Whispers

I walked for a long time without seeing where I placed my boots, without knowing where it was I was going
or where ..
or what ...
or who
I was trying to leave behind.

I just walked. Somewhere along the way I finally stopped to inhale deeply and felt my hand cover my forehead for a moment that seemed like a forever then ... slowly moving down to gouge my palm in the dip between my eyes. An even slower slide down my face until it stopped against my mouth. I closed my eyes and instantly felt a sense of impending vertigo. The whole world was leaking. The leaking of fatigue into my bloodstream. Leaking dabblings of confusions like paint smears on an abstract canvas. Leaking one man's dreams, his nocturnal visions, his nightmares across my own dreamscape. It had been a long time, hadn't it?

I felt the leaking of dampness between my thighs. I thrashed through my memories and my own dreamings for the reason. It could have been my own feminine passions rising. It could have been the intruder of my dreams. The fragrance of my own body was an assault. It hung in the air with a pungency. Ripe. A perfume that was so pheromone filled that men turned to watch me as I passed by with both a hungered look in their eye and a repugnance for how heady the elixir had become. I was far enough from prying eyes now to reach down and drag the hem of my skirt up. Fingertips delved into the sticky warmth that coated my inner thighs and

I knew.

I knew well who the visitor of my slumbers was. Why was it more important to me to know this than to find why I woke standing amidst the kaiila? I had my own answer even as the query began firing like sparks in every synapses of my brain. It was a taking of something precious to a woman. It was rape between a man and his mate. All that I had been willing to give .. gave over and over and over again ... had been taken without my even being cognizant enough to have any say. I heard myself whispering to nothing and no one. Is nothing sacred?

I stood there for a long time with my skirt clutched in my fist just staring at the moons running my thumb against my fingertips. Until the slick liquid began to dry and create friction between them. Until they had a dry sound like a cricket's chirp as they moved. Until ... I couldn't feel it any more ...

The moons!

Their fullness basked me in luminescent light. I threw the hem back into place and turned my direction back to the Sapphire wagons. I marked time by the lunar phases. What woman doesn't?