Lock and Key

old adobe interior

Breathing will be easier next time

“Do you really want to leave this place?” the visitor demanded. The question was surprising but perhaps a probe. Both of them, however, spoke of ancient energy that wouldn’t let him go. “I can feel it,” said the visitor again.

Not fifty yards away was an entrance to a kiva that some poor fool had long ago converted to a dwelling with a skylight and a stove. Who could live like that, though, underground, and why? Were there more chambers or a passageway? The surrounding landscape was so full of pot shards, he’d long stopped collecting them. Some weeks before, a work crew excavating for a water line uncovered thousand-year-old human bones. Houses on the road askew on shamans’ graves… What part of him accepted perfect punishment? He’d felt a similar great hurt beside the road in Massachusetts once and entering Ohio underneath a big full moon, but those were in a car and passing through. Living over blood is different. Something seeps into the half-awake, wears old clothes until they fall apart, and no one knows your name.

“Yes,” he said, “of course! But not from this place into nothing…”

“Of course,” the visitor replied.

[To be continued, possibly]

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John Hamilton Farr lives in Taos, New Mexico, U.S.A. As New York Times best-selling author James C. Moore tells it, John is “a man attuned to the world who sees it differently than you and I and writes about it with a language and a vision of life that is impossible to ignore.” See BUFFALO LIGHTS, TAOS SOUL, ANOTHER DAY IN PARADISE, and THE HELEN CHRONICLES. He has been publishing online since 1996 (Zoo Zone, Farr Site, MacFaust, GRACK!, FarrFeed). This JHFARR.COM site is the master online writing archive. Links to all current sites including NFT collections at linktree. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on About page.  

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