Listen to a podcast of JA Tyler’s “All These the Violent Children ( An Episode of Hills ).”
Princesses are in hills on the horizon. Princesses are in hills on the veranda. Princesses are in hills on the ridge of hills in the distance. Gently curving landscape, blonde braids spinning down the lawns. Yellow grass, yellow hair. There are princesses in those hills.
The children look up and the children see the hills. The children look up and the children see the princesses. The children look up and the children see the princesses and the princesses the children see are dead. They are not moving. They have blood sloughing from their mouths. They have no time in their wrists.
There are hills and the children looking at the hills are curious about the ways in which hair can be braided.
Ropes swing in from the sky. Ropes of hair. Hair in yellow matching the sun matching waving grass. The children wave.
The hills are dead princesses and the children know that if princesses are dead then these must be the hills that they have nightmared about. This must be the opposite of all the fairy tales. This must be a kind of spit out end.
The hills have princesses dead and in stacks and rows.
Children wipe sweat from foreheads. This is summer. Children wipe summer sweat. Flies buzz near brows; brows knit, the flies remove. These are hills where dreams have come up dead.
The children see their dreams dead on the hills, on the speck of canvas that is their distance. Flies and the sweat that they are wiping away. The hills that have all of these dreams dead on them now. Princess braids, crowded round children in a distance. Sacred visions, dream destruction.
A child says, Those are what becomes of Princesses and the other children nod their heads in the up down of yes.
The children say Yes and it resounds.
