A Diamond Tear

Another Vignette

(To be read with いりぐちでぐち by Ichiko Aoba playing softly, accompanied–if possible–by a distantly babbling stream)

A chiaroscuro of craterous scars decorate the waning half moon above. Lunar melancholy wraps the world below, like a phantasmagoric mother, with a ghostly anemia. Birch flowers hang from wooden skeletons and sway in the moonlit wind; sad, supple, green stalactites. “Winters coming… Winters coming…” a breathless man whispers under his breath as he marches down a small forest path. A bare firewood sled, rusty and grey, follows him closely behind. Deadfall litters the ground in broken constellations. The skis of the wood sled catch on the branch ridden ground in regular intervals. His feet stumble at each catch of the sled; and he in turn cries with a stifling panic, rhythmically, as if in attempt at an avant-garde jazz swing: “No! No!... Winters coming!” With each slip of his feet beads of clear, cold sweat are thrown down from the wet rivulets of his cheek, dampening the already dew-moist ground. “The wood… We are going to need fire!” The moon looks down from between a veil of thin, diaphanous clouds in a divine indifference. A silver alchemy infuses the air. The dark, slender, pyramidic green of the black spruces which ornament the wood shine with a dull glaucousness; their apexed clubs vault intimidatingly, dusted with a glacial olive. “It’s going to get too cold… I can’t let her freeze… winters coming…” A leprous arm reaches from the heavenly deep breaking through the shelter of intertwined spruce and birch branches; an apathetic glimmer brushes across the man’s cheek; an algid shiver trickles down his spine. An airlessness fills his lungs as he continues his trek.