3 posts tagged “eyes”

She stared at herself in the mirror, waxen and white, a corpse-bride if ever there was one; her lips a chewed-on pink and her eyes, in this light, anyway -

Grey, she thought.  Grey like fog, grey like rain clouds.  Her eyes, almost the same colour as the dark smudges underneath them.  She pulled her hair back from her face and wondered what she had become.  She shivered and looked away, recalling all the nights she'd spent crying herself to sleep.

That's it, she decided.  It's done.  There's nothing left for me there, and it's done.

She had only half-convinced herself.

A hand clutched at his shoulder and a gasp escaped her, long and reverent, as her other hand pointed up at the inky sky behind him.  The stars were her prayers, and each moving one was a prayer answered.

"Shooting star?" he asked, reading the wonder in her eyes.  She nodded, still staring wide-eyed and artlessly enchanted by this beautifully ordinary act of nature.  And a smile lit her mermaid's eyes as he reminded her, "Make a wish."

"Always the same one," she confirmed, burying her face into his chest.  She felt enveloped and safe, small and protected, all the little pieces of her in his arms.  "You should make one too, even though you didn't see it," she added as her new always-the-same wish (the old one having had come true) floated up to the sky.  When she looked up, his eyes were closed behind his glasses.  "You always miss the shooting stars," she said, absent-minded, as she recalled her wish.

He held her, again, for what seemed like the first, the hundreth, and the last time.  Lifetimes ancient and proverbial recalled in that instant, he kissed the top of her head, and answered in his heart - I don't mind.  I see them reflected in your eyes.

Those eyes were sea-glass and stained glass, holy and profane, the eyes of a siren and of a saint.