These birch at the riverbank, boulder-fractured of growth resting bottom of the mountain scree — they are me. Standing defiant, I insist on being though stone pushes and gravities are drawn, I drink strength of river.
Granite sings, should you open your eyes to listen. I can tune my growth to their song. I am woman, that pale goddess. And I insist you try.
Gathering of breath from wind, from rain, my arms have set to wave. For I bend, not break under the song of the heart. You would too, if only you could see.
How do I write a story? I forget. Perhaps one goes a little like this:
There once was a little girl, and she liked red and so she wore red. Except that her mum called it crimson and her da preferred scarlet. But the fae said it was more poppy, and so that stuck because her mum thought it a more cheery thing than those other blood colors.
The girl said nothing at all and not because she did not have a mind of her own, but because someone had stolen her voice before she was born and she had no head for writing, though she knew plenty of words like “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”, “snicker-snack” and “albatross” (a word she dreamed of shouting from the top of the radio tower that rose over the place she was born). But writing those words? Oh, well, that just was not something she could do.
A fever of climbing, each foot thorned on ossified remains of the other selves of his, those forgotten parts laying wasteshattered on this hill of broken dreams.
Cut hands, his own slivered bones shredding flesh to ribbons as he crawls his pile of human debris. Sunlight at the center, high above, mocking. It is not obtainable, but he has his own Sisyphus path, and that path involves the play of light and shadow with his burden being self — something far more weighty than stone.
A blink away of bloodstained sweat, he looks away from the improbissble past placed there in the fore. There is no sense in entertaining goals. Goals imply a chance at success. Success brings hope. Hope? No.
Right arm right foot left arm left foot, shudderdream quakes and shakes, and involuntary scream. But still, he carries his leadself up, an empty skull of his staring from the hill. All the whispers shout encouragements, but he cannot remain still to gather them in.
Rumors lead to hope. And “hope”, as the song goes, “is no good”. You would think we would not learn to base our decisions on hope. That is what we get for thinking, as my grandmother was fond of saying.
Better to put that bear to slumber once again. Help him to hibernate and sleep this long, cold winter of the soul away, away.
We can try to explain but the words come out all wrong and we speak of pain, people think we like it here. Ever the tears to hide, slip on a smile — wooden and hollow — and give in to the dreaming on.
Of the rubble they wandered, she and the one she called Puck; she dressed in crimson and ash while Puck was dressed in Puck, a shadow somewhere between chrome scuffed and tetris blocks that might have been mustard yellow, if not for the scorching and scratch. Azur, too, if you looked atop his aluminum pate from above or when not aloft — a rarity given the nuclear pellet fueling his eternal flight.
Stones rattled for reasons only stones know, and fell to the scree near her feet with wonton abandon. If Puck did not have encyclopedic reference to the circuitric contrary, it might have thought the stones were rushing down from the remnants of highrises to worship the angel at their base. Puck certainly did, but that was his nature. The girl was its goddess and its life and, even if they had been programmed otherwise, it would still choose this life of servitude under her wing. Call it love, for even machines may become such things as the capacity for love.
Puck tensed at the howl of greymalkin prowling distant, yet close enough to warrant caution. She dressed of vermillion tensed not at all, which was her nature, such as was her trust given to Puck. It was for Puck to worry while she wandered and his servos did whine at the unexpected danger lurking the shadows beyond. How far was far enough? it wondered. Almost immediately, it responded, Never enough, but was loath to leave his charge for the time required to chase the great cats off.
So Puck did the only sensible thing and flew closer to her and did what all things must eventually consider as their final option when danger lurks nearby: hope.
And so, Puck hoped while the greymalkin cast out more mewls and cries, suggesting the hunt had begun.
Puck sighed relief when the sounds moved away from their location, and it embraced the momentary calm, as short-lived as it was like to be.
At long drag, the fens and fog draw down, sucking the moon behind a veil of shadows to obfuscate and obscure. Edgewater, nightwalking slow, shoulders burdened of regret and battleworn, he shambles all shagged, matted and weary to the dampness of home.
