they scream at the horizon, renting it's perfection into a million jagged yelps. halting the explorer in the desert prairie, not even cactus needles can be felt piercing bare feet while her imagination is trapped like the tumble weed. forever destined to roll hand over foot, or foot over foot, or fingers all tangled up, or perhaps just ganglia extending its feelers throughout the sands bloodied by volcanoes battling with the seams of space and time.
rubbing the dust of magic from the corners of her mouth, blowing it from her nose, picking it out of her eyes, coughing it into a perfectly shaped phlegm ball and with it watering a particularly parched peyote plant, she dug the toe of her boot into a jack rabbit hole and wondered for a second how she's going to get back. or if she even needed to get back. or wanted to, for that matter. perhaps the only way she can really even go back, is to go onward. for if she is to keep going, then eventually she'll get back to where she needed to be. isn't that exactly what the amazing discovery of some stargazer discovered centuries ago? so she drew a circle around the jack rabbit hole and decided to head towards the sun setting behind the peaks.
her heart still lay buried beneath her bones, and while she could feel it beating, she couldn't seem to erase the pounding flow of blood that filled her ears when she was back there. 'when will it slow down so i don't feel like my whole body is about to explode and my heart is about to pounce out and kick around in the dirt and run off like a naked coyote under the stars? have i merely awoken a wildness that refuses to be quelled?'
the answer to that question, she suspected, was constantly circling itself around her ankles, whispering softly, and all she had to do was lean in to its venomous fangs and open up her ears.
written 2/25/11
