The Edge - EDrisko

The Eyes of the Dragon
Laguna Beach, United States
Dedicated to my lost lover, whoever you are.
The Eyes of The Dragon
By Coral
A weathered, old wrinkly woman living beneath a great tree tucked in a child and thought of a bed time story she knew well, opened her mouth, and here are her words.
Prison (she said it stuck her to a chair like a boring lecture, and to let the story emerge), like you are ill and stuck to this bed.
Once upon a time, a girl was born in an oasis far, far away from all other places. Bad luck shadowed her steps, and she could not escape the boundaries of a birth land without mercy.
(Belief in the blooms of beauty gave her a key to survival)
In the midst of the unvarying sand bloomed a fountain circled by a green, frothy life. The little world was surrounded by so much sand, the sort of sand where nothing grew whatsoever, and no one ever arrived or went away again. The sky never clouded or rained, and the sun was always very, very hot.
The people who survived here arrived riding the crest of a great flood many generations now gone. The sea left them here on the oasis and went away again, disappearing down into the thirsty orifice of the earth.
The stranded humans grew blossoms of mutation to conquer death and root themselves to life of the desert fountain oasis. The family tree branching out across time did not look like any tree of people anywhere else in the world. Separation from everyone lent the adaptations that stuck them successfully to the land they all shared together by marriage and children to be truly unique. Their beauty was nearly insurpassable. Like the fountain of clean, bright, beautiful rainbow-forming water appearing in the great center of nowhere, the people too were a balm to the eye.
Large silver eyes began at either end of the skull and met nearly over the nose. Long, curving slits surrounded in lashes growing thick and long as water rushes and bordered by small, flaring eyelids. The eyes sailed like canoes across the burning, blazing sunbright sand without scorching, as your eyes and mine would scorch. The eyes were a peculiar color, dark with grey underneath which caused the blue sky to be reflected - a hoary brightness like a well-shined tea set. Eyes such as this were set in purple skin strange and cool to the touch, and like a talc. But if you rubbed your thumb across this skin, a shiny trail emerged, and here the skin looked and felt like silk. Beautiful skin shaded by the land it was.
Pearly teeth sprang from beautiful, wide sensual mouths, warm and velvety, rimmed with full, pouting lips. Dark tongues danced out concepts from behind the line of teeth. Voices were modulated for pleasure and drifted forth orderly words scented with a twist of green citrus on vanilla wind, and from these ideas wafting forth the people built a civilization and a form of beauty.
Hands moved during discussions with the grace of birds, planing out shapes of air and setting them to spin. The hands were strong but quick, large and agile, able to catch and send life to supper all at once. The nails were thick and remained intact for digging roots and cracking the hard shell of a nut. But they were also good for bringing out music of a most delicate variety from lovely instruments made of strings and wind and for reaching long into the distance.
Hair burst forth all over the place and flowed down about the face in the midst of chaos and with strength. The strands gathered themselves into thick locks, which cast shade over the face and neck but still left room for passing air. Peeking from this vision, the ears came to a charming peak. The hair held a bit of oil in order to deflect the sun, which created a metallic reflection and shine. Uncombed as it sometimes was worn by the elders, it made odd catches and whorls and knots and grew rough and frizzled over the years. Combed as it was on the young women and men, it swung heavy and smooth. Eye sweet and luscious.
The human lot needed little water to live. Their kidneys were quite different from your kidney or mine and were as heavy as stones. Lung bags had a filtering gauze to protect the delicate pink membranes from the fine sand grains constantly swirling inside the breath on the hot, dry winds.
These traits were common across everyone. The desert drew physical beauty forth such as would make you weep. The vitality of the people shone sexuality and fertility. Perhaps the most desirable people in the world, they were also cruel and hard as the desert.
***
Ch2
A passing hand painted the expanse of sky with quiet stars and rivers of fading color. In the sudden relief of dusk, the people came together. A storyteller emerged from the shadows of his secrets and gave his (wc?) knowledge to the people. The fountain had always been there, would always be there. As long as the people performed the sacred sacrifices. The myths were dropped like small stones into the incense-laden twilight. The storytellers trained apprentices for full lifetimes in order to keep the chronicle intact within the right atmosphere. These were poured night after night into the waiting pitcher of the ear. In this way, the people learned to respect the limits of the water that separated their small world from the dead sand all around. The water was sweet. The stories were many and varied and full of instruction and magic.
There were songs sung to respect and soothe the spirits. The plants were beautiful because they were generous. They were fed with aged manure normally and also with meat from the sacrifices twice a year. Water is sacred and we are hungry and the ground is hungry and we must find a way, they once said. The stories wove mystique and meaning into everyday life.
The trees of the land had received love from the hand of life's painter. They were colored every which way with shades of life. Flowers on top of leaves, a nut and a red fruit. A yellow butterfly of the land took shelter from the winds inside little caves found in the low, bushy trunks. There were sweet-faced fruit bats and also colorful, little birds which hopped and twittered and which never left and could be tamed. Everything produced madly nearly all year round, except when the winds blew strongest and the trees put away their leaves and went to sleep. If populations of human were kept logically in check, all could eat. There are other ways aside from the way of the blood, it was decided through time and carried on the tide of stories. But we like blood and we hold lust to be a virtue. We see no need to stop ourselves from having what we like as long as we keep the sacrifices.
Drowsing away the long days and sleeping in the arms of the land, an animal lazed. The animal gave a milk and a meat and a hide for homes and clothes. There was plenty of food and water for all if human numbers did not rise too high and threaten the boundaries.
The hunger of the earth and the ghost of the starved bones of yesterday called for blood in the dust.
More girls were born than boys, a ratio which hovered around 5:1. As infants and fetuses girls are more rigorous. Perhaps this is why. More little girls made it in this harsh world of sun and mutated genes. Or perhaps the people made extra children solely to meet the bloodthirsty demands of their own thirst. A graveyard of children and wives supported the greater survival of the civilization from underfoot.
A little boy could not be sacrificed unless there were something clearly wrong with him.
A mother and father were urged to sacrifice the baby girl. When this happened, they got to drink the blood and use the body to improve their personal soil, which meant a richer harvest because so very little existed to increase the soil quality in terms of minerals and biomass and so forth. Compelling stories wove through the fabric of reality. Here was a logical solution to the problem, started in unsupported passions of bloody lust, deep in the mouth of cruelty, and given up to the harsh demands of the same desire.
A jewel of beauty caught the eye like a lure and held fast a life past the first year of girlhood. When all was said and done, the girl to boy ratio was quite close to 2:1 after the first year, down from 5:1. To survive for as long as she would, a female must keep fast to the lures of beauty and hook fancy.
The girls who shone like stars with an inexplicable drive to live on in the face of heartlessness opened their tiny voices in the night and screamed to the billions of stars their wish to be picked up and fed. Perhaps an unheard and unseen entity heard their innocent cries. Perhaps the same heard the silencing of these small voices and mourned. Perhaps not.
The people's elders separated a quarter of the girls from the rest at age six and sacrificed them beneath the fountain. These were girls who didn't smile, the ones who exerted less productive energy or were slow at their tasks. The ones who didn't have the heart to shine in order to appeal to their judges for their lives and future, these were the ones turned to blood rations. The survivors tried harder, shook their charms before the eyes of pleasure. A trait for vibrancy was preserved, and also passed on was the heart to grow with no hope. Some of these little ones learned to sing joy. Song could beguile a heart into forgetting fear and could win a few more years of life. The terror was not so present when the sound pushed everything out.
In a small world of changelessness except the season, the flowing liquid of blood became poetry. The stillness within was lit by the emotions played by visual flow. The elders hummed within their throats and cleared them, licked lips that really ripped into flesh to drink. That’s when the love songs stopped.
The ceremony was simple and efficient, appealed to mystic ritualism. Emotional states were created which led to trance and frenzy, as had been chosen by time for enrichment of the pleasure of release. Four points around the fountain, connected by square tiles foretelling the exact day of the ceremony by lineup of sunset with the orientation of the circle of water. Here were four straps, to hold down the girl’s limbs, and another, to pull her chin and eyes to her crown. Four stone alters connected by four long channels surrounded the bubbling fountain along the square. The channels below the throats carried the blood down and across the sweet waters to be gathered into a tank. The symphony of color and flow, the dancing, the music and the incense, at that time of intoxicating change of season when the winds let down for a few months and a stillness fell through the body and all grew golden and simple. Cups were held to lips and eyes were closed with pleasure.
A soft stroke of the clock for the ones who survived chimed, now shocked and frightened into a new submission. That very same day, the living 6 year old children had been placed into group bunks where they spent the remainder of their childhood sleeping in ordered slats piled atop one another.
The wheel of the seasons turn, and then once more. Chime out time.
