Prompt: Love for You

Thanks to Katarina Zirine for permission to use her beautiful "Love for You"!

Seriana swept her outstretched fingers over the tall golden-red grass as she walked across the field under the brilliant sunset colors of the clouded skies. Her shoulders twitched as her gossamer wings fluttered behind her. Slender and clear, they would not carry her for many moons, until she had chosen her life’s purpose. By then, they would have stretched and grown thick and strong, bold and jewel-toned like her mother’s, or delicately tinted like her sister’s.

“Why don’t males have wings?” she had asked as a child. Her mother had laughed out loud, and her sister had giggled behind her hands, but they didn’t have an answer that made any sense to Seriana.

With no males in the House, Seriana could only watch them from a distance. Her sister seemed incurious, but she was about most things except their mother’s power. Seriana had no heart for political games. She wanted to explore the world. She wanted to understand. Everything.

Her childhood wings had withered and fallen off two winters past. She had buried them and danced with her crèche-mates under the next full moon, before she returned home to her mother’s House for the first time. She missed her friends, their laughter, their play, their touch.

Her mother only touched her to spin her around after supper and examine her budding crystal wings. “Hmm,” she would mutter, or a casual “Good” as she patted Seriana’s back, then turned away. Seriana had dreamed of her mother’s love for as long as she could remember. Now she cried herself to sleep at night and pined for her crèche.

A tall stalk of grass seed tucked between her thumb and finger, jolting her from her reverie. She stripped the seeds from the stalk in a smooth pull and held them in her palm. Looking up at the moon, already glowing in the darkening sky, she made her first choice toward her life’s purpose.

Sweeping aside her long golden curls, she bent her lips closer. “I have love for you. Find me.” She blew the delicate red seeds, and they fluttered into the air, opening into tiny hearts as they drifted away. Unseen behind her, the edges of her clear wings faded to a delicate ink, and then purple…

Dogs in House	Houdini
Music	Sting, “St Agnes and the Burning Train” and “Fragile”
Time writing	~35 minutes
May word count	9,796