fire place

The hill stood cold as the wind blew past the tops of the matted grass, having been pushed down from the bodies of deer resting for the night. The sky’s grey, muting the greens and drawing the hues of blue out from hiding. The sun has long been set away for the season, occasionally peaking to see what is new, but mostly gone. Remnants of its glow still cast soft shadows around the edges of edges. The growth has stopped, time only passing from the white sliver rotating around the lower arch of the sky set back in black. I am laying face up, back damp from the moisture sucked into the cotton; mind awash, figureless, like the shapes in the sky. The trees are breathing, the moss clinging on, surveying the land, fixating — uptaking — silent. In the distance, the lights blink red — red — red — white. The light is tapered at the edges by the fog that rises from the hills into the chilled air, the last heat of the season escaping the branches of the pines. Stripes run through the woods, the metallic towers looming with their lines running into the valleys off into the invisible distance. They hum from their invisible provider. Silent are the woods; all is gone. Not making a noise. The evidence of a colorful past sits as it did when it fell on the forest floor. My falling feet cast a crunch deep into the labyrinth of scattered oaks and maple, marring the eternal silence, only for it once to occur again. The mud from the riverbed still clinging to my feet as I walk deeper. The lights trickle onto the ground through the web of black branches entangling one another in a slow death grip. Ivy vines climb those looming structures in search of that valuable resource that so scarcely makes it to the ground. The hills peak and sink — predictably — like ripples in a pond. Frozen. Boulders cover the bases where the two peaks push against one another. Forever. Water emerges at the bottom, pushed up through the ground, pooling and spreading across, enabling an array of slippery greens to amass on the ground. Tracks frozen in the surrounding muck, evidence of life invisible in the unpalatable space.