Gifts

The word of the moment: petrichor.

It is the smell of earth after rain. The word slides off your tongue like dewdrops from a leaf – a combination of the thick golden blood of gods and the ancient dark earth.

The thoughts make Brie smile to herself. Poetic phrases always come to her effortlessly. She has walked outside in the bluish-grey, lonely dawn and found stanzas written in the faint stars above. Words hum around her, bubbling faintly below the surface of a violin song and bursting in flaming Roman-candle glory across a forget-me-not sky.

Paragraphs smoother than silk come to her so often, she never writes them down. She closes her eyes and drinks in their resonance – and then, with eyes bright for the future, she's gone. Words crumble and die in her wake, like castles of ash dissolving under a steady rain.

We will leave her there, the air around her thick with tears from the heavens, dark grey clouds reflected in her eyes.

Brie has a gift. Fate made it hers from the moment of her birth – breathed a deathly beautiful song into her infant ear – but then again, Fate visits countless children with countless skills.

Gifts trail behind Fate like dancing rainbow shards from a sun-drenched prism. They follow like the glittering silvery wake of a shooting star, like sky-splitting lightning after a shattering thunderclap. They're more constant than the tides, than the sunset.

And each of us come into this world with our very own. You and I still have the echo of Fate's song ringing in our ears, old but not yet dead, soft but not yet silent. Behind your heartbeat and beneath your veins is the ancient song, so lovely and rich that to keep it caged would wither your soul in an instant.

So your gift comes out in some way – shared with world-weary millions or kept closely tucked inside your own head – and Fate smiles, because that is why you were visited.

All that Fate has ever desired was to bless. Bless the world one wide-eyed infant, one fledgling gift at a time.

That is why Fate pushes on, so that the newborn's first breath and the great-grandfather's last one and every one in between have something marvelous hidden deep inside.

But the tender stolen moments of bestowing a gift are nothing compared to the soaring elation of watching that gift blossom and spread like curling petals of rose, distilling sweetness into the air that lingers and diffuses ever outward, streaming up to the heavens – and then, Fate does not smile.

Fate weeps.

And the tears of joy fall to earth, cool and caressing the dry earth, releasing a different, tangible, scent – unique and unforgettable as a whirling storm of dazzling white-grey flakes.

Petrichor.
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