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“Digging For Fish” Excerpt-published in upcoming collection
The Dark Side of the Billboard
“This Side of Sanity” Excerpt- published in upcoming collection
The Dark Side of the Billboard
“Engaged”
Digging
for Fish
(Published Circle
Magazine Summer 2002)
I am a watcher.
I watch the flies searching for moisture on skin and blue-rimmed empty plates.
I watch the black curls on the top of my father's head as he walks across the
earth-packed floor, staring down at the worn straps of his sandals. I watch
my sister dipping her moon face into a cracked clay bowl to slurp her breakfast
like an animal. I watch the dark hole behind the fabric of my mother's cowl
where her worn face and the dark stone eyes are hidden.
I say nothing.
I've said nothing for years, except a thank you. I watch and do what I hear
for I'm a good boy.
The house
is full of dust. We breath it into our lungs; it circulates as tiny particles
inside the pumping flow of our blood; it thickens us from without and from within.
We move sluggishly, conserving energy, saving moisture.
I hear his
voice like a rough hand brushing against ancient wood, Mosen, run and get the
shovels from the shed, we dig today."
I jump up
excited. For me action is always less boring than non-action. My sister turns
as I run out. Her head is draped as is the custom and the fabric falls long
across her shoulders hiding her severed stumps at her side. My mother's hands
toil away attaching remnants of cloth together. Her eyes are always hidden as
she works; her pace is furious, yet steady as if she were mending the entire
unraveled blanket of the earth.
Outside
the sun is still low, barely edging above the high gunnel of our boat, tilted
on its keel on the dry bed of the sea like a stranded creature. It's ribs run
smoothly in a curve from prow to stern, an arched belly of a sperm whale. I
reach the shed and push into a magical world that may have been, a world that
was, that was made up through tales and smells and sounds when my grandfather's
hands were firmly in the present, when my father's eyes were not contemplating
sandal straps, when my sister laughed and tickled me running to bury my face
into the fish smell of my baba's trousers, when my mother hummed soft songs
to the stars on cool evenings.
The shed
is large; large enough to build a fishing boat, mend the nets, carve rudders,
and make tools. I watch the particles of dust fly up into the column of light
now streaming through the one side window. The skewed patch of sun on the floor
reveals curled shavings and chiseled chunks of wood shaped from evolving hulls
from another time. The assortment of shapes lie dormant like sleeping bottom
feeders left to dry and die. I hear my father's voice, arid like the wind.
" They're
resting on the rafters beside the bench, " he shouts.
I look up,
smelling the remnants of the fish oil and pine tar, the scent of rags as old
as dust and powdered marrow. The shovels hide behind the nets that droop like
dead birds trussed up to season in the air. I jump, stretch my fingers to hit
the shovel blades dislodging their balance, disturbing the fulcrum point. I
jump again and again until they tip and fall into my arms.
" Mosen!"
I hear the
impatience in my father's voice and race out the door toward where he is waiting
beside the old well, now dry and dead. Today the well is a small impression
in the sand, full of stones that once formed its wall. I see the images of another
time; my mother hauling water to the lip, the dark cool liquid staining the
stones, glittering in the sunlight a sit splashes from the pail's oscillating
waves over the sides and onto my sister's smooth bare brown arms. I hold that
image clutching it like a smooth stone to my heart, holding it down there in
my chest, preventing it from shattering and rising up into my throat.
I hand one
shovel to my father. He watches my face as I pass the well. He never looks at
the pile of stones that lie like a grave beside him. He takes my hand and I
obey. We walk past the original shoreline with its sweeping curve of graduated
sediment. We walk beside the pier, dropping below it as we walk out, letting
it tower above us like a bridge running out to an empty chasm. I look up and
see the sunlight through the empty spaces where planks have been removed to
build fences or shore up roofs. I think of how the water filled the space where
we walk and look at my father now submerged within himself as we move toward
the spot at the end where he feels we can dig and be successful.
At first
the sand is light, dusty and loose trailing from our shovels like wispy cascades,
dry tears. The shovels rasp through the skin of the earth, shout back at us.
Slowly though a hole emerges, symmetrical, hidden by the mounds of sediment
lifted out and raked back from the periphery. We both dig side by side, backs
against each other lifting with a rhythm; the arcs of our shovels co-ordinated
not to clash. I start to smell the memory of the fresh clean water of the sea
locked deep in the layers we cut through; some coarse and pebbled, others smooth
and fine like powder, moist and pressed to paste. I want to suck the sand and
draw the water out. My father stops when the top of the new well is above his
head and says.
" Get
the ladder from the shed and a pail with a long rope."
