black skeletons [rolo]

[/font] yanni w/ roger
words,[/font] six ninety-five
notes,[/font] ROLOOOO[/div]

[/color] when she asked for an escort out to hunt for herbs. "if it's leaves you want, just go pluck some from the garden," one of them told her, apparently too stupid to know the difference between herbs and vegetable leaves. when thalo had asked a second time, they had relented, but not in the way she'd expected. she was met at the gate by the smallest of all the scouts, a thin little scrap of a boy named nite. thalo knew him enough to know he would be no help at all if something tried to attack them. (just in case, she had tucked her hatchet into the belt she wore over her dress.) the boy didn't look very happy to be joining her. he looked even less happy when he saw whom she was bringing along. dryad was the only gardener who could be spared to come along. thalo had hoped for alexander's company, but apparently even he was considerably better at tending plants than the red-haired girl. as they exited the base, dryad was the only one of them who seemed remotely excited.

thalo had been told which direction greenville was, but nite had never been there before, so it wasn't long before they were mostly lost. the boy kept finding things he'd read about and explaining every little thing about them, like what color public mailboxes most frequently used to be. dryad was trying to flirt with nite, somewhat unsuccessfully. the boy seemed torn between smug acceptance of her flattery and annoyance over her incessant giggling. thalo wished she'd just gone out on her own again. she had hoped that by bringing dryad, she might be able to teach some of the gardeners about herbs and perhaps begin growing them in the garden. she figured now, though, that she would be better off taking seeds back to alexander and explaining it all to him. she doubted dryad would remember a word she told her. she turned away from the others as nite explained loudly what a storm drain was. the three of them were surely the worst of any at their jobs. thalo had not even told the other miners she wouldn't be working that day. and weren't gardeners supposed to be interested in plants? and, certainly, nite would be terrible at bartering with loners.

they didn't make it more than a few blocks further when nite began fussing over a heap of old metal that he told them was a transportation machine called a car. babbling continuously, he climbed in and later under the metal contraption, gazing wide-eyed at the various rusty bits and doodads. dryad leaned against the car, watching the boy not the machine nor their surroundings. thalo, on the other hand, had had about as much as she could take. the sun overhead was beginning to burn her pale cheeks, and her cotton dress felt like heavy and thick. she wandered away from the others, clutching her empty basket.

she didn't like the eerie skeletons of buildings that rose all around her. they reminded her of a dead forest, standing as a memorial of once was. at least the base had been consistently lived in for the last century. the city, on the other hand, frightened her more than the mines or wild moose. thalo wouldn't want to be there at night, when she felt certain the spirits of the lost were certain to wander their desolate streets.

a full block from where nite and dryad were still lingering over the metal heap, thalo crouched over a street corner. carved into the cement were two words, beaten and barely readable. she traced their shaped with one pale finger. had those words survived on their own all this time? she turned her head to the side to read them. washington st. what did the "st." mean? she thought her father had once taught her that "st" was the short way of writing "saint". "washington saint," then?

despite the empty city rising around her, thalo crouched alone on the street corner, paying little attention to the world around her.

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