#nyfws18

The sun played on the salt, glimmering and shining across the flat land ahead. This barren lifeless expanse ostentatiously flaunting its inhospitable nature like a peacock was a stark reminder that death, in all its forms, has its beauty.

Vines grow through rotten wood, a cyclical bit of absurdity as nature reclaims that which man has stolen from it, devours moisture and humidity, fills every little crack with its slow and inevitable penetration. It used to be a home for some poor souls railing against the elements in that cruel and unforgiving height but now it was nothing more than a collapsing memory, the token of it destroyed and incapable of bringing anything to mind beside destruction and ruin.

It had the look of purgatory. Fog cut through with bright white light, burning away the moisture in the air near the caldera, creating a crown of wetness and airy muck around that arid deathly pit of obsidian rock bubbling hot with magma. Here on the grey and barren rim one could so easily imagine they were stuck between salvation and the pit, walking in endless circles never seeing the entirety of the landscape, only wishing allowance to ascend or fall, but afraid to ever dedicate ones self to the choice.

The color black has no restriction to it, whether it be for mourning or villainy, one can don it without hinderance. The only danger, of course being that they will be seen, and it was for that express purpose that she slipped her alabaster feet into those dark leather boots and stepped out into the wet rutted mud path the town called a main street. She was no longer her mother’s child, she was some dark and cruel emissary of portents to come. To her it was no great thing, a fated path that the town had set itself upon and she with it. This place would burn.

Light shines through shadowed forms creating pockets of luminescence burning and refracting on the blacktop, particles and waves into the cone of the eye, blinding us for a moment before we adjust to that out of focus projection of the sun; an image so misrepresented as to no longer convey any concept of the source but moreso an idea of some celestial and deified immovable and eternal force. This is the lie we tell and retell ourselves at every moment that the thing which allows us our concept of the world is beyond our ken and yet it is little more than yesterday’s picture of that great sphere around which our entirety revolves.

He talked of the day his garrison was captured by government soldiers. It wasn’t with the somber and reflective tone so many who have lived through tragedy often take, it was almost as if he were telling a tall tale, something nobody could believe, but he had been there and he had seen all the cruelty and nihilistic depths of the human condition. They kept the men locked in the arms lockers for days on end, taking each out for questioning in periodic shifts. They would sit them under a small faucet and drip the water onto their heads as they asked the questions. Once the skin was puckered and soft from the stream they would cut slowly into that thin skullcap and peel it away from the head. At first it just felt like pressure, but once the skin dried the pain was unbearable. Everyone in his platoon talked, they sang, and when they were freed it was as if a legion of bald-headed clowns poured from the garrison, screaming mad and cackling at the ridiculous appearances of their brothers.

The room was covered in old daguerrotypes, the silver fading into a brown tar like color on the edges. Pictures of long dead family members, sitting stoic and unmoving were the lot, but there was one that had life to it, one that felt like those pictured were more than the delicate workings of a morticians tools. No rigored bodies here. Here was life and love for living. She brushed her hand along the frame as though hoping to reach in and touch such vigor even for a moment, but she moved on and looked at the dust on the tips of her fingers knowing that the subjects were long dead and the memory long forgotten.