Silence cast its shadow beneath the forest of mold and bone as the old woman walked in a lost thought—she was curious about the time when she could remember more than the images before her now, though as she tried to recall the past she found her mind was empty.

The dogs were in flight above the old woman, sucking on the floating spore sacks of the Primordial Glade with their toothless mouths. She watched as the older winged hounds dug their way into the loose earth for their final rest, she watched the dead ones sprout seedlings, she watched the fetuses gestating in their cocoons off of the exoskeleton trees.

The trees seemed to breathe as the mold snaked its way along their branches, releasing spores into the air.

Rhythm of the forest was fit to the old woman like a cold skin coat; its patterns left her eyes tired and mind barren.

            Night cooled the glade, a breeze blowing against the old woman’s face as she sucked meat from a fallen tree branch. “Taste’s good.” she whispered to the sleeping hounds above her.

The night was darker than usual, a purple hue downcast upon her meal brought the old woman’s glazed eyes upon a strange cloud crackling a purple static within. “I want to see blue.” The light began to crackle a light blue.

It was the meat; once in a while she would find a fallen branch and let its hallucinatory effects consume her already dwindled sanity. The meat was sour though she didn’t mind the taste; it was a change from her common diet of the hound’s excrement which kept her alive though was utterly tasteless.

A tree in the old woman’s sight faded to the blue hue of her mind, there was a mist flowing downward from the cloud and within the mist she could see faces. None of the faces looked familiar to her but each one seemed to recognize her as they flowed with the mist around the now translucent tree.

Her legs were wobbly as she stood up from a slumping high, she felt magnetically connected to the swirling faces around the tree, her limbs reaching out to its trunk like a wanting child.

“Deloris, how often must I tell you not to eat those cookies when their so hot? You poor little thing, let me see your boo, boo.”

“How old are you now Deloris? Five? Wow! You’re a big girl aren’t you?”

“Sit on Grammy Alice’s lap little child, let me tell you a story about the Poky Little Puppy.”

The old woman touched their mouths as they spoke, her slender fingers caressing their lips, she felt herself make a smile as her numbed face curled around wrinkles. “Poky…Little…Puppy.”

A familiar hand smoothed itself over her naked shoulder and turned the old woman to face the past.

            The green hills rose and fell like empiric blimps against the cloudy blue sky—there were two little girls laying upon the highest hill in the valley while a little white spotted dog chased dandelion seeds caught in the wind.

“Poky! Poky!”

“Let him alone Deloris, he’ll be fine.”

“What if he catches a seed, it could grow in his tummy and then…”

“Then he would poop dandelions, hehehe.”

“Not funny Alice!”

Light speckled through the clouds over Alice’s fingers as she twirled them around, much like a child will let an ant crawl over their hand. Deloris wondered if Alice thought she was guiding the light over her fingers, or if Alice thought the light was guiding Alice’s fingers as she had believed.

In the distance Deloris saw Poky running back to her with a bone in his mouth; when he brought the bone to her there were tiny ants crawling all over the bone and around Pokey’s little white speckled face.

            A gunshot turned Deloris to the mouth of a cave where her father was standing over a small white spotted dog he had just killed. “He was old, Deloris. I did this out of kindness; you need to understand that honey.”

“Does everything old need to die daddy?”

            Through the knot hole in her bedroom wall, Deloris watched as the fire spread. She was reminded of a time when her dog brought her a bone covered in ants and as she watched her neighbors scramble out of their homes and pile themselves onto her own.  

Others had boarded up their windows and pushed all their furniture against their doorways but the neighbors still tried to get inside for safety. It wasn’t until all of their homes caught fire that they noticed Deloris’s home was left unscathed from the torrent of flame caused by the meteor storm. Some of them had climbed the walls and were hitting her rooftop with one of the meteorites; as they pounded against the wood with the meteorite clenched tightly within their hands the panic overwhelming them had made them overlooked their own flesh clumping together in sagging chunks from their palms, exposing the bone.

It was only a matter of time before they broke through the wood, bodies upon the rooftop cluttered together in a tangled spasmodic mess with their bones waving in the air, others clawing beneath the wood to find the clear mineral skeleton of the unscathed ship beneath its residential shell.

Alice was out there too; Deloris suddenly remembered her when they were young and friends together, now Deloris couldn’t even recognize her childhood partner. Age was cruel to humans of the future and Alice was gnarled, pale and brittle in her age of seventy, while Deloris was still just a little girl.

            Stars ran past the ship like lines of dripping paint on a dark canvas as Deloris stood with her father in the ships bridge that was once a living room. Above the control panel before her father and her, a single picture of herself sitting upon Alice’s lap hung slightly crooked.

“You once asked me if everything has to get old Deloris…yes, we all get old. Some of us take a little longer than others, but all of us have to get old someday.”

“Why daddy?”

“Because life catches up with all of us someday and life is cruel honey…life is cruel.”

“I’m never gonna get old daddy, I’m always gonna be young. I’m gonna run from life forever!”

            Tears filled the old woman’s eyes as she hugged the tree, the faces began to disappear and suddenly she wondered why she was crying.