Well-Trodden Grass, by Para

[heart_and_crown]

(Originally written around March, 2025.)

Nice day today. Beautiful day. Haunted day. Those two go together more than most people realize.

It smelled like rain from a sky blinding with light, yet entirely shades of white and gray. Clouds moving fast; unrelenting. Rain threatened, yet all that ever blew by was wind.

That wind made it clear as crystal that the spirits were restless.

Walking down the street, I noticed the sun suddenly peeking like a framed circle of light among deep, dark clouds with stories to tell. Stories they couldn’t hold back any longer. Stories that sun was beaming into the hearts of the worlds below it.

I could never explain how I knew, but that’s exactly how I know it’s true.

Those spirits that are restless today; I wondered for only a second if it was a person—Morrison’s Beloved was on my mind from reading it with my darlings in a haze, for a class taught by a white woman with a goodreads account who we very well understand she doesn’t understand it—but they were far older than humans, that much was certain.

The spirits of the ancient beasts were aching—the ghosts from the Jurassic and before were unsettled. I wish I didn’t know what they were unsettled by: but I noticed it even in the way I was walking.

“Move to the grass,” they said. “Walk on the grass, as we did. Walk on the grass, as man or machine, you are nature. Walk on the grass.”

I listened. Through this messy bridge through time, I looked down at my feet and wondered how much these little patches of grass, this little strip of american land, had stayed the same. If it took the same shape or texture when there was a plantation right around the corner; or when there was a calm native village by what used to be a forest to the north; or when it was a tiny part of a tiny island being trampled on by small raptor feet and large triceratops footprints.

With the dark clouds passing to the northeast, the spirits seemed to travel with it. It was hot and wet in those couple million years. Sometimes, when it’s getting warmer and it smells like rain, you can still feel it.

Whoever was in the northeast would feel it now; hear the spirits chitter and chirp.

It was strange while they ran through here. The kinda day where what sounded like a crows cry mixed with a human screech, too far in the unknown distance to be recognized, whispered to catch attention; where the stains left by birds’ excrement on the sidewalk made strange streaks, like lightning, or the footprints of small claws, or ornate leaves. Where even when you walk back inside, you still feel strange—changed—because, for a few minutes, the raptors ran through you; through the clouds, the rain, then the wind, then through you.

“A storm of stampeding feet with great scales and ornate feathers heads northeast. Lock up your windows if you wouldn’t like them to run through your home in anguish at the extinction of the reverence for nature,” I would’ve said if I was still a weathercaster on a news show. At least, if that news show was cool enough to allow me to say something so spiritually real.

Even the dark sky hung heavy outside after. There’s a certain sense of mourning; but again, it’s not their extinction they’re mourning.

Walk on the grass. Your ancestors, in every sense, did it.

Walk on the grass.

Comments

[mackerelgray]

Ohhh, that was moving. Walk on the grass as your ancestors did.... I'm not as connected to the past as I could be, honestly - it's not like Biscuit knows it's supposed to be dead, not when it's alive! - but this still spoke to me. You paint a picture with your words! No wonder you were prized on the air. Thanks a lot for sharing <3

--Max (he/they) (and also Biscuit, in a way, though it's trotting to the kitchen in search of fish sticks as I type)

[heart_and_crown]

You made my heart soar with the comment about being prized on air—despite my issues with my station, I did actually like reporting. Glad I can still make the weather interesting.

I’m happy you liked it! Give that raptor some fish.