The water moves like flesh upon stone bones. Ripples pull up life from below and possibilities become verdant fact. The prairie is not flat; gentle undulations hold surprise valleys and hidden lakes. The sky is a blue dome over an ocean of green and gold. Twilight rotates the colors. Shadow paints the grain indigo blue, the sun lights the horizon gold and red. The rain stops falling at midsummer. Now it's a race. Reservoirs irrigate the grain- -not too much, it's rationed till next spring. The dry fields scorch and wither. We rush the harvest and leave the children to finish the job. Another rout: smoke and steel force them to part around us again. We drag the toxic corpses away from the farmland, but dust blows across the naked fields already. The nights are always freezing, but there is no ice or snow, no water all, except when we beat the drums.
Winter fades unnoticed into earliest spring. It's still so dry; piss on the ground and it's gone in seconds. Open your mouth to the wind and it will crack your tongue. The spriggans spread across the land and we part them around us. Weeks later, a dream of rain, the first drops touch, soak in and are gone as if they never fell. Reinforcements keep falling. The ground is hard, unyielding and unprepared. The water, spurned, gathers in puddles and rivulets, then tears across the land in sheets. Storms and lightning and flash floods. Ever-deepening churning brown water fills the arroyos, eventually calming enough to run obediently in old riverbeds and defiantly in new ones.
Story & Art Copyright © Kore