Sunday wearing Pants

singing telegram

5 - a chill when the dead man smiles

His long stick prodded in the scree. Fuz, son of Slayer, scrabbled in the detritus of a landslide picking out shards of stone for his project. He was of the Sullen, bent in stature and unobtrusive in his gray garb. They lived in the shadow of the mountain among the boulders, hiding, wary of the sky. The Sullen were taught to hate anything of distinction. The galaxies frightened them, the skyriders with their blatant displays of color and frivolity outraged them. In their holes they prayed to a thing they did not understand and some, the elders, relayed a glowering message of nothing. The absence of something.

He came upon her at dawn, with the landscape dimly lit from a shrouded sun. The Sullen never ventured out at night, when the stars were brightest. Emerald held her breath, crouching in a corner of the shelter with her steed, but the translucent wheezed and Fuz jumped at the sound. “Who is there?” he called, jumping back into the open beyond the overhang. He pulled out a polished waxstone and angled it under the leaning boulder, shooting vague illumination into the shadows. First he saw only a bulbous sheen, then he lowered the lamp and a light fell upon her smooth face. Fuz gazed stupidly at her, saw the large eyes and pink lips, parted slightly into a surprised O. Her tanned face, obvious even in the sparse light, furrowed Fuz's brow. “You are one of them, a flyer!” He turned to go, intent on sounding the alarm.

“Wait.” It was a tiny voice, thin from fear; and fatigue. “Wait. Come back.”

In the communal cave his mother was pale and bent, crouching over a stone mashing seeds into a tasteless pulp. Or she was working on an animal hide, pounding it into cloth, weaving stiff cords in and around the rough holes the men punched out. Her face was always downcast, she was nameless and alone in a family of men and infants. Daughters never stayed beyond their tenth year. This, flyer...was a woman.

“What is your name?” she asked. “I am Emerald.” Emerald leaned from her corner and held out a hand with a finger and a thumb extended. Fuz began to make out the shape of her grounded beast. It was spreading out along the dirt as it tired. He moved in closer and felt along the base of the thing with his stick. “Gently,” said the woman, “your hand would be better.”

The girl was beautiful, much more so than any of the women he had seen before. She was not dirty; her face was not crippled by desperation or odium. He sat on the ground, laying the stick over his knee and tentatively lay a hand on the quivering mass. Even so, Fuz could hardly keep his gaze from Emerald's bright face.

“It is a translucent. It sees. But we, my kind, we ride them.” Emerald was hungry and wanted to ask for food, for her and the translucent. Not yet. Soon.

“I have seen it,” Fuz answered. “I am Fuz.” He wondered what 'Emerald' could mean.

“Fuz.” Emerald repeated. They sat looking across the translucent at each other. Out in the open Emerald heard a scrambling noise and falling rocks. She shivered and fell back into shadow.

A low voice growled. “Who is in there? Fuz, come out.”

He stood and backed from the overhang. “It is just I. I have found nothing here of use.” The older man brushed Fuz aside and peered under the boulder, seeing the girl and her woebegone beast.

“You lie, boy. Say nothing, these creatures belong to me.” The man who was slightly larger than Fuz, but decrepit and askew, pushed aside his Sullen brother and moved closer to Emerald. The translucent trembled and blanched as the man waved a spear at it and Emerald cried out.

“It is dying, do not harry it further!” She jumped up and covered the thing with her body. The Man lowered his weapon and leered at the girl. He stepped closer and put a grimy hand on her shoulder. Emerald screamed as a stick cut the air, skimming the rock over their heads and sending sparks into the chasm. Fuz thrashed heavily across the intruder's cranium, spattering blood into the crevice and the man's neck snapped throwing him limply across the translucent and knocking Emerald sideways into the black. She breathed heavily.

Fuz shoved the dead man aside and pulled her up. “Come Emerald, will your beast follow? It is not safe here. I know a better place.”

part 6

4 - cloaked in a blinding flash of the obvious

Emerald rode upon her frippery, her knees were tightly clenched, and the pigments spread mutely from the dimples of compression. The colors on her leather straps competed madly with the galaxies that shone overhead, or below depending upon her acrobatics. Temple leaders in their clutches among the pallid crags cursed her people, those who rode the effervescing airbags in the sky. The translucents, once translucence, evolved alongside skyriders, shimmered in the sunlight and were glowing underneath stars. Her reins bit into nothing, seemingly, and the translucent spun, flowing languidly against the skin of another, and Emerald laughed. “Follow me,” she called, and the skyriders floated higher, blotting out the sun.

The sullen gathered below the diamond dust of starstuff as it filtered under the sparse cloud cover, creating prisms in the sky. Sparkling as it fell, on the ground it lay without timbre and mounded in defeated heaps until the faithful stirred the dust into a wan paste to seal their rock walls. They hid from the deafening skies, fearing the gods who warred above. It was sacrilegious to wear the colors, to gaze on the brilliance of the One.

