salute my shorts!

[Luz Cresceno]

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For Samson. SAUNTERThey were exquisite, as so many of the ape-empire's artifacts were. She had amassed them, one by one, until she boasted such beauties to both eye and tongue that selection of one wine-flask involved a great gnashing of teeth, figurative hair pulling, heart-wrenching hurt. Each swig was a snip of memory, tethered to taste's impressions; every sip spent alone or accompanied underscored words and small betrayals of the lip, eye, and hand, far more aptly than the astronomer would have with mere internal monologue. And yet these consequences did not impact her choice. Luz threw a seeking hand amongst her collection, withdrew it, and took leave of her den. Twilight -- when Luz had come reluctantly from dreams she couldn't quite recall -- had her school-girl giddy and waxing more so with every step towards a certain secret isle. How oddly heavy her opal necklace felt! Perhaps it was a portent, spelled in the small impressions that a stone might make on its owner, rather than the grand scale of the stars. If so, it went utterly unheard. She sang without words; she misstepped into moments of contemplation that swung into joyful noise within a gnat's breath. Such behavior was perhaps already expected by her neighbors, who saw the astronomer making such sounds moonrise to moonset with little apology to their snapped sleep cycles. The absence of the pillow-case (and the clacking instruments it contained) was felt keenly by her shoulder and arm, who seemed ill at ease with the replacement bottle. They felt no compassion for her fizzing nerves, her shivering skeleton, her thousand symptoms of giddiness. Luz would have laughed at them, had she been able to guess the displeasure of bodily portions, and rattled on with her private delights. As it was, the coyote-woman went on desperately unaware, striding over oak-gnarls and elm-shadow without a wit of concern. Not even the water gave her pause. There it was, reflecting a sky red with deicide, bearing a lily wilted with November frost, and the astronomer only slid into it -- a silver sliver (bearing a blue-tint decanter) amid so much murk. Was that a shadow amongst the weed-growth and tussocks? Her imagination suspected it was so, fleshing it with color before such details could even be evaluated. She approached the boy-shape from the fore, too involved in her body's reactions to chill waters to take great note of what exactly he himself was involved in. She brandished her alcohol like an olive branch, and as her head remained the only portion of her body unimmersed in the lake's teeth-clacking cold, small trickles erupted along her elbow, arm's edge and even the bottom of the bottle. "Shall I be drinking with you, then?" slouched the astronomer's familiar drawl across the airs, accompanied by such facial contortions as a lopsided smirk and a certain inequality of the eyebrows.

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