High above the sky is burning bright, all orange and yellow of a dancing flame. I myself am burning something hotter, burning from within, my blood on fire, my heart the pounding inferno of Dionysian savages set about a sacrifice. My legs will barely support my weight, for they are febrile, too feeble to straighten. My cane, a pitch-glossed blackthorn, tapping against the cracked concrete, echoing across and re-crossing the street, bounding from the crumbling brick and shining steel that walls this barren canyon. Those walls, those buildings, standing over me in judgment, their faces darkened by their own short shadows. I do not slacken my pace in their condemnation, I do not slack my pace for the sake of my lame leg, my bent back. Click clack, click clack, I drive myself faster, faster than those few others traveling my way, passing them by with hard shoulders coiling like serpents beneath my rough black shirt, serpents hard and hissing like the grave.
Women, the young girls who once cried out their love for me, they come the other way every now and then through this endless noon, passing me in their swirling skirts, their lazy summer dresses, their sweat-sculpted tresses. My own red-gold locks are long since shorn, my face baked as lean and Quixotic as that of a wooden Indian, yet it is not this which keeps my secret. Most of all, most of all, it is my crooked gait, my bowed head hiding those protean, Promethean eyes, it is the bending of the back which once stood strangely tall. By this they do not know me, though their wombs do still remember. I feel it in the air between us, even as I watch them only as the coursing hound watches the briars as they fly past. I feel their gate slacken as their legs widen almost imperceptibly, as their pelvises tilt, as they wonder at their own sudden loss of grace. Their hems wave to me in siren semaphore, and then they are passed, left wondering at this dark stranger as they would a fevered dream lost to the morning routine.
I arrive at length before the wrought iron gates, and as I touch their artful convulsions, their beauteous black contortions, they burst open, crying out in ecstasy and adoration.
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