They find the skull of a sheep buried very shallow.
Scrabbling in the frost hard earth with blue fingers, like the fingers of lepers (the imagined fingers of lepers) These delicate fingernails could peel away unnoticed, embed themselves in the earth and lie, like the fossils of baby oysters. Like this field or wasteland is still the ocean bed.
Gloves might help.
"It's a goat?"
They don't know much.
One of them chews the red clay from beneath those fingernails, still attached. Little fingers, remnants of varnish, an organic green. A growth of lichen across some minute pane of glass.
If they hold it up there - the last grey yellow streaks of sunlight catch at it briefly. Then the sun dips out of sight behind some low earth mound, bare trees, the far corner of PC World.
Gone.
"It's a fucking sheep"
One of them sucks icy air over their teeth. Like the skeletal distance between a sheep and a goat is infinite, and the tentative mis-identification disgusts beyond words. Drinks something from a plastic bottle, passes it on.
"Probably a wolf got it"
- the smallest one says, cramming the skull into an overly full backpack.
"Yeah, probably" the others snort.
They clamber up the bank and over the fence to the road. They hope the bus comes before the moon.
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nice man. i like the fingernails as baby oysters. it's lush. high.
ReplyDeleteI wish you an enigmatic Christmas! ^_^
ReplyDeleteAs always, the - hmm - curt ambundance of intense images is overwhelming. I mean, when I read it, I'm bloody there. So, once again, Kudos.
ReplyDeleteThere is something to this as to many others that is somehow horribly painfull to expose myself to, at least for me: The distance between your narrators and the vivid, intense world you describe, the palpable feeling of constant disappointment just hurts, man.
All the things you describe, the skull, the red clay, the pallid rays of sunlight, even the cheap thrills and the unadmitted fear of the chaps your narrator observes with such distance and disgust, all of that is beautiful. I don't just mean your words describing them, but the things themselves. Reading your pieces most times I want to rush on stage and shake your narrators, or slap them, and shout at them: Revel, you kahretsin coward, don't withdraw! Drink in the winter light, feel the cold on your skin, smell the snow on the air, bloody say YES to it all! Stop fucking protecting yourself from it!