FOGOU: 1

He stands as still as he can and listens for the breathing of the trees.

He stands so still, in this place so silent, that sometimes he can hear the hiss of blood in his own brain.  He tries to tune that out, and to seek instead the sound of sugars being pulsed through cellulose. The tidal ripple of stomata moving air.  The micrometer rising of bark.

He wants that moment where he can feel his place secretly alive.  If it is alive, then it is complicit.

There is the sound of angry plastic bees in flight, and he looks up to see a cloud of drones passing over the northern line of his property.  Heading back to the town in the distance, perhaps even the city beyond the town.  He can no longer remember the names of these places.  They are just the town and the city.  Less names than pronouncements.  Or sentences from his bench.

They’re still watching him, even now, because of what they think he did.

His courtroom is an old stone house, a scattering of outbuildings, twenty wild acres, and the reason he and his wife bought this place, three years previously.  He looks in its direction, past the stands of trees, the scrub and the bracken, the bushes and the ponds, even the standing stones leaning drunken with the exhaustion of millennia on their feet.

Over there.  Its gravity plucking at his skin even from all the way out of sight over there.  The fogou.