He turned to me weeping. The days are too beautiful to stand, he said. Lips caulked shut, the job sloppy around the corner creases, sounds came from a hole in his chest. Sunset-stained clouds hovered nearby; we waved them away like flies and I used my other hand to rub gold dust on his ribs, marveling at freckled constellations.
Crouching – I was too small to kneel – I counted the breaths that vibrated under the skin, one one two, matching mine to thine, sacrum completing the sequence with a taut triangle of threes fives and bone. The trip hadn’t taken long enough to matter, nine years since I’d been near this hill, wondering which memories I’d buried beneath the shivering aspen. They’re an organism, all one thing no matter how far apart they are, he said, even on the other side of the world. Nails long, he raked up and down the trunks, curls of black-edged bark raining, splinters in my hair. This grove is wrapped up in her corpse, I replied, reading the runes cast in scattered twigs, but I’m going to disagree. She doesn’t want us to be here and I wouldn’t want us to be here. We’re not connected anymore.
There’s hair twining up the roots from the freshly-turned loam. Everything is getting darker. He bends over me, antlers scraping against the low-hanging branches, for the first time smiling.
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