(This primarily about just messing around with language, because I wrote it for this album I was listening to, and was just trying to work out my impressions of the music. But I'm thinking about expanding it in the future, which would probably include some background as to what's going on here.)
His feet cut a path through the sun-painted grass, only for the furrow to be mended seconds after he had passed. Tufts of dandelion hung suspended in the sunlight. Flying things buzzed by his knees. Something landed on the shell of his ear and he flicked it away. He stumbled, and his fingers janged on the strings of the violin he carried, sending out music-less chords. As the ground began to slope upwards, it took more and more effort for his knees to push him, and as he crested the hill, he could hear himself breathing.
Turning, he looked across the space he had just crossed. A millimeter in the kilometer of the planet. Less than that. The area of a letter in the sea of some ancient volume. If the world were a book, he thought, what would the cover look like?
He tugged the rope tied around the tree crowning the hill until the knot unwound itself, and dropped it on the ground beside him. Then he waited.
He was an incongruous pillar on the hill—a Doric among Corinthians. A black something in a golden-green world. But gradually the sun bleached him of his harsh lack of color and he became as natural a fixture upon that hill as the tree, which, though it had no leaves in July, had been accepted into the landscape.
He waited with the sounds of his violin, drawing the bow long and lazy across the strings, sending out a syrupy song into the sunshine and sultry air. The whine spilled down the hill and filled the field. As he was descending another minor spill, pooling in an arpeggiated loop at the bottom, the sky clouded over, and the rain began to play pizzicato on his strings.
The rain fell harder, big round drops that splashed to the size of a nickel on his skin. He let it soak the strings, adding another layer of trembling resonance to his music. His arm moved faster, and he bounced the bow on the strings, drinking in the ratcheting sounds mixed in with the rain. The song swung itself into an Irish lilt, and he let it stay there, looping around and around like taffy being pulled. Had it not been wet, the strings would have sparked and ignited, sending fireflies into the dark, cool air.
His jacket was sticking to his shirt was sticking to his skin, clutching at it when he shifted his shoulders. When he felt waves start to lick at his feet, he let the bow drop to his side and swung the violin from the crook of his neck. Slowly, he climbed into the boat and sat, waiting for the water to rise. When it did, he reached out and pushed the trunk of the tree, the bark slick under his palms. Thunder began to roll back and forth across the sky, dragging up enough friction to make the underbellies of the clouds spark and snap at him in his little boat.
The waves washed him away from the tree, over the field and through the tops of the trees. When he squinted up through the percussive shower, he saw hills in the distance speckled with barns and trundles of hay. The water climbed higher, and the first bundles were pulled away by the current as he watched. Finally he drifted out of the trees and into the flat, empty land. Every once in a while, a whitewashed board would be carried past in the hands of the whitecaps, but for the most part, the sea was a plain dark gray, the sharp waves crowned by foam.
His boat was borne towards the white trees blooming on the horizon, propelled by the bass plucking the water into handsy crests. He lifted the violin into his lap as the water began to suck at the edges of the boat and lick at his ankles.
After an hour a day forever a while, it was like someone had drizzled milk on a bed of black cotton candy—the sky split the clouds with the pale fingers of dawn, and the sea calmed to a gentle lull. As he floated onwards, he sprinkled some tentative notes into the sea, and struck up a waltz.
