Inverted, a partially buried body
Inverted, a partially buried body head downhill and splayed legs protruding from the sheet of sand ending in the wrong bare feet, blinks flat beige eyes. The sclerae are beige. If the skin were not a luminous dusk pale the eye spots would appear swept away above their thin wax eyebrows. Sand has pooled smooth in a drape down around the body. Elsewhere nearby ripples are blown. A flannel collar point in gray and shell tartan stands like a sail up from the sand a distance from the face possible if it were wildly unbuttoned or not worn at all.
Cold dry night can sink eyes. Cold dry night holds fast its forebears’ received aspirations. Hopes hopelessly tossed to the obscure confessor of the ether are burdensome still. Sky without horizon is no relief. It fights the texture of consciousness like an iron mask. No longer flesh faces watch one another with painted mirror tentativeness. It is a tease of some opposition to the sealed head.
If the sky is an indigo dome from pronely below with sometimes blowing fogs of starlight, that dome has a base of deeper value oft circumcised by mountains that trap areas of traveling sand. Sleeping there is a tasteless, odorless type of burial. Most confluences of matter change so little that they can be named; they can be owned. The sand bodies that a night captures, that one moment’s breeze sweeps take new names in the day, claim new tenants in the day, and afresh repeated come again night. Those eyes and grasps claimed one night are given over to strangers the next until both wave and memory have lost sensation for one another.
All blushes of ruddy clouds devour the sky in the blinking eyes, slowly, like decommissioned mining equipment almost appearing functional in a coaxing wind. That creak of saltsplit wood over the lost slickness of the eyes from inside the skull gives no outlet, no escape, to where vision and the mind can name and know a face as mountain, mountain as dusty closet, and dusty closet as the unequivocal center of the galaxy when the world fails the eyes. These dry eyes were frail screen doors to this head and nothing human is pent behind screen doors. A perfectly faint sound like a balled handkerchief patting to the sand and a spectral translucency in what skin is exposed accompany the moon’s crest over the Funeral Mountains above the silver dune peak. The rising light addresses this face and this face is less than human in its finishing.
However many changes of venue pass, the transaction of the investment positive from night air to tumbling tomb happens but once. Sand more like powder and powder like liquid doesn’t cut the fragile imperceptible film binding together the fluid of the eyes into a weird sphere like big crystal dagger grains would or had. It flows more that it tumbles or grinds. It had ground in the way other simple structures blur into some things less than their components and the way that all bits that had once given themselves to mountains cannot without them be anything but loss.