He stands alone. The winds and the playa and the people swirl around him in a vortex of light. He rests upon an old stick hewn from time and old, twisted wood. It tethers him to the dirt and it pulses with an energy between his soul and… something else. He stands alone. But not. - Trey Ratcliff | Stuck In Customs

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He stands alone. The winds and the playa and the people swirl around him in a vortex of light. He rests upon an old stick hewn from time and old, twisted wood. It tethers him to the dirt and it pulses with an energy between his soul and… something else. He stands alone. But not.

Charon crosses the river Styx, ferrying a lost soul into the beyond, forever. This is where the souls go that have no hope, the endless void. Travelers come and pull and twist and spin and see the strobes alight upon the skeleton bones. The neck tilts and the head bows in a deathly pose, a skinless grimace pulls back a macabre grin of hate; the hate of a man who dies alone, between worlds of understanding.

The fire spun in a time the lasted forever in an instant. The man inside obeyed and commanded it, weaving himself into a veil between what we saw and what he felt. Inside, we saw each flame and it stayed with with us. In another day, the tower behind would burn.

I watched him dance. There was a fine powder of sand above the hard-packed earth. The powder was like a dust, a cloud, a fog, a mist that where his toes slipped around and through. The mist would eddy and fall and rise in time for him to slide back through, the orange light from the flames above fell into and through the mist, dancing with his gentle feet.

There in the gypsy’s creation. It pulsed around us like a thick red vein; a timeless conduit that promised to hold a time machine between worlds. And, I’d have it no other way, as every time machine should come appointed with the comforts of the sultans as they slowly wind throughout the edges of the Orient. The colored lights cast new tones and shadows upon the rich, supple textures. Small windows around the edges gave outward portal-glances to worlds and times that whizzed by, each one inviting a new pause to the story. The light, I noticed, did something unexpected as it tumbled and flowed and rolled across the skin, drifting over small sinuous shapes as the crimson rays slid up and over the flowing curves of a dune in the middle of a faraway desert. The lines would only stay a moment before the wind blew them into a new form. The light tore time away from the shapes, and I could not figure out what was happening until much later in the story.

She was tall; this is the first thing I noticed. Like the white-hot glow of Gabriel, with streaming starlight tearing at the edges of her shape, there was something else in her gossamer form. She drifted across the top of the white ground like a leaf falling in a sky without wind. And, as silently as that leaf falling, her hands and arms moved like long grass in a rising river. The fingers and the hands, I recall, rolled and beckoned lightly when a new breeze came through, and a new sound came from them were the tones of bells freshly rung.

A storm of sands. It comes to remind you of events that happen while you are busy living, and you ride alone through too many of them. And truly, in the middle of the storm, there is nothing else but the storm. It ebbs and flows and abates and gives shape and form to others. And then it dies down and falls away, like a strange dream whose haunting fabric falls away the longer you are awake.

Light came from her dress. And a little girl’s stars shone from her umbrella. And tiny tendrils of lambency flowed from a thousand other places. Whereever she went, she was their light. Are they posing for me, or is this just how they are? It’s how they are. Things with their own light are the easiest to capture.

If light and time are truly tied, and I think they are, then they are still there. They are still holding hands in the playa. She still has her lights about her and his fingers still hold around her waist like a tightly-strung petticoat.

A ship lays half-buried in the desert beyond. It lays freshly launched upon the ocean. It lays broken and scattered under miles of earth. They always move on it, beside it, above it, their light is like a thousand stars on ceiling of a little girl’s room, it falls quickly like happy-tears onto the desert oasis below.

The metal kimodo neck bends skyward. There is only one sound. It is the sound of a hundred trunk-thick ropes holding back a moored ship. They rub and tear against one another, the braids and coils tearing free and pulled back into the spiral. The ropes scream like iron pulled apart by a furnace, and they burn like a soul reaching back for the earth. Fire from the kimodo rests within and the broiling sea churns and twists beneath the hull. The head bends back towards the earth, a new tension building in its dire armor. It tears through the sky for something new to devour. A heat shimmers from its scalloped visage, a heat that melts the heart of all that pass before.

She was broken by time and the winds beat her into the dirt below. She sank into it without control. A gentle grace hungered in the vibrations that pulsed out from her previous life. Some people saw this and they came to bask, to climb, to commune, to sit, to laugh, to cry, to hold hands, to find a hand to hold, to stroll, to watch the moon, to add to the vibrations, to clambor, to hold, to rest, to meditate, to feel something new as she sank ever deeper into the earth, leaving rhythms of new life behind.

He stands alone. The winds and the playa and the people swirl around him in a vortex of light. He rests upon an old stick hewn from time and old, twisted wood. It tethers him to the dirt and it pulses with an energy between his soul and… something else. He stands alone. But not.