But a darkness still hung for a deficit still lingered. It was hard to place a finger upon precisely where; looking down to find one’s pawfists still unconsciously clenched only added to the mystery. An armchair psychologistroo might interpret such unconscious muscle clenching as indicative of anger held & therefore of a need to fight (but physically? or metaphysically?); yet another interpretation could just as well unveil the desire to hold on to, the desire to not slip up away into: up into the air and from a hard-earned & still-fragile standing arrived at, say.
There were some problems with the volcano island upon which The Rooster & Platy stood— chief among them: the tornado forming above. Accordingly, not all was idyllic & bliss; however contrary such newfound, caution-laden feelings may’ve been to the so many openly hopeful feelings felt so very recently prior, just days back. This was also to say: anything accomplished merely seconds ago by The Furry Fury could be unaccomplished in mere fractions-of-a-second flat; it does happen that doers who do can slip into recidivism until all of their so-recently-done doings are all but entirely quite suddenly undone. A flat black & oblong cloud presently whirled high overhead, beginning to dip a vorticular protuberance downwards. It was shaped not unlike a stiffening Horse of the Apocalypse’s member, set to penetrate into our heroic pair’s present day & close future anon.
Yet K-Roo wasn’t quite looking upwards, and so couldn’t exactly quite see. Nevertheless & despite his not looking up, his perception of the atmosphere in which he strode having palpably changed was unmistakeable: whereas whence before upon the shoreline he’d felt his feet pressing into its sands with all of his formidable weight, he currently all-but-inexplicably felt his step step lighter & lighter still— his groundedness hence being in question. Until when by glancing back & perceiving an increasing shallowness over the course of his footprints’ path behind him did he recognize a steadily-progressing lessening to their depth outright: it was as if the atmosphere around him had been administered of an admixture of helium, invisibly pernicious & drunken rooclowns having let the valves of their unfailing balloon-filling tanks run free & amok.
But even as all of the aforesaid stood the case: the feeling was, in part, pretty amazing; and felt, on a level: rather desirable. Like strolling a drifting moonwalk across the silver moon as one always sees space astronautroos doing upon the silver screen, the limiting chains of gravity shed. Nevertheless, the fact of this sensation having just manifested in the baseline of his existence— i.e., within his so-recently-established & newly-grounded day-to-day, no less— made him realize something was likely amiss.
And so it was at this moment then that he looked back once more to assess the footprints he’d been leaving, only to find that they were gone.
And then it was at that moment there that the famous & nigh-kitsch poem Footprints in the Sand came slamming into mind, like a tidal wave & a brusque headlock both. For not only were K-Roo’s footprints not there, but neither were those of the Christroo in the poem; all that was seen was a barren beach. It was thusly apparent that neither walking nor carried was he, but rather: just anotheroo whose travels made no discernible impact upon the world, yet all the while did his said travels absorb its resources all the same.
§
The troubling conditions behind this fact were obvious, perhaps even starkly so: K-Roo wasn’t fully there. Perhaps it was that with all of the comings & goings of his bounds he, at a certain point, didn’t realize how he, at another & soon-after point: failed to return to the ground? Or perhaps some other reason? It was difficult to say— many arguments could be made, and then those same arguments argued against. Yet however it happened, the defining place in a roo’s life of the fertile earth below hadn’t changed: fixed firmly beneath one’s waking feet or else set softly behind one’s sleeping back. [Though even as the prior sentence’s unassailable assertion is made: as regarded formulating unilateral proclamations— such as how “Groundedness is prerequisite to creating any works of any lasting meaning”— both K-Roo & Platy knew such statements could only be relative, would always be incomplete: for there were indeed times when “compromised” states of being could & did, in fact, now & again segue or lead into significant revelations and/or cultural productions; both had borne witness to or engaged in as much before, to oftentimes positive effect.]
But such effect registers changes over time. As for K-Roo & Platy & for the moment, those days were gone. No judgement was passed upon those still in the midst of their own Those Days; yet it was also duly to note that such days weren’t for the present their game. The problem at present was the whirl of air pulling them up & away from the world they’d only so recently, finally come into a closer contact with.
§
And it was a significant problem. For if this present tornado was, in fact, the dark member of one of the Apocalypse’s Horses, in what manner & by which machinations would it inseminate its world-altering, future-effecting seed? Probably: in the worst, most devastating of ways possible: by a pulling-up & a driving-down, & all at once; an inquietude & instability perpetually resulting, setting a torrid, discordant condition unceasingly & infinitely.
Given as much, K-Roo could thusly expect his footprintless-spacewalk-heights to be followed not by deeper footprints in due time (compensating for his absence’s duration), but rather by the arrhythmically repeated imprints of his body’s pliant, wingless-snowangelroo-esque outline cast of gruff, violentsharp hurls back down into dampened sands, over & over & until an undefined end; each successive sandprint bearing less definition than the preceding, of course.
§
With each of their steps in our sands such Horses record not hoof-shapes as we might picture, but the shapes of the bodies of those roos met & judged in their eschatologically-charted paths, forming final & impermanent records trailing, for awhile, behind. And after that while: all disappears into the fact of the natural order of things; the natural order of life. Erosion & evolution; a pair. Perfected.