The winds began to pick up again. Here the humans became anxious en masse and move quickly, seek shelter from the blowing sand. The weak felt their souls picked up by the wind and blown to crumbling dust in far dunes of sand without life. A murmur of fear rose with the wind and fluted through lips, a reminder for caution and a need bobbing in the rising tide of unease. The stories were serious now, colored with melancholy and privation. The winds brought sands that buried and the tent flaps were hung. The winds brought death to visit for a time, and they marked his arrival with sacrifices and a festival. Protections had been built that still held, and all lived almost safe from the wind - except in the stories that reminded. The stories told of fallen trees and buried crops and breath stolen from the old, the babes, and the animals. Death came riding his wind at this time of naturally rising blood pressures. The desire to have a secure shelter meant a split of less attractive or slower or disliked girls, and a shuffle of the other half, a deal. The flow of blood like wine released into waiting cups, put to hungry lips. Then came catharsis. The sacrificed were bound and delivered again to thirst. A desire to perpetuate beauty, and a desire for relief.
A few men became healers and stood apart wailing the losses into the abyss of endless open space. The rest of the people celebrated murders, eating screams like candy and drinking to the coming peace.
Following the ceremony, the ratio of boy to girl was near equal.
Last sacrificed were the aging wives of men wanting a new, younger wife whose turn had come up. These had no children under six living at home still needing a mother. The older women were somewhere in their twenties, suddenly thrust into an unwanted adulthood and death’s waiting arms.
Seasons of wild wind storms soon were coming, and the rising energy quickened the great fear: obliteration of water. Life wiped clean at once by a giant cloth. The sands came. The fountain tinkled pleasantly into the night.
All held a cup to their lips again. The bodies would be food for the plants. The madly fruiting tress put away color and slept till the worst of the winds passed. The stores put away in solid caches were full. There were new wives coming soon to fill the tedium of empty time. The winds brought shifting sands that buried, and all need be inside. A new year was begun within the tents now isolated by piles of sand blowing in drifts across last year’s work and the sleeping plants.
The dark anticipation came in the door with the fall of night, as the stars winked on one by one, and then a great blast of moon hit the oasis until it were a colorless stage. The tight clasp of the sweet unknown thing, the first sweet adoration – that was coming now. The blood was drunk and gone.
The little survivors were given to their new guardians. Feasts were laid and costume and paint freshened and dance and song makers ready to go. A hunger satiated, a sigh of replete contentment. There was still more to come this night. The rising energy a tide, bearing forward the surviving women on silver platters, rode its crest. In happier societies, the women would be joyful and happy on their wedding. On the oasis, they were afraid, for now they were without any protection, delivered to the hungers of men with newly empty beds and months of emptiness surrounded by screaming storms. There was no love in this land lost. Women were animals, and men used them only as long as their service had more value than their flavor. All the women left wanted life, as their hearts beat a tableau for survival. Through the windows of the visionary eye existed another universe, untouched by vampires, and it was beautiful because it was sweet. In the universe of the forgotten Eden, painted by God’s hand to provide a background of your own fantasy, where things are very nice. A thousand escapism fantasies wandered the land, twirling in the wind. There were screams.
Fizzing fellowships of missing links bore open barred doors of revelry and invited antics and glees. The living 13 yr old girls were split and shuffled between two groups of men in the midst of the party. The more delicate beauties were grasped into the fingers and hungers of the older venerable men who had watched their old wives earlier that day flow away to make room for a new appreciation and pleasure, and these fellows had more developed hungers and could better use the promise of unmarked fantasy appearing as validation of their own ego worth in the face of the public eye.
The lost girls were un-mourned. Men waited with anticipation for their chance to take a new girl home, to be a central player in a new drama on an old stage. The wait between wives was seven years if there was a child, or more for if there were more children, which is an endless time to a people who do not form long term attachments to human life but only to their own survival on the land. Enjoyed, tortured, murdered. Blank slate and new absorption. New one inducted into the tent, then gone. One or two men who had won a special status would be allowed to take a pick, and they uncorked the riotous party by performing a public sex show upon their new wives. They gave thanks to death that they were born by special favor into the comfortable seat of power. The rest were - untouchable and soon forgotten, expendable blown away on death’s wind. Dust.
The rest were assigned in a lottery of rattling bones and flashes of fire in the eyes, the night sky wheeling above and a feeling of dizziness and nausea, the sound of the hunting cry of a giant bird of prey shaking all their hearts like cymbals, and starfire fell all around. The second group of girls were handed out to men of 16 years, first time husbands, accepting their assignments like a poker hand. A handsome and cruel people they were. The specter of death put away his scythe for a season and rode on his way, followed by his train. All went into their changed homes and closed the flaps.
The fountain shivered up.
I don’t know what you expected, dear reader, when my happy tale beginning in woe was begun, for the world can be a dark and frightening place. Lucky, it isn’t always.
Chapter three:
It was, in many ways, an ideal world for a man who does not need love. Life continued bravely forward, having all dreams and wishes fulfilled and regrets buried. But not all men were considered worthy to receive this gift. The 13 year old boys were divided into two groups and set up in separate bunks of roughly equal number. The ones who showed promise as yeomen and who got along best spent the following years learning to plant, to build, to husband animals, and the ins and outs of daily oasis life.
The restless, the violent or troubled, the antidisestablishmentarian, the adventurer, the least favored and those who wiggled in their seats during lessons were put into another group. These boys were usually shorter than the other boys. For some reason, the oasis people preferred tall, thin reedy people, so these were the boys who were usually kept to become farmers. The rest were thrown away.
Even faced with the relative hopelessness of the coming journey, latter boys were involved in games of courage to occupy hope and brawn and skill. The next three years, they learned to navigate the desert harshness. They were driven to achieve in order to earn a settled place again in the tribe if return was braved, to be allotted a choice wife, to contribute to the store of mysterious stories. Those who didn’t concern themselves so much with the settling down now threw themselves into dreams of later and learned as much as there was to be shown. Here were the nightmare wayfarers of legend, flung from their own land to yours.
Laden with legends and maps and supplies of food and water and much cheerful laughter came: goodbye. They set out in little groups to seek the far oasisese marked on maps by nearly meaningless points. The little groups split apart to get through the maze to find their life’s worth. Most of them never found the string of oasis that led out, and human bones littered the path like a many-branching road, with most paths leading only to dust.
When the winds came and blew away the softer stony grains, the bleached, white bones shone and shimmered in the hot sun like beacons pointing direction. The slight winds that blew away the covering sands were called holy at first, and then cursed by the dying survivor whose companions had been sucked away and left behind.
In this way men who were potentially trouble to the establishment were murdered without it even seeming like murder at all: so boys slept on and had pleasant dreams of grazing animals or of pirates.
Those that did find the island oasis, one after another, might find them dry as bone and soon became as such. Most died, but a few handfuls made it. The rest contributed their bones to the paths trod by death, leading them away. Most of the very few who did survive chose to leave the past behind and not chance a return.
Some very few grew homesick and sought status waiting in the fountain land. As often as every five years or scarce as every fifty, a brave man or small band would return with a bag of treasures and a mouthful of colorful stories. These were given hero status for life and trained to become elders. They kept supreme order and tradition intact for love of what they had earned. These were the ones who preferred ultimate power and status to being soldiers of fortune out there, eternally separated from the motherland.
“Why return?” ask many a shivering listener from beneath blankets who don’t see the appeal of the bright little sad fountain land. A return was braved because the chance to be idolized at home outweighed other enticements outside, such as shifting backdrops.
One year, a muted man who had not been considered much for anything returned after a long absence with wool blankets, a metal cup, some strange clothing, and three exhausted and half-sick females from the world outside. This was unheard of. As a reward, he was allowed to marry one of the strange women he‘d forced into the journey. .
The two remaining outlanders were set up like exhibits with open doors. Initially, they were enchanted by the beauty of the fountain land and is people. The original excitement with the experience faded with the experiences of that very first night.
This was a world from which to escape. Far away. Said a small girl to herself. She shivered and pulled her blanket about her. Legends bloomed.
Ch 4
Some laws of the land.
To rape a married woman was a crime punishable by dismemberment because married woman was claimed property of a man. Men do not share wives ever. They share girls.
An unmarried girl was unowned and thus public property, and thus rapes were permissible. A frequently raped girl was more likely to be chosen by a prestigious and wealthy man as wife and flaunted as a prize.
Provision one: if a man left a mark or scar on an unmarried girl, including upon her veins, he was severely punished for destroying private property. Thus he could use her only for sex, but not for deeper hungers, and the girls were to remain untasted. It became safer to kill a girl than to inadvertently mark her. Many girls mysteriously disappeared over the years, and this was another form of population control.
Provision two: wives could be scarred by their husbands at will and also drunk from.
The legend of man and his strange wife grew into a greater legend in provisos with his present relationship with her. They loved one another even after having children, and they stayed married for their entire lives. The woman looked very different from all the other people in the oasis with black hair and black eyes. He wanted her more than a new, local young wife even when this was frowned upon and he was offered a position of honor in the festival. He was the only one who had what he had and the others did not want a real wife but still envied him. They were always seen together talking. In this way, a new concept of love made a break in the flow of tradition.
