AIR

She was injected with the crystal juice in the stones. There was a society there and its generations have been scattered across the Earth. She was a rolling stone among boulders, weaving to and fro beneath their shadows. She was a mushroom beneath the roots, propagating in chaotic spores. When I ascended the grassy slope, the boulders were scattered across my path and under many of the boulders grew patches of mushrooms. At the top, past a ring of upright birches, was a bulk of rotten wood surrounded by fragments of crumpled sheet metal. A few big, shattered cross-sections of spikes and cylinders of glass lay among the purple hyacinth flowers and poking out of patches of peat and upturned grass. It was the remnants of a glass structure which was once upon this hill, the cornerstone of a culture whose customs and social mores had bled down the slope like gushes of thick mud as they percolated, through reflection and subversion, into the dominant cultures of the towns and hamlets at its foot. The moss-covered stones ran across the paths of this mud, hugging and drifting along its descent, and told the stories of those dissipated generations like mile markers. The mud was pitch black in places, but when scrutinized swirled like reflective oil around the roots of trees. When held in the hands, it vibrated and invigorated the skin, circulating around the creases of one's palms. It could only be described as a bundle of reanimated pitch, peat, and mud. She was cradled in the bed of the stones.