“Bone & Blossom”

Once, he moved like a ghost through spruce and shadow—antlers wide as winter’s reach, hooves carving silence into snow. He drank from black lakes, tore bark with ancient fury, and watched the northern lights flicker in his reflection. But something—hunger, ice, or the slow bleed of time—caught him in the quiet. The forest swallowed the end without fanfare.

Now his skull stands like a shrine, weathered and hollowed, crowned in blossoms that should not bloom in such a place. Death gave him a second form—stiffened wood, sunlit bone—watching still. This is the elegy of a life once wild, now rooted in decay, where even ruin remembers.

“RANGER”

They used to park beneath these same stars—windows fogged, laughter breathless, a cassette humming some slow-burning tune through the dashboard. She wore denim and dreams; he smelled of oil, pine, and recklessness. This truck was their escape hatch, their chapel, their getaway car from the small-town gravity that never let go.

Now rust clings like memory. Grass sways through the wheel well where boots once slammed the door shut. The windshield catches starlight like it used to catch her reflection. No one drives it anymore, but it still waits—engine silent, stories loud.

This is what becomes of wild hearts and steel machines: they settle into the earth, one kiss, one bolt at a time, until only the night remembers.

“THE HOLDOUTS”

They weren’t meant to last this long. Bent and brittle, their petals frayed by frost and time, yet here they stood—lit not by sun, but by the full moon’s reluctant grace. Amid rusted metal and the silence of machines long gone cold, they bloomed once more, defiant and luminous.

A breath of summer whispered through the wreckage, soft as memory. The headlights are dead. The engines quiet. But these wildflowers—small, stubborn survivors—caught the moonlight like a secret, glowing in the ruins as if they knew no one was watching.

Decay took the world around them. But for one fleeting night, they bloomed anyway.