714. of flowers and rivers

Along a river they walked, sometimes holding hands, sometimes not. In the distance, children's voices carried on the warm spring breeze as Ariel's primrose hair shimmered in the Arc'teryxian sun, reflecting light as the river, as one reflects and mirrors the greater brilliance. She had asked about her father, if he was okay. The kinds of questions a normal seven-year-old doesn't ask, doesn't think to ask; the sort of questions that were unanswerable. So they walked, sometimes skipped, stuck their toes in the water and picked flowers as if they had never seen flowers before. And it was true. They had never seen flowers like these. And it was also true, the joy and happiness and love Kyra saw on Ariel's face was almost more than she could bare. A thought, a feeling, not of lightness or of love, but of something other, something that once, sometime ago, was not there; and, at one time, perhaps a time when she walked and skipped and laughed like Ariel, perhaps a time where Papa walked the beaches of Valla with her as she did now with Ariel, she knew not of this heaviness, this weight felt in the shoulders and down the back, this weight that furrow brows and turned lips down, this weight that pulled bone and muscle downward, toward the ground, and one could not help but think the body was ready to go, to go where it knew it would, where dirt would be tossed below shinny feet and flowers, like these flowers, would give of themselves, a final act, a final brilliance above ground, in the shimmering light, as they were now, just the two of them, along the river, among the flowers.