Unwind the Yarn

- Hushed murmurs announce my humble offering: a Marigold picked along the worn dirt trail. She tucks it behind her ear where it lingers, shining, the sun to her Nyxian demesne.

The oak wood barn stained gray, fresh-sprayed sawdust peppering the clear, warm varnish; the smells coalesce like the thick colors of an oil painting in the cool night air. Then diffuse, like the freckles dusting her cheeks, her arms, her chest half-exposed, horripilation backlit in the glistening twilight. We're dancing to the sweet whispers of Norah Jones on the radio. Well, she's dancing, I'm falling. Her arms rise in time with the music, then drop to the swell of my hips as I sway, wide and slow in jerky motions, orbits collapsing inward; imploding. I trace the lines of galaxies across her dimpled flesh-- constellations across the backdrop of her amandine sky --she moans the names of crumbled empires in fallen tongues against my ear. A Barn Owl screeches death from its roost while her hair billows black oil slicks about my shoulders, dark as the night incarnate. In this sea of a trillion stars, we are infinite.

1. I'm sprinting through the Birch wood, chasing her scent like a coursing hound at its prey. But she smells of cherry pits, pomegranate arils and silken ambrosia, like the barest winter chill past autumnal petrichor. She flits here and there, darting between trees with all the cheek and cunning of the Fair Folk, wild, her tongue bared as she easily outpaces me. I am lost: without her-- face in my sights --the forest fades to grizzled white, grainy noise, all static and frazzle, blown out like a blizzard. She reappears and I am saved; the smile on her plum-bloodied lips is matched only by my own. She calls to me, distant, but her words come out garbled as the bubbling brook, as the murder's bluster and caw. She creeps towards me and-- oh, how I am found --but the words she sings to my waiting ears share no cohesive meaning. Instead, they scurry by my eardrums like a mound of ants, angry and confused.

I. The ocean, deep dark and roiling, the last great expanse of Earth's frontiers. She loves it here, like the forest but so much wilder, more remote, emptier; a source of existential dread as much as calm. She dips her toes into the inky water and feels the cold dark press of eternity creeping upward, like a slime mold's kinesis in fast-forward, all numb and terrifying and sickly beautiful. As much is devoured as honed and preserved; the linear nature of time is cruel and pitiless. It comforts me to know that, perhaps, there is a version of us idling, sand on our backs, sneaked into our skirts, stuck like glitter up to our naked calves. When her foot sinks into the ocean it is returned in kind: no spreading ink, no filthy jaws of grasping ice, crushing and cold, just water: wet and gentle and wonderful.

- The hay and grey-green straw smell like mildew and chickens; clipped wings and caked on mold, but we are careless and free, skin against skin: let the weight of the world rest on someone else's shoulders. For once, I am unafraid. I touch the moon and make it mine, the stars are at my command. The radio's song turns melancholic, but it cannot penetrate the soft angles of my heart: protected by the effervescent glow of her, even as she turns to face me, eternity a dark shadow in her emerald eyes-- the first time I have bore it witness. A gilt flower is crushed behind her ear; the Marigold I slipped there, before.

From this day on, I will know only before and after: her, my measurement of time. Prometheus earned his eagle for a gift; I wonder what punishment will suffice for winning her.

II. Reclining in the hay with a spliff between us, the orange-white smoke rising in wispy billows towards the flaking rafters. The swarming gnats give it berth, swirling 'round like a flock of starlings, like some alien force; a hivemind dictating movements that leave only chaos in their wake. We laugh (and cough), at their perfection, their grotesqueness, at the world itself. We cannot conceive of other times or songs besides our own, for we are young, lost in each other as much as the half-empty vodka bottle at our side.

When I fall asleep, it is in her arms, to the music of her breath high rising and deep falling with the swell of smoke like waves cresting just off the dim-lit shore.

2. The path is faded, the music gone, when she leads me back down that old cabin road. The Marigolds have withered by the wayside, the worn dirt retained only by the predator trail formed in its place.

The barn of my dreams is there, blackened, fallen, disused. It smells of ashes and something sweet, nameless and unknown. Something very her, always her.

I have to dip beneath a collapsed rafter to venture inside, after her, always her. She's humming in the distance, warbling like some pretty bird: it's just the thought of you, the very thought of you…

-She's kissing me, and

III. it's burning me, the air is

on fire, the smoke coming from all around like the swarming gnats, the alien thing tarrying at the end of the world. Something warm is right around me, tight around me, but I break free. I run, and I run

3. inside, where all is absent but the cool night air and

beneath my feet

like it's nothing but it's

everything;

the dusted remnants

of Marigold

cinders

trail across the burnt hay floor.