But this day she pulled them on, looped the loops and held her hands up, unpegging an oversized, bright white tunic from the string strung between trees, and pulling it over her thin frame.  She tied her hair into a high ponytail and went and found herself a small, lacy cream skirt, pulling it up over her small waist and tying it.  Turning her nighttime eyes on the house she smiled that thin, sombre, private smile.  The nights before had been long.  The hours passed without rush as they stared at the crackling frame, watching the wood burn.  Such a sight didn’t hurt Nehemiah any longer. 

Ardently she loved him.

It was a windy day and it filled her hair and clothes with windy secrets as she crossed the fields surrounding the property, growing dusty and dewy skinned come the afternoon.  When she returned, with dirt on her knees and charm in her gaze, Nehemiah took her to the laundry and over the piles of sheets he made love to her.  “I missed you, I missed you” he whispered, and Talisa she shuddered, clinging to him for her all the fury of their love.

He turned then, abruptly, as he heard the shaking of the barn door outside.  And there he walked, concerned, to find his discovery sitting on a tyre, affixed to a rope, swinging.  Her smile was distinctly warm, brighter than he had ever seen it, and the edges and lengths of her hair undulated in the wind.  He was hypnotised by this woman and all her details.  But he did not love her.  Beauty was a whole other idea to what love was.  He had loved, but she was gone.

As if sensing the change in his thoughts, with the disappearance of the smile he had first displayed upon seeing her there, she twisted, like the leaves did as they fell, scrawny and stem like, and left the tyre swinging on its own to find him, his hands, his shoulders, squeezing squeezing, her movements always 2/2, to reassure him.

“You cry?”

He shook his head, dismayed.

“Why do you look at me so?

He looked down and let go her hands, without a squeeze, or a smile, and returned to the window to watch the weather.  It would storm tonight.

How could he admire her.  How could he when his wife was dead? 

But that night while the rain came down and he sat reading in his favourite highback, embroidered chair, Talisa came upon him, hands coloured in vespertine shadows, lavender dark slivered in white, tattooing her arms as she clasped the back of the seat.

“You mourn for her.  But she is gone”

He turned, quicksmart, as though, she considered, he expected her, had drawn her to him with his forlorn will. 

His mind raced and raced, “you’re here, you’re here you damn white beauty”

Her sable eyes, flecked in blue, reminiscent of blue smoke off the mountains, hurtling him where he was won’t to go.

She circled the arm of the chair and settled herself on one knee, two legs clinging to one, and held his face.

Lightning filled the sky, as his longing found her own.

Ash.  Smoke.  Soot.  Grime.  Cinders at his feet.  All he could smell and taste, even when he slept.

And yet he lived.  The Burning had eaten his entire land, his wife, his animals.  The fields of pure yellow made black.

Visions from a bird’s eye kept his awake so he need not dream of devastation.  He had anothers dream in his mind, floating like a cloud, free as an unmoored ship.  It made him cry, to feel happiness, he was desperate. 

But this vision that now fogged and kept him awake was a point of trouble.  The eyebird was wise, found what he was meant to, clever bird, and had brought to him a woman covered in snow, covered in petals, covered in what looked like cotton but felt like silk.  He stole his hand back and stared at it, as if he had been scored, and looked down again to this woman in her snowy grave of petals and a frown creased his brow, deeply.  He stood a while before bending down, hesitating before touching her.  He stared at her eyelids, pink, eyelashes that looked a silvery gray.  He found himself entranced.

“She’s beguiling…”

He reached for a petal, to have her hand find his.  Still, her eyes were closed, but she moved like she was awake, gripping his hand tightly and bringing the petal upwards, soft, tentative fingers pulling the snow crusted petal away, away.

“Woman you live?”, he muttered, his accent thick.

Her eyes open, two black, engrossing pools, filled with the swarming cloud-panicked blue of the sky above.

“I dream“, she replied, without a smile, though a loveliness lived in her face. 

And Nehemiah pulled her from her tomb and took her to the House on the Hill, Tiltt Hill, and like a doll he warmed her by the fire and dressed her and she him, sewing fetishes of bird claw and mouse bones to a leather string and weaving it round and around till it hung a long strap from his neck, a soulchain.

No words were spoken that evening, they sat staring at the flames.

They were alive.