Est'Bel Strolls

Urges ushered Est’bel out of her abode – a cottage cobbled together from cobwebs and clapboard – and she scuttled forth, her nesty hair tousled by a leaf-laced breeze In her bony hands she clutched dregs of a nightmeg broth in a porcelain jar stoppered by a coffinwood shard Her bare feet stepped on thorny twigs but she felt them not, for her soles had been hardened by countless treks across hot coals washed up from stygian shoals Leftward she turned, meandering down the narrowing, twisting path, where uprooted mandrake tendrils clutched at her anorexic ankles, while ravens pecked at her frayed follicles, until she snatched a leaf from a passing philodendron, folding it into a tri-cornered hat and plunking it atop her pate, rakishly askew Dewey sap from twisty-trunked trees dripped onto the nape of her gnarly neck and a raven on a nearby branch cawed his amusement, earning him her owlish scowl She spied a row of rotting poppies and plucked a bunch, sticking them into a crevice of her hat, then stepped onto a walkway of cracked shale slabs, which shunned her footprints, replacing them with snail streaks to mark her passing She made her way to a listing tombstone atop a gnarled knoll encased in gelid moonbeams and fringed by shushing sawgrass She took a small vial of indigo glass from beneath her shabby shawl and pulled out a stopper made from a finger bone of an unfaithful lover whose pickled tongue hung from a silver chain around her neck She poured the contents of the vile vial into the porcelain jar and listened to the fizz. It subsided into sloshes, reminding her of the sounds issuing from demented shells snatched from the forlorn shores of stygian shoals She gaped at the sky as an owl flew past the moon, stirring the dark craters, which broke up into swirling spirals, sucking lunar beasts beneath the surface, where they dissolved in the ceaselessly sliding sands And Est’bel raised the jar to her lips and drank a toast to the moon, and awaited the enshadowed shades drifting down the snail-slimed pathway, propelled by a leaf-laced breeze