Saffron and Sage

At times one of the adolescent girls or boys who go to see the weird egg monster does not go home to weep or rage, does not, in fact, go home at all. Sometimes also a man or woman much older falls silent for a day or two, and then leaves home. These people go out into the street, and walk down the street alone. They keep walking, and walk straight out of the village of Arrecife, through the beautiful gates. They keep walking across the spider-run health spas of the world. Each one goes alone, youth or girl, man or woman. Night falls; the traveler must pass down village streets, between the mer-gulls with cinnamon-fueled hunger, and on out into the darkness of the field. Each alone, they go west or north, towards the forests. They go on. The leave Arrecife, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us than the city of happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that is does not exist. But they seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from Omelettes.