Nighty battles commenced and the skyriders gathered over valleys to cavort, diving and playing under the spectacle. The One grew displeased with those who shunned His displays, but adversaries drew His eye from the cringing vermin. Once a receptacle for His wonders, the translucents glistened, mirroring flaming scaffolds in the heavens, they witnessed and stored creations from the beginnings of time. But now, Factions from the unnamed, unsullied, corners of the universe spoke in whispers, like turgid fogs, to the fell people who shrank in gray crevices. They coveted the dark spaces above, longed to fill the bright constellations with charcoal, spill an inkiness over the canvas to spread and cover the gaps with an eternal void.

To those who feared the light, it seemed a blessing. The translucents, as they soared scoring the airs with filaments of reciprocation, danced, oblivious of the convolution below. The vermin ground stone into iron and pulled viscous droughts from the bowels beneath fractured plains. They soured the sky with effluvia and stilled the voice of God, preferring the dearth of black, and nothing.

They began to die, the translucence, suffering every memory from the beginning on to the thankless filth, as they lay rotting; desiccate, empty. The One cried out, flaring madly, flailing, in the heavens, as the lights dimmed, then bloated in a last attempt to remain lit. The universe was shrouded in a blinding cover of white, blotting out every swirl and vast cloud, down to the tiniest of speck of lonely journeying star.

Emerald saw only the clotting shrouds shimmer briefly in the cold, as she stroked her translucent and fed it warm thoughts of the hidden, dying, vault of heaven.

–

part 5

3 - counterintuitive

The atmospheres over the evening skies flowed with shifting shapes and colors, a palette now insatiably coerced from the gods who strain against their fetters to battle and froth in the heavens, throwing sparks into the void to feed their ever growing need of admiration. Indeed, as the One managed His aggregation it groped rabidly at the endless confines of space springboarding into the dankest recesses and dusty corners. The One clutched the growing tendrils of dissipation but streamers of pinks and those illusive grays filtered out between the gaps and swirled until the dense matter imploded, fractured, and fled to thinks beyond thought.

There, they expanded, mingled and enveloped, and grew some more. Battles upon an immense canvas ensued, and below the galactic tides the lidless evolved in taste and girth, filling the voids, not as the One intended, their seed implanted upon vessels that flit among the stars furtively.

part 4

2 - from wounds to wisdom

Tantamount to sorrow, living on the brink, the translucence wafts in mid thought, oblique as it is opaque, knowing little but fixing its one great ocular scope on the upward bend of space. Below as it bounces on the firmament creatures of more substance but less opinion nibble at the fresh train it weaves, chafing on the surface of a new world. The translucence exists only to see, and in its great clouded mass it stores each image as the One has decreed. Heaven is a canvas and the stars are the brushes that swirl and coalesce into Klimpts of vast sagacity, blotches of light and dark, a chiaroscuro portion of soup to feed the soul of an unimaginative creature.

Each night when the celestial,wobbling orb completes its dance of revolution, darkness unfolds and the scrabbling being, ethereal in its impotency, unfurls a great lid and partakes of the beauty that permeates the spreading dome above. Elucidation envelopes its being and cellular elocution sparkles along synaptic chords. Tonight still hovers upon the cusp of a notion, and creation is rampant, fertile, overwhelming. Even as the vermin below cling to its scarred underbelly, feeding on the bulk it daily grows to compensate for a bulging memory core, the strain begins to rend and play havoc, until the translucence buckles from within and resolves to capitulate – it divides and surrenders precious memories to a second half. But in doing so, there is more beauty to behold, and to debate.

So the masses are fed, from on high to the lowliest, and presence is maintained.

part 3

1 - an aggressive return

From emptiness a pinprick responds, coerced by the voice of One, a sparse mote like an itch that sprang out of nothing, a concept in itself novel, and intriguing.

In and of itself an absence is merely the existence of less than something, and upon that notion a conversation begins which welcomes a banquet of soliloquy spanning distances unclaimed and forming tendrils of communication that mount a foray of platforms, and then: divergence.

Patterns swirl, become motion portraits stretching to infinity, uncatalogued, immense, untouched, seen and loved by One, adored by none. Existing in all planes and references, the One laments creation, but loathes to cede control to any but Oneself... a myriad of conundrums play out like moves on the chessboard, equations proceed, theorems construe like tattoos on the heavens and the dam is burst, a galactic finger pulled and rending the tender veins of Jericho, damning all that is and will be with a cancer that is God's answer to loneliness: life, eternal chaos.

part 2

intimate journey

Halfwit in old shoes

seen the wicked ways of this world

from the soles up

trod on his slice of life

the odd worm and errant flea

who refused to budge

from a delectable bite

of frosted leaf

softened by tooth

and mandible

He likened his life

to that of an ant

steadfast and replete

with purpose

he ventures forth anon

smiling like a shaman

or a dolt

on quests untold

unfolding before his great white shoes

collecting dust like clues for the clueless