Ni'Srilan: The Desert: Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows?...

“I’m glad you’re going,” is what his father said when it was time, disaffected gaze lingering on the horizon. It was night, but the earth was painted in swaths of dark purples, blues, yellows, and greens, as any true night is – there is rarely much real black, if any at all, and Kinh scorns those who insist on the dramatization. His father stood at the summit of a small hill; Kinh, the eldest of three children, just a half-step below him. The whole setting was familiar, and it comforted them both. “Thank you,” is what Kinh said, and nothing more. What he meant was good-bye, but neither of them said it, nor had they ever. They were cut from the same fabric, though as his mother was not his true mother, his father was not his true father. It hadn’t mattered; Kinh knew nothing of the others. Together they scraped at the dirt and snorted solemn supplications into the quiet night. There was pain, of course, like there always was. For the last time that sat together and pretended, and hoped that if they said nothing, it would all go away.

*

He does not know many here. (He knows, in fact, only three, if one could say he knew them at all; the crippled child, the fire-shrine Baraqel, and the chattering white stranger.) But it is for them he came, as if pulled by polarity, the soft thrum of curiosity working its way louder and louder evermore in his chest. He does not know the stories of their lives, even the ones he has met; he does not know the drama that winds its way like a perilous string across the various kingdoms, threatening to trip them all. Nor does he care. He did not come to be their friend, to love them as they love each other, to bow his head as they bow theirs and accept that this place is not natural, not right, nor fruitful.

But he did come to find something – not himself; that is not right for him, too dramatic, but if there is a more modest way of expressing the search for self, for final, pure existence, he would adopt the term – and for this reason alone he has decided to stay.

It is, therefore, purely chance that he stumbles upon a lone stranger that lurks across the dunes, his black, lanky form skittering about the dancing sands. Kinh is nothing if not disaffected, his placid face turning briefly to the stallion’s dance and then, away, to the horizon where the sun lights the desert afire and burns a sheer layer of sweat across his skin. His short, brownish tail flicks modestly across his hocks and haunch, scattering the flies that used the curve of his rump as a perch. Like the stranger, he watches night fade into morning, and listens to the population shifting beneath his feet.

It is fully morning, nearly daytime, when he remembers: horses here are not alone, it seems, not ever. There are wanderers but they, too, do not stray – not really; and if they do, it seems to Kinh they always find their way back quickly, time and time again. The stranger, though, seems in no rush to hurry back to the spiraling mass of horseflesh that saunters and burns beneath their feet. Kinh cannot help but wonder, and remember at the rhythm of painful curiosity just beneath his skin.

“‘Lo,” he says from some distance, calm, his head turned to watch the other. “You from these parts, or should I be worried about some spy?” He spits the word ‘spy’ out like he doesn’t understand it, because he doesn’t, just like he doesn’t understand scholar or warrior. How can they choose to be just one, when, as horses, they are by nature all three? Still, he says nothing of this - only lets his question sit and stir, as do the restless sands and his roaming, wondering, burning curiosities.