|
|||
and numb, and his hands are wrinkled with cold, like an elder's hands, but he strides with purpose, determined to be stone, consistent as all else around him decays and dies. His pace will carry him over the hill, toward the residence of Old Hawk, and there he will happen upon the remains of a burned home, pillars listing toward the sky like ribs of a skeleton, the haggard clumps of what could have been human bodies, the charcoal scent of oxidized wood. He will note all of this with hardened jaw, close his eyes for a few moments in something that masquerades as prayer, and proceed on his way, not looking back even once. If he did, if he remained for just a few moments longer, he would have seen a young woman emerge, moving wraithlike, her robes soiled with soot and mud and blood, her 
|
wide unharmed eyes blank as if in a trance, staggering down the same road in the opposite direction. [The next installment of Landfall will appear in the Summer 2006 issue of Caveat Lector.]  |
||
