Annihilation Pool

During and after the ice storm, like new recruits innocent of war, each cryosheathed thing with its precise weakness snapped under the weight of it.

Soon Riordan found and moved into the valley, beneath summits like the tines of some arcane crown bestowed upon long-storied ones. Cassie, he believed, resided here, and it was his time to find her once more.

Villagers milled and chinwagged and shaped a tale.

“Let me stay here among you,” said Cassandra, long grateful. “I will give my all to do justice to your endless hospitality.”

Their furtive eyes sought one another like stormclouds.

Riordan was from elsewhere, faraway as abandoned dreams, and when times grow fraught, such doubtful heritage is received less charitably, and accidents are not so much encouraged as accepted. His heart could parody no other, and he welcomed eventide amid the shadows, below the towering range: alpenglow, aureate and rose, the sculpted peaks so astounded in their caul of rarefied air they arrest your breath and incarcerate your heart. 

Pure blare blueshine and incandescent white. Ghost-world phosphorescence.

“Where is my Cassandra?” he asked of the villagers. “I’ve walked in dire lands and met so many foes I’m weary of it all. Please make this my journey’s end.”

But the villagers were narrow-eyed; thin of lip and crossed of arms.

Down in the valley, silent by the well, his own arms outstretched, Riordan tried to greet the paradoxes; the slow dead and the renewed urgency of a reconstituted dread.

But the village knew. And secrets rarely blink. 

“Riordan!” cried Cassandra, lodged and duped across town, somewhere safely away. “Where are you, my love?”

He even fancied he heard her, though he could summon no tenable answer.

They led his scrawny frame to a hidden hotspring, steaming under waxy leaves. Elders made him walk and he did so without rancour, his doomed eyes perfectly even and dry as pages in an obsolete book.

In the end, he walked willingly into the annihilation pool, the matrix of his skin slow to dissolve, a caul of blood soon belching surfaceward, releasing its charnel reek in the anticipant air.

Above the surface, a pinkish aerosol mist, his emergent ghost, his blood a vapour, a spurned arraignment, an overlooked indictment in some demented and unremembered court.

Cassandra, alone both here and also everywhere, waited while days like thunderheads heaped upon themselves along the world’s edge until even she endorsed and abided by her inamorato’s demise.

Quiet Eternal Song

She showed up every afternoon in the town square, her guitar and amp ready to display her bona fides, ready to dazzle. She used to hear god’s whisper but no longer. 

She was an auburn beauty, which was incidental, but her gathered ponytail and her classical vulpine face were assets, however the music came.

Yes, pretty hurts, but goddamn, it still had such currency.

“Pretty lady, I won’t rain on your parade, but this isn’t the place for you.”

The wolf had appeared from shadows beneath the chapel roof and the market awnings, and he smiled through tumultuous teeth and tried to dam his drool. Oh, he was hungry.

“The skies are clear and this isn’t my parade, Mr. Wolf,” she said. “This is a way station, and I come from elsewhere, but here I sing my truth.”

“Don’t push me, woman.” 

“I won’t. Instead I’ll make my music.”

And she did that. Splashes of half or quarter melodies, staccato squalls merging into dreamscape, arpeggios traipsing on ramparts of crenelated chords, spiralling into the darkest of wells and spinning into meadowlark updrafts. Distortion like the most shattered of mirrors, hot liquid globules and elastic spans of glass, a glittering haze of misted diamond. Her thumb like a hammer conjuring bass notes, rhythmic and sundry as coitus, her arachnid fingers a blur as lacquered nails plucked and glissandoed reflected layers of overlapping melody. And above it soared her voice, like the great mountain condor, effortless and buoyed by thermals.

The townsfolk gathered and grew in numbers, and they sometimes sang snippets that only augmented her song, and children danced, and then their mothers, and then, looking sheepish between themselves, their fathers. 

The wolf was humbled, reduced, his snout a wilted thing, his ears flat, the luxuriance of his tail now tucked. 

“Mr. Wolf, I won’t stay. I’ve done what I came for, and it’s always time to move on. What will you do?”

Cupping the town in its rough hands was a landscape of clear streams and falls, forests dappled by light and deer, skies that paraded like blue and white and grey ticker tape, crags and flats and the quiet eternal song of the land.

The wolf, who recognized the good as well, knew all this and loved it, but he felt thwarted. Her cello nape, her downy hollows, her female scent itself a taunt, and though he knew he was wrong, he let himself down.

“I will eat you; it’s how I’m made. It’s what I am. And you, my chestnut fawn, were made for this too.”

She sighed while she packed her instruments. Something in the faraway hills echoed and crackled like an exhaled nightmare. She wished she could love the wolf and receive his love in turn.