He lifts
me out pushing me up on his gritty shoulders with his sandy arms. On the
On the walk back up the sea bottom scorches my sandals and I stop beside
the pile of silent stones, the old well. I hear the voices talking to me from
beneath the stones; harsh guttural sounds mixed with familiar haunting tones
of panic. I rush past them letting them trail off into the morning heat. In
the shed I see the pile of coarse coiled rope along the wall facing the house.
The light in tiny bars slants through the timber slats along the wall. I crouch
down throwing the ropes across my back like a cape and bring my eye to an opening
between the salts. I can see a small toe, my mother's toes in a dusty sandal
stretching out toward the light. I hear the voices once again, sounds from the
far end of a tunnel. I am my father now, buried beneath the coils of rope, heavy
like fresh earth upon me, listening, hiding from the sounds. I dare not ask
myself questions. I grab the rope and find the pail and return with the ladder
on my shoulder. My father speaks to me from the hole, as if in memory he has
traded places.
"Where
have you been? I could make rope and build a ladder in that time." He is
impatient. The need for water makes us all impatient; I can't tell him where
I've been, back into the dreamtime when all things changed. He would forbid
it all with a look ad a slap, a striking out against himself, a poor soul in
need of punishment. I don't speak I watch, and empty pail on pail of sand, one
after the other, watching time hauled up and scattered on the ground. We take
turns. I descend to dig and fill and he ascends to haul and scatter. Over time
we draw apart, a father, a dark strange shape silhouetted against the yellow
sky, a son buried in the damp shadows of the hole. I want to get inside his
skull and ask him why.
My sister
comes. I see her against the light above; holding the yoke designed for her
with food prepared and water collected from the night traps. She is a black
scarecrow on a cross to me. I ascend. We both with our hands like spoons scoop
the lentil stew out of the pot into small bowls.
"Thank
you, Mira," I say staring deeply into her dark expressionless eyes. My
father looks downward as always and grunts his thanks; his dark curls now moist
with sweat and pitted with the excavated earth. We eat in silence. Mira sits
on the sand motionless, covered except for her moon face; the yoke free of its
burden still across her shoulders, a grim reminder. I imagine that she is reaching
out to me from the folds in her shawl, her soft brown arms holding my head gently
close to her breast. She rocks me to sleep with a soft humming when the moon
is a sliver in a sea of night. If you wish to read more of this story and others link to
Ascent Aspirations Publishing
Copyright : David Fraser
This
Side of Sanity
(Published Wilmington
Blues March 2003)
"Where is he?"
"Honey, just leave it alone," said Susan.
"I've had it, that 'frigging' dog's got to go."
" But what'll Mary or Josh think, Jack?"
" I don't give a damn. First it was the slippers, then the pee on the
rug, now my manuscript."
"But Jack, we can train; it's only a puppy. Mary or Josh will walk it.
I'll walk it."
"Puppy! You call that slobbering sack of shit a puppy. It's eating us
out of house and home. The carpets are ruined; you can't get piss out of carpet.
No one walks it. I walk it around the block, leashed to it, him leading me around
holding a plastic grocery bag of his most recent dump."
"Jack, stop it."
"Don't they eat dogs somewhere in the world. We could eat him and put
us out of our misery. Susan, it's going for a ride and it ain't coming back."
"Jack, you can't!"
"Just watch me."
Susan watched
the blood bulging in the veins of Jack's neck as he left the kitchen, threw
on a lightweight gray polyester jacket and jingled the tags on the leash collar.
The dog in question responded by rushing to the front door. Jack snapped the
collar around the dog's neck and led him out into the night air.
Susan watched
from the picture window. The silver gray mini-van pulled out backwards with
Jack's face obscured behind the reflected light of the street lamps and the
dog's panting face visibly nuzzling the passenger side window for more air.
"He
is truly crazy, " she whispered beneath her breath. She'd seen him like
this before, always tormented by destruction, undone by the imperfections of
his world, trapped by possessions breaking down, food uneaten and rotting in
the refrigerator, scratches on furniture, the lack of reparations for all the
victims of the world, of which at times he felt he was one. She'd seen him wild
and furious, ranting and raving at circumstances always beyond his control,
a naked man beating back the elements of the storm. If you wish to read more of this story
and others link to Ascent Aspirations Publishing
Engaged
(Published in Outer
Rim-Mythos August 2000)
The beginning of the end started on the day that
Clay looked down from his drab apartment balcony onto the grimy tops of the
lower buildings of past decades and further out across the green expanse of
Elysian Common. The ancient oaks were a rolling canopy of life amid the gray
concrete and the pale blue ice-cold corporate facades of high-tech glassene.
Behind him he could hear the audio on the computer terminal chirping out the
usual morning messages-in-waiting that so aggravated him. There was no escape
from the constant monitoring, the steady stream of tasks, responses, and corporate
jumble-babble as he called it, the infoglut that came with the virtual sweatshop.
