Wilte: The Enchantress

    “Don’t look for me,” I say to him.  

    He doesn’t get it now, but he’ll understand when the air’s cleared.

    “We’re poisons, you and me," I continue, “I’m arsenic and you’re cyanide.”

    “And our love’s a rat trap?  You’re not well-spoken enough by half to be this dramatic.”

    What does he know about chemistry anyway?

— — —

I wrap my arms around myself as the waves crash into the breakers.  The wolves of white-capped water gnash their teeth and claw at the weather-worn edges of the concrete wall.  It was a little more than a month ago that I threw myself in.  Most of me died then.  My soul sank down below the waves, below the point where light breaches the dark waters.  There was no point in doing it again—the soul sinks, but the body floats.

A broad-winged seabird faces the torrent with measured strokes of its wings.  The bird, at least, has a compass that guides it—surely, infallibly.  To the sea bird its soul lays to the south.  The burden of man is that the soul rises or falls while the body is stuck to the plain of the living—the sliver of elevation where humans dwell, where the water meets the land.

Even now the hurricane lamps are being extinguished and the lighthouse's lure is a specter in the wind and rain that bores down on the breakers.  I stand and face the storm just to feel the wet and the cold and the wind dragging me sideways.  If the wind could take me—lift me up like it uplifts the broad-winged seabird…