“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]
John Hamilton Farr lives at 7,000 feet in Ranchos de 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.” This JHFARR.COM site is the master writing archive. To email John, please see CONTACT INFO on .png)
Wow! Double-wow!