#prosety

We do not glance to meet each other's eyes, our features masked by the same blank red. Take away the human features, and less attachment occurs. 

"It doesn't matter. Nobody cares when Nobody leaves, and Nobody ever comes back after."

A wrist-snap in the flames. It has been weeks since we last heard coyotes and I hope it means they gather somewhere in the darkness, howling for the moon and plotting an attack. I fear it means another species returned to dust. 

"I-I would scar myself. For your absence." 

In a society contingent on sameness, identifying marks ostracize you immediately. People fear the strange, unique, out-of-ordinary -- fear always roots into either love or hate. Emotions of any kind have no place in a dying world, too much work need be done simply to stay alive. 

"I feel my presence as a growing darkness and sterile soil."

For the most part, we have our language paired to easy, familiar phrases. Simple, short, direct, but full of a bleak poetry; we grasp vainly for anything both beautiful and permanent in this world where everything withers, straight down to the bones, to the vaporeal soul.

The fire tires of breaking bones, begins to settle down into itself, pensive, a wonder and wait. 

"You are the soil to my roots. Beyond our dust is simply more dust. What do you expect to find but Death?" They stand on top of a dangerous, teetering house of matchstick feelings and their voice shakes to the foundation.

"Nobody knows that for certain. I know nothing for certain anymore and I have less and less to offer every day. Cull the weak laws no longer apply, but those laws did exist for a reason."  

"You are anything but a weak shoot to be culled--"

I cut them off before they can continue. Tonight we will not tread footsteps into the past. Tonight is the first night of the future. 

"If I am anything at all I am a weakness here. If I become I, singular, I belong beyond the dust." 

"There is no beyond the dust." Sometimes anger sends off a palpable pressure, a heat. The fire picks up, feeding from it. 

I prod it with a long piece of rusted rebar, a skeleton from days past, perhaps a skyscraper. I wonder if it remembers the cool of low clouds, dreams of fog as it begins to turn red hot in my hand. I throw in a few more compress logs, flames jump awake, startled and hungry, throwing sparks to the sky to spite the hidden stars. 

"I will simply accept the dust my soul is made of if that is the case."

There were no protocol expressions out where our words hung now; our sentences become weak and naked if not rehearsed. The fire returns to bone-breaking and this time it sounds like spinal vertebrae.

The silence plays in and out of the sparks, pokes a hole through the dust-colored clouds above, the hint of a star, maybe. They never seem to look at the sky, never head-back wonder like mine. Feeling that sheer awe at once was, what is now. 

I shake my head. This is not a night of past. 

"If there's nothing to change your mind, I have something I want you to take with you," they say at last, their voice flat as mine now, house of feelings swept away in a sandstorm.

They shuffle around in their big, baggy, dust-colored pocket. Skirts are the most practical thing in the life-long desert. When they pull out their hand it shakes -- whatever they hold, they hold for dear life.

"I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's viable-- but here," they grab my hand, shove something small and hard between my fingers, into my palm. Then they grab me around the shoulders, our heads pressed side-by-side together, closer than we have been in a long time.

"Save your seeds, my love."

With that they push away and turn, head up, shoulders squared, disappearing into the darkness beyond my circle of starving yellow light. It starves with me, starves like the miracle I hold waiting to sprout in my hand.