love silhouetted against a wet day

This is how it rained in Jose's town. Water poured and poured and did not accumulate. The trees were still visible, dogs could be seen running amok as always, lazing around as always. Huts floated, but Jose and his people went to work, played with their children, made love to their wives. The town would not sink, would not be submerged. It had a planetary existence of it's own, an existence that was unaffected by everything. Everything except sadness.

It could rain forever, as it did - as was happening even now - and it did not matter. But if a heart broke, you could feel the lightening bolt under your skin. A single tear from any of Jose's people reduced the whole town to a state of unspoken misery, and an inexplicable sadness seemed to permeate the very mud of the huts' walls. The dogs wailed and the air over Jose's town thickened with pain and hung low around the people, so that they felt, at all times, a knot in their throats and a spirit weighing down their stomachs.

****************************

One by one, all the people of the town went to Cemilisna's hut with baskets of food and fruits, exotic nuts and strawberry vanilla muffins. No one knew what happened to the food, because though her door would not open the food would not be there the next day.

No one had been behind the closed door, not a soul had seen her in the past thirty seven days. They did not know of the irrevocability that had occurred, but they knew she was alive. Inside her hut, Cemilisna's heart was beating still. And the whole town knew that each reluctant heartbeat carried a throbbing ache, an ache that had filled Cemilisna's little hut and overflowed into the town. An ache that had taken over the roads and woods of Jose's town, an ache which was now threatening to bring onto the whole town the all pervasive malaise of pain.

****************************

He sailed on.

The town now lay far to his West, and his heart lay somewhere farther north-west. He looked ahead and saw the form of that which he had to search for in the inkiness of the dark world. A flash of her jaw set firm, lips commanded sternly to keep from quivering and eyes forbidden from expelling pain came to him and he stared at the blueness of the ocean, willing the water to swirl malevolently and to swallow him in a rush of violence, a movement akin to the contorted symphony of violence on her serene forehead and in her clear eyes.

Her clear eyes. Like a still ocean asking to be chartered. Like an unknown form in the darkness, waiting to be discovered.

He looked up. He sailed on.