The Crone at Sunset

It is an evening burnished by the sun’s slow withdrawal, and the Crone lifts into  the air as gently as a bit of ash. It does not surprise her particularly for she has long had  little in the way of material conviction, and yet she did not expect to exceed the water  oak tonight, as decisive about its solidity as she is ambivalent about hers. As she  ascends (or is it descends? It is difficult to be certain the planet bobs in the starry broth  of the universe in just the way she imagines, because even the most inconspicuous mote  has an underside, does it not, or is it an overside? You see the problem), she imagines the crown of her head being pollarded for fodder to feed the younger Crones, the ones  who will not rise for millennia, the rank and file who yet have much work to attend to  on the ground. She was once such a Crone herself, freshly wizened, eagerly invisible,  ready to stir the cauldron abubble with the day’s gruel, endlessly, endlessly, dressed  always in widow’s weeds and ardently awaiting the next mourning, the next object of  her studied despair.  

As she begins to pass the swaying branches at the top of the tree, the wind  unwraps her woollen scarf from her head, and it catches on a branch. Just as she is about to float free of the scarf, she grasps the snapping tail of it, and she undulates there in the  evening breeze like a black eel rippling in water.  

Above her a murmuration of starlings expands and contracts, a dark lung, the  sky gasping then heaving a sigh. She wonders if it might be blood in her eye that has  lost its way. A body has its own ideas about how best to arrange its allotment of matter  and grows impatient and willful over time.  

Tethered to the tree in this manner, she recalls the many Crones she has known  who have been beheaded, hung, consumed in flame, infected, or simply stashed at the  bottom of a hayrick, for being an old woman is a dangerous affair. And at that moment  a tiny javelin of light pierces the Crone’s cloudy eye, traveling clean through the optic  nerve and out the back of her skull, and she feels strung like a bead on a string, a bauble  dangled round the neck of the coming night. And suddenly a burning, fanned from  within, eats through the palms of her hands like a flame boring through parchment, the  skin crisping around the center, the sky now visible on the other side, and she watches herself disperse, cell by incendiary cell, ember by ember, into the Mouth of God, which  she now sees suspended and gaping before her, lips cracked, teeth smoking, the uvula  waiting to be rung, and this is the place she will end, and begin again, inside this holy  consumption. The world is weary and full of regret, but the Crone is light as a brittling leaf, light as soot. Take, eat, this is my body, which is broken for you, and she dissolves as she meets the ready tongue, the sun incinerating itself beneath her.