How she got to that pit stop in time itself was equally unsettling as the mass of scars that trailed in procession from thigh to ankle. Little scratches fine and precise. Uncurling from sleep swept tangle she heaved herself up and looked into the hole of the wall where time felt ageless and unmarked and without calculation and nothing could be bonafide or remembered. Just was.

With a hand into a tousle of autumn curls she tugged at the locks and looked back down to the bag at her feet, and then to the man with oil black hair and wings for fingertips. Looked like he was reaching for the sky like she hadn't seen anyone reach for the stars in a long time. Too many days with herself thrown chin down into desert sand, or backseats of cadillacs with cowskulls on the dash.

"Wanna bone? No wolf can blow it down", a lopsided smile, and she waved to Revic, bidding him to the sack at her feet where once-was-skin rattled and turned. Little orchestra. Tempany of tombs. Dirt showed under crimson nails that this here was buried treasure. That it had taken a gravedigging to get this far.

"Come on.. Build yourself a place. The walls don't listen here.."

Stale canopies of thought bayed like wolves overhead. Thunder accompanied the drone. A railroad once above, from where tarred pebble now rolled away from shoe. The foghorn of a freight off its track..


"Not children. Maybe a couple. I dug em up for the man who helps me sleep. These bones have long slept, and I think he shall awaken them..."

Pale hand reaches out, dashed before his face without touch, a swipe as though to catch graveyard dust in the gaps of fingers. It was gentle, her own insinuation of what an awakening might be.

"Are you wanting some? I have many. And there is no telling when he may come again. He roams. But I wait. I think he will not mind the sharing..."

Softly, in all ways, she smiles and stands from her own bend, much akin to rumpled cigarette, to take his face gently in her palms. Lifelines tingle against pores.

"Maybe, you can play the bones like an accordian. Or a piano. Your fingers look like songs. You have your soul in your palms. What a sailor once told me about men that played instruments. Carry all they can in their hands. Nothin' more..", she leans close, a whisper to ear, like a child with its lips breathed against dandelion's crown, "no less"


Her legs and their scratches from brambles in dead river. She had been following angels since leaving Desdichado. She tried to say this with her eyes. Ernest and fired up.

"So, what do you say?"

Bending, and opening the bag wide.

"Maybe we should run away together. Maybe the bones are best left...", dubious, a glance to him, then the road. Sunset over desolation.

... She orientates herself for the north, shoulder bones, hip bones. The crossbones from a lonely sea in the bag at her feet somewhat dislocated and forgetful. They were dreamless and not like the stones that spoke. They had forgotten the muscle and skin and blood so near for so long, long ago.

"Then get back to your road. And your closets. But let me stowaway"

Red hair like a demented autumn flew in ribbons as she spun away, twirled and held her arms out as though to catch a falling sky. Tremble with the rain. She threw her arms down and they hung at her side like tired naked branches, and her sad little sundress was something windy and sandy, faded and wrinkled, like she were some remnant of the dust bowl in the mid nineteen thirties with that ephemeral tousled breezeblown seas of sand fatigue. Her face forlorn and crazy happy, in its way.


"Where are you going, runaway?"

Gas station at fifteen. Long miles. Pining for. She remembered. Unlike bones, she did remember.

"And more importantly, can I come?"

Green eyes, like sockets that stole the sea, glued onto him as she heaved that bag over a shoulder, and barefoot walked for the tar and rubble, and waited.

"I already have. I am here..."

Sweeping glance to road, raise of hand, fingers outstretched to tar and possible mirages to come.

"Let's go"