A Singer's Breath

im posting the second half here. mostly because i will probably scrap it, and i wanted it posted somewhere.

ii.

Meredith approached the makeshift dock stretching off the too-small patch of land Allison's family owned. Tied to what could best be describe as the most uneven pillar was a little dinghy with some scribbled Vietnamese characters on its side.

He never bothered to actually learn the language, or even enough to jot down some poetry. Allison simply picked up a pamphlet discussing music at an airport the week before and tried his best to jot down the symbols. It was not actually written in Vietnamese. The pamphlet Japanese, promoting a young woman's choir course. The words he copied translated roughly to "A singer's breath."

"Hello Meredith," the recent college drop out shouted from a reclining plastic chair on board his mighty vessel.

"Hello Allison," she quipped back with visible frustration. "What the Hell are you doing out there?"

"Why, I'm getting ready to for a trip around the state."

Meredith was the kind of girl Allison needed, sharp-tongued and responsible. But this little boat was a bit too much for her, another step in his awkward march toward the bizarre.

"Well... I'm going to my aunt's house for the weekend. I thought you might want to say goodbye to me."

"You're not going to your aunt's house. You're going to sail the Seven Seas with me."

He was right about one thing. She wasn't going to her aunt's house. She was leaving him. It wasn't, at that time, much of a surprise for most folks. When a young man leaves school and leaves his future in the middle of a relationship, any young lady would need to think hard about the change, would need to ponder whether it was reasonable to stay. But Allison's was not a rational mind.

She walked away. He muttered some little tune about the sea to himself.

A week passed and Allison got the news, through a letter on his kitchen table. Dalton handed it to him and watched a light go out in his brother's eyes.

"I'm sorry, man," Dalton almost whispered.

His brother responded with a bit of a smirk. "No worries. I had an affair too. And the horizons themselves made the place where we could meet again."

Allison drug his feet a little as he walked to his closet and picked out a silk dress-shirt. And he slipped outside and to the dock and to its end and sat in his little reclining chair.

"Haudure haudure sun-tawn yet conshiun," he sang until the sun tripped over itself into nightfall.