She stands alone under a spilling sea.
Loose threads sway at the edge of her fraying shirt as she traces her fingers across the setting sun. Colors crash into each other, a star shatters into a million.
She traces shapes into the universe, creating collisions after collisions until blue spills over, sloshing over every street and alley. The flood washes over you, coaxing and swirling and soothing. Night runs rampant along cobblestone streets.
She watches as you learn to breathe underwater, as threads holding your consciousness together loosen and liquefy and leak into her cupped hands. She drinks.
In the mathematician’s dream, he’s fishing, casting chalk worms as bait into pools of dark green. In the writer’s dream, he’s making pottery, molding clay in his bare hands and sculpting stories with his bare mind. In the astronomer’s dream—
well, the astronomer is awake.
and he’s watching her back.
He picks up a thread that must’ve fallen from her fraying shirt, a thread that has been dipped in every color except the color that is the astronomer’s eyes behind curved pieces of glass, that is Mercury and Venus and Saturn and Sirius, that is the void to some and the light to others, all mixed into one. He places the piece of thread in his palm and offers his hand to her.
They stand together under a spilling sea.