Star Dancer III: the Waterfall

    She was laying in a grove of wildflowers, smiling at him from below his arms, arms that pinned her to the ground like they'd never let go.  Most of the flowers were clusters of chrysanthemum that had bloomed in an array of different colors.  Others were more rare, such as the tall ginger flowers near the trees to their sides, and the isolated strelitzias, which looked like they wanted to take flight.  Her blonde hair curled around them with affection, showing him a sense of nurture that he'd never experienced among his Fathers.  It was the most breathtaking thing he’d ever seen.  If only he knew how to preserve the moment somehow, like the way sculptors in his village would base their designs on real, living things, entombing them in representations of what they appeared to look like. 
 
    Managua smiled for the first time since they’d made love in the cave under Great Bonsai.  Naya felt the warmth of his body sending waves of energy through her own.  The energy caressed her heart and moistened her body, like the sun evaporating dew off the plants around them.  To her he looked like something from out of the sky; an aerodynamic bird who had lost his wings.  The wavy rivulets of his hair swept back across his ears against the blue color above.  No matter how elated he felt, his smile looked empty to her, seemingly tainted by childhood problems or memories forgotten.  She wondered what such painful eyes kept hidden from the world, and felt a motherly need to heal whatever was hurting inside him.  No doubt, his banishment had taken a toll on his spirit, but even before that she'd seen the same sorrow. 
    She knew that her Mothers would never allow them to be together, so she kept their love a secret from everyone they knew, with the exception of her closest friends.  Jingo was the only one Managua had willingly told.  Naya on the other hand had a whole group of socialites who knew about everything they'd done, even the smallest details.  Girls have been known to spread a gossip or two, and a secret such as sex would have had about as little a chance of staying a secret as the sun disappearing from the sky.  This kind of trouble caused a horrible anxiety in Naya.  At the rate people were finding out about them, everyone in Inana would know about it by the next new moon.  What's worse: the penalty in her village for being with a man was far worse than being excommunicated from Marduk, the way Managua had. 
    To escape from the pressure this caused her, she would close her eyes and dream of ancient flute wings to take her to faraway lands.  They could only be found on Montezuma, one of the largest mountains in the Limestone Range.  An ancient myth told the story of a  boy who discovered a flute in a cave of gold underneath the mountain.  The boy had always wanted to climb the legendary mountain, but it was too high for him to do on his own.  That is, not until he found the flute.  When he played it, the music magically gave him wings, but in order for the wings to stay on he had to keep playing it.  And so he played and played, soaring high into the sky until he reached the summit of the mountain. 
    Managua had a flute of his own, and whenever he played it Naya dreamed of him as the boy in the story.  While he played it, she identified each note of the melody as rising and falling, the same way the ridges of the mountain would.  She imagined him carrying her on his back while he played and flew, higher and higher, then lower and lower; higher, lower, and higher again.  The notes of the music made them rise and fall in unison, like a sine wave.  Whenever the notes he played escalated, she saw them rising to meet the crest of a ridge; whenever the notes fell, they descended into a lush valley together. 
    One of Naya's hideouts was at the base of a waterfall.  They spent a lot of time there getting to know one another and allowing their love to grow.  They also played with two dinosaurs that Naya had befriended: a brontosaurus and a pterodactyl.  Petey the brontosaurus liked to bask in the water at the base of the falls, in order to keep cool from the jungle heat.  Wheaty the pterodactyl liked to rest on his head while he did this.  The two had been refugees from the Dinosaur Oasis, a once thriving community located deep in the Orion Desert.  When a terrible drought dried up all the water and the greens, all the dinosaurs fled west to search for better land.  Petey and Wheaty were the only ones who'd survived the long trek over the Limestone Mountains into Gambria; all their friends and family had tragically died along the way.  This was now their new home; a place they'd come to adapt to over the years.  As far as size was concerned, the old oasis was nothing compared to Gambria.  Here, the land would never become parched under the intense heat of the desert sun; rather, an endless season of rain and intermittent sun allowed for an abundant supply of leaves and water for them to consume. 
