Strokes of watered down white paint across a never ending blue.
It was the first thing that graced her sight. Her first memory.
Then came the sensation at her fingertips, her back, between her knees under her calves. The rugged uneven surface dusted her bronze skin ocher. The minuscule stones, prickly fragments of the steep mountain looming above her, dug into her bare flesh. The earth urged her to move. She did.
She sat, facing the bare mountain she now observed to be an outcrop of clay and sand. Then she mustered strength in her arms and legs; she now squatted, her four limbs acting as pillars. Then she stood and turned around. She stood to behold the world before her.
The assuming thoughts within her head reasoned, if such a wonderful array of blues overlooked the world, if such a bright tincture of brown covered her palms, surely, surely the world would be as equally as bright.
Black earth. Cracked. Dry. Barren.
Hints of life, of death, nonexistent.
Such was the world she existed in. Such was the world which lay beneath the blue.
The swell of anticipation waned as the light did. The sun, having watched her from the horizon’s edge, inched behind the cracked land. So she stood. So she watched, for what could she do in this desolate emptiness except bask in the gentle dusk light.
Blue turned orange, orange faded to yellow and gold. Pink stains on the clouds turned purple. And before the sun disappeared, before it’s rays suffocated behind the cracked earth, she reached out in desperation and snatched a ribbon of sunlight from the darkening sky.
ns 15.158.61.23da2
