Our currency is buried in soil. Rock cleaved to the ground. Our hands pick through striated, warm earth; crusts of rock, the soft clumps of moss and saxifrage, root and earth. Behind us, the crystal tinkling of the brook, ahead the mountain top, striped black and blue, lashed with snow.
We dig for rocky ore in the muck. Our hands are maws: pink, worm-like, blind. They pause to consider a piece of white antler or horn. Horn, wood and bone are all as one here; ebbed down by permafrost and howling winds, cast in fragment-like desolation against the stark, strange mountainside. Behind us, the wall is a beading jaw. We lever and ply rocks out of soft molasses-black ground. Orthodontists popping out teeth. Then we place them into the uneven crown of the wall.
It’s an edifice both fragile and strong: a primitive feat of engineering, a golden cow, a temple, replacing a pig-sty long gone. It’s only time that makes the hazard of rock piled on rock become the certainty of a wall.
833 words a day 