That is, until today.
For weeks he had been preparing for this moment when
he would be, at least temporarily, free from RadCam's grip on him. He had developed
the programs and sub-routines himself, linked them to the pre-prepared video
clips of standard responses that could be fed in for brief seconds to give the
semblance of his true presence at the terminal during the prescribed working
hours as determined by his contract with RadCam. Now all he had to do was to
activate the program and he was free to escape.
Clay walked in from the balcony, retrieved the file
from storage, and loaded it into hyper-memory. For a nanosecond the screen blipped
and the program, not Clay, began to scan the messages in his tray, prioritize
them and then actually analyze the contents in preparation for a response. The
tasks were spooled into a machine-logical partitioned order ready for the machine
to begin, which it did to Clay's ecstatic amazement. This was the beginning
and he realized that the possibilities were endless, but today all he wanted
was a walk on the common, and a chance breathe the fresh air that came with
the spring-fever he'd been feeling for weeks.
He locked the door behind him, trusting in the months
of exhaustive programming to allow his undetected escape, waltzed down the corridor
like a convict who had suddenly discovered the tunnel to freedom, and pressed
the optic button on the elevator. The doors silently opened and he stepped into
the mirrored interior. The box zoomed him down to the surface imperceptibly.
At the entrance to his condotel he lingered briefly on the stone steps, slipped
the two security guards a smile and a " gaday " and was off at a swift
clip across the fluorescent-pink polycrete boulevard encircling the common.
Pedestrians were safe on the boulevard since the hover traffic was still limited
to the old gray asphalt passageways of the city. Piece by piece the old streets,
the highways and byways of the grounded automobile were being replaced by narrower
layered hoverways. Less people were traveling now that the impact of the electronic
super highways was finally sinking into the deep consciousness of the modern
worker. The work traveled not the worker who either was a freed butterfly of
creativity or a prisoner of the nanochip.
Clay stepped from the artificial pink surface of
the boulevard onto the newly sprouted spring grass, watched the dew bead upon
his shoes and breathed deeply from the trough of life. The air was still crisp
as winter hadn't entirely loosened its grip. He followed the worn path of many
feet that wound through a forest of oak trees that could trace their birth back
to the time when the aboriginal corn fields had stretched for hundreds of miles
without a break, row on row in silent mounds beneath the moonlight. But eventually
the forest gave way to a wide plain of grass whose centre-point was the reflecting
pool, a rectangular slice of dark water still ringed by tenacious ice crystals
that hung onto the shaded edges. The free standing black water of the centre
caught the huge oak boughs and also drew into its reflection the higher spires
of glassene from the city's commercial shrines. Two paths lead around the pool;
Clay took the one less traveled, the one that skirted the historical cemetery
of centuries past. It was here beside the low stone wall that he saw her for
the first time, that he felt the impulses that would be the beginning of the
end.
A stillness hung like a damp cloak upon the cold
carved weathered tombs. They rose up out of the wakening earth surrounded by
little rusting wrought iron fences. Interspersed around the old homes for wealthy
ancestral bones, jutted the marble-pitted phallic markers of lesser men and
women, and babies, tiny creatures dispatched from a hostile world, babies who
had either fallen dead from shriveled wombs or been caught by the grip of death
on the soft pillows of their cribs.
At first she was no more than mist clinging low to
the frozen earth, weaving through the mortuary stones and then she was cream
fabric streaked with the brown earth. She rose out of the soil as a flower stem
bursts still death-white into light to warm itself under the rays of the sun
and flame itself green, clawing at the air. There was a wildness in her hollow
eyes, white against the fabric of a sheer cotton dress caked in the filth of
the under-burden from which she appeared to have emerged.
Clay watched her claw her way out from the moist
frozen leaves, crouch like an animal and wearily survey the wide curve of open
common where he stood. She rose to her feet and darted nimbly behind the closest
tomb and like a mist struck by the sun evaporated before his eyes. Clay quickly
walked beside the low stone wall varying the angle of his vision hoping to catch
a further glimpse of the fleeing figure. For his rational mind she was a young
street maiden, a homeless victim forced to sleep beneath the leaves, or on other
nights huddled in a cardboard box behind bushes, or curled among the fermenting
garbage found in alleyways in the restaurant district. He had heard of these
forgotten people from the Telnet newsboards to which he subscribed. Every once
in a while when the right vote gained control, a squad of hunters would be sent
out to round them up, cleanse the city, purge the filth, exorcise the collective
psychic guilt of the metropolis. But Clay knew nothing of the realities, only
of the virtual office in his apartment, his prison, and of course he knew of
lies. If a simple drone like himself could electronically conjure the images
of his productive self, what could the real masters of deception create for
the world at large.
