A Token of Stasis

I was enjoying Scrabble with someone who took inordinately long. I was just waiting, itching for action. This is just a short, written animation of or inspired by that feeling. I wrote it then.

One must say it is terrific, when it is. One must report in bullet points to the heart how much joy was realised.

The dawn drops the night, and the crevices exposed to only the pallid glow of the flashlight with wandering, menacing movement, are now fully lit.

The scab of the evening has been ripped off, and the gurgling blood drips forth from its protruding lip. This still gargoyle juts out into space; an immobile under bite. Teeth gone. Gums grey. What were rosy cheeks are now mossy homes to miscreants of the muddy undergrowth who scamper blindly through the spaceless arches of the silky green promise.

Home to fairies they say? The only magic is the question of life. Life here.

Some lurid wings must flap breath into the lungs of these statues; these stony settlers, who at first seem ancient relics from forgotten terrors who made many fateful errors.

The vitriolic expression frozen in their brows is a wrinkled picture: grazes by a child’s crayon of far, fleeing birds with no face or feet.

As the rain seeps into the hollows, it is trapped. They are forever-lakes and webs to the flakes that rise and fall with the wind. Their crusty colour hearkens back to the depths, darkening, getting heavier as the water softens its edges, pulling its centre down, down, down.

Nobody ever visits and no one ever speaks. Only the wind drones through the dormant lashes. Occasionally, a change of direction might amend the melody. The lashes like leaning steeples are a popular perch. They burgeon on the horizon, those flying wrinkles, coming to hazard the constant skies.

Not much else is around. The footprints of once awe-filled observers are sunk. They are filled with sand, and every indentation is masked by time.

A dragonfly visited once. It zigzagged up the limbs of a corpse, bashing back and forth up into the groin, bound by the air, after which it faltered. With it’s ribbon tongue, the air spat it out, and it tumbled down, unravelling into the windy gyre. It landed, splayed under a dust cloud, next to a bulbous foot.

All I wanted was a little finality. The sheer thing twitching. The firm ankle, still.

But no, nothing!

Both just continued, a-little-bit-alive.