Salvo

Salvo

            “Look at your fingers, they’re… they’re thinner than before.”

            They hadn’t considered this. Idle hands etc., not as if they’re a colossus elsewhere, tinkering in minds.

            “We’re very low. Some hundred feet below sea level.”

            “But is this what happens? I don’t know. Should we keep going?”

            They both can see the bottom of this valley. It is not too much longer to get there; the coral grows as if it is thick in saline and kelp. They walk just a bit more slowly than to which they are accustomed, some biodome experiment. Intruding on a closed system—

            “Did you hear something?”

            “No.”

            Lungs are sharp. They both count among the striated few, ironman finishers, sinew subletting expectations. Both feel risen, as if they have been in a trance and now feel the full mountains of their spines.

            The dirt cakes in the folds of palms, accentuates veins bulging from bariatric changes. Seek out a control center but they do not see a beaconing light or reflecting glass anywhere, not even along the rim of this depression. All light comes from the stars and their mirrors. They do not stop often to rest but when they do they feel as if their blood has taken on new plasmas, Ayurvedan energies not previously known to them. Power is unease an unwitting mantra, sure, but it’s what sticks.

            They search out a specific patch of earth-- previous expeditions, done centuries ago, speak of crops and plants that could to all current knowledge not grow in this climate. Kudzu eating the land and then falling away, in a faint shiver. Deer and rabbits graze along the edges but vanish to other places. They listen for cicadas, any sort of dry buzz,

            The earth is dry and cut but it is not a slate in some endogamy of shapes; thorny trees grow among the cacti placed almost like sentries.

            Hills billow and bend like marasmus along a recovering body.

            They see where the forest becomes desert. It is a gentle transition, a liminal space of peace. The colors burn brighter where the volcanic stones give way to pine barrens and interiors of leaf and twig. Small mosses even acclimate on boulders unmoved for thousands of years; they touch them as if they are or will come to be piecework in Thelemic rituals, of lizard-people and a million loving occultists. No need to speak of apocrypha: you do not need to win an invisible game.

            YOU DO NOT NEED TO WIN AN INVISIBLE GAME.

I was born the year Klaus Kinski died. Means nothing to anyone else and just marginally more to him. His hair does not stay so golden in the sun and under the rays he retreats unto himself. The humidity kicks in, rather he feels it after so many hours drifting down the river and he can only hope to sleep for some time as he pedals from the back of his canoe. The river is gentle but they have been in the radiating light for the better part of its rising and he sheds off his skin like a particularly perturbed garden snake through shrubs and vines. He, the redoubtable oaf, seeks apotheosis—is it there? Who cares. Flicks away the inter-finger stratum. Clay and his own hairs. After such exertion he cares for his joints, innocuously popping, rubbing out the trigger points or anywhere he aches. Sick of fighting, sickos fighting, sycophanting, he is not unhurried. Always/never bold.

            She sits on the ragged edge. Impossible for comfort but that is not what she wants. A rare dint; a thousand rat eggs. She caresses her long fingernails and notes the shades of dirt caked underneath. Titrated layers, they will take some time to wash away.