To be told by the cawing of the crow, the breathing of the distant sea, and the soft kiss of the breeze upon his naked bald pate, "You are now and have heretofore been still more than all of this. Keep existing my friend and lover."

She closes her eyes to the feeling of her fingernails underwater. She doesn’t see the black of eyelids but instead- the deep green of quiet air under the pond’s surface.

"The lore says her husband buried her beneath a nameless pile of stones. The Earth swallowed up her wants and dreams as it did her remains. And all there be of her is a strange legend in these, the woods of her daughter's son's cousin's step-mother's property..."

"The roiling currents wound about her amphibious feet like a gleeful symphony for a new Queen..."

"She sees him bow his smiling craggy face down so his lobe meets her lips. The way he does this- one would think he is smaller than her..."

"She can't see the pigeons anymore. But she hears them take to the sky in bursts. The sunlight breathes on her knitted skin. She can't see the tower anymore..."

"O, It can be a scary business- the clandestine life of a scarecrow who wants to dance..."

"The eyes of the inquisitive children hit them all at once with a piercing collective ignorance that seemed to bring its own desolate breeze..."

"That giggling infantile phantom she desperately wanted and needed to feel needed by..."

"Indeed and to make matters worse it seemed that the more he polished his armor- the angrier he seemed to be."

"The louder the rain came, the softer the message and yet it was all she could hear. And with thirsty ears she drank it's faint words..."

She caressed the steel and the tines, then the snowy porcalin which contained that bottomless dark roast. "What is around that edge of bricks?", She whispered to the morning gusts of wind.

Aye, but it didn't feel as long as that slow dragging slide of her spine down the trunk of the Old Hornbeam Tree.

Nothing else had such a way of making the child lose herself... quite like a sunset.