She returned because she had too many words in her mind, all strung out like cracked ivory buttons on a shoestring. Nothing matched, nothing flowed.
There was a shiver that still ghosted over her skin, pulling lightly, that could have been from from the wind that had pushed gentle fingers through the curls of hair at the base of her neck and teased the fur lining her coat hood, but she suspected it was from something else.
Perhaps it was from when she’d knelt in the mud and new grass at the foot of the cairn, salmon-tipped fingers clasped earnestly, head bowed, ears attuned to every sound. The wind, rushing; the waves below, murmuring. Crashing just a little.
She had felt something then, that slid past her shoulders and loose hands and settled, pooled around her knees in the earth. There were so many sounds, yet the world somehow stilled. Peace, she wondered. Maybe that’s what it feels like. And she said thank you, thank you, again and again.
Then again, perhaps it was from when she had stood at the edge, looking down, and tears started in her eyes for a reason she could not find as she looked to the sky. The tumbling clouds, awash with a divine glow. And she looked to the water, where the deep, teal waves pushed ever to shore, breaking gently, surely. A golden film had settled on the layers of mountains that slept across the water, and as she had turned to go, the rush of wings overhead had grounded her to the spot.
Perhaps, then, it was from the flock of swallows that had wheeled over her head, swooping and diving and spinning; flinging themselves unabashedly to the darkening sky, only to tuck their wings and fall, plummeting to the greening earth below, some innate sense assuring them that they will be caught in the gentle hands of the wind and tossed aloft once again.
Her wondering eyes had tracked their movement, the reeling motion underfoot and in the sky making her head spin, and she thought- perhaps that was all there was to it.
A Fox It Was 