#this is a (slightly modified) excerpt of a longer book i've been working on for a while

[petrichor-moss-and-lightning]

The men come with their barrels and buckets and bulldozers. They come with their knives and teeth and guns. And they salt the earth down to the marrow – raze the landscape with flames that bite chunks from the sky, turning the air caustic with thick plumes of smoke. All for a little bit of metal, a slip of paper. 

Can you even remember the taste of an open sky? The sloping bend of the constellations? 

When was the last time you heard the birds sing? 

Overhead, the clouds rumble. I know you can hear it too. They shake the sky raw with rage; grief for rivers turned slick and black; grief for the pale underbelly of a fish, turned upwards and rotting in stagnant waters. The stars have all but gone out now; the moon’s turned the wrong way round. 

We pray to an empty sky and wait for the end.