What have you done to the game?

She looks up puzzled, more puzzling than the set of pieces moving before her. Chess piece or my eyes deluding my foresight? Heavy thoughts are bearing on the horizon, like torn sails on ships as empty as rotten planks, drifting, the wood continues so, to be drifting on the horizon. And my mind won't clear. What have you done to me?

The sun, hot and swell, pierces this old house of brick walls and even more brick walls. I am standing between what may once have been kitchen and living room, where I now make out the silhouette of a wall. It's ironic, but to me it feels like nothing short of stupid. Like the last rusting nail in that damn rotten plank. And something that may have been chess, being played less carelessly than felt.

We are pieces in her hands, I muse. We are idle little strings along birds' chests, painted red or orange, or maybe blood-orange. My chest is now closer to blue, but that's a faint murmur of something else, besides, irrelevant. Not spoken of. The blood of the nobles would have no colour, she muses. If I were less faint, I'd hear her speak, but I don't. My eyes are like dust on the wind, the outskirts of a storm. She is rather caught in the eyes of a cat, gracing feline steps along the windowsill, moving gently from the surface of the ocean. While I cling onto the plank in the water, she must not even float.

And they don't believe in miracles; I laugh. I, scorn inside, feel crude at the tip of the sword, moist around my soul, slumping down with my heart. People fade out and in to be shadows, to be silken touches of a world unreal. I try to fade and she reaches out, touches my bones with her fingers. What doesn't frighten you may let you feel alive. Little more by little more. I want to be scared, but I am not even less.

The game, that is, needs nothing of this. But adding something brings to light what we bring to empathy. The chess pieces move, but they turn blurry before my eyes. My skin is glistening with the blood of stars, I'd say she'd say this. What are words, I muse again. I know the question isn't the answer, though she surely is the ocean, the sea. That vast, wonderful expanse of nothing and more, casting no shadows and moving but itself, slowly, about my neck. My skin vibrating with touch.

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