Meadowlark Prairie My body is a sacred note.

Sleep-walking through life; pulled by the tension between the stars, which stared emptily down at him, orbiting his vision like a trajectory of comets circle a singular sun. They get no closer, no farther, but they are not stationary either - Heksvarrim sees the pinholes as blurred lines, dancing.

He realizes it isn't his eye that is the problem, or any clouds. The heat in the air has banished any cloud-cover. It is the forest — reaching with open palms for those same stars.

Pluck out those eyes, he thought. For a moment he saw those trees as three giant heads, the tines of their branches were many teeth, and they grinned; sisters three.

The forest did not beckon him close. He did not recognize it, but he should have. There was a strong odor, woven like a tendril of spider's silk, that reminded him of a deep, dark, wet hole in the ground; the smell of death.

He would not go investigate something as prolific, nor as mundane, as that. Without a word the corpse walked on in his stilted way, keeping to the edge of the forest.