He never saw his street maiden again that day although
he walked the perimeter of the wall many times and even stepped over and trod
among the graves looking for mist and footprints on the damp earth.
At home, taking the software off-line, transparently
he re-integrated with his work. The experiment had been a success, tasks had
been accomplished with an intelligence beyond his original expectations.
For the next two months he worked hard with the regular
duties from RadCam while at the same time building on the sophistication of
his program. He didn't sleep except in short burst like a general caught in
a prolonged front-line battle. But sleep didn't rejuvenate his mind because
the images of the street maiden haunted him. She seductively reached out for
him. The mist curled through the plastene walls, wrapping him in bandages. She
pressed her cold lips upon his neck as he worked at the screen and touched the
soft hairs across his shoulders with her breath. Her feral wildness excited
him, distracted him and sent the blood pumping through his sex. As an outlet
he logged onto the kinetic holocomps program, but even the virtual very tactile
sensations of electronic companions didn't satisfy the urges that his street
maiden was creating inside his soul.
He needed her now and the software would once again
free him to search for her and bring her home. The past months had seen spring
bloom and summer burn down upon the common. He started there after crossing
the circular polycrete boulevard that separated his technological world and
her earthly one. No one ever seemed to be out on the common now that the electronic
revolution had turned everyone inward, into the wireless communication cocoons.
There wasn't the need to physically communicate when electronics could satisfy
all the needs, even the sexual ones. But Clay wasn't satisfied. He wanted his
street maiden who had been haunting him, calling him like a siren, tempting
him with her cool breath.
The sun beat down on him like the eye of the world,
watching his search, laughing at his desperation.
He spent the entire week with no success, wandering
through the tall oak forest, searching the graveyard for signs of her lair,
her shelter from the street slime, the gutter gangs that emerged in the heat
of the summer, the gangs of fair-weather predators he feared may have already
raped her and left her to rot with an open throat beneath the brambles of the
undergrowth. He even stayed out in the open at night, sleeping on the common,
shivering in the chill of a star-filled night. And then when he had almost given
up the hope that she had even existed except as a vision within his own mind,
she appeared, not as a grime-covered wood nymph or the earth maiden emerging
from the soil of the underworld, but as a water maiden rising out of the long
dark pool.
Her hand cut out of the water like a fin, a flash
of silver reflecting the rays of the sun. She swam smoothly along the brackish
water of the long pool sending out tiny droplets like pearls caught in a cosmic
swirl and then abruptly near the edge she stopped and stood with the earth washed
from her face and limbs; the surface of the water settling smooth about her
waist. The cream-white cotton dress clung to her body revealing her nakedness,
displaying the fruits of her body, her athletic breasts heaving up and down
as she breathed in and out from the exertion of her swimming. Clay stood beside
the pool speechless in awe of the goddess he saw before him.
Breaking the spell he spoke, "Let me help you,"
offering his outstretched hand toward her.
Instantly she turned with the timidity of the fawn,
blended with the feral glance of the lone wolf fearful yet ready to attack.
And in the turning she slipped beneath the water and was gone. Clay watched
now closer to the edge of the pool waiting for her to surface. He waited and
waited and then at the far end of the long pool she emerged white and ghostly
in the distant sunlight. In desperation he ran along the polished granite stones
encasing the pool toward where she had emerged, watching her motion as she moved
quickly out of the open grass of the common toward the forest and the orchards
beside the cemetery.
He left the common and entered the forest as the
sun was setting across the old white memorials of another era. The darkness
engulfed him almost immediately; the thickets grabbed at his clothing, tripped
him as he tried to run toward the open spaces in the forest. In circles he ran
, lost in the confusion of the setting sun, the rising moon, the density of
the underworld of trees and nature that was so foreign to him. Finally he came
upon an opening in an ancient orchard of pear and apple trees gone wild. Exhausted,
he sat upon the damp earth with his back resting against a rotting stump. The
moon had risen quickly and the pale light brought a pewter-coloured illumination
to the clearing. He closed his eyes and perhaps he slept; he didn't know, but
eventually a slight rustling brought all his muscles alive with electricity.
The street maiden was in the clearing, white and pure, fresh in the moonlight
reaching up toward the curved boughs of a pear tree. Clay watched in silence
as the boughs bent toward her, lowering the fruit to her waiting mouth. One
pear hanging from the bent bough dropped lower as she reached with her neck
extended, her lips parted, reaching to swallow and suckle the fruit of the tree.
Slowly at first she sucked the wide bottom surface of the pear, drawing it gradually
into her mouth dissolving its flesh, letting its juices slide down the interior
of her throat, excreting the excess through the sides of her mouth, down her
chin and across the tight cords of her extended neck.