The traditional way was kept and not challenged. So the pair were allowed to remain as a sort of curiosity piece.
Love brought chaos, but the small world remained unthreatened by change. Chaos had been formed into order. Men sacrificed their wives and did not miss them. Fathers watching their 13 year olds daughters put to death did not feel anything but a thirst for the taste of blood.
Why did this man, who desperately wanted to be accepted, keep the woman? Yes, the strange woman lit up his glory, was a living symbol of his achievements he held, a flame that could not be extinguished by normalcy. She kept his greatness in that fire she held in her hand to illuminate him. He protected her like a prized possession or a priceless treasure. The woman thrived under circumstances that would have killed you or I by developing a pleasure in her duties as wife. She enjoyed the slow pain, groveled prettily, and there was no doubt but that she loved the girl's father. The pair were nearly inseparable. Perhaps they were soul mates and had found heaven in a kernel of life clinging to the smooth lip of hell. Even to old age.
The two had love children. One is our protagonist. They were raised in the usual way.
As her belly rounded, the woman knelt and quietly dedicated her growing seed to a sacred ground. The father to be looked with pride on the strange and novel grace the woman provided his hearth.
~
A shaking utterance without a voice moved through youth in a quiet dream of visionary flames. The girl discovered her strange gift at the age of five, the first time she was raped. It was evening, and she had just finished laying a fire and lit a flame. A man came down on her, invisible and silent, a predatory monster.
Blackness fells all around reality. In her hands, she cupped the familiar, and she roared away the room when no one came and then. In her hands, she held the fire of her own desires.
Her eyes fixed on the tiny flames, and she discovered if she looked deeply enough, she could see strange men and women within. Within the flickering fire, she saw a band of men come upon a small, quiet village and ravage until nothing was left and no lives stirred among the ashes. It was her fear she saw reflected in the flames; but she felt both parts of the vision. She cried over the loss, but then it was all over.
Later, when the whole thing seemed like it had never happened, there was rage.
The man was swallowed from the story, but the window of fire remained open for her to climb from reality and escape for a holiday. Over the years, she sat again and again at her flames, losing herself in visionary rambles. Her little confused self collided with a larger truth night after night inside the fires; villages were laid to waste, women were consumed and massacred in ecstasies of sexual culmination, babies were buried to their necks and heads kicked away, holy places were destroyed. Even in her own mind, she could not stop them. She also felt the warm coming pleasure of the violent man's love of violence; she felt the pain and despair of the victims. She felt the whole world.
She was a perfectly balanced individual; through her veins ran the blood of the conquerors and the conquered equally, and she bore their stories in equal portions. She was at once the killer and the victim. She was both strong, and helpless before strength. She had no defenses against herself, and she could not be moved to pity her own plight. She cried and cringed at violence, but a lust for blood and chaos rose within her that tasted of bliss. Inside her head, a pressure grew. But she was a child of love, and her two sides bound.
She sat by the fire and felt the pleasant numb settle in as her walls fell away, and relieved of the burden of her inescapable life, her soul soured through time. These were her first wild rambles across the path of humanity, and she feared mankind. She could do nothing to reach in and protect the beautiful little glowing pearls of life being consumed by the waves tearing a dirty infertile trenches across softer, greener ways. But there was always the waiting pleasure and solace of numbness.
She remained strangely peaceful in the midst of so much war. She had the appetite and brutality stirred her, but her body quaked and hid. A part of her longed for the green peace of the little knolls slumbering peacefully beneath the humid twilight. As this longing collided with the thrill she felt at the face and forms of the arriving warriors, she found a ledge of beauty on which to perch. She sat and witnessed, become a pair of bodyless eyes carrying the force of her soul. She was balanced such that she could only stand poised on the dividing line, rocked with understanding amid the trample of feet and mud as her visions tore through her ghostly presence.
Calling from the ledge, both sides a smooth-rimmed fall into nothing on either side, she broadcast a desire for a friend thus stretched between the good and the evil of the world, someone with whom she could sit and sometimes hide her eyes and sometimes laugh.
There was no one like her in her world, and she was lonely. On occasion, she skated atop reality before the waves of war dragged her down again into the roil. She ran and hid from the pain in the grass. No agreement existed in her blood except a wild desire to live. She sought to escape the pain by riding the clean waves far above her experience, where the wind still smelled fresh, and then the warriors appeared every time, and she loved them and hid.
However, she wanted to give herself to not death but life. The alien whirled about her cage and sought an escape into somewhere green.
The tedium and effort of her life dragged her to the murky bottoms, where she lay down. Real predators arrived, attracted by her unique beauty, and fed their desires. But her soul was far away, seeking her friend.
At seven, the girl looked around and stopped to consider life. There were none like her here. Her eyes were green, her hair red, and her skin dark yellow. She was not completely adapted to the land as were the rest. She was raised like the rest of the girls, but she felt alien. Her uniqueness, in a hopeless land over which her distant parents walked together in a vision of far off, did nothing to protect her longevity. Her immature fantasies of worth withered upon rainless rocks.
The daughter was 13 and the sacrifice was approaching; she was at the center of a controversy. Some made a case she was too weak to survive, more affected by the sun and wind, and a drain. There was fear her children would also bear these strange weaknesses. On top of this, she made little effort to please, did not pretend to enjoy advances made upon her. It was easy to dismiss her to death when she would not act as was correct. And when the vintage of her blood was so rare. On the other hand, she was a sexual favorite of the men of the tribe. Many men coveted her, and each sheltered fantasies of bloody sodomies and her tears, as was only a husband’s right to experience. Her blood will flow in time, these men said. But first.
She wanted other worlds and quiet sleep under beautiful views. She had no liking for the choices offered in this little world.
~*~
chapter five
Dream Interlude:
At night, she dreamed of water. Cool water in great quantities on a quiet day. Vast expanses of salty water that curved on the horizon and met the sky gratifyingly. Rivers of flickering light ran down the roads of mirages and disappeared into the sun. She sighed and relaxed. Small lakes of reflected images turned. In all of them, she dove her burning body and swam. She dove like a seal and twisted in joy, a blue kiss. She cleansed herself of her far off beginning and sought her future. Contentment.
Then there was trouble. A storm. She was caught by the water and could not climb out. Holding her breath until her lungs ached, she struggled for her freedom, waited always for the point when she could not longer endure the pain and she was forced to gasp a plea for air from death. But always the rush of water that filled her lungs came and went like air, and she breathed. It was sweetness she breathed, and its brine made her whole. She floated on the tide toward far shores and disappeared.
Part two
chapter one
Stillness within a cave, subdued. A water drop. Another. Outside, the picked up and played about the mouth of air. Wind rose in vast songs, an exhalation from a dusty wanderer reminded of a happier times. Carrying the lullaby of the solitary people and the ghosts. This song was one of barren contentments, a drop of water in a stream, a sprinkling rain, a hot drink burning warmth into a frosty night, a face lost in the crowd and swept away. Of speaking to one’s own sorrow like a lover, of giving loss to the tides of nothing. Sudden, meaningless joy ! The invisible heard the sound and remembered they were unseen. And why. And how. The hardness of life, a bleak strip of a tree’s bark peeled away in the wintertime. There is comfort in such a thing, as there is comfort in a snow-covered field without tracks, as there is comfort in silence for ears grown accustomed to stilling, in the bleak and windswept colors streaking rock. In quiet sleep. In sudden respite from illness. There was a wash of happiness. In quiet ruin overgrown by trees. The last breath, the letting go. The rising wind carried tears, but louder came laughter around a blaze.
Warmth arose, and it was bundled into arms of spring and handed around the waking flowers.
The stiffening spines of old men relaxed, and once more, for the 50th time, they dreamed.
A velvet wood placed life into new while the old shed a winter coat and grew branches.
The wind came to a quiet, green wood covered in sleeping moss draped with humid dreams and the filled with the hum of small insects. White rounded stones covered with soft green patches made pillows for fallen logs and hidden doors set at the foot of giant arbors. The small things moved on silent feet. In the air danced small bits of light. Through these, larger winged jewels cut glittering trails. Living creatures clustered here in the green gloaming bordered by the gleam of gold.
The liquid swing of birdsong soaked the air with color, cloaked the foliage of sleeping monoliths with good vibrations.
Another melody rode on wind, and this tiny stream lifted the hairs around the ears of a giant, moldy hump and crooned, "Rise, rise, come now, rise. Come along, get up again." He shook away his dreaming and emerged, rising from a stump damp and green and covered in small decorations given in recognition of time spent solid and present. Tangled and creaking, shaking warm dirt from his toes and his ears, he left the pleasure of a bed in beautiful magic forest and ventured out again into the ugly world.
The little breeze amidst the croon drew him away from the languid curtains of green sleep. Led him to a stream, and then away. Another stream and to sustenance, and then past. Beyond that was the beginning of ugliness of the greater world coated in concrete. To his nose came the breeze, a smell of flowers to temper the human civilizations of educated people, pouring filth into the earth.
