Metal

Disappointment tastes like metal in the mouth. So a metal piece.

Metal, ore, iron in the earth. Rust, red, black metal rusts, bright metal tarnishes. Men in green jerkins who mine silver, pulling it out of seams of black ore. They make arrows of silver, a shining sacrifice when they find their target. Or they use iron and find their arrowheads again using magnets.

Iron has a taste in the mouth, a taste like rust. A taste that black currants can mimic. The taste of blood is iron, a taste in the mouth. Blood is red, like rust. She tries licking rust from the old post, to see if it tastes like blood. The skies are always gray in this part of the world, where the iron rusts and the taste of blood is in the mouth. People wear iron shoes, or iron nailed to the bottom of wooden clogs. Everyone is magnetically attached to the earth because of the iron.

It's a noisy town, clanging shoes and iron doors. Wood is at a premium. Leather is rare, too. But iron is so common the dust is red in this town. House have iron doors and iron shutters. It's dark inside the house, but these people are adept at seeing in the dark. They can see in the mines and in the dark houses and in the woods made dark by the heavy growth of evergreens and spruce. They eat a lot of mushrooms, cooking them in iron pots that leave a strange taste in the mouth. They shoot hares with silver arrows, right through the eye, and cook every part but the feet. The skins make slippers for children. Wooden clogs with iron soles are a rite of passage, given to girls as they begin to bleed. Red blood. A strange taste in the mouth. The forges of blacksmiths light the interiors of some of the houses behind the iron shutters.

Originally written Nov. 5, 2002