When she had consumed the first pear, she moved on
to another as the bough bent to accommodate her ritual. Clay sat immobilized,
his scrotum tight, his penis engorged with his life's blood. He ached to take
her beneath the moonlight in the deep green grass beneath the tree but he was
paralyzed and caught within the rushing waves of his own passion. The street
maiden unaware, moonlight glistening on the juice rivulets streaming across
her cheeks sucked the second fruit and drove Clay beyond the bounds of human
reason. With a tiny cry of mingled pain and pleasure, a cry of a wounded animal,
the whimper of a child in slumber, Clay's erection erupted spilling his seeds
into the fabric of his cotton pants. With that tiny cry, disturbed from her
suckling, the street maiden vanished leaving him alone and empty.
The night of the orchard as he called it remained
an agonizing memory for Clay. The lingering image of the silvered light of the
moon glistening on her skin haunted him as he sat alone in the darkness of the
apartment with only the blue light of the monitor casting shadows on the wall.
Summer disappeared into the autumn and the cool nights brought frost and carpets
of leaves along the pathways of the common. Daily Clay searched for her, driven
by a ritual desire to possess her.
Finally on the evening of the first snow his persistent
effort was rewarded. He found her sleeping on a granite slab outside a tomb,
her body wrapped in damp gauze crusted hard in the frozen snow that had melted
and turned to ice upon her form. She lay still as death, waiting for the voyage
into another realm. Clay bent toward her and gently touched her blue lips and
the ivory hardness of her frozen face. Her arms and feet were wrapped tightly
and concealed like a mummy waiting for the lid to close upon the sarcophagus.
He picked her up and carried her to the boulevard. There he removed his coat
and wrapped her in its folds and with one arm, lifted her as he would a drunken
companion and moved across the boulevard and through the entrance of the condotel.
Once in his apartment he laid her on the sofa and pressed himself against her
and wrapped a heavy woolen blanket around them both. The heat gradually warmed
her frozen form and slowly her skin, the muscles on her limbs began to respond.
At this point she opened her eyes and he leaped up from the sofa and stared
back at her in silence.
The street maiden didn't speak and Clay just watched
her and fed her soup. Her eyes watched him suspiciously as he moved about the
apartment, but she remained silent. A number of days passed and the street maiden
lay with her limbs wrapped in the gauze bandages as Clay watched her share his
soup. Finally after a week he began to unravel the bandages starting with her
neck and working down toward her feet. The web of gauze was natural like an
extension of her skin, fine filaments interlaced together, wound into strips
that encircled her frame from her neck to her feet. Clay carefully pulled at
a strand breaking it and creating a starting point to unravel her body. Her
eyes watched him with panic painted into their intensity. With each revelation
of her hidden flesh the tension grew deeper in her expression as she watched
helplessly.
The first shockwave hit Clay when he revealed the
deep ragged scars across his street maiden's neck. Angry red keloidal worm-like
raised strips of flesh stretched in completed circles just above where the neck
meets the collarbone. The filaments of gauze grew tenaciously around them. He
pulled harder to reveal them and the bandages separated from the wounds. Her
eyes watched and watered as he continued to unwrap her. She watched the horror
in his eyes as they were continually drawn to the writhing mass of healing scar
tissue. Her upper torso took his breath away. Her breasts opened to the air
were white and pure, smooth as polished marble, flawless and arousing.
Clay unwrapped her arms and gasped. Her wrists were
jagged stumps where her hands had been severed. Here too the filaments clung
deeply to the wounds. Clay stopped, gulped for air and retched the contents
of his stomach onto the carpet. He sat down in a chair unable to continue and
watched as she lay propped up on the sofa naked from the waist up. He didn't
want to know the extent of the remaining desecration. But gradually his curiosity
forced him to continue to unravel the remaining bandages.
He stood back from the couch and surveyed his new
possession. His eyes traveled past the web of roiling snakes encircling her
neck, down across the smoothness of her chest, her stumps, the flat milkiness
of her abdomen flowing into the smooth hairless mound of her sex, down the length
of muscular legs to her lean ankles, but no further for she had no feet.
Clay choked out his first words. "How did this
happen? Who did this?"
Clay's street maiden responded with her pained eyes
and a flow of tears that streaked down her cheeks over her chin to catch like
drops of dew in the ridges of her scars. She didn't speak. Clay quivered in
shock at the sight of her juxtaposed beauty and desecration.
" What shall I call you, earth maiden?"
Slowly her arms moved, imperceptibly at first and
then more obviously into an opening, at least an interpretation of an opening.
Her head tilted slightly to the side as would a playful puppy trying to decipher
a casual comment directed toward it.