He traveled miles and months, crossed terrain from loveliness to places torn by different sorts of games. The moss dropped away, and the country began to dry, and at last he found himself in the midst of a desert that stretched endlessly before his heavy plodding feet. The ugly hideousness was broken only by humor and bones. The softness of his joints disappeared and cracked into pain, and his knees ached even when he lay down and stiffened. His hair lost the smell of fuzzy green dirt which he used to scent his dreams, and he began to smell like a mouse. Acrid like a wretched highway, and as exhausted. His shadow stretched on.
Always there was the fresh breeze, the, "come, come, hurry, follow," a little skip, and always there was the little bit of food, the mouthful of water. His mind became as blank as a plate. He had no more mind to understand or tell. The humans who met the man and fell away from his life held no understanding for his meaning inside their worthless hides. They spun away, unmoored from life and disappearing from this story’s memory.
Then there was the oasis of the fountain. His feet never left the stream of flowers. He watched his energy flow to waste across the hard ground. Months shaved grom his life. He watched the world fade to death, and all around human beings tore cruelly into delicate lives. He sighed and moved his bulk solidly through insanity.
So. Little. Left. for us. He thought.
chapter 2
A patter of sand drumming on the roof the chaotic rhythm of a storm. A black rose of squall bloomed. The stars were covered with hard pieces of flying stone. The fountain silvered up.
Evening fell hard, found the girl gazing into fire, trying her best to ignore reality. Night gathered in supremacy and spread darkness around to fill the last spaces of light, here where she lay her bed. The gazes of passing men fell hard upon her, heavy with the approach of sand. Sometimes she felt claws that were intentions rake her body with a shudder felt on both ends for different reasons through astral space. She ignored as best she could in favor of something her own, share with herself and speak to with a voice of glistening dark color in billows. She kept her focus, the tiny images of movement, lost her personal reality in the flicker. Perhaps, then, a black cat should scat and the moon rise. A lonely, merry widow put away a dish and a spoon. Hope bloomed in a flame for prophets. A new song wound its way up and rose into life not far off.
Those who gave up what they loved in order to sing out across death to find and follow life’s call, where those live with feet in the path of green ancient ground: what did you find? A fearful hope, voices quavering on the black wind, found, snuffed to silence, ignited once again. There love stood in a thousand forms.
The next day was the sacrifice and the giving event. Everyone talking said, I want my cup and my new woman and a new start. Tonight she was aware of the emotion of ambiguity; where would she be placed the following dawn? She concentrated on the beauty of the night and the fire of her own soul. Tonight, she held onto her flames to remember herself. She hadn’t done a thing to encourage the attentions of any of the men. In fact, she sought to disappear from their interest. She held onto her soul and begged for a way out. She had done nothing to endear herself to anyone, in fact. She survived. She had nothing to live for and look forward to, though she didn’t want to die, and nothing to do, so she prepared her mind behind that which engaged the flicker of the dance. Restless roaming of the night flew men, looking for one last chance with the woman or two who would soon become private property; tonight was called Halloween in happier places and a holiday in both. A night to celebrate the joy of the hunt, the pleasure of coming blood as tomorrow drew closer. Night would fall, was falling, had fallen, and tonight there was a strange taste to her mouth which hadn't been there before.
She chilled her fever with cold perspirations, shivered precious waters away.
Tonight, there would be nothing but fear for her strange flesh, and tomorrow fear for her life, and then the years stretched on. But these were thoughts she would handle later because now there was (were?) the solace of her flames. She existing alone, choosing complete absorption within and absolute indifference to the hungers that wove and danced outside with small snaps and dark laughs and curling fantasies. Or as much indifference as she could manage, startled into fear despite her objective. She found hope. Inside the flames, there were still beauties that lived. She hoped loud as possible beneath clenched, silent lips and downcast eyes, then sighed.
Overhead, storm roses bloomed. The girl noted them, and gathering strangeness was covered by the sudden rise of sand.
She covered the smallness of her existence and the meaninglessness of her life in dancing flames. She sat from afternoon to twilight to night and wove ribbons into life so it would be better. Above the sand, new rhythms rose with the clouds.
No place to hide. The girls older than six lived in communal huts and the night was long. The fields were orderly so there was little privacy. So she stayed where she would be least likely to disappear from herself, at the edge of the sand, where it was quiet and pleasant, and the contrasts were pleasing, by her fire, and she escaped further into her flames. Outside the beam of the reality of her soul’s presence, onto which she held for dear life, storms came.
She waited for one more moment on the edge of consciousness, and forgot to post a guard as she sunk into dreams.
A breeze romped over her face and brought the smell of flowers to a battlefield where she watched a bodiless hand curl in upon itself with the languid movement of a dying insect. Something was very wrong about this existence, she knew, but she knew nothing else.
A gift given outward, fully open, upward to a source of light meeting her own far, far above, that lit up a spiritual depth which filled the time against a backdrop of sand and sudden life.
Tolling bells, clean voices, clear notes, washing across the board of dreams, rinsing shooting stars and hard-handed honesty, but cracked, like our hearts.
And then she heard a voice, like the creak of a door, and slow within her head: "A firewatcher, here. A girl young and far from those who teach. Accomplished. I never expected…" Something wooden and alive created an echoing vibration of silver within a world suddenly blown up.
In her visions, human marched before a crowd of nearly hopeless youth and waved beauty. Be overcome. And rise again.
Across the fire she saw a pair of bright eyes looking in at her through a window opened like a perfect square into her mind, and for a moment she saw her figures dance in the air between them, and she understood that he saw. The figures left her personal and lonely sphere of mental isolation never before entered or seen by anyone. She saw he viewed her soul through that large face, larger than any face she'd seen, burned to a deep black and wrinkled with exposure like a walnut, like asphalt buckled in the freeze. Before she could fight this first viewing of her soul, twist her body in fury and maim this violation of her private entertainment which she valued enough to want to live, which was all she had of value in her life, a giant hand was upon her neck, and she was unconscious, her last thoughts of his mangled death. All who had touched her in the past had taken a mouthful from her small allotment of life, and they had only gone so deep as her skin. It was to keep him from harming this small kernel left of her own that she fought. Her small fists balled together with resolve. She did not yet know her soul was eternal and was afraid it would be eaten. But then her fists hung useless, as useless as a small life in the world of concrete ashes.
She was carried from the green island of life filled with beautiful people preparing for a celebration. Through the desolations of endless miles all around and then beyond. Where she had glimpsed beauty shining beyond the rising rivers of blood, still unharmed, there still yet was love. She was carried forth amidst a rainstorm, the first in the history of the land.
chapter 3
Over the years, he taught her the habits of the order of the Wind Warriors. She was placed in this life by mystical sources. Traveling soldiers. Servants of life. Warriors not for blood but for the creation and preservation of real beauty. Some were sent to aid the earth, others to humans as little deserving as she. They moved from natural pocket to city street covered with herbs and vegetables, venturing into the world accepted as reality only to fulfill a mission, as wild as a deer seeking a bush of wild berries. Only on wind's orders did they ever move through the dying tide of the homes of hopeless heartless humanity without green.
A dancing film of three dyed sheets winding through the air with insinuating, sweet beauty flapped on a clothesline.
Trees fell all over, flames rose, the air was rancid and sick, and food was scarce. Water was bitter. Life disappeared from the deep, creating pockets of watery wasteland scientifically termed Dead Zones.
The domesticized and therefore safe world of predators with diminishing resources crowded into epicenters of peaceful time sitting on salaries. On the surface of human badlands, lives rotted because. Voices cried forth for salvation but did not specific salvation from what. rarely was the request placed directly to the power that drew light like a spider from an unending abyss of darkness and created the delicate web of life within the universe. The sinking man entreated the flood and not the Hand that threw rain. The times were dangerous, and mankind lashed out at one another viciously, clothed in false smiles.
Older ways were rejected as fantasy and lost along with the ancient forests. The hardness of the land grew and was called reality and was coated in bright and useless decorations that gave no food and used up water. Life hardly struggled for a hold between the concrete slabs anymore. The genocide of life dying beneath the crush of this killer machine included perennial majesty. Purple grape wine were bled and replaced with cement. Lifeless salt wasteland bogs that arose were only good for burial plots. The land was no good.
The crush of man was a wine press spewing blood, and the girl's small reality was a refraction of nothing within it.
The signs of vibration from the Being with the power to begin and end is opposed by desire to turn this world into an abyss of lifeless death. Turn the world from a productive place to a land which was a wasteland of unproductive thirsty grass and concrete roads stretch in all directions. No wild animals roam.
She was shuttled into a secret order of mystery. She learned ancient secrets of the land’s renewal, even as God’s forests gave up their ghosts without consent on the altar of mankind’s hard greed.
Shallow, meaningless displays of power. The bolts of life slowly unscrewed. Beneath the cities, the land rotted and fell away from order, creating unseen caverns below buildings and roads and air moved beneath a thin coat of concrete underfoot.
