The Weight of Water
We forget the feeling of earth against skin. The way the mud pulls at the heel, a soft, insistent gravity. As children, we understood that to be clean was to be separate from the world. To be dirty was to belong to it. We waded into the shallows,…
The Map of a Century
I once sat with a woman in a village near the border who had lived through enough history to fill a library, though she had never learned to read a single page. She traced the lines on her palms as if they were a map of every road she had ever…
The Breath of Rust
The smell of damp earth after a long, dry spell is a heavy, velvet thing. It clings to the back of the throat, tasting faintly of iron and decaying leaves. I remember walking through woods where the ground felt like a sponge beneath my boots,…