Part Eleven

Posted on March 7, 2014 by Catastrophe Jones

While Medowin slept, and Laila kept house, Nine Trees went outside to the yard, to help with chores, a way to keep busy, and to help Laila, who still had her life to attend to, and had no intention of slacking off on the busy business of piemaking. He split wood, fed the chickens and goats, singing to himself the whole while and kept himself so busy that he was startled when Laila joined him, saying, “Come back in for lunch? The lady, your friend, is still sleeping.”

“No, she’s singing,” he said, looking to Laila. He dusted off his hands, and moved to follow her.

She, however, had stopped dead on the path back to the house and looked toward it, then back toward Nine Trees, saying, “No, she’s quite asleep. I’d hear her if she were singing.”

“Not that sort of singing,” Nine Trees said, turning pink at the ears. “I’m sorry. I have a feeling nothing of what we say for the next while will make any real sense to you,” he tells her, looking apologetic. “She doesn’t actually sleep — what she’s doing is reaffirming her knowledge of the songlore she holds, she–”

“Stop. Come in for lunch. Y’make my head dizzy with this nonsense,” Laila sighed.

While they sat, eating in silence for awhile, Laila looked increasingly uncomfortable, saying finally, “Try again. Maybe food has made my head more able to take it all in.”

Nine Trees took a deep breath in, let it out slowly, and then asked Laila, “How much of world creation do you know?”

“It’s forbidden for folk to know,” Laila said, watching him warily.

“That’s not what I asked. I need to know how much I should re-explain — it would be a huge waste of time if you already knew it,” he said, smiling, not unkindly.

“I don’t know how much I know,” Laila said, shrugging. “I know how I was told the world began, in the separation between the first inhale and exhale of all the gods–”

“True,” Nine Trees said, nodding. “Go on.”

“It came into being, and was given life. Each of the gods made life with their words, all of them, except for Sarad, who waited. He held his breath–” she went on.

“Do you know why?” Nine Trees interrupted.

“In Sarad’s name, would you stop talking over me?” Laila hissed. “I’m trying to tell you what I know!”

Nine Trees looked abashed, and made a gesture for her to keep talking, biting the insides of his cheeks to keep quiet.

“He held his breath because he was too busy watching his brothers and sisters. Raduli, who had gone first, made sound.  Then name Oban, who made light. And all the rest, who made, well, everything else,” Laila said, waving her hands to illustrate glossing over such details, and moving on. “He was watching, and then the world was there, spinning, moving, full of rock and water, light and sound, fire and earth. And Sarad thought it was beautiful, but lacking. He reached down into the world, and he touched sound, and gave it life.  And that was Medowin, whose name means song.  But I don’t understand how that means she’s in my back bedroom, and I certainly don’t understand what it has to do with me.”

“She is song, yes,” Nine Trees began. “But she is also story, and verse, and the embodiment of word. She holds all the magic that song contains, and remembers every story ever made.”

Laila felt queasy at the scope of the concept, but waited, quiet, for Nine Trees to continue.

“She must remember them, so they can be legend, when the world ends, and is remade,” Nine Trees explained. “She is the keeper of all of them.”

“What do you mean when the world ends and is remade?” Laila whispered, her eyes wide.

“That part is abstract,” Nine Trees said wryly.

“How… how am I to be a part of all of this?” Laila asked. “A part of the world ending?”

“Ah,” Nine Trees said, nodding, believing he finally understood the young woman’s confusion. He tried to explain, “You’re no longer a piewoman. You’re not a part of the world ending, Laila.”

“What, am I to heal it, then?” she wondered, her eyes wide. “Do I bring peace to the realms, then, and stride across the world, banishing hunger and misery with pie?” she asked, the words half-scornful.

“No, you’re not listening,” Nine Trees sighed. “As I said, you’re not a part of the world ending–”

The more he spoke, the more Laila worried — something about his voice rang in her ears, echoed in her head, settled about her shoulders like a stifling pressure. It was Truth, and it was heavy.

