— Color Wheel —

Simply an animal before the land and our god.

With a warm beating heart and a mouth full of razorwire.

What’s cold? What’s still? What’s dead? The sky is ablaze over all the muted teal angles of the world, which cut like lower teeth against the soft and fiery expanse. She lowers her mouth to a living pool of blood, maintaining its heat against the crust of snow lining its edges. The fluorescent gazes of street lamps are bruising more than they are piercing, yellow-blue smudges against the gray-blues and the black-blues and the ocean-dark snowbanks.

Bum. Ba-bum. Ba-bum.
The wobbling shape of charcoal, undeterred, maintains its gait. Blacker still, the gun. Hyper-attuned ears catch his footfalls from the end of the slate-step corridor. Arch-grown trees lean over one another from across the trail. They perfect the tunnel vision on the assailant.

Ba-bum and ba-bum and chunk and a vengeful scream.
Temperance never learned to read. She can recognize the broad forms of some phrases. No trespassing. No entry permitted. Smile, you’re on camera. We don’t dial 911. They usually mean the same thing. Beware of dog. A narrow tinge of guilt nips at her as she considers the last of these.

Temperance never learned to read. Any animal, however, knows how to read the words “I will kill you” written across the groundskeeper’s face. Hole-bitten, rotted-out autumn leaves were never so crumpled and contorted as his veil. The wind growls. Temperance is a whisper in her own breath.

He strides unevenly. His movements were unorthodox even before she mangled his leg. He collides with branches - how could he have missed those? - yet he shrugs them off. Silver slick boots gather grit from obvious muddy puddles and ponds. Still, he presses on. He marches forth without a lamp. There is no question to her that the man cannot see.

And yet.

Crack!
Temperance flies off the trail with haste. The new blood in her throat only replaces the old blood, now spilling from her side. A world of dark hands brushes against her cheeks; a thousand leaves are meant for pushing through and closing behind her. His scream again. The sky shies away from the commotion and draws her curtains. There is a new world of color as shadows melt into shadows. The mouths of the land curl their lips to blow smoke over her eyes.

The descent is steep. Her feet do not find solid ground. The root of a great and mighty oak catches her falling body like a hammer catches a nail.

The first color was a bright white. It gave way to yellow, itself followed by red, then blue, light black, and fuzz. The world was then white again and could settle on becoming neither red nor blue, and so the color of the abyss was created to sidestep the matter. The history of the Earth’s palette wheeled and wheeled overhead before someone finally said, “why not mix them?”

The cerulean sky coexists with the early stars. Soon, the iron strands of the highest tree limbs rake at them, as if to sift the stars from their place in heaven.

The nature of animals is to find their way to the most comforting spot. Temperance drags her body over deep, rich earth, the wet coffee ground soil clinging to her as desperately as she digs through the monochrome understory. There, in the sable-dark shrub, that is the place to go.

The rainbow of the natural hues of the world pulses at the edges of Temperance’s vision. Her ribs are the only thing that bears heat in this world. The snow is white and red and yellow. A halo of greens and oranges dances around the deep, fuzzy, dark hole before her. She pulls her body inside.

Everything in this world is the darkest blue. Daylight has never known a home here. Needling thorns caution against pushing any further. It could be enough.

Crack! Crack! And his scream again, now desperate.
The man with the long gun thunders down the slope without ever once breaking his lopsided stride or losing his footing. Low weeds bind his feet. He kicks through them with ease, never once looking down. He is a shape against shapes as Temperance looks back. He is quickly advancing.

Ba-bum. Ba-bum.
His footsteps. Her heart. She tunnels.

Needles press and press as she flails. There is a turquoise whine and a scarlet wheeze among the freezing gusts. Temperance never learned to understand the Language, but the man’s cries of rage are simple enough.

Crack! Fuck! Crack! Crack! Fuck you! Crack!
Am I struck again? Her mind has closed itself to any structured thought. The thicket shakes violently and his bullets make hay of the thorny cane surrounding her. She creates more, going down, down, shedding her old reds and devising new ones.

The rainbow spins faster until it becomes a blur. She is queasy but there is no way out but forward. Forward, down, deeper into the pit. Blood roars through her ears. An opening into another sharp chamber. She plunges through and frenzies onward, but here - she pauses. Sounds creep in little by little. The shrieks and yells are washed out by the blacks of the deepest shadows of the world.

He is distant. There is no frost. There is no light, even. Here, deep in the abyss, the earth is warm and inviting. Here, Temperance is safe.