There’s only still gray sea and the weariness of silence. Silence so thick, should he press an ear to it, he doesn’t wonder he hears Chronos’s dull metronome. Grimacing, he mounts the prow and howls at the drowsy air: Aeolus, give us some fucking wind. But who’s he kidding? It’s the nature of the gods to ignore you when you need them most.
With nothing else to do, he lies back against the mast and thinks back on the night before he left her.
What are they? he asks, pointing to the images glowing on her chest like phosphorous in a ship’s wake.
Signs by whose combination you can write words, she says.
His eyes combust in cunning.
Would knowledge of these signs give him the power of prophecy?
No.
Would they let him see the thoughts of other men?
She shakes her head.
Then what use are they?
"You won’t know until you decipher them…but I caution you not to."
Why?
Because they are just a way to make the same thing seem different. The knowledge is cursed.
Now those images seem so close and yet so far away, gleaming like lost amphorae, coins, and oil lamps at the bottom of her skin, crying out to be rescued. As if he could dive into her chest and scoop them up, rub and restore them, put them back to use. Then he grasps their true shapes and meaning. But he’s been tricked because this knowledge cannot be forgotten or ignored. Like tissues spooling a cocoon, it winds through him slowly, separating feeling from thought. For days, he watches thousands of butterflies float across the still mocking sky. He remembers when he too could fly like that, spoiling in that unthinking knowledge.
Then the wind came.
蝶
First published in Lumiere Review, Issue 7.
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