Clay perceived the movement as communication to his
question. " Yes, that's it, Earth Maiden, you're Earth Maiden sent to free
me, your loyal drone from the clasping claws of techno-capitalism."
He moved to her and held her gently around the waist.
Then he lifted her from the sofa and carried her into the bedroom and laid her
onto one side of the double bed.
The bed was where she was to lay each day; propped
up on pillows during the waking hours, watching him watch her, or listening
to him working quietly in the computer room, and each night; horizontal beside
him sensing his nakedness beside her, waiting for his movements, his touches,
his eyes devouring her skin in the darkness.
Overtime they drew closer together without dialogue.
Clay spoke and she listened. He pleaded with her to communicate and she listened
and watched silently with the eyes of a bruised animal compliant and fearful.
Clay moved toward her one night when the room was bathed in a particularly bright
illumination from the moon. The light mingled over their skin, bathed her ripe
nipples with purple hues and created a spark of excitement in both their bodies.
They joined together, their hips moving toward each other like water to water,
mercury to mercury. They formed a unified shape, each piece of each other a
piece of the other. He felt her internal pain flooding from the pores of her
skin, skin that touched back at the caress of his hand. He felt the softness
of the insides of her thighs, the underparts beneath her arms; he felt her wrap
her severed arms and legs around him, soft snakes encasing him in her passion
for togetherness. He felt the tiny filaments that trailed from her ragged stumps;
he felt them moving across his pores searching for openings in his flesh. He
gave himself utterly into the moment spiritually and psycho-sexually and drifted
into sleep still connected.
In the morning he found himself flat on his back
beside her. Earth maiden lay as she always had , flat and compact with her severed
arms beside her waist, her severed legs stretched out tight together on the
comforter. Clay rose up naked and didn't bother to dress, left the bedroom and
entered the computer room to check on his program. He had perfected it to work
in perpetuity if he needed to be totally free. It was working hard on the morning's
task list, searching the Nets for the needed data, compiling the requested reports,
responding to the professional and personal mail. He left the screen satisfied
and walked back into the bedroom. In passing the wall mirrors he noticed something
different. Tiny red lines marked his back, arms and his lower legs. Nothing
hurt; they weren't scars, just little lines that could have been made if he
had stretched out in a wicker lounge in his bare skin. Looking over toward his
lover he noticed that the filaments on her severed limbs seemed to be longer,
but almost imperceptibly, so that he really didn't consciously intellectualize
what he actually saw.
From the ceiling, on a hook hung a waxy leafed hoya
that for years had grown inch by inch until it had finally just curled itself
over the lip of the pot. Clay glanced at it briefly and like the filaments its
vines too seemed longer. On the outside of the window frost gripped the pane
in a web of fern-like patterns. Through a small clear patch Clay could see the
tall oaks bare mostly with only a few clusters of tawny leaves like gnarled
hands waving in the winter air. The landscape looked harsher than during previous
winters, but he merely saw it all without judgment or evaluation.
Turning from the window he approached his Earth Maiden
and was consumed with the passion and the desire he'd felt of that first night
in the woods, the desire he'd given himself to the night before. He moved to
her mentally and psychologically, became a part of her and she a part of him.
Endlessly they joined themselves together, roots blending, branches growing
together in a cloistered closeness. He felt her arms once again moving around
him growing into his skin as he grew and pulsed inside her soft woman place.
Time ceased to be a factor as the darkness came and
the frosted light of morning drifted in, held then faded into long shadows,
into gray then black. Each time they joined he felt the consumption, felt his
loss of self, felt the generated power of their coupling. A week past into weeks
into months. Clay couldn't remember moving from the bed but tell-tail signs
of empty plates and a variety of take-out cartons scattered across the bedroom
floor made him realize that he must be ordering in. The room was green with
growth; the hoya now spread its vines down to the floor and across the walls.
Tiny waxy pink trumpet-like flowers glistening with drops of nectar spread a
overpowering scent throughout the apartment. The windows now were frosted shut,
caked in layers of ice that distorted the view out across the boulevard and
across the common.
One morning Clay was conscious of time, conscious
of these changes, conscious of his consumption into and of his Earth Maiden.
It was on that morning that he witnessed the miracle. With the bedroom festooned
with the vines of the flowering hoya, with his body red raw with the thin red
lines from their coupling, with the room bathed in the crisp winter light from
the window he watched the regeneration begin. The filaments projecting from
the stumps of her severed limbs quivered and grew, entwined twisting like wire
worms, like roots, fused and formed themselves into hands and feet. Clay couldn't
speak. His Earth Maiden put one finger to his lips, kissed him gently, touched
him softly in all the special places with her newly formed hands, wrapped her
arms around him and ran her fingers through his hair, curled her toes along
the lower part of his ankle and slid the balls of her feet carefully along the
inner portions of his thigh.
