Thunder, Hoofbeats

The cool slick in Oxter’s lock is from dung mixed with water. It keeps away mosquitoes, brings on the flies. Oxter doesn’t remember how he got his name. It feels strange in his mouth. Terracotta skin — burn, burn, burn — that’s what he’s got, so most folks don’t bother with him.

At night the mountains wheeze whale songs and sometimes the whole village feels like it’s under a million pounds of ocean water. The birches and the sumacs crackle, make a grand show of age, tempting what they may: most of us, he says, hell God wants us so don’t we want him, isn’t that the point, to get this over with, claw, break stones over skulls, eat, pinch hairs off a mummy’s arm to get a whiff?

Though, when death does come, Oxter is hitched halfway up a Great Oak, lassoing himself round the trunk of the Great Thing, the rope slipping too, and a buffalo soundlessly leans into a crimson sun. The moon shatters a milkweed sky.

This, the dry season.

Spit honeysuckle, suck rainwater deep into welcoming lungs: breathe, burn. A forest fire, disease too, the golden herd — you hear them, smell them, before you’re underneath them — stoops over these boiled bodies, which will return what they have taken: flora, fauna, ruins: everything swift with the wind.

They, too, will soon discover rust.