strength and the way to slip through the molecules of living.  Permiating.  Awakening...  Something deeper than otherwise intended. 

            Rain was the bringer of life.  It annointed her.  Consecrating her desire.

            Firebird, was a true, natural born, Phoenix.

            Kara brushed her long dark blond hair,  back away from her face...  Her hair was always getting in her way... but she would not cut it!  That would be a kin to clipping a Unicorns mane!

 

            “You jest!  You fool me!  You trick me!  Father, and no mother... no mother because of who I am.  She who was born, of her own ashes, destroyed by her mother’s sorrow.  She could not bear the accompaniment of sun, her own greed for power, diminishing her in the same light from wince I first came.”

            Father!   You competed to destroy me! Refusing to accept wisdom granted, from the mouth of a child, worth listening to.  How tire I! I who bear the burdens you fled and hid from so young!

 

            Shall I tell you!  Would it help if I were to bring to light these fragile origins, and then you, might not, so fully despise me, for what of gift, I possess within.”

 

            Kara stood and turned.  Her eyes flashing to glimpse who stood behind her.  To know whose hot breath had crept so suddenly across the pulse point of her neck.  A hand.  A faint touch, slipping, slipping, so quickly to stillness once again.

            No one.  No one was there.  He was gone in the instant he touched her.  Drawn across the chasm between them.  To hear her voice set clear and strong, yet again.  He knew she was alone.  He knew! Cry folly all! He knew and so it was,  an aloneness she bore with a fierce independent nature!

 

            Cry fowl, grandfather rooster, echos.  He calls with the end of the day.  He sings out for all who are kindred to hear: the Earth is here.  The Earth is mother... father.  The Earth will not betray your solitude to a petty whim of mortal resistence.  Calm.  Calm, dear sister.  These pains will mend soon!”

  Part mortal, part elemental, he steadies the young birds heart from the distance.

 

            Here.  Here, inside of all of this.  Kara!   The cries come out from across the winds of time.  Kara!  You are strong enough.  You are strong enough!  

            She lays down at the edge of the woods.  She is weary.   No one can see her.  No one will ever know.   She curls in the isolation of the cold rain.  Her face slightly muddied she lays against a soft fern bed.  The moist place.  The quiet place.  The place where wild mushrooms grow. 

            Had she tripped?  Had she fallen?  How had she come to this place.  How?   Kara looks around.  She sees the outline of the work that remains ahead.  She sees the field at the edge of the sub-division.

            There, there is where I will be, Jack said.  Just as the edge of these shapes.  I will wait for you in the wild!  I will comfort you in the unseen.  I will!   I will!  I will protect you.  I will invoke you.  I will be there to make you whole.  

           

            Kara stood.  She was tired.  She wanted more than this dull slowing that kept the final precipice just a little farther and off to the right...  What dignity in these affairs?  That I should a light and with a foolish heart.  Surrender!   Surrender.  Myself, to you!  My equality as less..than would bear the accompaniment of the heavens!

            Cry folly!  Cry folly that I should be made as other than this!  I will lay seige to you fears!  I will lay seige to your trembling heart!  This is not what right between two such as the likes of we! Jack! “

 

 

            Kara ran through the woods.  Through the depths of ivy and fern... past the tendrils of honeysuckle and the scratch of wild blackberries... through the tumbling, blood rush of desire.  Into a clearing beneath an old sacred tree.  There he turned.  There he stood.  There was Jack and she....  His hearts truest kindred.  His fast furious desire.  His longing, requited by her touch, though in some measure despised.

            She would make this difficult.  He wanted her but he knew he would have to disappear again.  No true detection.  It wasn’t allowed, not now.  Maybe someday, but not now.  She had to stop pushing.   She had to stop trying.  She had to let him... be...

            Kara stood five feet shy of her beloved... and she stopped.

            He looked at her.  She looked at him.  He smiled.   She smiled.  He was confused.  Would she not try to kiss him?  Try to convince him?  Try to distract him with some words of love which he never could believe!  Was she not... his ruiner, the one who had captivated what only ever sought to be in solitude?  How dare she!  How dare she render him to this... broken, by the knowledge of the complete appetite with which he wanted her and would always, always deny!

            Kara wanted him.  She wanted him with a hunger past longing and beyond the clumsy grasping of despair. Time had been a teacher, healer and friend.  She wanted to reach Jack.  She wanted to touch him: to free in him, the passion for life that he had freed, unintentionally, in her.  ...but Kara knew... she knew with the certainty of breath...

            He reached his hand toward her.  She reached her finger tips toward him.  A single step.  One movement forward, and he could just bearly touch her.

            Kara transformed.  Light poured from every sub-atomic particle of her being.  She shrieked!  The fire!  The fire!  The light!  Light of summer!  The clouds.  The clouds melted in a wave of quickly diminishing fog.  The west wind bringing with it a cool currented breeze.  Leaves blew clear... and the tops of the trees swayed as the storm cleared away.

 

            The day was a cloudless, crystal blue. Kara thought of Jack, somewhere just beyond her reach.  He was watching her. He would  remember her always.