With her new parts they joined more fully, more closely,
more endlessly from day to night and night to day, without sustenance other
than from their own flesh. Clay lost all consciousness of his corporal self.
He spoke to her in murmurs, gestures; she replied with the subtle movements
of her eyes, but still she failed to speak and he had only his imagination to
interpret if she really ever was saying anything to him or was merely a moving
breathing possession of his desire.
One morning he snapped out of the loop with the sound
of his computer in the other room chirping at him in a high pitched whine, a
whine he recognized as urgent. He leaped up quickly as if programmed and immediately
a searing pain pulsed across his chest, the pain a of long-left adhesive bandage
being ripped away from a hairy piece of skin. The pain was abrupt and in his
haste to reach the computer screen he blocked it. Quickly he activated his actual
head-shot on the monitor, patched into the incoming visual of RadCam personnel;
he expected Loftus Lake, his senior VP to appear accusing him of the whole scam.
Jerry Walsh's smiling face appeared.
"Clay, buddy, how can you always be working
so hard in this winter-set; it's depressing. Surely you can come out once in
a while. The guys and gals on the board miss you, miss you throwing back a few
at the old local. How you been? You look thinner, bud, no sunshine with this
blasted winter. They're blaming it on those two big ones; Indonesia, and the
mid-Atlantic; Pinotumbo and the new island, they both keep spewing out the ash.
Keeps it cold, blocks the sun."
Clay took a moment to respond. At first he checked
the program to make sure it was still doing the job. This call could be a ruse
to flush him out; he couldn't be too careful.
He pieced together Jerry's comments and looked out
the window. The sky was a weird gray, even through the thick ice on the glass.
He looked at the internal clock and shook his head. The digital read 4: 7: 09,
July 4th, 2009.
" What's going on Jerry; today is a holiday?
Where are the fireworks? Later maybe?"
" You really have been working too hard. A lot
of people are hanging on to life by thin threads. Of course over here, for a
while, we are okay but the other continents, they ain't so fortunate, never
were as you know. No food, no growing season to look forward to this year. The
climatologists predict another two years at least if indeed it is those damn
volcanoes. Of course the fundamentalists are terrorizing everyone with the end-of-the-world-is-near
crap. They missed 2000 so they are now telling us the calendar was misdated
from the beginning as if any beginning was anything but random. So sorry, Clay,
no fireworks; everyone is sitting tight conserving what they have, rationing
our stored surplus, conserving energy. And at the same time those who have are
making millions. Do you want in on the cash cow, Clay? You got futures on some
of that storage; I'll buy off your hands and we will both be richer than we
ever imagined. What ya say?"
Clay thought for a moment. He didn't feel any heat
on in the apartment, but the room felt tropical despite the iced windows. At
least nine months had disappeared within his consumption with his Earth Maiden
and now Jerry was telling him they were still in the dead of winter, no growing
season all over the world, whole civilization of the developing constituents
of the world dying of starvation, erupting volcanoes, end-of-the-world doomsayers
once again. Money to be made. Did he care about money now? Jerry felt so alien
to him now, and so did the rest of the world.
Clay took a couple of deep breaths. " Give me
a few days, Jerry. I'll call you back." He signed off quickly, switched
off the monitored head shot. He walked around the room a few times before sitting
down heavily in the chair in front of the computer. He called up the program
and began writing new routines to screen out all future interruptions. Many
hours, even days passed before he totally refitted the code for all eventualities.
On the last key stroke that activated the program once again, he felt the tiny
hairs on his neck move like blades of grass in a gentle breeze. His Earth Maiden
laid her cool lips upon his neck. He felt her breasts brush softly upon his
shoulders, her hair trail like vines down the front of his chest. He rose from
the chair, turned toward her, feeling his sex erect, pointing the way forward
like a branch. She gripped him and they joined together standing in the blue
light of the computer screen. The room burst into a profusion of vegetation.
hoya spread across the walls. Other strange vines crept across the floor. Flowers
burst up in pockets out of the hardwood floors and the plaster on the walls.
The room became a jungle full of flora and crawling beetles, tiny worms, flying
insects of all varieties. The air became fetid and musty, damp with the mixture
of rot and growth. Clay felt her closeness, pressed his sex deeper, pressed
her smooth cheeks into him and she clung onto his neck as if he were a tree
in the forest. And then she spoke.