“You will do what you were made to do, Mr. Wolf. But you are not emblematic of your kind.”

The wolf was puzzled. He didn’t know what emblematic meant. And while he crunched her words like marrow from the bones of a lover, spurned and sickly as the plague-struck, the townsfolk moved in silence with their clubs and knives and systematically dismembered him, and hearing his last furious yowl she cried as she left town, her hardware hunched like a stigma on her back, the neck of her guitar a phallus, her keening cry a screech of corvid grief in the spent and airless afternoon. 

Spindrift

She came here among us, yet no one knew her name.

Some called her the Fabulist because her currency was stories and her audience mostly children. Yet I listened too, and my name is Rashida, and I am a grown woman.

Her stage was formed in rubble, the pale beige dust tracing a chalklike ambit, the sporadic roar of warplanes a sonic frontier. The audience was the silence and its inverse. Amid bloodred cartographic deltas, septic watery spools of unraveled gauze, the dirty frightened actuality of a war zone, the Fabulist came and told her dream-clean tales. 

Of pirates, of explorers, of women who entered a dark place and found light, of men who relinquished their power in favour of something new, of wolves who moved into a magic park and changed the warp and weft of the scenery. Not content with that, she embellished the proffered truths of our age and threw them into relief. And the children loved her more than anyone, as if Santa had dreamed of a cartoon mouse and made of his largesse an infinite childhood shrine. 

As the regime moved closer, sending shells and rockets and even a terrible airborne assassin that formed sickly bubbles on the lips of the children in lieu of screams, her stories were bulwarks, speaking of the lionhearts of history, sketching the tales of forest outlaws who accosted the elites and reapportioned their ill-gotten gains to those more worthy. 

Robin Hood. Joan of Arc. Simón Bolívar. Arthur Pendragon. Che Guevara. Marie Colvin. 

The people, reduced to a faux square block of crumbling rock and broken minarets, began to gather, bereft of any other hope, and the Fabulist told stories to undo their last dissent.

“Feel my heart beating,” said Ahmed in spattered surgical scrubs. 

“I shall. But first, a story.”

And it went like this:

A headstrong woman on a beach sat for days after a shipwreck until a coconut became a fledgling palm. Nothing sailed by, and the sun remained in the sky, and the air was still as death, and shivering with the fragile ebb and the tenuous flow the palm became a tree but slowly. The woman walked the beach and traced the cadence of the tides and sang in tune with them. 

Until one day another castaway coughed and gasped his sickness upon her world. 

“How dare you come and sully this expanse?” asked the woman, now angered.

“My ship is lost, and this is nothing I would choose,” he said, still puking ample saltchuck.

“Ingrate!”

She moved to smite him with a blade of pale driftwood, but a wave pulled him back beyond the scope of her rage, a riptide rescued him, and she felt a rib inside her creak and twinge. She thought for a second about relenting and retreated. 

Shearwaters drew letters in the sky—“please help us all”—and a turtle crawled from the tide and made its way along the lower jawbone sweep of the beach, the great Nike swoosh of this desert island uptick, and settled by the sawgrass and the tiny dunes. The humans from their distant perches—she downwind on the glimmering sands, he on a cluster of rocks offshore—watched as it laid its copious eggs and buried them. Food for days, they thought, and schemed. 

But they miscounted the days and the eggs all hatched and tiny spiderlike bodies began to row tideward. 

“You should have come in sooner,” the woman yelled across the still ocean, “so you could help.”

“Why? To meet the flat of your oar blade?”

Like this, their days dissolved into something other than days, a way of being, a miscomprehension, and still the ponderous air stayed still. 

Until one day she said, “Come, then. Let us merge our skills and build of this a new brightness.”

And he came swimming from the dwindle tail of rocks and walked the remaining shallows and met the brandished edge of her driftwood blade and was dead before he hit the sand.

“That will teach you,” she said, while the petrels wheeled and screamed in cryptic cursive against the firmament and thunderheads built upon themselves offshore, distant, convulsive, revolving like sickly guts.

The children sat like penitents atop a monastic peak. The Fabulist stayed among them, now silent. Someone screamed they should go down the stairs, but no one moved. Post-traumatic blasts ramped up like lariated strings of cherry bombs. In what world does a child distinguish between a cluster bomb and a rocket? What rift has split the twin realities of life as its lived and mere story?

Only the Fabulist knows. No, thats not true. I, Rashida, cowering under the withering trellis of vines, showered by dust, dreaming spindrift tales of unthinkable escape, also know. 

Sorrowing

Dusk comes with a slow dimming, as if the world's sorrowing.

