"Isn't that grand?" Cleo paused to say with her merry flick of laughter. She could not contain it. So sharing Hamish and the power and the joy.
"What?" said Elaine, and Carrie laughed. Elaine ignored her. "What? Crawling in dirt? A gentleman?"
"Yes, what a life," Violet drawled, and the cleverness of her dialect was an instruction to them all.
But Hamish dined in airy halls, grandly draped in gilded damask, immaculate linen flocked the courtly tables and among them moved silently on tufted slippered feet the tray-bearing flower-bearing secret-nesting dark-faced slender men wearing bright vests. "Of crimson or blue," Cleo stated with assurance.
"It's as though she's seen it," Elaine whispered to her inner wrist where thready purple veins crossed the blue merely under her milky skin.
"But she has," Carrie encouraged, nodding to Cleo. "Hamish has recounted vividly."
Esme(e) did more, which was her way in every slanted pillar of life and there were many and they came without pattern, overall, though with color and with purpose. "She has lived Hamish," Esme(e) said.
        Cleo's eyes sparkled the light within them was so clear. Her neck was slender and the fine bones of her shoulders precious as alabaster and could not be diminished and could not be hidden by the flutes which crowded toward her collar. "Every morning was that way," she said, "and every night. The world was steady and right was on the top."
        Nights were big as hearts could be and as dark but darksome illumined by the suitable fires of the realm. They had always been, the eyes of the cat, the eyes of the bat, the fox, the bird, the whispering polished stones and the gossiping lesser goddesses. Night took them and was them and all became transformed constantly into the new which like breath was new and old once and future always night was the turn of time where things moved and fruit fell with a singular sunless sound.
        The river was there in the morning gray growing green and roping through golden sands, the dark mud, the bright reeds where hopeful birds clasped tightly promise and crocodile eyes captured the world.
        Hamish strode the river, by which Cleo told them how he crossed it and conquered new folds of cliff and rods of tunneled veins and all upon a breakfast of fruit and tea.
        Hamish took care about the water. He rolled his sleeves and kept the watch of his favorite uncle in his vest pocket. He wrote in books at night and stood to pace the pearly rooftops his mind ablaze with coursing insights while he gazed upon the realms of stars and rose with the morning with the river to find water in his basin and the blossom of the heady day between his face and mirror.
        "Hamish," and Cleo's voice had become soft as a nursery blanket, as chamomile tea in a delicate cup, "saw the comb. Others could see the breastplates, the headdresses, even the sandals, but Hamish could see the comb."

 

Hamish's nose was like a hawk's, his eyes were more than that and his brain boundless. And so he could kneel and crawl and pull himself through dry dirt and pebbles both fired by daily suns and nightly comets and untouched for millennia shunned by all the living.