My heart is untamed, without pace, without rhythm. Breath remains my own. In. Out. Slow. Slow. I feel the air flow into me, through me, to the very tips of hair and skin and nail. Unfurling. It reaches the edges of my body and lifts me. I am light, without weight, without darkness.

The sky trickles then pours between my fingers. My hands rise of their own accord, lifting. I look up and find raindrops as big as my fist. They glide down, falling like snow, soft and slow. I catch one and it rests in my palm for a moment, smooth and cool and glossy, then bursts and splinters into droplets that sparkle. Laughter streams from me.

I turn to show Mam. She is close, I see but cannot reach her. See her speak but cannot hear the words. The space between us is small and I stretch out to her, watch my fingers touch her face but I cannot feel her. She is not really here. Nothing I see is really here.

The ground beneath my feet laps and swells, rolls and spins, gradually at first then faster and faster until the grass and sky and trees turn too quickly for me to see and finally the earth throws me off, into the sky, soaring through the air. Pitching clouds toss me between them, fat round raindrops balance and shatter on my outstretched arms.

Beyond, past the cloud and rain and sun, with my hair streaming behind and the air blasting through me, I reach night. The sound of my own breath, the beat of my eyelashes, boom and crash of my heart. Outside myself, nothing.

Then, stars. Bright, sharp specks that flare and soar through my fingers, hard and barbed, burning like an ember fallen from the grate. I open my mouth to cry out and all the searing stars are sucked into me, leaving me alight, and around me is only blackness.

In the dark I see him. At last. My new master. His eyes flaming, his mouth a depth of emptiness that I could fall into and fall forever. The fire inside me blazes and pierces. I do not want this. Do not want him. I want light and space and freedom. He opens his mouth and breathes out a hurricane of fire and smoke and soot and I am calling, screaming, begging to be delivered but I am covered with his black breath, mouth and eyes filled until I see nothing, hear nothing, not even the pull of my breathing or beat of my heart.

Splinter

Day after day Daniel went to the river, rising before dawn or sneaking from the house at night, when they all thought he slept. Still the stone hung where he had left it.