The people move delicately, their motions precise and penumbral, campfire noises distinct. The world seems formed from grainy points that swirl like quenched lightning bugs. The cough of a burro. A deterrent growl. Cast iron pots. The reek of smoke. Human warmth.

The girl, forgotten a moment, rests on a low wall on the edge of the settlement, waiting for the light to leave the violent rim of the sky. Through the trees, the squat sun spasms and the girl gazes at faraway realms, the serried distant hills like hunched triassic beasts.

Always from new aspects she has craved and surmised great wondrous lands, and now another lies above the horizon, canted over this very world, our sunset cumulus their doomed archipelagos in a bloodsea.

She wonders if they'll come for her. Her people. If they even remember. Her people of phosphorescence in this darkling land. Mayhap their recall is receded into fable, or fashioned into yearning auguries. Unrequited in this life.

A rough hand clasps her arm, drags her campward, and hope rolls back into the sultry vaults of her heart like eyes into a blinded head.

One of these nights, the coyote people will carry the day in this place of wolves, she no longer thinks.

A Fable

Far, far within the usual boundaries of the forest, in a place that has been forgotten certainly twice and perhaps thrice over, lived a caustic and demented rogue named Drano. He dwelt in squalor here, happily ignored by his time, in a house built from stomach bile, shame, and swamp mud, simply because he could no longer live anywhere else. Evil and mischief roiled beneath his clammy grey skin like nimble parasites. Flies, initially enticed by his foul miasma, dropped dead on contact.

Into this scene rode a figure atop a horse so vividly white that foolish and casual onlookers suffered a form of snowblindness long afterward.

Drano heard the animal’s hooves, and grinned as he made a grab for the brutal-looking mace he had long kept hanging near his front door in anticipation of such an encounter. (The world in its joyous derangement can never be held entirely at bay, after all.) Emerging with bestial assurance from his home, tree-bole legs splayed wide, big oily muscles squirming with malevolence, he confronted the bright stranger.

“Your life must truly be meaningless,” he said, grinding his teeth, rocking on his heels, and grinning wildly at the blissful delivery of fate.

“On the contrary,” returned the stranger, in a voice so mellifluous a gathering flock of crows was struck instantly dumb with shame. Here and there, on sinewy, dormant branches, blossoms spontaneously erupted. The woman who now dismounted from her brilliant steed was beautiful beyond all sanity. “I am the only thing with meaning you have ever encountered in your sad, beshitted life. I am the turning point and the crossroads, the watershed and the fulcrum. I am the Queen of the World. And your choice is stark: take me for a wife and find redemption, or do what your maggoty heart truly urges and destroy me.”

For a second, Drano hesitated – enough for the Universe to exhale the fragrance of infinite ranks of exotic flora, to round up the scattered quark herds of Outer Arcturus until they danced in a froth of reunited quanta, to sound out the tentative opening notes for a Cosmic symphony so quivering with intimations of beauty that some comets relinquished their once-resplendent tails in homage – but it was only a second, really.

Within the Queen’s jade eyes lay the distillation of all sorrow.

Drano brought down the twisted and monstrous weapon with both sturdy arms, and the Queen of the World was bludgeoned beyond all recognition, her royal brains and courtly pieces of skull dripping from the still, shocked, arboreal witnesses.

Outraged, one of the dumbstruck crows began a lament, its voice a swiftly rising tin-on-iron screed.

The World shifted, rocking on some unseen axis, a vast spell not so much broken as altered.

Something feral coughed in the thicket. Drano laughed with great fervour and pounded his matted chest. Except it wasn’t matted, nor indeed was it broad. Suddenly confused, he looked down at his breasts; finger-tipped and caressed them briefly, like an interrupted lover, like a shrewd and picky shopper in a fruit market. He saw his slender hands, their manicured nails like something precious strip-mined from the sea. He looked up at the horse, no longer blinded when he took in its beauty. Without thought, he mounted the animal, and sat astride its muscled girth. He felt a tingling between his legs that was both familiar and infinitely alien. Helplessly orgasming, he burst into great fits of ecstatic sobs.

Eventually, after days of blissful shrieking torment in the deepest, darkest part of the forest, the Queen of the World rose up on her blinding mount, tears flowing like contrails behind her, and set out on a new search, on a fresh and wrenching Quest. To heal the incurable, rescue the lost, wrestle the woebegone. And, when everything is dotted and crossed, all for naught.

*     *     *     *     *

A version of this story appeared on BlergPop on May 7, 2012. David Antrobus also writes for Indies Unlimited and BlergPop. Be sure to check out his work there if you like what you read here.