The stars’ thin glow stales with the waning reflection of the weary moon, retreating without shame nor honor, simply as part of a passing of time she had no will against.
In the hesitant light leaking from the thin scratches in the ragged blanket strewn atop the canopy of a quiet town, a lone straggler makes her through the barren woods, tracing her dirtied soles along the withering sunburnt leaves, painted by autumn as momentously as was the moon. She dotted each hanging branch with her fingerprints, coated in sweet syrup. Meanwhile, her mind raced itself across the rolling hills as she lazily hummed a tune or two, her thoughts splitting like the bark cracking off each oak she strolled past.
Each musing curled its sly fingers into the folds of her braided pigtails and clutched it with the stubbornness of a redwood, pulling her with the subtlety of a faint cinnamon in a strong cider. They pulled her East. They pulled her West. Until she slipped carelessly into a dip in the muddied earth.
Her jeans scuffed in the dirt, and her flannel shirt, buttoned up to one row before the collar, browned in the wet mound of autumn leaves beneath her. She caught her head before it grazed the maze of littered pinecones about her.
Or perhaps, she didn’t.
For the trees appeared closer without the courtesy of a warning. She hadn’t seen them inch nearer. For all she knew, the roots were grounded deeper, surer, more unyielding than a stem on a ripe pumpkin, a boot on a tempered foot, a button on a doll whose cotton-stuffed limbs shift just enough every other blood moon to cost its captors a dozen nights of sleep.
The stars mourn some tragedy they’ve long forgotten but still are bereaved by every moment, for they know nothing else. Their tears slip in shaky spirals from the perforated, dusty black blanket above. In pockets of coupled droplets, they rain over every jagged, five-pointed, dying cut-out of what spring once was.
The skies are changing; the air is shifting; she is walking somewhere else. The leaves are falling, and she is, too. Even if all else is slipping, at least she isn’t alone. If anything, the persistence of this apparent change is her one constant.
She falls; the trees crawl; the light scatters and shatters.
Once again, the stars’ thin glow stales with the waning reflection of the weary moon, retreating without shame nor honor, simply as part of a passing of time she had no will against.
