Raina After Midnight

Raina, who lives next door, is always tending her garden after midnight, sipping milagro straight from the bottle. Once I watched her from my window, as she cut out weeds and thumbed her flowers sans glove, bottle in hand and smiling hard, like a woman in love. I asked her why. She answered without looking up, that darkness was her thing, and wise ones never run from true nature, that uncoils to reveal itself like the unconscious motivations behind a dream. (Or something like that) I laughed at her and shook my head. Then she said: A dragon that's kept hidden, will someday break free to consume everything it hadn't been given, as if all doings were left undone, all words left unsaid. That's just how it is, you'll know it well before you're dead. Then she went back to her work-hum-sip, that was that, that was it. Sometimes I still see her, washed in moonlight and the soft winds of the Summer, as she moves like air, and occasionally wonder what in the hell she'd meant.