Garden of everything
He is different.
She notes this as she looks upon him. He has shed his coat of sky and earth, and become something more. He is dark, Stachybotrys chartarum. With highlights of light, Physarum polycephalum. Black and Gold.
She is white. And gold.
They are Yin and Yang together, airy and fleeting, their golden hooves move in unison as they retreat amongst the forest’s oldest trees, the ones who have never known non-existence. They have been here forever, and they always will be.
Her steps bring the grass, and the little wildflowers, miniature daisies with their sun-spot centers. Clover blossoms with their domed purple heads, and the little three-and-four leaved leaves about them.
His front feet press to the ground, and beneath him dark moss springs forth, just a bit damp, just beginning to grow high stalks. Then the mushrooms come, light stemmed with dark caps that are reminiscent of decaying things.
His toes dig into the ground, and slime mold creeps outwards, yellow tendrils that eat away at the ground. These are their footprints, these patches of life and decay.
In the winter, he brings the hoarfrost. It climbs over the ground and the trees, and over the surface of still-water ponds, sometimes, it is not hoarfrost. Sometimes, it’s howling blizzards, and the great chunks of ice which crash into the sea, the sheer cold which holds waterfalls back, and silences even the loudest roars.
In the summer, she brings the wildfires, licking, lapping, reaching higher, it grasps at branches and the dead leaves and needles from the pines, sizzling and popping on the forest floor, blackens the earth and the sky.
When they meet; it is glorious, it’s cold, and hot, and steam, it’s violent in the most beautiful of ways, they ravage, and then leave.
And with their leaving comes their footprints.
And with their footprints, the beginnings of a new world.
