Steep sunlight and shadows on stone. Grey and white and a yellow mottling of dry moss. Bones. Corpse dust, shell and bone rolled under the weight of a lost ocean, accreted, compressed, repeated, driven deep. Soft now on her hard fingers as she traces the pits and ridges. Not yielding soft but worn to a gentle grain. An almost audible scratch of her skin below the wind.

"Bones is rocks," she says to nobody, lifeless words, reciting. "Mud is flesh."

It is history she feels there, weathered but not lost. Its grime pooled soft into craters and pores, the detritus of the world clinging there. Clinging to that miniature landscape, itself just a glimmer, the surface echo of an interior unseen.

"And we's the fleas, then."

Her fingers linger, teasing the textures for meaning.