Ignoring the attempts to create a stable world, God sighed over lifeless waters. Tigers screamed and launched out claws against the end of ancient laws.
Atop this crest of civilization, before the end fell all about in cracked shards, the old warrior murmured ancient secrets with a creaky voice. As the legend goes, the warriors receive orders from the breezes coming from the mouth of God Himself. It is said that God existed in fathomless darkness but created light within a fold, making the stars and dust, and here spun and danced reality. Even if humans succeed in eliminating life, the universe is untouchable and distant, cold though the lights are burning and dancing there in nothing. The alpha and the omega, forever out of the grasp of humanity. It is said God preserves eternal darkness beyond the stars in an inescapable abyss loneliness, a soul trap that could not be left. A roach motel for the soul. For this reason into the darkness the soul must not fly. The warrior is taught charily to differentiate the orders from the rest of the chaos to find the lessons of life’s preservation. Who were these creatures who preferred the poison-coated grass of a lawn to the forests of mystical beauty and lost fantasy? These were human. Could they leave behind the ways of total annihilation? Yes. And next: silence. A thin coating of mankind’s reflection of creation, lifeless and hard and evil, resting atop the murdered beauty formed by God’s own hand now sunken away.
Majesty cried out to God, and the pressure increased, and a terrible salvation held out His hand. A salvation of screaming life enduring atop the sloppy mess of flesh.
The warriors do not interact with other humans. In this way, the warriors remain free of human attachments and are ready to work wherever they are sent. Regular jobs are impossible to hold, as are lasting friendships and marriages, which is understandably difficult. The warrior walks down the street, and all turn to look, and then forget, as they forgot the ghosts of ancient forests closeted beneath their sidewalks.
Readers prod within themselves to seek the resolve indispensable in a good warrior. Ala Carl Jung, into the deeper recesses of the mind. Here lies the collective unconscious, the archives of human memory. Through here winds a clean stream of fresh water. Here is a place where good humans sit together in a mental fast of hope and kindness still.
One does not dig too deep to the place where gravity cannot be escaped (such as the fiery core of the earth and the suns) or fly too far into the night beyond where the stars end. These things are said often, to be mulled over after prayers and remembered forever. The rest of space and life is fair game. Golden alarm clocks are quiet for now. A dream enters the mind.
In a world of uninterrupted order, where basic hungers are met inside packages, exists a repository for prayers in the deep. Far below the predators and monsters is a safe place of clean, clear water protected by a secret door. But first, horrors and predators must be braved. Through this door the old warrior shuttled the young. Thus the warriors who dwelt within this frequency of life prayed every day that it be on earth as it is heaven. God painted landscapes, and they hung on the skies. The warriors were unknown to man and cities and the civilized blooms crunching down on the dreams beneath the hurrying feet of business.
The codes of chivalrous honor demanded an existence not easily found at this time of spiritual and natural poverty. The warriors were committed to themselves and God, and so they never followed a human master or political leader or king. They hailed from nowhere. They were no one.
Unless ordered otherwise, they lived alone resting between jobs somewhere green and fresh. Undertaking the training of an apprentice was a rare pleasure. Until then, the warriors were forbidden consistent companionship and a familiar bed. There are those who would crush out even what they love using the fear which pervaded the general human populace. The warriors remained secret in a world almost devoid of secrets. They moved through your lives quietly and disappeared. However, they were still human; rules were broken.
It was the wind that was the companion, the air that spoke and sang and laughed and kept one company, and the prayers that sustained. A clean and healthy path in the midst of hunger and filth and monsters. Unseen and dismissed by tired feet and wistful eyes and aching knees and fattening bottoms plumping on chairs before blinking computers all the day long.
Outside the press of a thousand cultures lay a fading simpler living. Here there were stil the wild places and the land. He taught her to fight, how to gather food from the land as well as from the streets. How to make an impromptu shelter and seek a safe bed. He taught her how to move about in the world undetected, invisible. The song of the invisible man fell from his lips, and she drank his wisdom like a baby bird. They meandered down a clear ribbon of awareness, a silver river leading to bridges of light stretching like fine webs over the abyss.
She learned to laugh. She learned to play. She learned the basic lexicon of happiness. She learned the nourishing sleep of one who is protected. She felt treasured.
Traveling through time, passing through lands of great beauty and terrible devastation, he taught. In the silence of movement, in the observations made and small fruits of labor completed, a trust grew between the two in a shared objective: a lifetime in time had chosen them. After a time, it felt as if only they two existed in all the world, and the rest of life was a backdrop for the drawing of their breaths inside together. As if they two were stilled in the center of a blurred movement that flowed in all directions. They were in complete isolation in a dim, brown memory of trust, and when she brushed the dust off her reflections of this time later on, found a sense of security in her mind's memoirs. He was a tree solid enough to lean against and protect her from all the blows bearing down on the winds that bring nothing good. He was kind and open and solid and she could act as she wished with him, even as she cried and screamed a tornado. To still her again, he taught her to listen over and over to the breeze at the center of her own perceptions. She was a child again, taught life's lessons anew as she let go of what she knew. Reality blurred and had softened edges, and there was a dream-like stillness inside the backdrop of war and the fast-fading wild fantasy of the green world.
Her visions dampened, and she sighed as her body began a revival from a long devastation. She found a way to hold her breath and see the kernels of beauty persisting in hidden pockets. There were new visions
One night, she caught the hand that had reached for her and carried her off to secret places where eyes still started wild and afraid. She pressed his knuckles to her lips and rubbed the skin across her cheek. She looked at him with eyes big and tilted, with love brimmed to tears for his soul, and she said my cup overfloweth. Because she was sweet and pretty at that moment, and because her lips were soft where she'd kissed him and her skin was smooth and pleasant, and because he had forgotten these things out of survival's demands, he drew her close. Because she owed him her healing and happiness as they had traveled together across the years, and her safety, she laid her head across his chest and hugged awkwardly. How carefully he had avoided touching her during those uncountable hours of training. It happened in this moment of closeness and friendship that he did not think to guard himself against the pleasure of companionship, and the pleasure overcame his beloved solitude.
She laid her ear to his heartbeat and lost herself in the sound and in the rise and fall of his breathing, his warmth. She felt that comfort she'd never known from a mother or a friend, or from her own visions, and after a while she sought to burrow deeper into comfort, and he held her while she slept. In those next hours, there was a new sort of quiet between them that was curious and happy like a new spring growth by a brook filled with black stones, and a new sort of seclusion that was even more interactive than before, like branches covered in spring blossoms swaying overhead. It never happened again. In the morning he had replaced his guard and was once again only a teacher. They never slept again, huddled for warmth and comfort. Her closest encounter with physical affection was brief. She was accustomed, and supposed to remain accustomed, to sleeping alone and unsoftened as her order qualified.
The next day, the breeze ordered she be sent to a master smith to be dressed in a fine set of armor plates crafted so that they fit like a second skin. She was to wear them day and night. Her armor was worn as much to disguise the lines of her femininity, which bumped from childhood to womanhood as attractive, as to protect her from attack. Over this she wore loose clothing of a hemp textile which withstood the elements.
She carried a short sword at her side, but the wind directed that she not kill anyone. The sword was for protection and not a tool to release her desires and rages. In dreams, she saw entities such as her fathers come and destroy and leave everything worse. She leave things better.
One morning, she awoke, and her teacher was gone. She was alone.
chapter 4
In the dry part of the year, wildfires ran across the land, jumped and danced and fell.
Her rages exploded again into existence with the loss of her teacher and her isolation. She did not like being alone. The charm of her terrible fire visions no longer fulfilled her in quite the same manner. She could no longer find the solace she held to be her center apart from reality. She wandered aimless. Her sword piece was heavy, and so were her armors.
Before her stretched an untrod wilderness of the future, and she was solitary upon it.
For a long while, she was a failure. That's the kindest way to put it. Mission after mission she failed. She was in a rage. She lost a fight. She was discovered and driven from a village with violence and oaths in the mistaken belief she was a monster. Another day, she would make a fatal mistake at a vital point and everything almost together would scatter apart again. The people she was sent to help often were no better off than before she was sent to help. Some seemed worse off. Or if she did succeed, her subject would be unpleasant because there had been chaos and missteps not evened. Boulders strew across the road. She was rough inside, and cold.
Always, the wind carried her away when she would stay and fight or wish to try again, or forced her to stay when she wanted with every fiber of her being to run and hide. She grew uncertain of her own instincts with no guide to keep her to the path. Her sense of defeat and failure grew so strong that she wanted to give up the secret, lay down and exist in a lonely hole of broken nothing.
She doubted capacity, along with the majority of people she crossed who glimpsed her fever-bright eyes and wild hair. And then: perhaps the warrior had made the whole thing up; perhaps she imagined the messages. Perhaps she'd lost the stream he'd taught her so carefully to follow and had tumbled into another, discordant and darker and wrong. These thoughts she nurtured to life in the garden of her psyche where she morbidly dwelt. Then the wind would lift her face. Before her eyes, a scarlet bird swooped.
