Desreal: roosevelt;

I will leave in the hills a bit of myself--
The heat of my eyes which saw them bloom;
And cicadas, nesting on thorny branches,
Will sing out the shrill cry of my desire.
- Anna de Noailles

Beneath fur as soft as the antennae of moths; the bones are hard in their jut - all sharp knobs of cartilage and persistence, taut strings of gut and futility, straight limbs shot through with silvered ligament and reddened artery that twist and pull against the curl of leg; and that fur is the color of bone left too long in the sun and the sandstone of deserts. Aridity is in her blood and it dries up the rivers that run through her in red currents of air that flows hot and dangerous. Arid too, is her tongue as it rasps from her throat in sonorous sound that is little more than murmurs to match the murmurs of the leaves as the air sweeps through them in long, silvered sighs.

Green leaves, green leaves, she thinks; her thoughts strangely childish as a smile ghosts along her lips only to vanish as if it had never been - as if she had never been, for she is lost in a sudden whirlwind of dust and dry air that moans in desert-tongues but dies as fast as it had sprung to life from the very center of her - be that heart or brain, she doesn’t know and doesn’t question which is the victor of that battle. Green grass, green grass, she muses and dares to glance down to where the grass withers at her feet, and turns a queer brown.

But a noise startles her - the pale head is flung up to where the nostrils flare red and wide, as she scents the air that springs readily to her command on small, infant gales that wallow in the white of her mane. What is that? she wonders, and is guided forward a step by the innate hand of curiosity that falls upon her or rises up unopposed where once, she might have balked and fought it as lessons in life had taught her to do. Blissfully so, she cannot remember and thus, does not balk but stands emboldened and curious, in the direction of the sound that disturbed the childish singsong repetition of her thoughts.

In that moment, her eyes of deepest night and all the mysteries that it encompasses that hide in stars and comet-tails (though the stars and their shine are gone from the black space of her eyes, leaving them curiously limpid and impossibly black, black, black), meet those eyes of amber. It calls to something in her - something unremembered that bids a small breath of simoom to blow across the distance between them. It spins, a small whirlwind that gathers to itself all the particles of dust that leap from the spillage of sunlight between the trees, and gathers too, all the loose grains of dirt sprinkled amongst the leaf-litter until dry and dusty, it blows round him.

She trails along in its wake, wielding the small whirlwind artfully and courteously until she is close enough to call it home, where into the pale fur and the pale hair that wafts about her head, it retreats and sighs every now and then in gritty protest.

Acacia;
perambulating dust