A moment

    For a moment, what appeared to be a trash bag drifted across the dome of the sky. There was silence, except for a whisper in the breeze, and the valley seemed like a pleasant place to be. Two sparrows flitted after each other in the topmost branches of an aspen. They took turns repelling and appealing to one another, playing at their game of love. That morning, they had watched a woman pass under the grove of trees, and had not seen any living creature since. They were foreign to the valley, the victims of a savage north wind that had torn them from their homes and brought them together in this new place, this strangely quiet place.

    The woman’s tattered hair had been gray, and it had languished behind her fiercely bent head as she stampeded through the undergrowth, breathing heavily but not slowing her pace. Long ago, it had been debated whether her eyes were golden or red, and the issue had never been concluded. She had been known to hypnotize the village men with her eyes, once, those eyes that had seemed to hold on to their minds as they stared back at her. To the men they had appeared as though backlit by some inner blaze that was peculiar to her, as if a ray of sunlight had passed through her mind carrying her seductive control to the surface in the orbs, whose color changed with her mood and could never be placed. For the women they had held only a starry void which had chilled the blood and spawned no invitations to gossip.These eyes now flashed in a weathered face, but her youthful beauty could still be seen in the creases of her swarthy skin. Deep marks from an animal’s claws played over her cheeks and shone like rubies in the sunlight.

    She had traveled the length of the valley between sunrise and midday, the valley which had once starved an Apache war party before they could exit from the other side. The steep faces of the mountains that flanked the channel had offered the warriors no opportunities for exploration, and indeed there was nothing palatable to be found in its entire length. They had run for several days to meet an enemy in the outlying plains, and by degrees had fallen to walking and then to crawling. Expecting to forage for their sustenance, they had been destined to find, day after day, that the earth yielded no provender to their digging hands or their notched bows, and if ever they struck a bird it continued to fly.

    The woman who now emerged from between the mountains fell to her knees and then lay prone, letting the stiff grass of the prairie obscure her form. If in her life a person had ever spent more than a few minutes in her company, he would have conceived of the notion that she spent time faster than time itself was presented to her, as if she wound and unwound the clock of life at her whim. This notion had never been conceived by any person, and the vultures that now descended on her corpse did not pay it any heed. The silver crescent hung in the night sky, glinting from the dark feathers of the bird which now landed on the woman's chest and prepared to pluck at the cold void in her eyeballs. For a moment, he hesitated, and the woman was on her way again, carrying a vulture tightly wrapped in her shawl. As she walked she left behind a whisper which could not be heard in the time that she left it. The prairie was briefly still, then a stiff wind bristled through the grass in the south. Again, the woman fell to her knees and fixed her gaze high in the boughs of a solitary tree, where a tiny sparrow cocked its head to fix its gaze at her. She pursed her lips as if about to speak, then the wind grew so forceful that it tore her words from her mouth and sent them to the north. The sparrow's feathers flew up as it feebly grasped at its perch. A bear bounded from the darkness of the woods and attacked the captor of his master.

    For a moment, what appeared to be a trash bag drifted across the dome of the sky. There was silence, except for a whisper in the breeze, and the valley seemed like a pleasant place to be.



Copyright 2007, Gabriel S. New