Something forbidden and untouchable wove around her static field, and in the middle she was alone. Her appearance disturbed those she met. There was something incredibly seductive about the fiber of her movements. But there was also the disturbing eyes, which gleamed from her unwashed face like knives.
Loneliness was crossed by forbidden one-time experiences, strewing beauty like petals across the pathways of her memory. Many were drawn to her, and she allowed herself brief traveling companions, guilty of breaking the rules for a few pleasurable hours or months before the melting of the body into the night on different paths. She drank up gut gin rot with company met on the road. She danced the dance of circles towards goodbye. She smoked. She remembered to smile again, a lesson she’d been taught. She shook out her silver and bought little things to cheer her. They scattered across the path of her passing. Things got better after that.
A traveling companion scattered small gifts across her path, and she was grateful as they exhaled snaking whorls of thanks and blessing.
She found the secret, circular gatherings of the marginalized magicians, and here she learned the art of comedy so laughter could not be forgotten.
As she moved down empty roads, alone again, absorbed inside of herself so that she saw was blind. It appeared she engaged in a dance with her own shadow stretched before her feet to like a black carpet unrolling the miles she was engaged to trod. At some point a black puppy took to her heels and became like a second shadow behind.
Sometimes she would stop off at a tavern and pass the night inside, paying with coins she clutched in fingers and found in ways she did not know were wrong.
Traveling, she often wanted to rest and settle beside the brooks of twilight, but she was bound to movement in this time.
Footsore and an eyesore after the lonesome miles, it was no wonder she spooked the passing inhabitants. They had their dreams, and she nothing. From this arose a jealous desire like a twisted flower enduring a dream for protected ground and a constant companion to last a lifetime. At this point, she was all but useless to the ghosts she passed and was supposed to somehow help.
She saw things she had never imagined, and she felt a cruel streak widen. God was laughing at her and torturing her, showing her all that she never had, could never have, which would never be for her. When she could she laughed it off gaily and kicked her heels back to the road, her dog right behind. She was ok then. It was the other times.
The dog disappeared in a terrible circumstance, but some miles later mysteriously reappeared.
Sometimes she grew cruel and hard and would kick at the dog that followed her or set fire to an empty structure to watch it burn. She insulted people and drew satisfaction from their faces. She planned elaborate revenges inside the pressure of her head, and they were brutal. She was in serious danger of becoming one of the cruel creatures of her fires, of subjugating forever the bits of her that held to kindnesses. Be happy she was not allowed to get to this point, and only very, very close, or else there would be no hope for the love children of evil worlds. The girl exploded into the next years of her training as if she were a starved animal. A great, ripping sadness tore into her center, and she exploded out into waters of sorrow and life.
Part Three
Chapter uno
On the far edge of the civilized world was a pretty nunnery full of, happy nuns. These little wives of Jesus and children of God sang all day their love, scattering holy water and tending beautiful gardens full of fruit and fountains and songbirds. They lived in a home with windows of stain glass that made rainbows dance inside, and surrounded all around by bamboo. The atmosphere was colored with laughter as light as floating leaves. The food was simple and tasty and the beds were simple and covered in white linen. These nuns were of an order that sought the joys of heaven already and did not waste time on suffering because they figured other humans were doing their share for them elsewhere and that after all there needed to be more joy in the world. Altogether, it was a comfortable place, and inspired. It was the sort of place men sent their daughters when no other good men were around to give them happiness. Here in this haven, the nuns trusted and cared for one another and sailed little catamarans around windy lakes.
One day, a youngish traveling salesman on the edge of manhood, with a nasty reputation in other parts of the world, lost his way and found himself emerging from a beech forest to the open gates of the nunnery on Easter morning.
The mother superior invited him to stay for the services woven with song, and so he did, soaking in the atmosphere of nun pleasure. Here was a new experience, and his pockets appreciated a free meal. The flowers spoke to him of something he’d never known but always longed for. Calling for confessions of blood-filled gutters and urine-stained dumpsters to fill hungers, for bleak morning wakings with nothing left and no memory. He wondered at a life of beauty and ease and quiet, and perhaps his hatred of the softer world, of which he’d known only before his parent’s broken marriage drove him to the rocks of the street Isolation from this had made him ugly, or that’s how he saw it.
He hadn't had much success as a salesman. He was beginning to look seedy. Once upon a time, he’d been a very good looking man, but he’d traded that piece of boyish tender for harder thrills on the hills of hedonism‘s rollercoaster.
He allowed a little hope to creep with the beauty into his mind. His soul‘s substance was hidden beneath the stamps of his harder road. He found the courage to move through it. Not a great man, but a hero in his way, according to the hustler’s credo. He was one of those two-timing men who uphold double standards and are well-versed in goodbye idolized in the sort of movies that feature tragic love stories.
The beauty of the chapel and the nun's song worked upon him like magic. Before too long he found himself offering this heart eagerly to the Lord with both hands, but with embarrassment, until a cry of the spirit on his lips sent those narrow, fast-life hips swaying. He even cried and felt infinitely better afterward, though his lids drooped too low over eyes without innocence left.
He probably would have gone away and forgotten the whole thing, except as a fish story and booze late at night with the boys, but the Lord works in mysterious ways; He took the offered heart, the often offered heart, and handed it to one of the little nuns, seeded completely with love. She took it up like a safety blanket and held on tight, eyes closed, and rubbed the softness of her own heart against his cheek.
After the salesman was done with his cry timed to the tempo of the music (like a snake he was), the nun caught the man's eye, and he watched her for the rest of the service. He noticed she was stealing glances at him, too, and blushing. He gave her a high-sign. Then the planted seed took root and grew, watered by flattery (for she was a pretty lady) - and the temptation of forbidden fruits whetted a particular sort of hunger. He found himself head over heels for her, crazy for her, aching for her in a way he had up to this point managed to avoid in his dealings with the fairer sex. His mouth softened as he watched hers open with song.
She had only recently undergone the changes of womanhood despite her 22 years (which is why she had found herself at a nunnery at 18 after her parents despaired of her developing the ability to perform the duties of wife. Heaving in her breast were the emotions of an adolescent romantic; she was experiencing for the first time many new emotions at the sight of this man. She liked the nunnery and was well liked by the other nuns and didn't want to leave, but sometimes she found herself thinking about love with a man who was not Jesus, which was shameful. She prayed often she would be forgiven her thoughts, for she was chaste.
At all costs, she avoided this thought - divorcing Jesus and embarking like a scarlet harlot into a second marriage. The guilt of a betrayal of this magnitude forced her to her knees daily. Her mind not suited to unhappiness and adultery. The poor nun was an emotional, hormonal wreck as she found she was not satisfied by Jesus alone.
She saw the man cry she cried a few with him, because it is holy to cry with those who are sorrow. On top of that, he was the first man she'd seen since her change, and she was moved by his manhood. In her love-starved eyes his face reflected and looked nice. She thought she saw Jesus move in him, and she wanted to wash his feet and his face with a little damp cloth scented with oil and comb his hair. She’d make the oil from her own leaves and flowers gathered by hand.
The services were long, and night fell before the last song was sung. The Mother Superior remembered that angels appear to test our generosity. She invited the man to spend the night in a little shed she kept ready by the nunnery for such occasions and threw in a plate of food. He spent a few happy hours before sleep playing with the puzzle of the nunnery. to pleasure the little nun without getting caught, turning the puzzle in his hands and mind. Though he had given his heart to Jesus earlier, he was still a man of the world.
That night, the man and nun were visited by the same dream. They were granted the opportunity to love one another and have a happy life. However, there was a condition. The nun was released from her vow of chastity only if she and the man both took a new vow in its place: silence. Dawn found them together, the man happy to be rid of demons on his trail, and the nun dreaming of goodness, and there they followed the path set forth in their dream through a natural trellis of trees serving as a doorway into another world where no other people lived much like this one, only perhaps more beautiful. It was an entrance into a landscape of hot love set against a beautiful, cold vista of untouched majesty and mountains.
chapter deux
Perhaps the vow of silence and isolation helped their marriage, for the couple was always happy. The former salesmen never had to tire of the nun's speeches on the subject of religion. There was no alcohol, so no obligation to reform him. No tail to chase, so no bitter lessons of jealousy and betrayal. For these reasons, she stayed sweet and happy day after day, year after year, and looked good even as she neared the middle age. He never tired of her because there were no distractions, no road further on full of gold. He just put that right into her, either way. He was her king. He was content because there was nothing else and he was glad to have her.
For her part, the former nun never had to hear debauched stories or meet his friends who took him out without her. There was still always the pleasure, but with no option to share it around. She was able to preserve the quixotic belief that he was a good man. There was no disappointment or regret, only a sweet nostalgia over memories. This, then, is what they knew together - all or nothing - and they were granted all. For a time. For a time, they lived a soft dream.