“–you’re the one that ends it.”

Part One – Part Two – Part Three – Part Four – Part Five – Part Six – Part Seven – Part Eight – Part Nine – Part Ten — Part Eleven

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Fading

Posted on March 6, 2014 by Catastrophe Jones

“Every day which isn’t a day but is occasionally a week I find that it’s coming undone. Bit by bit because it’s like it’s further away for some of them,” the girl says, looking at her hands.

“Claire, sweetheart,” the woman says, her face lined with age and grief. “Can you hear me? Do you see me?”

“He walked along the beach and was lost and found again. She has shells and sea glass. She asked her mother to bring some home. He cried, on his twenty-fourth birthday, because he wasn’t where he wanted to be. A thousand words I want to say, but it’s impossible to spit them out,” she says, the last of it coming out in a sing-song voice.  “I see,” she adds, but if it is to the woman who speaks to her, it isn’t clear.

“I’m right here,” the woman says softly, reaching out a hand, for Claire’s.

The girl’s eyes turn to the woman’s, and they are starry skies, infinite and wide, storming and deep. She looks to the reaching hand, and allows it to slide over her own, looking pained, and then indifferent. “No,” she says, her tone conversational. “No, you aren’t. You can’t be,” she sighs. “Not always.”

The woman looks hurt, but swallows it down, and takes her hands back, murmuring, “I want to understand, Claire. Please, help me, so I can help you. Please.”

The girl cocks her head to the side, and regards the woman as one might a strange pattern in an oil slick, with a faint sense of fascination, but no empathy.  She looks back down at her hands, and then turns her head away, as though listening to some far-off radio station, tuned in to something only she can hear. “He just came in. He wears the smartest suits. She wants to push that kid into the elevator shaft, chair and headphones and all,” she says, not at all on the same page of conversation. “They all connect to the nexus. They sit there and talk about a past that never was. They used to build worlds. They built worlds where we all walked. Where this whole world walked and had its own nexus of people building worlds and did you know the night the three of them listened to Mandy sing about George was the first time she had seen time used that way?” she murmurs.

“Claire,” the woman says, tears in her eyes. “Honey, I love you.”

That seems to catch her attention for a moment. Starry eyes blink, focusing in the here and now. The girl turns to look at the woman again, frowning like one might at a child that wants constant attention. “They’re the same two men, over and over and over again. One woman, two men. They change on the outside. Sometimes they change on the inside. They’re the same, again and again,” she explains carefully. “Can you tell? They have so many stories. So many ways they fit. They don’t recognize one another. Not always. When they’re separated, they hurt themselves trying to reconnect. There was the fog, when she met them the first time, in the fog in the wild, and then there was the place she made him mayor, after taking him away from everything he loved, and you can’t begin to know how many cups of coffee and how many hand signals happened, to tell the story back and forth, when it was less broken, less strained between them,” she explains. “They are all here, everywhere, all the time. Everything,” she says, her words coming alternately fast and slow, a tumbling river over rocks, rapids and spilling over one another. “Sometimes, it’s just as simple as ‘He loves her.’ but no one can hold on to any one of them for too long,” she murmurs, talking past the woman next to her. “All of them are true. All of them,” she whispers.

“I don’t understand, but I’ll listen,” the woman says, moving to sit just a little closer, moving to take the girl’s hand again, to brush tangled black hair back from her face. “I’ll listen as long as I can,” she says.  She turns her head for a moment, to look down, to give the shortest of glances to the body on the floor, and its sightless gaze, half-hidden by round, rimless spectacles that reflect the light in the room, giving it inhuman eyes. When she looks back, she looks hopeful as she whispers, “We have time, now.”

