Deep inside the creation, the pain of searing iron. The beast staggers in shuddering darkness. Even the heart renounces the unworthy moment. A warm sensation. Yellow, liquid, raw. Always rawness . . .
The litany of hours passing, one inside the other. Corpses. Countless. Rows and rows of corpses. Blood. Soil. Blood-stench soil. Death's visitation hours.
One scream—one—one. The iron pushes deep. Deep darkness, endlessly shuddering. Life fights to escape the iron. The bearer as blind as the borne. One more time. Against everything. The woman.
Then the dust. Under the sun. The heat. Iridescent. To walk the dusty road, as if endless (one, two, one, two, one—spasms, heat, charcoal heat, liquid heat, fire—two, one, two, one, two) to move through heat and more heat. In search of cold . . .
Caught in the scream, the beast staggers. Futile. Futility. Futile hours. A throbbing. A cloud, hushed, calm, free of pain, moves above the dusty road toward where there is less heat. Mother. The color of clouds. Joy. Oozing. The moist passage at the opening, the joy of quiet death, oozing.
The sun above. The creation still in the dark, yet to live. The sun scorches the shadows from above. Defeated shadows, shadows dissolving, turning to dust, shadows dying. The road. Hot. Still. Endless. The chafed calm of dust motes rising, falling.
An odor. Female. In the dusty, scorching heat, the odor of flesh oozing, bare, rancid. Regeneration still far off. The coolness of stones dissipates in the wind. A stirring. Contraction then release, tightening then widening. Release. Iron. The flesh splits open—the odor of flesh sh sh—parched, thirsty, drained of its excess water.
Underneath the stones, the wind stagnates. It gathers heat, dust. The stirring now becomes a push, the push of release, something akin to will. Slowly, slowly, beyond the heat, the drought, the dust . . . The sudden sweetness. The cool's soft . . . Soft. Nothing else. Cool. Soft. Equal. The first stirring still inside the belly. One emerging from nothing. Laughable. The cool air recedes, grows hazy again. Time begins its rounds of knocks against the tightening that time has ripened. Along with the heart. One, two, three, four, five . . . The count begins. Along with the unknown, hazy, fragrant light, past the verge of darkness . . .
The road is long. From trough to trough, one after the other, water gathers in pools of green, courses from trough to trough, spreads. The road shortens: abundant dissolution, joyous ripening. To flow through and through. To believe in the newness of life alongside death. To fall suddenly from the coolness of stones into the scorching belly of heat, then to retreat. To feel the round round reach of the stabbing push to fear it will stay buried inside the torn flesh to fall feeling its blood-soaked smell its throat-ripping swell to fall through the passage the tremors the oppressive heat the murmuring blood . . . The woman . . . The emptying. The easy, the very easy end of all emptying. The soft scream—long-awaited, unknowingly—that moves the stones. A boy, the first child. Toil. The woman reclines. Restful calm. The sea, washed in its own light.