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Death, transfiguration, forgiveness . . . flashes of the human condition. Browse this Category | Browse this Author | Return Home Rating: N/A |
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00:00:15
There is nothing but passing earth below and the mirrored light from a river like a snake of silver.
00:00:15
A soft chime in the recycled air and she turns. Her lips move. Familiar thoughts given voice. A smile. "Good to get home."
Oddly--sunlight metal-bright arcing rapidly across the narrow ceiling.
It begins like this. Now. Here.
00:00:14
Intrusive--shadows form through sunlight and reach like flexing fingers. Her smile, her familiar thoughts, halt in a skidding slide.
00:00:13
Something wrong. A hot coal dropped into her belly. There's a distant dim rumble--a far horizon storm--and the dead-of-night restlessness of unfamiliar animals beneath her feet.
A slow turning in a dream, then--
00:00:12
In the eaves of this storm, comprehension flees with the sun's ripping of the earth and the earth's betrayal of the sky. She is cut cruelly at the waist, though her head is oddly proud and her fingers are claws seeking balance and the tangibility of dreamless cloth and plastic.
00:00:11
Falling.
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Tumbling.
00:00:09
The world becomes a small tempest-filled room and even the woman next to her is locked beyond its doorless walls.
00:00:08
And in this place of storms, her husband appears and he smiles with compassion and sorrow. "It'll be all right, honey," he whispers. "It'll be over soon."
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And then light turns to darkness. Returns to light.
And she tells him, "I love you," until--
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the earth takes away her breath.
00:00:00
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The Architect
Dr. Watkins gazed down at the young soldier through blood-shot eyes. He felt himself moving within; two halves on a rough sea, weaving on the drop, stuttering on the rise.
"The arm's fractured," he slurred, not caring, far beyond any notions of conceit.
"Oh God Jesus no!" The boy struggled to rise from the crude operating table. Two orderlies held the boy down. Another pried his mouth open and poured brandy. Poured some on the wound. Eyes rolled to egg shells. A Minie ball forced between crooked teeth.
Dr. Watkins took a pull of the brandy, forcing stillness on a trembling soul, and began to saw.
The boy thrashed and cried in an unknown tongue, though the meaning was clear enough, until he fainted.
An orderly branded the ragged stump, the tent filling with the stench of burnt pork.
Dr. Watkins nodded, swallowing strength from the bottle, waiting for the next one.
Towards night, after the guns had grown silent and cool, after the sun had set like a bloody egg behind Seminary Ridge, Dr. Watkins stood beyond the shadow puppets that flitted on the tent walls and faced a lifeless edifice. Farmer's arms and shopkeeper's legs. Hands, coarse from hard living, hands soft on a child's face, lover's fingers, killer's fist. He stood as an architect, knowing that more work would be done, and this knowing was a thing to stop the world.
He turned in the darkness and walked.
Praying for tears
Searching for a merciful bullet.
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NightBirds
These mysteries fall like wounded birds through my soul; wings flashing scarlet in the light of
a dying sun, wind-tattered and trembling, tumbling . . . through the color-leached air.
Hands cupping darkness reach through the pale spaces to collect these fragile winged
ponderings. To hold and listen to the last whisper of cold truths from beaks seared and numbed by flight through sacred fires: They say I am not. I am not. Only in the burning of a freezing sun, where tears fall and shatter like glass, can I realize what I am . . .
Perhaps.
These mysteries, these haunted, star-eyed nightbirds come bidding in the lowest ebb of tide, exposing the bleached whiteness of a still further shore, revealing by each lunar pull another trackless surface: I stood upon this and witnessed my own presence and saw that all was impermanent, shallow, filled by itself, devoured by itself, lost to the darkness.
I was. I was not. I am. I am not. One mask with two faces, each in denial of the other. A mask made of lead in a country of gold. A mask through which everything is lost and forgotten.
I turn from the empty shore. Watching as each footstep fills and bleeds and fades from sight. I lift my head to the sky, filling with an expanse, a wind-caught leaning towards . . . a clarity, a cleanness, a flight within a heart long bound and tethered. The nightbirds rise around me like mist and I can hear their whispers.
With aching fingers I grip the edges of the mask. Flesh and blood. Soul and spirit. There is aparting and a joining and I stand bleeding, raw . . .
But somehow, the night upon my naked face is sweet.
I hear the rustle of wings. The soft touch of wind. The sweet calling of stars.
These things and much more . . . I am.
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Old Friends
"I've missed this," the old man said, squinting into the summer sun, feeling his age melt away. "Thank you for letting me come."
His friend nodded, reeling in his line. "I've missed you."
"Funny how time changes everything. Me and you. Our perceptions and priorities." The old man shrugged as he cast out his line. "I suppose it's natural after all these years. After what we've been through."
"Do you regret it?"
The old man laughed. "Regret? When I was younger I swore never to regret anything I've done. Now?" He nodded at the lake, sadness touching his eyes. "All this beauty and peace--yes. I regret what happened between us. But I guess we all follow our own destinies--however difficult."
"You had such great rage."
"Yes, a great shooting star. It burned me." The old man trailed a finger in the water. "I'm down to cold ash now."
"Can you forgive yourself?"
The old man leaned back and closed his eyes. "Can you?"
"I have. Long ago."
"Too late for me. I cannot change my nature. The world is set in its course."
"No. The world has been off course and it's time to set it right."
The old man shivered in the sun. "It would be good to come home."
"It's time you did," his friend said gently. "We would welcome you. All of us."
The old man looked out over the lake, his gaze moving into brightness. "Thank you, Michael."
"It's been too long, Lucifer . . ."
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All His Sins Remembered
Unheeded.
Untouched.
Unloved.
This soul that waits like cold smoke over dark and silent waters. He had spent a lifetime denying my presence. He had mortared and bricked me from the sun and moon, from the wind and rain. But still I lived in the silence between his heartbeats, in the suffocating confines of his conscience.
This night, I stand trembling as a lover come to quench a lusting thirst, filling as though stars were rising in my eyes. The cemetery, holding fast the darkness between pale stones, becomes a mute witness to my unfolding. Here in this necropolis, my memories come in gatherings like dried leaves, scurrying and scratching in cool moonlit breaths and then are no more. I kneel before his grave and knead fingers through fresh soil, inhaling the intoxication of time and night, whose mating had produced such a rapacious daughter to lay within, all his sins remembered.
I gaze at the words chiseled upon the marble headstone. I had but murdered a killing stranger with a familiar name and visage. Nothing more.
I watch the moon slipping gracefully through reaching fingers--save those of mine own. I whisper my farewell. The past is dead and as true as the rock-filled coffin beneath me. I am dead, never to return. I am reborn, to begin again.
I walk through the cemetery gates and into an unfathomable night, till at last I stand naked and raw and beautiful. My eyes filling with stars.
--William Hiles
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