No. Not there. She's not on the moon.

by waste

Elle

Altogether they took on the plains. The sky would be moved by the plight of the trio. It’d open another pale expanse of itself to give them light. Plump fat batches of light. Heavy and hot and perched on their chests and backs. The plains opened beyond any opening imagined. Elle would stop and eyeball the endlessly spread landscape. Everything paling away into the blue. Into the clouds.

A glance filled with a compass. Her eyes scraping the horizon. The day shaved itself in to the curls of an afternoon. The blue, crisp blooming afternoon. The three of them all hold their struggles in backpacks and canvas. The weight is unkempt and messy, moving between Luna and Hayden. Unable to express affection normally Luna settled for thieving Hayden’s weight until Hayden would steal it back. Luna would inflate a smile for this sometimes. It’d only stay for a second before she’d lope back. To her distant, listless misery.

Promisingly Hayden was better at luring Luna out of that place. They share the long red dawns, the long red dusks for a week now. Ever since the outburst in the cave Luna was getting a little better at managing her grief. Her guilt.

Elle coped with death differently.

Elle moved and they followed. For a while, if it was possible she followed him. Her husband. Safe in the knowledge that he’s dead she followed him anyway. He would cut across the long grass, singing a pointless song. The legs of denim and his puffed out jacket. The aching un-realness of him caught up. It was another second of him standing there with the beautiful frame of his face. The curve of his neck she liked to kiss. Then he was gone.

The yearning suffering for it. How she despised. How she loved.

She kept walking despite it. A walking wounded heartbreak in the shape of a woman. She would have her face carved forward so no one could see it. Although clear to her now, she knew she’d forget his face. The painting of eye, mouth and cheekbones. His face and smell that was once hers a while ago.

They camped along the side of a river. The bags to one side and her grief on the other. Hayden and Luna were muttering about lunch. The rice was taken out. A can of spam. A tin of fruit for Luna. It would be placed on a canvased part of the ground. She left it to a scramble of hands and hoof. Hayden and Luna stoked a fire from billows of dead grass. The long dead tree from the banks of the river. Patiently the fire grows. The smoke picks itself up and stands. The spluttering spike of smoke. Tall in an infinite flatness.

Elle helped herself to the rice and another memory of him. Not the soft denim kind. But the bloodied kind. His face flat down with the pool of red underneath him. A murderer was slacked over him. A pistol in its hand. Behind him the glass was shattered out. The murderer had a wrapped ski-mask as a face. In the shards the mask reflected a smiling visage.

The sun didn’t help. The blinding ruin that the sun can make. In a far off land Hayden and Luna were still talking. The memory, however, was night. The looming smokiness of night. She remembered how even then the murderer in the ski-mask could cast a shadow. A Fragmented bloodied shadow, from broken glass, from the hanging stench of gunpowder.

The murderer spat out some words.
“I’m sorry.”
It’s smiling eyes revealed that it was all true. A cold cruelty held behind its mask. The murderer in the ski- mask lifted his hand and the pistol followed.

She held her husband’s gun. The Remington with the grinning iron barrel. Loaded with birdshot from when they’d go hunting. The gun kissed the air in a red. The barrel lifted. The bird shot splattered across. It slumped into the murderer and the murderer slumped into the ground. The pistol sat across the room, its’ blind barrel pointing to the splintered window. Smoke moving over.

The silence spread like a scream.

She knelt over her husband. The spluttering remains of him rolled over to his back. Strong enough to hold each other’s hands. It took a long while. His patience. His strength. His beauty. Another spluttering as she held his hands to her face. He tried to stroke away her tears while she crumbled and leaked all around him.

“We shouldn’t have fixed their car”
“No, we shouldn’t have”

She could see it. He could see it. His own personal death was coming to take him. But not yet. His breathing is flattened out. His flesh is dark.

“It was all my fault”
“It never was”

He was held tighter. He was beautiful. He was everything.

"Hayden"
"Yes. Hayden"
"He's outside right now"
"Yes"
"I'm sorry Elle"
"Okay"

Another stillness.

“Elle I’m going. My back’s ripped up.”

He faltered for another second then leaped. Death had picked its way through the shattered window and took the whole of him. He still held the hands of his wife. The murderer was slack. A bad impression of a human being.

The room would be filled with an absence. The filthy dark scratching at the filament bulbs. The start of sobs. More of a great emptying then a weeping. His body lay there unfinished and faded. She had emptied each tear and each sob for him. She wiped her face.

She remembered taking the shotgun. She bought the loader to the counter and took out the bird shot. The unreached shells pumped out in a clunk. She opened a cupboard. She found the box and loaded in the buckshot. A wind pushed its way through the room and rattled the barrel.

When she returned the Murderer in the ski-mask was gone. In a panic she takes a tired boy into the truck. She had enough time to kiss the ring on his finger. Then her lips on the top of his head. She left it there on the top of the head. The kiss the last thing left in the room.

The memory of him lingered. Heaved.

She watched the memory shuck itself into the wind and the fire. Reality reached a fever pitch. It crashed over her, while the campfire had reached a hazed conclusion. The hissing fit of smoke. Risen to the sky. Halted by the blue. No flames left. A boy and a pony pick themselves up. All around them the mess is stowed into the canvas. The bundles heaved on to backs.

All around her the absence of him.

She stood.

She would see him waiting in the south.

She walked.

Comments

[ultrasolarflare]

this is good so far keep up the great work