If ever she had belonged to anyone or anything, she belonged to the ghosts.

She sat on her front porch steps, her camisol and shorts clinging to her in ways that would turn heads, if only the sour expression on her face wasn't such an unpleasant distraction.

It had been a hot July, and an even hotter August, with the sagging vegetation suffering heatstroke alongside the humans & animals. The trees were one of the exceptions. The majority of the Elders hung on, their laborious breaths disguised as wind, whipping the molecules around them in search of moisture. No matter that their efforts sometimes ravaged their neighbor's limbs. There was no room for the sickly or weak, here.

Their roots were so dry. Too dry. Shortly after the beginning of summer, the composition of the Solstice songs had changed, and the earth beneath the trees heard nothing but increasingly discordant notes. She knew. She had been listening to the same symphony of confusion & lament.

She tugged at her bra strap, irritated by the rough feel of the fabric against her heat-prickled skin. She hated this season. It was a season of death, anymore.

Even so, she always knew the rains were to come after the trees spoke with such great distress in their voices. 'Water. Water. Water.'

As a reply to the supplicants of old, the rains would eventually come. The storm clouds would roll in like panicked livestock, the shades of blackness stretching across the skies in haphazard depth & form. The rain would sluice down at crazy angles, battering the already-defeated lifeforms beneath it.

But then, the trees would....

This Collab is going to be addictive. huzzah!

Written to 10" worth of Sigur Rós's "Takk" album :)