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She keeps running towards this white lump in the horizon, as if she can find an answer there. The running never tires her, but the hill never gains in size. The rocks on the ground don’t tear gashes into the soles of her feet, but they don’t provide traction either. There is no blazing sun in the sky to make her sweat. There are no clouds on the horizon to make her shiver.
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
To her left there’s a lake. A glistening blue lake. A glistening, cold, blue lake. Surrounding the lake, snow blue vampires feed on living statues. Pudding thick blood erupts from the statues’ thin, white, marble necks. The statues laugh and continue their tarantulic dance, their bleeding seemingly unimportant to their being. The blood leaps around as if propelled by a sprinkler, but never disturbs the lake. She can’t stop to swim, or drink, or dine, or dance. The hill in the distance still beckons her forth.
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
To her right there’s a tree, its stout obsidian trunk laced with dark gray vines. The vines pulse the bass drum beat of a heart. Ba-dump ba-dump ba-dump. The tree is barren, lacking leaves, or shoots, or buds. The tree has only one dark branch, nearly the same length as the height of the tree. The tree lives in a desert. Sand covers the landscape. There is no horizon here—simply sand reaching far into where a sky should be, yet there is none. It is almost as if the black tree were painted on an endless orange canvas. There’s a chessboard at the base of the tree. All of the pieces are scattered about with no rhyme or reason to their placement. All of the pieces are black pawns.
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
Above her babies cry. She tries to crane her head to look up to them, but the blazing white hill ahead has her unwavering attention fixed. They cry in unison and it is beautiful. It is as if she is being escorted by a chorus of angels. She tries to accompany their song, but to no avail: her throat is constricted. The only sound she can make is a hiss, the sound a person makes when they are too scared to even scream. But she is not scared. She is intent on reaching the white dune.
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.
Behind her is this scene played out over and over again. It is her running, the hill, the vampires, the statues, the tree, the pawns, and the babies. She can see the scene behind her without turning around. She simply knows it is there. It is as if there are two silver mirrors; a small one suspended before her and a large one grounded behind her. She simply continues running towards the horizon, not knowing what there is to gain, not knowing what there is to lose.
Robert Taylor lives in Sterling, VA and works at Dulles International Airport. In between the demands of home and work, he finds time to attend writing classes and workshops in the Washington Metropolitan area. He is thirty-two years old and has his MS of Public Administration from George Mason University.
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