Serendipity
During the day, she considers the wind a stranger. Maybe she smiles at it, whisking it away with a curt turn of her lips. Much of the time, though, her eyes browse the clouds. They hang like layers of daydream, thick and difficult on the skyline. She studies her great gray canvas. She opens her hands to the air. She opens her eyes just in time to snatch the wind in her palms. She captures this image. The canvas swirls and thickens.
On autumn nights, in some parts of the city, the wind rustles like a giddy soul. It drinks in cocoa and cedar. It tips coffee shops. It sifts through her hair. The canvas ripples. It loves to live, it loves to die. She cannot love this, but she remembers the energy. Her hair spins up twisters of orange, crinkling fire torn from the treetops. Swathed in sparks, her eyes brand warmth. She glances, raises her hand, and the winds turn to mist. She breathes cinnamon on them, and burns them away. They pine for her, they want to stay, but she steals herself. She smells them sizzling on the rooftops.
The dusk mist sits between the hills and villages. Nighttime transmutes the fields into nameless expanses, hiding from their own shadows. The darkness believes itself. But the winds taste her, a traveler, returning. The canvas sings, motes of water, staccato silence. In turn, they breeze back through the streets, a wordless note to her. She spins them into the city she took. They flow and explode, and lie thick throughout. She drinks in this menagerie. The streetlamps wane and she strikes her flame, and the skyline dances with joy again.
