peripeteia

A sea bereft of waves. Timepiece ticking, hanging by her waist. She held it up, filigree work glinting gold in the light. It sparkled like a star, and it glowed like one too. The amber flickering interior. If you held it to your ear you would surely hear a soft whirring mechanism. On its face, one swirling clock hand whizzed sprightly around and around, running somewhere and already quite late. The other, a blue azure dagger shape, sprang forward and halted, before springing forward again.

And lastly there was the one that never changed, always stayed the same, pointing towards the twelfth hour.

A soft breeze drifted in from the north, pulling her hair back from her face like a mother's hands. She looked up. The boat was arriving. White sails fluttering, set a-rush in a flurry. The gold-crinkled stars on the cloth aflame. Sand stirring, rising about the marram grass. She picked up the rucksack by her feet. Watched as a plank was lowered into the quiet tides, rising and falling like the breath of a dreaming child.

Boarding, the strange figures on the boat- they almost seemed like illustrations, rather than actual people. Their colourful robes and scarves and peaked hats, eyeglasses, swords and tunics. All a tad too vivid for the soft world hanging about them.