These invasions falling into his moors and swamps, they ache with each needle piercing at the festering wound of birth. Could they not find another fallow place for their disruption? He scoffs at the idea, certain that the answer will remain that his time has grown overdue and, like these wild places, he must also be forced to submit or wither.
And submission is not his nature; and so he shuffles from damp stone to damp stone, wary of the moss growing slick over each, lumbering on his way home to rest. For tomorrow there will be fresh battles to weary him to the bone. A wry smile, only tugging at one corner of his mouth, at the thought. When that day comes, he will lay down his fatigue and return to dirt. Rest comes for all, eventually — but in this, he must struggle bitter to the end.
The following is a lightly-edited fragment of a what was intended to be a longer bit of fiction I wrote in January 2015. I found it while looking for old files on a portable HDD to see how hard it would be to recreate “Rust” from my post yesterday. No dice… yet, anyway. I may be looking for the wrong filename and it could be under another name entirely. The song I referred to as “Myrrh” (which is only one of many “Myrrh”-titled songs I’ve worked on) is actually fully intact and on my modern DAW, so I might have to share that (with vocals!) once I decide what those lyrics should be. But, on with the story… I’ll say a bit more about this piece after the fragment.
Strife
The smell of excrement, rot and chemicals rose from the waters as the barge Vivienne and Llewellyn were riding floated across the River Strife to the slaughter yards south of the river. The copper smell of fresh blood drifted over the other smells and Llewellyn had to choke back a the bile that threatened to add to the miasma of roiling in the dark twilight waters below.
“Good gods, how does anyone deal with this stench on a daily basis?” he asked no one in particular, and didn’t expect to get a response. He covered his face with a handkerchief.
I have forgotten stars now. That light flickering, I wonder how it entranced me so now that it has faded from view. Perhaps I used to be somebody in the before. Or, maybe, it was always illusion that snaked this road into each night before the screens stole it away.
Blood hands from holding blades, shards of glass on a beach of stone. Mournful, the cries of ravens from the cedar warning me from the windswept hill. They used to hang people there. They used to pierce them, too, to ensure they were not playing the dead, those soldiers of gloom.
A right pinch of snuff and a stroke of scrimshaw in the left hand holding. Clearing the head of stagnant saltwater in rituals of the hands… I am bone, I am stone, I am wings on the thermals ride. Black as the night that drew me. My feet pound the wood dock branching out over water, echoing the hollow within.
Joyless I wait for the push from behind, black water calling.
He chased the coffee rings on the formica coffee bar with his fingertip, spreading the thin ensō of liquid into ever broader strokes in time with the acid jazz playing softly overhead. It was past midnight on a work night, he should go home. Instead, he lingered at the late-night coffee joint with the drinks looking for sobriety in the dregs of their cup and not finding much there to give them hope. The stared at their empty cups, debating on if they should risk the drive home or the sleeplessness another cup would bring. The Beacon’s barista could not be bothered to help them decide — the tips had been lackluster all night anyway with no promise of more to come for showing a willingness to serve the clientele another cup.
Mark was avoiding home, with good reason. Along with the futon bed that called his name even from here, his studio apartment overlooking the Sound was otherwise occupied by ghosts.
So he put off dealing with the unwanted, uninvited guests at least until the barista made his last call announcement. Mark wished it was not raining, because then he would have been able to roam the streets until daybreak, when the ghosts would finally take their leave. He thought he might call in sick today so he could sleep for the first time in three days.
If he was lucky, perhaps he would sleep right through the return of his ghosts after dusk. It did not seem likely, but he considered himself an optimist.
He was minding his own business, fishing there up on the bridge and not catching much at all when she went and showed up. The only thing biting were the ‘squitoes and deerflies in the heat of the summer haze. And although he had his line dipped in the cool fishing hole swirling about in the creek below the bridge, and there were plainly river trout with their speckled bellies flashing in the noontime sun, he was not catching a thing. Not that was surprising at all to him, seeing as he had neither baited his line nor tied a hook at the end of the line for which he might bait.
The way Hank saw it, if you put a hook on a fishing line, you were apt to catching something at the end of it even without bait. He had seen it happen that the fish would get all glammed up by the shine of the sun on the metal and decide that if something were so shiny, well then it might be tasty too.
