Elijah had always held a commune with things that Madison in quieter moments had envied. He could hold sway with the grasses which leaned into his passing feet and could tell when a storm was coming a good half week off. He could whisper a horse that would take her a whole day to rouse and gentle giants with only a look. Hadn't he done the same to her? Was she not the leaning grass, the coming storm, the untamed mare, the girl who saw herself at a huge 8' not 5'11, all once upon a time. Wasn't he the one who took more than her virginity in the daisies? Given her back something far more valuable. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

Her head was bowed over crossed arms rested on the top of her shovel as she slouched over her own shadow in the cemetary yard. The day was unusually hot for deep winter and she could smell the midsts of summer in the occasional off-draught that caught her unawares and refreshed as she moved through the stones dragging and heaving. Sometimes, too, when her knees begged to lounge in the forgiving shade and light a smoke, steal a nip from the flask and then get back to it. But summer was like a memory. This year, winter crawled in with bigger teeth and it took hunks out of her. She squinted her eyes and stared over bent knee at the grounds. Wasted and weed-ridden. She remembered the funeral. Still, she couldn't believe he was alive and well, well enough. Still she envisioned him not being so all this time but undead like her, crawling out of his own oblivion and wreck to find her.

It was easier to believe than what she was faced with. That they shared the same condition. That he would understand the Madison Now. Easier to worry over that than the pressing worry that she might not understand him. Elison Blue. Who was that man?


But like two old songs, they knew the lyrics to one another. Some words you don't forget. Some melodies play on and on and on...


Whistling, she took up the shovel, dug into the soil, and let out that breath she'd been holding for years.

"... What to ignite and what to extinguish?"



The bed of daisies. It was picture perfect in her head. Time had not tampered with it. It remained in technicolour. It had not gone to the dogs like a lot of her memory had, these days, all rotted and curling, burning paper. Boots thrown to table top, elbows to chair arm corners, and she rocked. The fields were empty except for the flick of Marigold's tail, animating the twilight with the occasional stir. Above, the clouds built their staircase to the firmament and the sky kept on moving. It had weather and stories to sell. She watched.


Elison Blue. Elijah Donaldson. Two sides of the same coin?


On the back of one hand sat a silver dollar. If only love were so easy to decide. Flip a coin. Take a chance. She felt like it was her last dollar. All that patience had dried up and all she had were left overs and shrapnel. Anything of substance washed up in laughter or sex. That's where you learn about a person. Their humour and their appetite, they say a lot.


Her head felt like it did when weighted underwater every time she thought back to the first time they made love, when she thought to the first time she saw his very fine line come through the door of the Inn. Sometimes you didn't need to be anywhere near to water to be drowning. And every day she was going under. Getting deeper.


She had long ago lost sight of the shore. Madison was a mermaid. The fathomless deeps the new territory. Tie a yellow ribbon around the tree, wont you honey. She might never come home.


Exhaling a stream of smoke and taking a sip of whiskey she hung her head. It hurt like hell, but what was, was what it was. The night spilled like someone careless with ink over the city, and her heart went black.