Fiction: Silent spines in my grounded sole

It is as if you saw me already. You with your faded jeans and blushing cheeks and dirty dusted hoodie. Your eyes covered by the edge of the fabric. I couldn’t understand what you were saying at first. You mumbled and quavered, your toes drawing dreams in the sand. I bent over slowly, as not to scare you back into the rabbit hole of your past, and I whispered a forgotten hello. But you knew exactly what it meant. The blue of your eyes showed no fear, no remembrance of the time before time began for us. It seemed so clear to you that I was to appear, you were to sigh, I was to breathe, you were to ask. 

I take your hand without a word. It lay limply in my own; a captured dove pale and still in my palm. We walk towards the hillside, towards rocks paused in the middle of their tumble down the slope, as if catching their breath before finishing the descent. We walk over clay red and rough beneath our bare feet. You squeak with pain when the cactus spine tears through the tender underbelly of arched bones and thin skin of your earthbound sole. The dove flies free of my grasp and flutters towards your splayed toes. A fuzzy ball of needles clings to the curve of your point. You don’t look up at me as you take knife from back pocket, position the blade between skin and fiber, and fling the source of pain, of gasps, of beauty, of defense back into the dust where we hadn’t looked before. You examine the tiny pinpricks letting the universe in through the bottom of your foot. You smile and brush at the ruby droplets and microscopic spines intermingling.

Knife back in pocket you climb up my body to standing, my gaze distant and startled at the sudden intimacy. Your hand is a sparrow and nestles its way into the nest of my fingers. You pull me along the path as the sun sets over the hill before us. The shadows disappear and we wonder how they (we) (you and I) ever existed.