The Swing

She rocked back and forth in the swing. She was a small bead on its end, hanging like a grain of salt on the hook of a wiry, old fishing line, waiting to be set free from the high walls of the labyrinth. She prayed that she could be given the chance to fly. She would immolate every caterpillar in the garden for a single moment of flight.

She kicked forward with her legs, almost breaking the thing. Her feet elevated into the mouth of a dogged black sky. Again, she pushed her hips, and with every motion she felt closer to the toted blackness. Her face perched around her collar like a blossoming rose reaching for the darkness. Higher and higher, she was free. Flying, floating, “yes,” she cried at the height of her voice. She swept backwards again and then pushed forward. Her hands tightened around the tethered rope. The air lifted in her gut, and she genuinely thought that she’d float away into the sky. Yes, I’m flying; the thought brushed her mind almost instinctively, in an instant, as though it were true. She was at the crest of the swing’s curve; she knew she couldn’t rise any higher. She tried to go higher but she couldn’t, and having adumbrated a curious thought, she flailed her legs about in a violent manner as if to kick away an anchor-of-sorts from her feet. She was quickly guided back to the ground like a dandelion seed without its peacock-buds (a feather, having flown all of its life, wishes simply to fall whereas the dandelion seed wants nothing more than to find a cloud and adjunct to its base). The ouroboros worm in her seat moved a little. She plummeted to the ground in a ripe lemon-path, “Damn,” she softly colluded with the ground as she pulled her legs back into their imaginary shells below the base of the seat. The swing moved in an oval spiral, pencilling around an imaginary spot, which patiently settled to a standstill.

She subsided; her face was a translucent white, streaks of cobalt and cherry flushed beneath the skin. Her legs bowed inwards and her feet dragged along the dirt, etching limp circles, which stared surreptiuously beneath the skirt. Her green eyes sank back into the muzzle of their birth.

The wind was sharp against her face. She collapsed and her back fell hideously forward. Into its coarse fingers, into its dear silence, she sounded a long mellow note which was preserved delightfully by the gardens of Ethera like sunlight in a glass jar, though it was dark, and a wintry wind, no doubt from the icy north, clung to the long scream like rust, waiting with the rancour of a thousand fickle moons, to douse the flame, so that the labyrinth could continue its pall of silence.