It was a roughed-up envelope, two slabs of goatskin leather stabbed together with fishing line, and it contained exactly forty seeds, the size and shape of teardrops. She had plunged her damaged fingers in, feeling the cool roughness of them, and now she examined them, glinting in the thumbprint-bruised palm of her left hand. The seeds were as hard, brittle and concentrated as freshwater mussel shells, but each one was distinctive, as distinctive as a different species of butterfly.
They were not uniform, except in size and shape. Their colours jostled against each other for room, then drifted into tiny sparks that registered briefly against the blue-grey air before curling away in the dusk. There was no thunder. No lightning. Not yet.She transferred the seeds to her good hand and picked each of them up singly, feeling the subtle variations in texture, and pushed them down into the clinker of what passed for soil in this graveyard, pushed them down into the specific wet spaces where she knew the bones had never been, and when she did so, fresh cuts slashed into her fingers but did not bleed, and did not add to the pain. She endured. She continued under the static moon. She worked without pause, beneath the dome of branches that formed the remains of the ceremonial canopy.The owl shrieked. A beak-shaped twist of skin peeled from her body, fell to the ground amongst the leavings of the long-fled hunters’ dogs and the debris of her recent planting. Again, no blood.
The clouds massed and twisted in the fading sky, but still the thunderstorm did not arrive.
She stood up, her undamaged feet wriggling in the cold embers. She saw the distinction of her footprints. Every toe clearly defined. She scraped the soil flat, deliberately choosing the hand that was still healing. The furrow on her forehead released. The matching frozen slick of ripples on the river thawed and flowed away.And then, a single splinter of lightning cracked through and froze in the sky, leaking out a constant muted light. But still no thunder.The dry casings of the seeds cracked, and green stems as jagged as forks of lightning broke free, squeaking instantly to the surface.
And then the moon fell, fell suddenly from its air-bound stasis, and drenched down towards the earth, and fastened onto the broken network of ceremonial branches and eased itself over them, pliable, soldered to each twig like lava, creating a skin of light that itself blocked out the light.
And in the gloom, she could hear deep, deep down a sound like scraped whispers and in her skin she could feel them through the distance: grey hairs snaking through the undersoil then up to the surface, snaring the stalks and dragging them downwards, past their bending point, down-shooting them, leaving the roots exposed, and the only sound she could hear was that of the stems rooting their way downwards, scarpering from the darkness of the moon.
And then the hairs rolled into a ball, gained momentum, and hustled through the soil-crust and at the last minute she was certain she could see the vanish of tiny feet.
And almost instantly, she knew that something was eating away the subterranean shoots.
The slow wind was heavy, wheeling down upon itself then back up again, picking up grains of phosphorescence from the ground as the lightning slowly faded. The air remained dry.
A nose snuffled up through the surface. Inhaled dirty air. Exhaled soot. A bloated creature, choked on hairs, made from hairs, ruined stems in its teeth, staggered and almost dropped; it defecated a turd as large as itself, impregnated with tiny impurities, and collapsed, weakened. The owl screeched in low, its eyes narrowed to arrow-slits. It flapped twice, then descended, and picked up the almost-inert parcel of hairs. It flapped twice again, to ascend, then bent away, suddenly sulphur-yellow and glowing, the crack of its small bones and sinews slapping the air above the thin soil without echo and then it faded to green and it faded to brown as it absorbed itself and its burden like twigs and leaves into the noise of the forest.
And she reached down, snapped each speck of adulteration away from the creature’s dry stool and counted them: forty seeds, each with a scribed white impression of a face she recognised – forty people with different birthing days but the same drowning day - and she picked them up and let the fallen drop, let them drop into her roughed-up envelope, two slabs of goatskin leather stabbed together with fishing line, and she pulled the neck-string tight above them and she closed her eyes and briefly retreated into her own darkness. She opened her eyes and the dirt under each of her fingernails was a different colour.
Then, with a sound that was more a hint of a sigh than a sigh itself, the soil turfed back over and dragged the damaged shoots and leaves back struggling to the remnants of the light.
She turned her back and walked away, her own miniature graveyard dangling from her wrist, leaving her new footprints, webbed and indistinct, leaving behind her a cluster of seedlings, rallying, finding new life, growing away from the earth, pushing through the dustfall of the felled moon that was powdering its skin down the last few feet to ground in a silent statement of its own pointless oblivion, fading itself away as the light eroded before the dawn.
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