Their happiness was increased with the arrival of a son. He was as beautiful as the dawn. Everything about him was bright and full of grace. A little light burned inside of him and he lit up his surrounds. He never had a name or learned to talk. It seemed to his two parents he saw things and heard things they did not. Each concluded separately that this was why he more beautiful and better than either of them alone. He was a simple part of their lives. Chords and harmonies of heaven’s choirs replaced grammar and arithmetic.
The vibrations of the earth and universe and the moon with its phases and the rising sun promise coming like a kiss and a hug. Everything had a part in a grand chorus that moved the grass blades and flowers to grow in dance and of - JOY! The worms and fungus in the dirt had a sound that went "boop boop beep boop bop. Da. Daaaa . . . da da da." He raised his own song in a wordless space, and his limbs danced until he took flight. He grew up straight and tall.
A good child.
chapitre tres & trois
The father was proud of everything that his son was. His son was Special. He looked at his handsome son on his 16th birthday and wanted to communicate happiness and love. He did in fact hear the vibrations become a song, and he was pleased. But the father could not hear the melodies. His love melody wavered into worry and mud.
The father stooped by a river bank and picked up a bit of clay and fashioned a little sun image. He pointed at this and then pointed at his child, as if to say, "you are the sun for me." At this point, many things happened very quickly and definitively. The boy understood for the first time that he could create with his own hands images within the world, as well as swim within the currents of song and weave new ribbons. The nun heard a little whisper in her ear, "I will spare your son for he is good, but he will be cursed until the spell is broken." The ground shook, and the wind turned.
A roar like a freight coming somewhere deep within the melody. A storm erupted and sucked his parents and his house away, and he, too, was swept up; he was placed all alone in a new land far from his beloved hills, and here the song was not so beautiful and often interrupted by the noises of violations. Before the freight disappeared without him into the distance, he was told he must never leave else he die.
For the first time he heard the notes of discord and disharmony. His happiness was shattered. His heart was broken at the loss of his beautiful song and all that entailed. When he finally healed, there were lines and scars and little bits missing to mar the magnificence of a happy childhood. Things ate at him like time and rain. But once – he had lived perfection and hadn’t known anything else. He held onto perfection and it gave him a circle.
Part 4
ch1
The first was a young woman who emerged bedraggled and half-starved from the dark woods ranging with evil laughter - a woods bordering all sides of the little valley of his new home - and fell through his circle of safety. He never ventured into these woods. Shadows crept to the edges of his domain. Nightmares spoke o him, but he had no words to respond. He was suddenly all alone in the center and ill-equipped to deal with anything but dance and making useful things from clay. He held her in his arms and surveyed his campsite critically.
He'd managed to build a little home within the noises where he could create a patch of peace upon which he pasted memories of sensation. Holding in his arms something nearly poisoned by the intentions behind those noises, he surveyed this girl. Topsoil blew by in clouds overhead to nothing. The trees moved and shook branches as if reaching for his body. He looked at this beautiful girl lying in his arms. Something that laughed about terrible things that might come and stole away his peace lurked out there, but she was safe in his arms inside his charmed circle. He imagined scenes with no things that hurt one. He wanted space for the nurturing of beauty, cleanse with a flash of mirrors, reflecting into his future a solid wall of stars singing into a clear depth. The woman he held in his arms shuddered a bit with a terror that bordered too close to acceptance; he clutched it close and made noises rather than words to comfort her back to life. He grabbed her back from the edge of death and stuffed the medicine of beautiful sounds into her fading heart. It beat on.
He had a fire to warm her and food to put in her belly and a hide to cover her. She shook with fear and cold and then with fever, and for several weeks she knew neither her past or her present but only the dreams that pursued her day and night. He sang to her his wordless melody of concern, and she turned fitfully beneath his eyes like a bit of burning bacon. Underneath the fear he heard something tinged with new green and pink and gold. This is how he learned the colors of her soul. It was to that he addressed his song. Perhaps it was the beauty of his attention and care that finally drove away her demons, for one day she opened her eyes and was still. He wept that this delicate thing had to be surrounded with so much death. She tore a hole through his simple charms to create a space for beauty, and was like a flame.
She was a little orphan who had worked under the roof of a wealthy man and his lady. The man smelled of camphor and stomach acid. The woman was petite and pretty and lived in a constant state of worry. The man molested the servant continually behind the back of the wife. When she found out, she had overworked and beaten her and mde her feel like dirt. Things happened involving babies that nearly killed her right away then set off an infection and madness.
Then the temperature spiked and she lost all bearings of reality. She'd wandered away in the fever and followed what appeared to be a path of light before her toes and thus found her way to the wordless boy. In this way she was saved. He took care of her better than a doctor.
When her fever died she became aware again, but her memories fell on her like a rain of stones. She found herself with a young man who did not hurt her but helped her. He looked like he was surrounded by a golden halo as the sun poured through the door behind him. She turned to his light for comfort and cried about what her madness had tried to shield her from remembering. In circles her mind ran, faster and faster, and her eyes started, and the boy could not understand why she could not just be happy here with him. The stones fell into her mind, try as she might to forget, and they hurt. The boy, having no memory of anything but joy, wrinkled his brow and did not understand. He loved her, after all. She was his. She turned in sorrow, and he reached after, digging through the avalanche of stones, searching through the rock pile, seeking her lovely eyes lit with happiness.
He held up a symphony of song and shook it about her like a blanket. Though he could not speak to her, he heard the composition of terror that came from her and sought a comforting response. He ached to ease the tenor of those sounds, and he reached with his hands and sought to cover her hurt with the music of a flute. She reached for him, and he picked her up and carried her to sit with him in the beautiful garden.
He learned her soul with his ears, and he learned the contours of her body, and he loved her, but she was crushed beneath the weight of heavy things. Across the rest of her experience there remained an impression, and beneath the bed with the monsters she cowered. Like the burned outline of a sulfurous demon pressed upon a patch of wildflowers in the morning
He longed to kill that specter, which was the first time he felt anger.
Every day her song was the same, piping from beneath the rocks. The impression remained and was between what would have been their own experiences together. Then he would look beneath the weight of sadness, and there she was hiding and still singing an echo of the songs of the hills.
He found her through her beauty, and in the curves of her, and in her sleeping stillness. He pulled her to himself naked and shivering and terrified. He pulled her into safety far from the evil hunger, and she lay in his arms in peace. How sweet it was to love someone who wanted to love you. In his song, he took his ax to her bed and chopped it to ribbons. Pulled her whole and as a child from the wreckage to his arms.
Nevertheless, disturbance remained, and he grew afraid that she would allow the pain to swallow the part that was like dancing sunshine. There was a black hole nearby, and it threatened to suck her away, and as she clung to him, he felt its pull about his own body. He needed to bring them away from this dark place.
The darkness edged in a bit. He sickened beneath the weight of their twin losses. She would not hear him or alter the stream that issued from her lips. He had her in his arms but she seemed to be disappearing, and he was alone in his memory of the harmony of the hills where she left him and went away. All around the forest reacted with pleasure. He began to believe that there was no helping the absorption of their small light into the greater darkness that grew.
He remembered then as their lights dimmed and the shadows grew long, he remembered the sun formed in his father’s fingers. He fashioned a statue of her so that she could see her beauty, how it shone. From the dim place, he sought his dance, and from that source into the stone he poured his song, and from beneath his fingers emerged her as he loved. He caressed that stone and it became her hips, her thighs, her breasts, her eyes. There was no mark on the statue of those that hurt her. Just her essence. All that he separated he threw back into the darkness where it crept and slithered. There she stood in stone – a beautiful flower. There she stood in life, a beautiful flower trampled by boots but still alive.
She saw the stone and knew herself and was startled by her own loveliness, but when she looked into those stone eyes and saw happiness there, she no longer recognized herself and turned away. A romantic waste of time in a world where she well knew her place. She was of a world of nothing good. She had never known happiness such as that.
So he poured in sadness, too, all that terrible noise rising from her and wavering like fumes, but contained within a little glass heart which he placed in the stony breast, and from the eyes of the statue poured real tears of salt that flowed down the stony cheeks and fell upon the earth. Then she knew herself and turned back. It was sadness, not inherent badness, that marred. She felt better; the gloom drew back. A new happiness began.
Where the salt tears landed, little white flowers grew. Sweet of smell and pretty they were. The girl plucked a bloom one day and put it to her mouth languidly, with a dreamy motion. The thin harmony of beauty the boy had heard rose to a full sound as she tasted the essence of her own self. Like a morning bud opened suddenly to reveal a drop of dew, like a pearl shining below from the clear, warm waters of delight. From her breast and shoulders fell away the sadness, and nothing remained but her own shine. The grime now could no longer reach her, and she was no longer was a part of their vibration.
She left him after a while. She was lonely for the cities and the masses of people and wanted to shine all over the place. She became a singer and went before kings and courts and crowds and spread happiness even in difficult times. The statue still cried, and the tears turned to blood as she left. But she, the living, breathing counterpart, never had to again, as the boy had wished. In that stone resided all the sadness she had ever felt and would never feel again.
