When the queen was a child there was a span of time when she and her family had lived in a desert. Baptized by white light and pale sands, salty stars thrown across a cover of onyx, she sleeps beneath an awning of indigo and crimson. Years later as she raises her eyes in her forest kingdom the verdant canopy takes on the appearance of the congested galaxies of those desert nights. Gilded leaves dance like the monumental orbs that torched the nocturnal terrain of her youth. There is the flapping cloak of the tent scented with sage and myrrh, the stone taste of tepid water from the canteens as her mother lifts it to her lips.
In those chalky mornings before the sun presented its steaming daggers, she is allowed to wander at will in the dunes. She shuffles along the fissures, slicing at the air between land and sky with her long angular body.
The child had been instructed in the ways of the nomads. She took readily to banishing mirages in the half light of dawn and twilight. She knew how to sniff out the difference between arid sand and sand that had known rain within the month. She observed what it meant when the camels twitched their tails right rather than left. She could identify which plants pointed in the direction of the oasis and which ones denied their allegiance to it. And eventually she would come to understand that the sand, the stars, and the hot winds that blew before dawn were ignited by the same elemental force as her mother's tears.
During these walks she became a gatherer of bones.
Bones were the only objects to collect in this vast and empty place. Bones that lay white as promises, each one radiating its own sun. Bones shaped like things that had nothing to do the geography in which they had emerged. A small clavicle looked like a butterfly, a rib a petal from a lily. The jawbone of a creature she could not name took on the shape of a sailing ship. Upon a shard of femur that seemed to her a petrified piece of moon, a bit of dry flesh remains. With thumb and forefinger she gently pries at the edges of what appears to be lingering connective tissue.
A scalding gust carries it away into the granular monochrome.
A shred of jerky to be swallowed by the living.
During these walks she became a gatherer of bones.
Bones were the only objects to collect in this vast and empty place. Bones that lay white as promises, each one radiating its own sun. Bones shaped like things that had nothing to do the geography in which they had emerged. A small clavicle looked like a butterfly, a rib a petal from a lily. The jawbone of a creature she could not name took on the shape of a sailing ship. Upon a shard of femur that seemed to her a petrified piece of moon, a bit of dry flesh remains. With thumb and forefinger she gently pries at the edges of what appears to be lingering connective tissue.
A scalding gust carries it away into the granular monochrome.
A shred of jerky to be swallowed by the living.
