WA-2 first draft

A boy with wings, pale and flat, lay underneath the surface of the water. Metallic fish swirled around him like razorblades, slicing this way and that, drawing sharp, bloody cuts in the water.

Above the boy and the fish, the water roared by, sandpapering rocks with their rolling bellies. The hostile sky, a lightyear away, swam dark and malignant, a cancerous tumor, spreading rapidly. Multiplying cells.

There was a toadstool on the bottom. The boys toe gently scuffed it, the cap falling off in slow motion, pieces of mushroom cascading across pebbles. Floating away. To another place.

The boy with wings' hand was pinned against a rock, his fingers lean and flat, as if tacked to a bulletin board. Something fluttered inside them, consciousness awakening from a long hibernation, pale and rasping to be let out. His fingernails whispering against the rough, asking to be let free.

But she couldn't let him go, the girl perched above on the smooth stone, worn by water, fitted to her frailness like a throne. The princess of flat boys with wings. The princess of boys drowning beneath rocks. The pastel rays of light reflected off her gunmetal dress, the hem crinkled and brittle, silver steel dripping down the sides of the rock, solid silver tear drops falling on the boys' wings. The waterline was rising. The boy was drowning. And she sat there waiting.

"I can't let you go yet." The boy with wings was under water, he didn't hear. Swishhh swishh. He was slowly vanishing beneath the swirl of liquid, the life leaking from his toenails, purple. "I can't let you go yet." What was she waiting for?