In the dusk-yellow sunshine of the desert, the morning wind is crackling like static over the sand. It breathes salt, breathes sore throats and raw skin against the red mountains. The crows are croaking again, low and harsh and rattling like the final breaths of a half-dead man.
This man is alive. He crawls spidery and long-limbed against the dirt-rimed cliffs, lost now in a patch of purple shadow. Now here he is in the sunlight, new and watery, and his skin is red and peeling, and the snatches that have fallen off flutter to the dunes below like snow. This man is alive
(alive for now)
alive for the hot cruel scratch scratch of the sun on
The air is fog dark, hazy with smoke, pulling the last hours of the day in long thin threads to wrap around white fingers, around yesterday and tomorrow and the crumpled edges of Villain's cigarette. He breathes faint clouds into the October evening, and the edges of his vision are blurred slurry and soft. Villain has eyes like early morning (gray) a nose you could strike a match on (he does) and a cat's predatory smile (it won't hurt, not much, I promise). The edges of his world are knit together in fine striped cotton and bootlaces-- he is long clean leather in some places but mostly scuffed, mostly worn. He smells like lost chances and the
The sky was a long, pale streak of blue and pink across the horizon when we headed down to the beach, slapping our sandals against the old gray road and giggling through our fingers. The morning was cold and smelling of salt and excitement—together we linked our little fingers and walked like elephants in slippers, soft and silent with the promise of golden sand in our sight.
The water felt like ice against our toes and we shrieked and spun like the seagulls, tripping falling laughing in the dunes and weaving crowns of wild grass for our hair. We were the seashell queens, our palaces made of mud and mussel shells, our scepters spiky coral an