The boy stayed in his valley and watched over her sobbing statue and guarded her bloody tears. He missed her. There were days when he did not get out of bed, but lay there all day.
But then another woman came to him, and later another, and then another... he loved each, first with his lovely body, and then with a creation of love emerging like a dove beneath his fingers. In order to heal to be able to share the swell of his lost boyhood hills like dreamshine. Every statue cried. Each woman was healed by eating a flower plucked from her blossoming tears. Each left him to share their health with the world, and broke his heart for a time, and carried his legend with them. Leaving him behind to guard the statues crying rivers of blood into masses of white flowers growing red hearts at their center moving fluidly downhill.
All of the lovely women found fame through song or dance or story or form or by becoming great wives, known for a clean happiness that healed. The legend of the boy spread. Those with great riches spent fortunes seeking him, and it became fashionable to install crying fountains of oneself in courtyards planted with islands of white flowers. Many posed as his protégés and made small fortunes in swindles. But no one who sought found him, and those who did come upon his little valley of sun in the middle of those dark parts of nowhere journeyed through despair, and they walked illusory paths as real as the breezes which guide the warriors of the wind.
Long years of travel followed. Sliding, haunting memories flew and spoke fragments of images of conception that existed then disappeared, shifted always into new forms. When she let down her guard, it sat on her chest so breathing was difficult and sucked away her mind, feeding from her emotions and excreting images and sensation; over and over again she huddled in the night and clutched her knees, retching, covered by the arms of this silhouette folded over her existence. It crouched over her lonely fears, and though she cried and pleaded and grew mean, she could do nothing to change its intentions to draw out her full span. The black dog watched nearby as she cried out in her sleep.
The earth was hard, but it gave her something solid and alive to hold while her fears swooped over her sleeping head.
A storm
This last stretch maddened her shadow-eaten mind and reddened her eyes at the center. A long way around the land of people, filled with hard ground and painful knees and evil feelings. At last the weeds grew to woody brush and then open fields, and then a fence. She slipped through. Beyond was a wood filled with giant trees as high as the clouds. Here sun wore a green dress, and ferns hid beneath the skirt of the glory. A forest people salted the trees, and when the storms came and lashed about on their platforms, there were cries, and in the cries were triumph. Then came the sun again, wearing her pretty dress, and all were gay.
But then the land no longer belonged to the ancient lives, and the giant blades of death cut down the wood. First the women who would not leave the trees were lowered from the heights of leafy heavens naked and tied by wires, screaming as joints wrenched from sockets and swung free on iron and breeze. The people had no weapons and could do nothing but hide. Large trees were chewed alive by teeth of greed. Mankind flocked to these places to eat their bread upon corpses and build houses. Those who limped away from their living homes, alive still somehow, hurt by fear and ineffectual anger, were shells of what they had been until they began to laugh again, and then were still always haunted.
The masters of death moved on to other places which no longer belonged to God, to wrench life from its roots and sell off the land. The mangled corpses of wood were gathered and carted off. The mangled corpses of humans were shoveled into holes and forgotten. Those that lived hung on at the fringes of society. Elsewhere, the conquering heroes did not remark the losses over a breakfasts of bagels and grapefruit to the children. The fates of these other people and those trees were not fit to be mentioned in the company of children. Their place was silenced and forgotten, to become just more skeletons in the closet and buried by a generation of Santa Clause.
She saw the torn lands and sat with the renegades over bitter coffee. She traveled on with red still in her eye, and her mind unraveled and grew loose and began to knot into new and disorderly ways. Young lovers who made love with abandon in high, green branches now faced a life of ugly tasks. An ugly war about which nobody cared outside the ancient wood. This was the land of the holy, and the graceful elves now had no home.
The warrior entered a new wood, a young scrub, angry and barely fertile, but nesting with the small birds and small seeds of hope. The trees pulled and teased at her skin with thorns, leaving little bloody scratches, and then the woods grew dark. Then darker. There was something wrong and her shoulders drew up, lifted. Somewhere before her waited a dark sound. She tried to double back on her path, but the paths doubled and twisted. The sun filtered down upon black rot and garlands of old, dusty spiderwebs which caught in her hair. The ground was hard and sodden and there were endless flies. She burst from the decay into the plateau of statues. There were many of them, cold and beautiful, all sobbing blood.
Flowers gathered in pools and ran down in a froth of green. Women encapsulated in stone were frozen in moments of gleeful sport with one another, and they spiraled around the charmed circle and neared a cottage, and out of the cool thatch issued a creature filled with gold, and it was all much more beautiful than I can describe – and more strange and magical. The poor warrior fell in love with the vision, though the energy from the place was soaked in grief (wc? Something slow and melancholy). Beads of sweat covered her skin and bumps rose and then there was a metallic taste in her mouth and burning in her nose. The golden creature approached slowly.
She was carried there by the scent of flowers. The breezes blew around her gustily and blew her head empty of thought and gave her eyes so hungry she opened her mouth and out came a ripping noise, and all around in the woods there was a silence. He picked her up and carried her inside.
She was sick with disappointments and loneliness and the evils that called to her fingers and teeth and mind, and he heard her sickness arose not only from oppression and disinterest, but also somehow from within. She was different than the other girls who found him; they were sweeter beneath their sadness. Her body held the beauty of the hills, that was there, too. There also was the sounds of the dark forest sleeping within her center. The two strains inside did not harmonize but ran against one another, crashing her mind to pieces. He was unsure how to begin the healing. A bit afraid of her. He recognized she was a snake fighting a staff, fighting and not agreeing. This made her dangerous. This made her a loose cannon.
They ate together and slept near one another, though he never became her lover as she did not remove her armor. His soul calmed her. Charmed and magical circles and spots. He approached her fluidly and quietly, and she relaxed at last.
She was not naked with him and was not touched. There was sleep. She felt he was far away even when he was close. He was surrounded by beautiful dancing women crying flowers. She knew her heart, her little angry heart, would punish him for his sweetness. She enjoyed the atmosphere simply, instead.
But she loved him.
He did not create a statue because he did not touch her. He bordered on a conception of boredom at the thought of beginning the process again In his way, he was quietly relieved to have time without the emotions of love and the difficult creation of an iconic reminder to stand as a grave later of what had been. A curse it was, but tinged with hope because there was a chance someone would not tire of silence and stay. He poured out his love and waited.
Time passed. The statue was not begun rendered. Oddly, he did not want to. She shied from his touch like a wild thing and watched him with glowing eyes all of the time and kept to the edges of his universe. He was free with his home and his hearth and his smile. At last, they slipped together into a brown velvet friendship. At night, she curled against him for warmth and came to love his smell. They danced and laughed and ate and sat together in the sun and slept again.
He felt moments of unlabelled guilt, an obligation towards her that was not begun. He leaned towards her with a desire for completion. Her disc(h)ord rose when he came near. What's more, she wanted to hide from the beautiful boy her attractiveness and all it brought.
She was afraid to be touched. She was frightened by the images of such hungers she'd seen left impressed upon the bodies of others. She did not want to harm, and especially not this fuzzy headed sweet face. He danced and sang and she wove in her own song. He was very much the drowsy beauty she'd seen destroyed again and again, with no defenses against her ancestors. With the armor on, there was no opportunity to slither into something destructive to his peace, she thought. So she kept the armor on, did not encourage fingers of creative desire. She kept in from him in order to protect, to not smudge his outlines. With her eyes she adored him without touch. Like a treasured and delicate hanging jewel, she watched him in the light he cast. She helped him remember himself.
The weeks passed, and then the months, and the two of them slipped easily into quiet friendship different from the loves and passions that may otherwise may have been. They forgot time without one another, their separate experiences receded in importance with the comfort of time’s passage spent in peace. Her arms holding protectively to his middle, his eyes closed and body pressed without fear against hers. These were happy moments. Her witness to their actions meant that on some deep level of the psyche, the memory still disturbed humanity. So she learned gradually the art of protection and became a better warrior, and he found that though every girl had left him, he was still worthy of value simply as a companion.
The bag of friendship, that different sort of soft love that neither had encountered before and thus treasured, created a chrysalis into which both crawled and emerged all those months later far better than before. She took as a muse and soaked in the atmosphere of warmth. He enjoyed the company with distance from the feelings that came with physical love. He felt what it was to be both untouched and with beauty. Having been almost entirely isolated from humanity and then almost entirely encapsulated by wilderness, how could he have known the affect his smile had on the heart? That was his sickness.
In addition to the two of them, there lived there a very small sprite who while floating by was attracted by the spell of the beauty of the statues and by the boy's light. It'd been jealous, but let that go when it saw she was not a real threat. It saw the pleasure they had in sleep and made up its mind to experience sleep there next to him itself. It was too late for it to claim the bed of the boy. Yet, it thought. It planned for a future time when the bed was empty. Then it would fill up his bed with chatter and its own mercurial energy unique to small, flying fey. Though not human, it tried to imagine how to get close to this man and sit upon his shoulder night and day. It flitted around and waited and somet