As the last of the months waned, air and sky parted on ambivalent terms. The silence that ushered in breaths of a secret afield, transported hummocks of fine, suspended ash. It declined to fall and stayed lingering midair, a frozen faint grey snow, aquiver on the heels of a softening southerly. The unshelled air spread far and away without limit, through the gossypium fog toward our half obstructed, dying star.
The shore end of her obstinate smirk glinted through the sweeping miasma like a casted anchor. What was the last song you listened to, before you crossed over from the other domain? The music had gone, with all its instruments, to dock. Where that wharf was, or how it would be discovered, remained to be seen. What mattered now was the silence, draped in a floating whirlpool of ash. She stood with fistfuls of it, peering out over the steel-light sea. It was hers now, and she thought she’d tell her sleeping father.
The shrill plunging hellfire had ceased, the barriers shattered and pulverized. She could walk for 283 kilometers, unharried, and reach Beirut or Damascus. She could swim out deep. Yet her feet were planted firmly where she stood and implacably resisted any impetus. Her heart welled with the waters of the known world and threatened to burst its dams and drown it. On the jutting branch of a scorched acacia just adjacent, speckles were starting to cover the initials someone had carved deep into its cambium: ح + ن.