SSCS 01: Installment 25 of 31
Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
This is Installment 25 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…
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.
…Because the Desert is a Great, Broad Beast of Memory
Installment 25: 20.0412
The song of the carrion beetles is the song of the valley. The whole of its history. All of the breath it has allowed itself in more than five hundred years. Only in the light of the full moon. Only when the memories are clearest and sit trembling upon the world, too full to be forgotten, too full not to spill out. To breathe out, then in, just once.
The valley is barely here now, yet everything that has come within it stops to listen. The desert’s silver snake shifts up a bit through the sand, so that the moonlight throws brilliance to glint off its scales. The bone feathers lie still and flat, just watching the ripple of this song filling up the world. And the ruby petals, scattered and apart, remember the shudder of closing, just a little, so that the moonlight could bathe the pelts of their scouts where they lay in their rest, within and beneath, under leaves now covered by the desert sands.
And the beating from the sky has held still also. It is listening. Comparing this to all the songs that it knows. It had called the bees’ honey forth, but then the sand had smothered it. Even still, it has been waiting. It is a thing that waits. Until it finds another thing that it would gather to itself. Another song to make it stronger. This song is one breath out and one breath in, but it is both holy and ancient. It is power.
The moon rides to its zenith, and the beating from the sky reaches down to gather the beetles to itself. The carrion beetles, the caretaker beetles, who sing in the moonlight. Until just now.
The moon reaches its zenith, and the beetles’ song stops. And they burrow back down into the sand, returning to their leaves and petals, returning to the remnants of their dead. And when they are buried, the bone feathers sigh out, and the desert wind sighs across the shallow bowl of the valley, hushing, whispering, singing the emptiness of the sands.
And then the sky beats once more, and the winds are gone. Along with all the detritus of their dervishes.