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Deficit

Posted on March 5, 2014 by Catastrophe Jones

The hollow inside him cannot be filled with the food in front of him, nor the drink. He sits alone in the restaurant, fingers at the stem of the glass, then palm cupping the bowl. When he lifts it to his lips, the tang of it assaults nose and tongue — it’s a decent wine, but nothing transcendent. It will do as it must, and infect his sensibilities with a reminder of something earlier, something easier.

He knows what waits for him, upstairs.

He looks down at his plate, and then up toward the ceiling, eyes unfocused, pointed toward some vague and distant thing on the ceiling just beyond the dim glow of the pendant lamps, and he tips his head back, throat working to swallow the last of the wine, to let it swirl under his tongue, against the backs of his teeth. He gets it down, but for a moment, just barely.

He knows the empty bed and white sheets are a blank canvas.

He doesn’t want to ask the waitress for the check; she seemed like a nice enough girl, but the smile on her face was too familiar, too warm. He knows he’d be doing her a disservice to associate her with the end of the meal, with the end of his chance to escape from here. He wipes his lips for the fifth time with the same cloth napkin, and briefly pauses, fabric against his mouth.

He knows he will paint his thoughts upon them tonight, in sleeping tears and dreaming sweat.  

He pushes the napkin between his lips, to his teeth, parting them to slide it back against his tongue. His eyelids flutter shut as the eyes themselves roll up and backwards, and his breath catches. He remembers the feel of madapolam against his cheek, the knot on his tongue, the twisted kerchief like a bit between his teeth. He remembers the perfume, the night, the cry, the anger, the loss, the confusion, the way eyes are not windows to anything but mirrors instead: you see in them only a reflection of your own need. He remembers all of these things, and when the busboy comes to clean the table, among the plate of half-eaten food and used cutlery, the empty wine glass and full, sweating water glass, a single missing napkin is hardly missed at all.

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Stitch

Posted on March 4, 2014 by Catastrophe Jones

The pain in her side was sudden, a sharp and toothsome thing that dug in and held, without any intention of going anywhere else.  It spread wings within her spine, and its talons slowly encircled her heart, and began to squeeze.  Somewhere in the dark red of her, seeds of agony multiplied, took root in her blood, gave birth in her lungs.

When stars blossomed in her vision, red novas of exquisite detail mapping a delicate haze over her view, her face was locked in a cheek-tearing grimace, her molars cracking as she struggled to keep her teeth closed against the fireskinned demon living inside her.

She hit the ground stiffly, muscles seizing, body contorting. Rather than curling inward, fetal, distressed, she splayed outward, curving, spine arching, cracking, hips and shoulders bowed. Chest and pelvis thrust out, head tipped back.  Her eyes were squeezed shut, blood collecting in the lashes and lines at the corners, saliva foaming at her lips, brought on by locomotive breaths and a glottal-choked howl.

When the medics came with the needles full of silver, full of blue light, she only relaxed the physical half of herself; far beyond the dark red of her insides, she floated away, dreaming.

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Return 6

Posted on March 3, 2014 by Catastrophe Jones

We tried to wake it, but it would not rouse. Bloodless, it seemed like stone. All of its color had poured into the water, and cleared it, giving the pool life, giving us life. The Captain named the place ‘Songfall’, and drank from the pool, telling us all to fill our canteens and bottles, and make shelter for the night.

Luroteo held vigil over it, leaving it where it lay, one hand in the pool, and all the children sat around near it, holding hands, singing its song. Some wept in understanding. Some were too young, and thought it only asleep.

When night came, the blood moon rose, its sickle casting the red lamp’s pallor over all. Many of us slept well, finally, glad to have found fresh water, even a little relieved that the creature was dead, that it could not change us, that it had given its life, but now its story was over.

All through the night, the waters sang, and the children dreamed, of music, of memory, of what had fallen through the clouds and brought them life.

The captain still had one of its feathers; he kept it in his bedroll, and held it while he, too, dreamed fitfully in the red dark.

Return — Return 2 — Return 3 — Return 4 — Return 5 — Return 6

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