Mountain leaves and palindromes; the girl could not create one from the other. “I give up,” she said, bowing her head to the old man. “All my answers are wrong. I don’t know how they are alike.”
He grunted and shrugged. “Keep walking,” he told her, “and you’ll see.” He quietly shut the door without even a final nod, and she knew it was useless to knock. The door would not open to her again.
No one missed her when she left. As she walked she turned her scarred face in greeting to the sky, letting her village grew tiny behind her. Its bright noise dwindled; the children shouting, women chattering at the marketplace, and carts rolling over the stone roads all grew faint and then silent. The sun rose above her, and once she leaned against a cliff wall to eat a bit of potato from her provisions. Her fingers toyed with the small piece of chalk at the bottom of her bag. She straightened and withdrew the chalk, writing a poem on the rough rock as neatly as she could, as the ancient wild sages had done. She knew that time would dissolve her words. Like all things, the poem would be vivid for a day, then would fade back to sand and dust. It was a palindrome, in a way, riding the same path backward and forward.
The sun lowered to the horizon. She gathered meadow grass into a bed and started a small fire. Her sweat smeared the dirt on her hands, like watercolors. She imagined the droplets rolling down the mountains as she labored. Her old green coat stank with smoke and her unwashed scent.
She lay on her back, counting constellations and listening to the rushing stream. Perhaps by now her mother had noticed her absence but would say nothing to her father, who would not care about a missing daughter too ugly to marry off or sell. The moon and stars saw only the land below them, all creatures blending into the whole of the earth.
The fire warmed her and she let her eyes close. She knew she’d die in the coat she wore, but one battered green coat can hold many years in its pockets.
***
I found this little piece I wrote a couple of years ago and sadly, I don’t recall which song went with it. When I wrote this, my goal was to make it to August without any death. I could make a little graveyard here of all the people who have died on my blog. I think that makes me a horrible, horrible murderer in a literary sense. I will reform, I promise. Or at least, that’s what I said at the time. You be the judge.
