With aching legs I drift down mudslopped streets. No more whore’s drums and pimps clapping their horny hands together on street corners. They fled at word of the Ghuards’ arrival. I can see the camp of the Ghuards in the distance, through gaps in the buildings, where it lours like a chancre on the opposite side of town. Smoke, laced with seams of red fire and convolving bulbs of flies, hovers over the camp. Behind a rampart of chain-bound barrels they are smashing their screaming prisoners to paste in massive iron mortars, or pulling them apart in demoniacally gleeful tugs-of-war. I know there will be others, a rape ration is what they call it, brought in soon if they’re not there already. A woman’s, for example, right arm might set alight, or her face, for example, or his, might be mauled by dogs, as the Ghuard travails upon her.

*

The port’s wall extends in a broad bow with both ends in the sea, encompassing an area in excess of the dimensions of the town itself. I can walk past the point where the houses peter out, and there’s nothing here but dunes and ashen, sandblasted trees, all strangely deeply dark in the gathering dusk that layercakes the sky in fire ribbons. I’m gratefully still perverse enough not to miss even the beauty here, that flips adjectives and such around in my brains, as though this refreshing air, that seems forcibly to inflate my lungs and threatens to puff me up so I bob off across the sand, is stirring up in me a dust devil of whirling expository phrases. The particles tick against my skull’s insides. I’m hoping any moment they’ll blow out my far ear and inside and out my head will be all sliding wind, and I’ll see my own shadow weirdly dark as well.

I’m simply too numb and tired to take in the ocean. I don’t believe I can say I’ve ever seen one before.

After catching a few z’s, lying in some romantic sand with a kerchief over my eyes, I wake up to still sun and breakers. The front of my face aches with the drying out of the wind, and nicely getting up there’s a rill of pain shoots from my left heel along the back of my ankle. I hobble my tendonitis back in the direction of town.

There’s a spot I faced as I slept, where a heap of stones receded into a jumble of details I didn’t bother to make sense of at the time, and as I glance at them again I feel a memory come on, a dream of a black-streaked mouth in the stones, that spoke dream talk to me along the wind. I remembered the voice, but not in the way I normally remember voices. I didn’t hear it in recollection, but my memory started making vocalities at me and it was the affect of the voice that it partially imitated; distracted, sexless, neutrally old, talking off at an angle and to itself, but I was meant to overhear. I only overheard it speak. A strong definite sound, but it trembled. It was a death’s bed murmur, words maybe addressed to death, or through it, by a dying speaker. I get away from the beach fast, and as I walk the stiffness goes a bit out of my foot.