literature

dawn to dust.

Deviation Actions

Published: Sep 18, 2014

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Literature Text

_{There was a stretch of land, filled with the harvest of Mother Nature’s bountiful corn. They shook in the breeze like a child with a tambourine, and the sound whistled over the tops of the stalks like a hot air balloon. The sun was the most brilliant azure on a late afternoon, so beautiful it made even the hardened of veterans realize just how small they were in the wide, wide world.

A path ran straight through the field, leading in a pattern that no one ever quite understood. But if you walked for long enough, you would come to a clearing, almost in a perfect square. A small house stood there; white washed rancher, sun burnt just as anything else could and would be in these parched lands. The window frame were cracked, splintered just enough that if you ran your fingers across it, you would come back scathed. The door was wide open, also in that dim white color that seemed to make up the house. You couldn't see inside properly, but it gave off the feel of a very old home, that had almost seemingly fell out of the sky to land where it sat now. A dirt path ran around the house, and a small garden lay at its side, with enough desert fauna in it to make it appear to be something from nothing. A dusty and beaten ‘Welcome’ mat lay at the front of it all to complete the picture.

And to the side of this picturesque house sat an old Cadillac. The burnished red color blended into the dying light that permeated the very air. Its tires were the color of chalky coal, and looked like they hadn't moved since it was built. The windows were rolled down, as if the car needed to breathe in the prairie air to move once more. The windshield was wholesome, if dirty, and small animal prints covered the left-hand side of the glass; someone called this vehicle home on cold nights. The leather seats were cracked and worn, and matched the leather steering wheel. Small pieces of duct tape were wrapped around the handle in some places, making you feel like that time your bike broke down at your best friend’s place, and all you could do to fix it was wrap it with the duct tape your friend offered you. And on this old piece of history sat three girls. Perhaps only a year or two between each other from youngest to oldest, but they sat there nonetheless. They wore similar gowns, as if ready for bedtime. The tallest (perhaps not the eldest) wore a gown of purple, the hem trailing the bottoms of her knees. It hung comfortably on her shoulders, and was just barely starting to hug her hips as she grew into herself, and she stood near the hood, leaning against it to watch the sun go down. The middle child’s gown was the color of sea foam off the Caribbean, or so I hear. It threw itself around her calves like a contemporary dancer, and fit her just the opposite, rustling against the trunk of the car where she sat. The shortest girl had a gown of beautiful blue, the color of the prairie skies on a hot summer afternoon. It flowed past her ankles onto the roof of the car, where she had settled herself contentedly to watch the spectacle of a dark colored rainbow while the sun bowed off stage.

There was hardly a sound to be heard, except the crickets and the soft breeze grazing the stalks. The girls watched, unblinkingly, hardly daring to move lest they miss something that could change their home. It was a scene out of a fantasy, and old western. Time was frozen here; there was no changing that.

A shooting star crossed the navy blue that was finally descending onto the fields, and the shortest (perhaps not the youngest) gave a trill of laughter, the sound so pleasing to the ear. It would remind one of the early morning birds that woke you up ever so quietly, that you just knew it couldn't have been anything else. Their eyes were turned to the skies even more intently now, focused on spotting the falling star before it burned up in our atmosphere. To imagine such an otherworldly thing could disintegrate so gracefully in the view of our very plain eyes, was such a concept that wouldn't be dreamed of by those girls until very later in their lives.
The moon began its ascent into the sky, crawling from the horizon after it had kissed the sun goodnight. A crescent moon, divine and destined to leave Earth dwellers in awe for many, many moons to come. Its finely shaped contours easily outstripped any mortal beauty; who could match the curves of the sculpted Luna? She was finer than all the others in that visible sky. Many years from now, in a house similar to this one, the girls would discuss the moon and her properties, and their husbands would wonder just how they could talk about something so alien as easily as if they had met the moon in person. They would never understand that their wives had spent many sunsets watching the world turn just to try and understand that they, too, would someday turn with the world – and in a more intimate way. For their views on life were that of the here and now; the men of the world in that time had to worry about the present, what was visible to their eye there and then. The rare women that could hear the universe spinning were often left to their own devices, alone when they finally went back to the stars they had called family their whole Earth lives. And even then, on the seldom occasion that their men would sit back on the porch they had built with their wives, they still wouldn't understand that their women were those stars, always there to turn with them until they, too, turned.}