“Here, just- stand like that, just there. Is that better?”
She swayed. Head tilted to the sky, rain sluicing down the thirsty grey length of her. Clouds raced, gravid and wind-spooked, labouring and collapsing under their own weight. She swallowed it, blinking flooded eyes at the hazy pearl light of the sun somewhere. Hidden.
“Better,” she said from a flooded mouth.
Better. Still dry to the marrow and cracked through the skin, but the wind that drove the clouds didn’t threaten to snap her in half. The hollow scoop of her hipbones wouldn’t crack before its time.
She flexed her toes into the grass. It muttered marshily, matted roots choking on foreign bodies, like her own flesh, tendons on bone. Unnatural structure. Petrification; breath pressed huskily against her lungs.
“No trees,” she trickled to the hollow of her throat. Hollow, hollow. A hard place, all except the grass and the hands still on her arms.
Soft hands, uncertain about letting her sway, certain about not letting her fall. Kind hands; scents her hard husk knew as wool and cinnamon.
“No.” Kind voice. The woman who had brought her from the stone to there stood behind her, the way she had done it, still. “It’s, like, an hour by bus to the nearest park. You didn’t look like you were going to, well…last that long.”
Uncertain. Shifting hands. The woman didn’t know what she was holding.
The she being held understood. She didn’t know what was holding her. Hands, woman, grass, rain, yes, but beyond that, the stone. The grey, a hard, wailing crack where she had fallen, metal and shock and light they cut apart. She’d had nothing to understand until the woman had touched her and asked if she was all right.
She had asked for soil. For grass. For trees. For rain not being stopped by the grey, for anything she could understand.
“Not deep enough,” she said. A rainwater sigh, running down her chest. The woman had wrapped something cotton and real around her, wet and close. So much comfort in those hands.
“No,” the woman agreed, “Not deep enough for trees. Listen, I- I really don’t understand what’s happening here. Is there any way you could tell me somewhere I won’t be freezing my ass off?”
Chill rain. Downy clouds. She blinked down, back at the woman, a creak of tensile neck. The woman’s face changed colour – fear in her cheeks, her eyes. She swallowed it quickly away.
“Right.” Though some still clung in her throat. Trembling rivulet sound. “Well, if you can just…wait here, I think I saw a shop with umbrellas on the corner. I’ll be right back.”
