Sublime

This part’s always disagreeable, the brute scramble up towards daylight. He burrows through clay, grabs at roots, until the earth falls away and he’s looking up at a vaguely yellow sky.

hardscrabble

She would turn into smoke, rise up into the sky, and mix with the clouds. Then she would come down to the earth again as rain, and nurture some nameless patch of grass with no story to tell.