forWinds

Here amidst the bones bleached white, the echoes become trapped in ribcages like a heartbeat. But it’s just a sound. No blood pumps through the marrow thick like baby’s breath- flowers for someone who is sick or dying or dead. No light shines under the skin and muscle. How dark it must be for the delicate, fleshy bits underneath. The lungs don’t know when it’s time to go. No moon to guide them. How do they know when to stop? Does the heart even know the color of blood?

When she was a child, the sun was her God that rose and fell one day after one day after one. When she was a child, the sun was her God unchanging, unlike the tenement halls she scavenged for her faith. When she was a child, bruises took her knees from praying. When she was a child kneeling on the floorboards, she begged the sun to shine through the window bars. It only happened sometimes. When she was a child, the sun was her God but slowly she found that God was not the sun.

Blades of grass brush the bottoms of tanned feet, the cloth of orange robes. The wrinkles in the hem transform an instant into an hour as thistles whistle windswept past deaf ears and hunched backs, pursed lips, closed eyes that open to the soul. Calm ripples out from the center in a golden, misty halo that echoes, falling away like waves on a shore, swelling loud and crashing all at once into thin sheets. The waves move up towards wrinkled feet where mist brushes the brows of the brothers in orange and dissolves like the silent ohm of breathing, deep and steady, up to the open temple walls and far into the trees.

We stand and face the blinded men. There is one for each of us. They stand like ruins in the rain, the water pouring down the cracks in their faces, corroding away the skin until there is nothing left but sand. The officer barks- we raise our rifles and learn only to remember the jolt in our shoulders before the heavy fall. The bodies crumple to the ground like folds of laundry. Yet one still shivers across from me, wet between the legs. Another bark, but to my left remains standing a gun cocked and loaded, the sight shaking with a trembling chest. Bark, again, but he shuts his eyes and shakes his head, denying the t