stream of consciousness

The canopy of leaves above her head was gray-green.

Something had ended. It was over and it was time for her step back, to see what had happened. She stretched her long legs and pointed her toes. The space between her breasts opened painfully. It was releasing, it was stabbing. Her head fell backwards into the moon. The clouds pillowed her ribs and thighs. Her legs spread into the stars.

She was thirteen. A dove perched on her right hand. A sash of stars breached her shoulder and strapped her hip. A crown of sunrays extended to the edges of her sight.

Someone had wronged her. A crowd surrounded her. Of people? Of trees? Of beings that stood tall but still she towered over them. She tilted her head to hear better. Maybe it wasn’t to hear better, but to change her perspective.

She felt her body ascend from the tree branches and into the clouds. A stone temple arced beneath her. Or was it above her, and she was dropping into the sky? The sky opened its blue mouth and the canopy parted and she inhaled with the wind. A tiny face gazed at her from far off in the distance. Its face was frozen, or passive, or peace. She could not tell, she could only see that the path to the face veered off to the right and she was rising, or falling.

She looked down and away from the eyes. She pulled her hands away from his touch. The glass behind her filtered the sunlight into a dozen colors, they passed through the gauzy fabric of her sleeves and lit her body like a dance floor. And she was dancing, letting go of the hands and the lips that leaned into her and celebrating, releasing, undoing into a kind of wild abandon. She twirled and sighed. Her muscles stretched out of the ends of her fingers as she spun, pouring off of her body like coconut oil, like warm saliva. Viscous and connected to everything.

And then she was connected to everything. She was a spiderweb, the spaces in her body balanced and proportional but not symmetrical, not identical. She waved in the breeze and wove threads of time and crawled away from the web, eight-legged, a white spider. She crouched and birthed a thousand children, a forest of them. Her garments were drenched with afterbirth and her feet were bare. She took steps without watching where she was going. He body became a pigeon’s body; her wings carried her into the ferns. Her feet became tangled in the brush; she was trapped, upside-down hanging, stuck trying to cast spells without power, playing instruments without sound, summoning gods without soul. The dragon fell into her lap and she grabbed its scaly head and examined its innocent eyes. Her key did not fit into its lock, but while she looked, a butterfly flew out of the keyhole, hovering over the flowers at her feet before sailing against the wind as though the wind were not blowing. Though it was, very hard and steady.