A curtain of dust hangs low over rubble. It sifts down, grain by single grain. When it gets close to the broken stone and churned concrete, an errant breeze kicks it back up. Such a wind carries with it the stench of hot sand and burnt metal. The dust rides these updrafts in circles around its ruin like a swarm of carrion birds above fallen kin.
The dust drags with it memories of eons. It sings of a new world’s first dawn, of fathomless pressures and lightless millennia. It whispers of time’s slow turning in a language known only to the dead.
For a moment I can hear its voice. My flesh pulses its cadence. My bones echo in harmony. The wind falls away, leaving only time to hold the whispers aloft.
Each by each, the grains bury me. My flesh relinquishes its grip on pain. My bones sink beneath a dry entombment. A timeless dark closes around me and I pray to the dust that it remember my name.
Corey Laisure 