Orion

The beach is quiet at night, when the sands look more like a muted brown than the soft white in the daytime. No one comes by the shore so late, when the moon is already halfway through its cycle and the sun will break across the horizon soon. With the backdrop of a sleeping city, Orion takes his time eddying around the waves the sea makes on the shore, the lull like a lullaby beneath the moonlight.

Here is a secret Orion never tells.

The waves catch at his feet and run down slivers of his toes, over the silkiness of his skin, calling him back and back, louder each time, to the sea. It grows in crescendo and his temptation with it to dive through the waves until his legs grow scales and join together to form a tail. The sea is his home, and he knows it. And so does the water.

But the sand and the cement beyond it tell him of stories from people now and long ago. There is a way to how the crowds move like schools of fish. Orion keeps between them and they remind him of home just as much as the ocean does. There is someone, like him, who belongs in the ocean yet cannot bear to leave the land.

Some days, he dives headfirst into the water if only to feel again, to breathe again, the water that runs through his gills and courses through his veins and the salt and brine and seawater—!

Home is where his heart is: in the sea, on the land, nestled between the crook of a neck and a shoulder that dips low into the collarbone.

Good night, sweet prince.