Member-only story
Mongol
Impermanence
In rags, with eyes of almonds and lashes of frost; limbs and hair of wound serpents; and lips of pumice; as the evening drew on — at the outset of a night so close to the tongue — I caught sight of a stranger.
I knew not from whence she came.
Like a painting liberated from undulating propensities, she was locating silences, seeking refuge in an eternal drift along unseen gateways of deepest blues.
Counting seconds, disappearing and taking shape, like a stray child in unknown arbors of divergent worlds, her words were in shambles, as though shattered by her own cudgel of unease.
Shallow and shadowless, her halves and doubles breathed with assistance from the wind that dissolved the echoes in her skeleton.
I then saw them, the bleeding flesh and seeded womb; she was to turn mother.
I surmised, watching her wheezing chest and fallen countenance, that her bed had burned.
Like a stream toward an ocean, red striped her white cotton; I wished that the map that plotted us reverse the clock.
Quietly dreaming of frogs leaping into the ponds of Basho, her spring would beckon none but the season of infraction.
In a semblance of reality, the spells of the nights — as she counted sheep, desperate for a sunrise — bestowed upon her the kisses and butterflies and rain and prayers of her last kin.
Risen from a reverie of ancient stones, city gates, and silent footsteps — yearning for a meeting in the cold with but a sky above and a voice within — she sang to her heart’s resonance.
Even should the planets fall, as the moon embraces the earth upon nightfall, she would not sing songs of lament: she had found a place outside of time, above the clouds, and beyond the lagoons of nebula.
The crimson queen lowered unto me a filament of pearls from the clouds to impede my pillow thoughts on common grounds with a spirit from a past to present.
It is then that I awoke on the same loyal wooden floor from which the familiar scent of pulp and glue had waned, and the creaking was soundless.
As the last grain of sand fell, her hourglass lapsed times from shores to mountains.
She had carried me home, over the ashes of seas, summer showers, and the waves that churn, bearing witness to crusades of infinite rumbling.
I left nothing behind.
Reminiscence: around a fire we sat, she and I, recollecting wars long lost and distant horizons long gone, and hoped for a second confluence.
Akin to wailing mountains upon the sight of an…
