"She dreamed an endless, labyrinthine dream where shadows stretched over the abyss, where vivid colors sank into her skin, where the memories of the entire world were contained in a single drop of water that trickled down to the bottom of a forgotten riverbed. She dreamed because the liquid images were all she had left, all she could grasp with any certainty. Corrosive, dry years—along with too many days peering at the sun with her blue eyes—left her blind. Her vision had disappeared in gradual phases, like the moon, until the sliver of light finally faded and never returned. Muscles followed soon after, evaporated and useless in the perpetual drought of old age."
|
"Mame Lamkin’s husband had wandered out to the forest’s edge past the animals. The year that had passed between his murder and the moment of the old man’s flight had not seemed to change him at all save for the wispy thinness of a dead-self in limbo that had replaced the manly flesh in which he had once lived. He swayed against the wind current, looking down on his mangled midsection in agonized translucence. His eyes hung down, no longer looking for the vigilantes who had dismembered him, nor his lily-White lover who had sat in her house and chewed her nails—tellingly—while the buzzards plucked at the Black flesh to which she’d once clung. He sensed the old man, and lifted his empty, invisible eye sockets to the moon. The old man moved beyond the ghost and his sorrow."
|
Subscribe to our free newsletter to receive one piece of literature from AZURE: A Journal of Literary Thought in your inbox every month.
|
© Lazuli Literary Group 2022 | [email protected] | 847.970.2506
Illustrations & Logo by Evgenia Barsheva As an affiliate of Bookshop.org, Lazuli Literary Group earns a small commission on sales made via any associated links on our website. |