The red dog dipped under from the dark leaves, departing with his new herd, not all red at all but in the sun tomorrow flecks of gray and black, peppered effects.

Ginny called out to the herd she led north. She was breathing hard, sweating in the cool. She called out to the herd with no need but to be neighborly, and only to those in the small slice of the universe she could see, her own three-sixty, that private computation, that proportion men could calculate, give name to, boys in white jackets, slide rules in pockets and telescopes, boys like Dan before he was turned into Dan, the potential of Dan lost by herding cows and men herding him, or Ella, or perhaps even Saul if he wasn’t Saul, a country boy. These people.

No matter now. To see into the universe, to measure it, to run into it alone, to say anything about it, for Ella Ella Ella—for anyone at this late date—it was nearly impossible. Far-fetched.

She hurried on calling into the impossible, calling out up the trunks of trees and owls’ downy fronts into the black curtain that stretched out between the fringe of needles solid as cliffs. She tried to pierce it, the sky, to part the curtain with her body: the projectile of living. She tried to run off the edge of the earth’s carpet into infinity. It was hard to do. The horses were tired, the mules, the dog. She hurried on, out to and between starlight, which, she could see now, even from there, was just skeins of bright shiny seaweed stretched up from the bottom of the sea-night-toward-earth, around earth, vines whipping beyond humble earth in graceful waves in the waves of space, wagging and snagging from roots in the sandy cold soil of the beginning. In the beginning was Ella and Ginny.

The universe was scented in her own sweat. Black-bruised-purple of prune skin, the pores broken open to disbelief and cold night air. Life was done. It was starting. She began to see for a millisecond into the flat of color behind the curtain down the roots of the entrance of on-and-on-beyond for a fraction of a millisecond. She ran into the terror of knowing all she saw. To be blind is so tempting! Where, if entered, she would never return fully, innocence lost.

‌Six

Tree

MULE CENSUS
Day One, Yeoman’s Calendar (dawn-sunset)
SPECIES: Equus asinus × Equus caballus
LOCATION: Yeoman Sea