For her, the sky was a new burden; its vast capacity for dreams shackled, recessed by a dulling curtain of rainclouds. Wire, coiled and barbed, leered down from sandstone blocks stacked into prison walls. At the base of the structure, the girl stood. She was barefoot and sinking in the sodden morass; and so too were the stones, the heart of that wild place lashed back at civilisation with miring subsidence.
"Oykot?" Her famined frame, less than a swirl in muddy dress, fell against the fortification. All she had, the brittle remnants of normality, shattered on the insurmountable divide. The innocent umber of her palms scratched the mossy grain. With a fingernail, she could carve divots, but she hadn't the lifetime to get through to the other side.
He was inside the walls, she was outside the walls. Denying her, holding his thoughts in his heart, would spare them both the dread of consequences. To pin back the desperation of their passion jarred as a paradox, and so he called back to her with spittle and strain, "I'm here, it's Oykot! Naixa, don't stay here! You've got to go, you've got to get out of here!"
"Why did they take you away?" she screamed back, her ankles swallowed by the slop. Naixa beat at the wall, lesions opened along the edge of her fists. Blood spread over the damp grit.
"I stole something, Naixa" The ruined boy fidgeted at the foot of the enclosure, unable to withstand the drowning absence of hope. "I took some food from the plantation," he whimpered, his voice cracking, the contradiction of pride and shame seeped through their division and weighed on Naixa's heart. Had his been the only empty gut, then he would have found a solution at the end of the rope, but Oykot rebelled only to feed his wife and their children.
Occupation came as the turbulence of a storm; and yet, resistance was clear in the placid morning pools. Marauding expansion cleared forest and erected prisons along the periphery of the Xangu Basin. Bloody eyed conquest drove their ravenous colonial expansion, slave labour and rich earth made settlement ambrosial to the sweet tooth of their ruling class. Felled trunks were stacked aside, ready for extraction. Checkered cash crops blanketed swathes of old native hunting grounds; those dear places, the trees slept through generations while kids came and grew. Together, those woods were where they watched the small free birds fly. Under the mahogany, Okyot and Naixa were sure they'd never see an end to it all, their love.
"The warden's coming! Oh gods! He's coming!" His little rabbit heart pumped a frantic beat to the tingle of his feet.
"Okyot!" she cried, "Oykot!" she screamed. And she scream again. A painful wail set the little finches to the skies.
"Run! Nothing matters when you're free. Just run!"
Naixa pulled her feet from the ground, gasping with grief. She ran, but stumbled, her feet caught roots and troughs when she looked back at the shrinking prison behind her. The tree line beckoned her with the verdant lure of safety, she could be hidden in the chattering undergrowth. Yet, Oykot, left behind, anchored her agony with the hopeless of his plight.
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