" The time has come to let me go." Her
words transpired like moisture from the pores of leaves, an invisible, inaudible
diffusion of sound, sensed rather than heard. Clay wrestled with what at first
he interpreted as a random thought, one of his own thoughts, a questioning guilt-ridden
thought about his holding her in his apartment, like a rapist who had captured
some young street kid and used her until he was tired or bored. It was a fleeting
thought that he pushed out quickly to float among the vines. He had saved her
life; he had helped to regenerate her severed limbs; he had loved her gently,
loved her endlessly throughout the cold winter; he was obsessed with her beauty
and she was his foundling, his goddess, his earth maiden. She couldn't go. Where
would she go, back to the common to be picked up by some wandering gang on puerile
street kids who couldn't appreciate true love, who would really use her and
then discard her, perhaps leave her dismembered once again, scarred and severed.
" It's time to let me go." Again he sensed
the words as ripples of moist breath caressing his ear.
This time he blocked his thoughts and steeled himself
against a weak response. He held her tightly, lifted her above the vine strewn
floor crawling with slugs and many-legged creatures, and carried her, stepping
over protruding roots, to the bed which also now was overgrown with the jungle
growth.
There he pushed himself inside of his earth maiden.
She moved by instinct as she was born to move. They moved together, grew tighter
together, more entwined. Clay lost himself in her warm flesh, in his possession
of her. Time and time again he blocked her messages, drove her pleas for release,
and for escape from his conscious mind. The rooms filled with the forest so
that if Clay had wanted to rise up from the coupling he couldn't as the density
prevented it. Gradually the pleas for release subsided with her exhaustion and
she gave all of herself to him, not only her body but also her soul and they
became as one together entwined upon the bed of undergrowth within the enclosed
forest of the apartment.
Outside winter raged throughout late summer and into
fall, through into traditional winter and early spring. Many human beings died,
the land died and only those who had from the beginning the resources for survival,
continued to beat out the dying of the land.
Within the forest Clay and his Earth Maiden silently
and endlessly fed each other with their passion, until a weird sound pierced
Clay's consciousness. It started low and soft like a rumble of thunder, transformed
into a high pitched wail, a keening wail of a mother who had lost a child, who'd
watched her little baby run out into the path of something moving fast and shiny,
heavy and unstoppable, a stone cry of anguish that could not be comforted, a
cry that held the strength of the earth within its strident notes.
"It is time to let me go. The beggar woman searches
for my corpse upon the common. Cities are left without joy. I cannot eat of
you any longer so you must let me go."
" But I love you. You must stay and love me
in our underworld."
" The eye of the world is upon us. You cannot
forsake the earth for your own desire. I will eat your seeds no longer. Either
you release me now or I shall leave you."
Her words grew stronger as she spoke, again in puffs
of moisture exploding like transpiring droplets from forest leaves.
Clay paused to analyze her words, sense their meaning,
read the syntax within the code. He could break that program. He was in control.
She was his to mold, to lay down lines of structured design. She couldn't leave.
She could only leave if he allowed her to leave. It was with this last thought
that he laughed out loud in a deep guttural, chest heaving laugh that shook
their bodies together in its vibration.
" If you let me leave we will part gently as
lovers and I promise I will return each year and we can join and I will eat
your seeds and we will grow. But if I'm forced to leave you against your will
I cannot ever return sweet human."
Clay laughed louder this time and clutched her closer
to him, driving his sex into her like a weapon. He felt her warm tears upon
his shoulders, then felt her hands pushing deeply into the sinewed muscles of
his back, gripping him from behind and prying his entire body away from his
loved possession. He was fused to her through the longer duration of their coupling
and as she pried him back from her the rooted filaments of her skin gripped
his flesh and ripped it from his bones. In the soft parts where organs were
unprotected by his ribs his guts came loose, his stomach and liver, the large
and small intestines in longer yards of overlapping tubes became detached from
their owner and clung to the Earth Maiden like grotesque decorations. Closest
to the heart the filaments were most strongly entwined and as she pulled away
Clay felt and heard that organ being ripped through his rib-cage pumping and
spraying his life's blood and held suspended in the air attached to the filaments
growing out of her breasts. Time stood still differently now within the tangle
of the forest, earth-brown and green splashed in the hot blood of his beating
heart. Clay lay back with the hollow cavity of his chest open and empty and
listened to the last sounds of his life dripping drop by drop upon the leaves
of the forest floor.
The Earth Maiden trailing her decorations like strange multiple umbilical cords,
moved through the forest to the apartment door, left naked, down the corridor,
down the elevator, out the front steps, across the deep snow on the boulevard,
beneath the oaks with the gnarled leaves. A beggar woman met her later that
day. Some say that their tears thawed the earth. Others felt that the crisis
of the volcanoes had run its course. Later when the heat of summer filled the
streets with the smells of rotting garbage, and someone from RadCam became suspicious
about Clay's dead monitor, they discovered an apartment full of dead vines,
and Clay's corpse with all its organs missing.
Copyright David Fraser
David Fraser's Home Site
Email: David Fraser
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