COOL MATTE.
Everlasting smooth.
The smell of dust mites after rain.
Scrawling arrows of violet trace winds of the Pacific. Straight, straight, straight, curve down, forward, forward, forward. Straight, straight, straight, curve upwards, forward, forward, forward and swirl.
North Equatorial current.
North Pacific current.
Alaskan current.
Follow the green arrows, down, down, down. There's a patch, a little button of pistachio and bumblebee and ochre. Japan: Tokyo, Yokohama, Nagoya, Osaka, it says–those onyx letters.
Cup the Pacific Ocean and turn the sphere. Follow Japan. Trace China with the ivory stub of nail, feel the rise of mountains under skin of ice as fern and dandelion gives way to shades of almond to nude to white. Trace, trace, trace across the exquisite jewel of electric canary and quiet olive—India.
Let the violet arrows guide again. Run a finger along a triangular current, above the arrows of the summer monsoon drifts. Up, up, up, curve, down, down, down.
Feel the heat spilling into your lungs. Smell the saffron dirt caking your throat with scales. Taste the purest land on Earth.
Ethiopia.
The prince taps on the ruby star: Addis Ababa. Watery eyes find a stray "A." He follows it backward to find a "C," then "I," "R," "F," "A."
Africa.
Metal chimes inside as he taps the plastic matte. The land embedded in the sphere of Midgard (that he cups with his shrinking swollen fingers) is bigger than one spread hand. Cedar desserts and flaxen flatlands and pine-green sleeping forests wash into one blurred muddy color behind the pools in his eyes that then grows into a greedy mouth that swallows his probing finger.
He lays his hand over the land he can't look at a moment longer. His barely beating heart wants to burn all of it up with its own boiling blood as much as it wants to trickle free underneath its toasty wings made of earth forever.
Africa. It sounds so, so sad.
Dossier published in full length at home: allerdale. wordpress. com
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