SSCS 01: Installment 24 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 24 of this year’s SSCS. If you want to start at the beginning of ‘Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory’, go here! If you want to know what the heck an SSCS is, go here!
Previously…
Two more loops and First-shivered has also mastered the path, and Black-fire. And then the last-and-smallest, who had traveled the furthest to reach the gather-place of the beacon and had had to feel most closely the faint, faint drumming of it through her bones, whose bones still buzz with the memory of it, making her long for the peace of the scouts who have returned home.
And so they are falling, around and around. Falling and listening. Listening for silences.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 24: 20.0328
***
In the desert, in a depression where, long and long, longer than memory, there had once been a valley, sand continues to pool and spread, shift and swirl, ever wider. Ever higher. It has not yet reached the once-valley’s rim, but it laps toward it, seeks to rejoin the greater desert of itself, to know wide and perfect dominion.
A scattering of petals skirls along in this wake, amethyst drops curling small upon themselves in the heat and the drought of the constant wash of sand, ruby chips like flecks of blood sifting, drifting toward an unknown shore, pulled apart from what they once were. They have known stillness too long to dance within this tide. They merely are, within it.
But there are other pieces of the desert here that do know how to dance with the sands, how to flutter and skip when the wind blows through, how to make themselves a dervish with it. The bone-bleached feathers the desert’s silver snake brought inside this place know best the desert’s wind. Wind-shredded, they are a part of it and know only its song, to their very tips and tines. There is no wind yet in this place. The sand washes upward, and upward, but does not sing, does not sting the world with its pairing to the wind.
And all the while there is a great beating coming down from the sky, and the sun is hot and drumming, and the bone feathers shift a little, and shift a little more. Silver-desert-snake has not called upon them, but where they are the song of the world feels sorely lacking, and the sun is so hot, stirring the air to a thick mirage just waiting to lift. Even the beating from the sky wants to hear their song… They flutter a half-breath, and the great power of wind stirs within them. They tumble against the snake’s coil, and begin to skitter and drift.
But then suddenly the air cools, and a shadow fills the bowl of the depression that was once a valley. The sun is set, the sands turned black and almost still in its absence.
The sky is still trying to beat down from above, but it is more like breathing now, it is more like night, and stillness.
But the black of shadow does not stretch.
Because then the moon rises, round and perfect, more silver than the snake, which has wound itself down into the blackness of its spreading sand and barely even glints now in the cool light filling up the place where the valley used to be. A full-moon night.
It is time.
Shaking off the frost that has held them, the caretaker beetles stretch leg and wing, circle once to gather a petal, each and each, circle once to gather, to bathe in the light of the moon. And begin to sing.