beneath

just as vowels space out consonants so we can understand words, great pastoral fields stretch between cities so we can understand:

• 
  the breadth of the world,


• 
  the lines that eddy down from the crown of the earth to its base,


• 
  the feeling of infinity you find when you stand in the very middle of a great slab of concrete, feet planted firmly with blank air in every other direction.





blue wears too-long overalls that have been so scraped from the gravel roads she walks barefoot that when she sits on the top rail of the fence out front of her home, the white threads that held the denim together hang down as fragile as lace curtains.



what she wanted was to build a dam. she started slowly, gathering sticks and rocks in separate piles in her backyard so that her roommate, dina, asked her if she wanted to just use the rake. but dina saw that blue's hair fell in shining electrified coils in front of her eyes, that the tips of her ears were spiked with sweat, and then at the bottom, the glare that set blue's lips in a line as flat as the horizon, and she turned back inside so that the screen door swung shut and clattered wooden and once the sound finished echoing against the garage out back, blue was alone again.



she started slowly, like the last bit of syrup tries your patience when it crawls along each and every crevice of the plastic bottle, even though you hold it vertically.



once the sticks started falling from the top of the pile to the bottom, blue went looking for all the tablecloths in the house. again, dina watched her, but this time from the chair in the corner by the window, not once daring to move and make the brittle legs scrape the wood floor. so blue gathered the tablecloths in peace, tore down the curtains, and hid in her room.



days and days went by with early fall's white sun turning the polished hard wood floors unbearably hot. dina kept her feet tucked up under her when she could, and other times raced across the kitchen floor to grab food from the cupboards or the refrigerator, to get back to safety as soon as possible. once blue came down for lunch and found dina hunched with her feet clammy against the marble counter-top of the island in the kitchen.



later, blue marched out and a parachute trailed out behind her, boasting floral patterns and plaid and checks, sewn together with red thread that could still be seen grasping messily the edges of two fabrics. blue had never learned how to sew, dina thought, then took another bite of her sandwich.



but it was the last time blue saw dina or dina saw blue, because blue threw stick after rock after stick on top of the patched-up parachute and dragged it all away toward the stream that was a mile across un-tilled fields.



the place that blue came to was quiet. it made her slower, even, than before. she watched ants wander over pebbles thrice their size. she saw them pick up detrius. she saw them eat and saw them disappear back into their hole. 



then she stepped into the water. it curled around her leg. it was cold with the coming winter's breath, but warmed enough on its long journey above ground, past cattle with big warm lungs that breathed on it when they drank, that blue could stand it in and feel no difference between the temperature of the air and the water. 



she first stuck sticks up out of the mud of the bed, testing to see if they'd stay upright against the current. many sticks, hollow or weak, or too-light for whatever reason, found their burial that day. many others floated on to be caught by reeds or vines that overhung from the shore. when the sun set, the wall of sticks stuck up from the water like black pegs on a glossy black table, and blue slept under a willow tree.



*



suffocation. all the air she could want filling her lungs, and still suffocation because of the fact that blue could not measure the millimeters the water rose above her ankle and whether or not it were still rising. and because she'd never learned where the stream came from; no mountains -- unbroken horizon. 



there were ants swirling in lazy clouds of legs and thoraxes and abdomens around her. some clung to the baby hairs on her legs and tried to crawl up, but she kept laying stick after rock after stick on the dam and her overflow continued to blossom lake-like. 



she was suffocating because she had it in her to flood the world if she just climbed up the back side of the dam to keep laying the bricks on top. and what was there that inspired breath more than destruction?



standing in the middle of a slab of concrete brought her peace because she knew the wild earth lay dead below it. the lines of latitude and longitude meant the wild earth had already been conquered in academia, meant that it was all mapped out and available to lay waste to. every ant would drown, every mammal would end up as floating skins, and birds would fall like cannon balls when their strength finally gave out.



and maybe the would would have burned around blue.



if it hadn't been for the touch of a fish.