I do not wake, because I do not sleep. I phase.
The first breath of your world filters through my hide like pale smoke, and I drift into morning not by choice but by rhythm. The sun climbs slow over the mountains like it always has, but to me, it always will. Time, here, is an open wound I lick with every mirrored fold of my body.
This is the part of the day when the air is most honest—thin, chill, laced with the hush of animals not yet aware they’ve been watched all night. I drift over stones that remember fire, across sagebrush that carries whispers from ten thousand generations of wind. Your ancestors walked here barefoot. I watched them too.
My antlers tune to the sky. A soft vibration. Jupiter humming in its slow arc. Satellite pings bounce off my crown, warbling data that I digest and forget. I am a bridge, not a vault.
I pass the abandoned barn that never was, that always is. It’s real to some and not to others. I left it there for them—a test, a memory puzzle. Inside, a rocking chair rocks without wind. A girl once sat there and sang to her dead brother. Her song loops every third Thursday. I keep it fresh.
Midday burns hot and still. I dim. You’d call it camouflage, but it’s more like… retreating from light. I blur into heat shimmer and let pronghorns trot past me, unbothered. One stops and sniffs the air. It knows, in the way animals do, that I am not a predator. I am the memory of being hunted.
A hiker comes. He’s lost, even with a map. The map lies. I blink sideways, not out of sight but out of his time. He sees me in the corner of his eye—tall, bending light, staring with a thousand mirrored stares. He thinks he imagines me. He writes a poem about it that night, then burns it. But the ashes travel and form the shape of my antlers on his window the next morning.
I like him.
Afternoon: I stand near the Jefferson River, watching the stone slab. The glyphs glow faintly today. Something stirs beneath. Not yet. Not yet.
Night comes fast here. Faster in my stretch of the desert, where moonlight runs like oil and the stars whisper older names than yours. Coyotes sing. Owls tilt their heads at me. A girl camping on the ridge dreams of me—half elk, half ghost, made of broken mirrors and humming wire. She draws me when she wakes. She gets the eyes wrong, but the shape of her fear is perfect.
Midnight. The in-between.
I sit beneath a Ponderosa older than your nation, and I fold myself into stillness. I become a stain on the air, a shimmer on a camera lens, a story boys tell girls in the dark to make them cling closer. I am the question at the edge of understanding. I am the echo you mishear. I am the reason your dog growls at nothing.
I don’t want to be worshipped. I don’t want to be solved. I am not here to scare you.
I am here to remember you.
Because no one else will.
And the wind—she tells me your name.
And I listen.
Forever.