    Managua and Mango liked to climb up Petey's long neck and slide down on it into the water.  Petey would make the gradient more steep for them by putting his head under the water and holding his breath for the duration of their slide.  After flying off the top of Petey's head, Mango's little splash would alert Wheaty of what he'd done.  On hearing this familiar sound, the swift creature would dive down to the water, lift him up into the air with his talons, and drop him back into the water again.  This annoyed the monkey greatly, but it gave Naya so much pleasure that Wheaty had no problem pestering the monkey in order to please his human friend.  
    Naya was always too scared to go sliding with them.  She found the most pleasure in watching them have fun, with a guilty silence that only young girls know.  One time Managua decided to jump from atop a high rock overlooking the pool beneath the falls.  With Naya watching, he extended his arms forward in the air and rotated his hips, making him look like a flying ballerina through the parabola of the jump.  He fell a good hundred feet all the way to the bottom, causing Naya to scream in fear that he'd hurt himself.  She ran down to the pool and waded forcefully into the water, hoping he wasn't hurt.  When he reared his head out of the water, laughing hysterically, she shoved him back under for causing her to worry so much.  Later that night she wept in his arms, wishing he wouldn't do such dangerous things, especially right in front of her.  To soothe her distress, he promised her that he'd never jump from that great rock again.  Nor would he willingly do anything as dangerous, though deep in his heart he knew it was a lie. 
    Every night they made love in their grove of flowers, under a twilit sky that always became more nebulous after sunset.  Intricate formations of cosmic dust spun in a kaleidoscopic milieu of colors that the gaseous clusters emanated.  Naya liked to imagine that the constellations were dancing with one another, putting on a show for their tiny audience down below.  Or that somewhere else in that great black beyond, others were holding hands and looking up at their own sky, wondering if beings on other planets were doing the same thing they were.  When she told Managua this, he said there was something about the vastness of space that made beings lose themselves inside someone else; something that made two bodies entwine unconsciously, as if the knowledge of a larger sphere out there would cause them to drift apart forever.  Maybe, he told her, such a fear of separation would cause the people watching them in the sky to make love to one another, as he and she would. 
    One day, while the lovers were dancing in a heavy rain, the sun broke through the western sky and recognized the world with light and rainbows.  Prisms of quartz seemed to smash to smithereens as the sunlight refracted through the massive raindrops around them.  Naya stopped, opened her eyes, looked up, and let the lost shards of light illuminate her face.  Managua looked at her and thought she was glowing like a yellow balloon drifting up into a storm.  If heaven is a place on Earth, this is it, he said.  Together they danced in the sunset for the remaining hours of daylight, singing in enchantment and not tiring for a minute.  Together they ran through the jungle to a place that had not seen the likes of human sex in ages.  They made love not in the jungle, but above it that night.  The city of animals in Great Bonsai jeered at them for intruding as they climbed the tree with their wet, naked bodies.  On reaching the top, they were able to lay under another endless, twilit sky; this time even more alluring because they were that much closer to God's kingdom.  Here the stars were painted on a black canvas that was even darker than the ones they'd seen from the ground.  Naya said, Because of you, the stars are like holes in the prison of space.  And with your Love, I can fly through them.  And Managua believed her.  He believed everything she told him now.  He believed her when she said that it wouldn't be the last time they'd ever make love, and he believed her when she said they'd always be together.  
    However, as time after time young people have found that the future they dream about becomes only a false hope; that they should never have set their expectations high enough to believe those dreams would become realities, the same would happen to them.  Most doomed lovers flaunt themselves unconsciously about austere forces that conspire to spoil their passions, just as Managua and Naya did.  Unaware of the danger lurking on the horizon, it was only a matter of time before their ignorance about the fall of a jaded civilization long past its days of glory would rear its ugly head, meddling with their lives in the same way that any other society starved for utopian perfection would.