In the dead cold of the night they sat on their haunches and observed the blackened world for its true intent. Three girls, alone. The youngest eighteen and the others not but a few years older. Here in this boundless arid wasteland devoid of purpose or navigation and across the blank wall of existence rose stars tiny and insignificant like calcite patterns painted over all the sky. Vast expanse of darkness without analogue to suffice where once there had been grassland pastures and shale rockfaces and the cool wind to brush against their moss underbellies as they slept. They felt like silk under your fingers. Soft and delicate and without equal and now never to be put back again. What hope in this rotten place but of one more night ahead of them and beyond no such afforded fortunes.

There came but once a frail howl in the cold. Wolves in the hills. These girls made no sound and they knew themselves in this wretched land to be the sheep. Vague shadows in the distant fog lumbered to and from like amorphous walleyed fiends conjured from some unreckonable atavistic biome where no man would ever prosper. Antecedents from whence their origins entirely unknown. Their presence like the arrival of some strange arcane horde. Three they were and yet they dared not wander from the hill even when the snows fell and the night grew longer and colder. The youngest among them crouched lower and drew a finger across the ashen silt. She imagined herself the author of some scripture or parable for precious future generations to decipher in years yet to come. Dear curious stranger, our plight carries us further than we dare go and we find no refuge anywhere and all is darkness.

Their death all but assured should they wait among such snow and ash. The oldest among them stood on a small incline overlooking the bleak and sightless prairieland beyond. She remembered in times long gone by the architecture of plains just like these. Green as can be. In those fields the sumac and the honeysuckle, pale and spiderlike limbs row on row like terracotta figurines in rebus to nature’s spectacle. Child’s idle wanderlust set to purpose. Her name called from voic