Chiron

The figures in black move across the plains between the smokestacks and endless pipes of the paper mill and the foundry. They hunch and move quickly through the low-hanging fog searching like field mice for a bit of something there in the wide open. A raven flies above them in the twilight. It banks left, away from the factories and towards the city that is smoldering and will be smoldering for many weeks more. From the top floor of the last tenement that separates the plains from the city the figures are ghosts with black shawls that trail them like a wake of death or destruction or fear or nothing. The grasses that reach up and collect dew in the shepherds crook of their leaves are flattened in the figures’ paths that resembles the V shape geese or bomber jets fly. 

The figures pass over the land and move from grass to scarred earth. Shovels and backhoes and bomb craters and bodies on bodies on bodies. Death does not discriminate here. The raven that once flew above them had turned and come back with three more of its kind. They too flew in a V towards the three in black that hovered over the mud and death. 

The ravens and the figures arrived at a body and stopped. The ravens kept their distance. The figures surrounded the body as best as they could. It once belonged to a boy who had summer straw hair that fell over rosy cheeks and almond eyes. Now his body belonged to the earth.