Don't hold a glass over the flame - any

[Mauve]

SO WHEN YOUR HOPE'S ON FIRE 
BUT YOU KNOW YOUR DESIRE

(‘How did you know your rabbit was ready to come back to you?’ she asks her mother one evening, as they wander the shores of Tephra.

‘I didn’t, she replies, considering her daughter with a soft, sympathetic gaze, ‘I could not take it anymore, so I went to her.’)

She leaves endless summer for spring. Across the strait, in the in-betweens, the world changes drastically. Tephra is perpetual—warm and homely, vibrant and rich, but it is constant and reliable. Mauve likes the rambunctious and volatile. Or so she believes. 

Everyone romanticizes what they do not have and fancies the grass beyond their backyards.

The common lands follow laws beholden to rhythms; ebbs and flows that swing violently—cycles, between the harvest and the sow, all those mother’s lectures she spent her girlhood rolling her eyes at. And yet, as she pulls herself from the water, setting her eyes on the different things that grow along these snow-speckled shores, she knows the appreciation is there, in her like a seed planted deep and taken root.

The Mother’s work—nature and the nature of things;
The Coyote’s work—the mischievous elements of life;
Perhaps, the works of other forces beyond their hands and paws.

She finds her eyes are ever commanded to that hunched-over titan. She sighs, the morning air still cold enough to precipitate her breath. As a girl, it had felt like a holy war. She had been dogged about reuniting with her canine-self, a body she had and has never captained before. 

As she grow up, she finds the binds stretched are exhausting and taxing, and she turns her mind to other things—the ways stallions can make her flush without exchanging even a word, the way Tephra works from its insides, the independent spirit that keeps her hunting for things that live beyond her family.

Mother had said that she could not take it… and yet it feels much harder than just that, in practice. It feels insurmountable and as the immortal spirit of childhood relinquishes its grasp, she begins to harden in the emptiness, finding less pain in other undertakings.

Mauve traces the riverbank, gushing with new life under the thin patches of ice that still remain and with those that have splintered off. Around her, the exposed grass glitters with frost, white snowdrops and yellow cowslip yawn open to the world.

(Deep in her chest, a howl quavers urgently; her nose, wet and leathery, tests the air for all the quarry that has awoken.)

DON'T HOLD A GLASS OVER THE FLAME
DON'T LET YOUR HEART GROW COLD

PHOTOGRAPHY © RAY HENNESSY