4 /scifi/

1

The light refracted through the water as if with every sound the brook murmured, it caused light to appear like iridescent flashes of bright, healthy teeth, falling in and out of sight as if the small waves were lips, lips that hid and revealed the glory of a lazy smile that teased and dazzled, charming hollywood narcissism woven into the mild waves that obeyed the beck and call of the Moon.

It reminded her of when she had been a teenage waiter working a quiet shift, enjoying time spent flirting with patrons and colleagues, content with her servile vocation because attention was lavished upon her through the subtleties of society that she read fluently.

She had been employed to be the star of the diner, paid to dance a waltz, tango with plates, patrons, purveyors and if fame was a mask that ate into the face then she had become the idol she was proclaimed and pretended to be, which made her relish her life.

Her hand penetrated the water carefully, acquiescing to the cold, reaching for something that would force the acquiescence to evolve into something new, something that would transform the regret that arose from disturbing the murmuring of the water, into joy,or at least something that would resemble it.

But what she wanted wasn’t there, with no promise of arrival later.

She withdrew her hand slowly and held it outstretched over her reflection, diaphanous drops of water with the potential to intimate to her choosing not to, choosing instead to escape her grasp by falling from the great height as if to be away from their mother was to not exist as they were meant to and as the sons of the brook ran to to their mother, her reflection changed with the arrival of every escapee, every runaway, every transparent leap off her hand causing it to shake, shimmer and shatter.

She wondered if every  reflection that appeared anew as the water consumed itself was a reflection of another part of her, one that looked the same but celestial or cosmic, occult or fictional, a  liquid eye seeing all realities at once, blinking as it’s children returned to the womb, each blink shifting it’s vision to another perspective, each perspective more bizarre than the other.

She wondered if one reflection would be of the sky showing her body under the lake, devoid of life and consumed by the water as the drops were.

 “Macabre”

Flesh, blood and bone today.
One out of the three, one day in the  years to come,ossified thereafter.
2

“Sure, you can live in harmony with just nature if you're of the same species as those that gravity enforces the banality of  earthly life upon. We don’t belong here anymore. We have the gift of honest consciousness which, whilst making us an invasive species, is proof that we are not of this world and as such we aren't slaves to the stems and the peaks, gelid currents of air above or streams below and all encompassing. We are destined for bigger things, yet we still respect the sanctity of nature as those with a sentient soul, amalgamated with the consciousness of both the celestial and the holy,  tend to do.”

She stretched her long legs outwards as she spoke nonchalantly, tendons and muscle tightening as she forced them to touch the end of the velvet covered chaise-longue. Her arms did the same but reached upwards with the polished, gleaming fingernails of her open palms catching the light that seeped through the white wooden shutters intermittently, giving him the impression that she was exerting all her force to push away the shadow of a large sun that threatened to engulf her, a mime parodying a woman soon to be kindling for a fire that would continue then achieve to raze her house to the ground.

As he pondered this to protect himself from the articulate brutality of her words, she appeared as if she wanted to move, but lacked the miniscule amount of ambition required to motivate her to move to another part of the room, settling for uncomfortable apathy, like a cat who spies its owner’s lap but settles for coarse carpet under its claws instead, out of arrogant indolence.

“Quite frankly when people talk about 'humans' or 'people' they're referring to us, the species of human that has ascended, for better or worse. Feel free to hate us for slights against the world you still belong to, a world we have left in all but unrecognised nostalgia of sentiment. Feel free to harbor that resentment for as long as you want, but while we colonise the stars that lie beyond the shining corpses you see when you look up towards the sky, not just tonight but in the millennia to come, through accumulation of the descendance of spirit, I hope that resentment evolves into malformed vainglory of the life you're forced to live so that you never wish for the life we now have”

She was lying on her side now.
Her head was on the headboard, her face towards him.

Her right arm was dangling over the side of the headboard, the pink tinged glass skin of her upper arm resting on the side of her face with a wrist dangling in the space between the mahogany desk and chaise-lounge.

He noticed the nail on her thumb slightly grazing the velvet and it struck him as something that would be a beautiful metaphor for the nostalgia she felt for a world that had spawned her centuries ago but that had raised him decades ago, if he were to write a novella about this moment.

She had waxed anacreontic platitudes about it but he was born here.

Was he?

When he was born his feet had touched the steel of a tray with wheeled legs after he was ripped from the bosom of his mother, a tray placed on white tiles instead of the soil below.

At least he was born meters away from the mud and leaves, whereas she was born in the Celest, the True Earth light years from her infantile feet.

Sailors on a ship at sail may have steady feet during the brief interludes of the sea at rest but without an anchor currently fulfilling its purpose, the steady feet were just attached to a sailor ready to fall prey to an ocean prone to seizures symptomatic of night terrors, night terrors that exist in actuality, in the Celeste.

He felt the sun imitating the woman’s stretch,  he felt its warmth creep through the gaps in the shutters as it pulled itself to its full height for a moment.

 Rays of sunlight caught the lenses of his glasses and pulled away what remained of the gift of primitive sight then returned it almost instantaneously, as if the warmth and brightness had amalgamated just to latch onto his glasses to give him a poke, albeit a near intangible one,  a poke like one gives a drowsy child in class.

The sun had done its job.

He awoke out of the reminiscence of his birth and the trance the woman’s monologue had put him in and prayed quickly to himself that he had chosen to speak to her when the world outside was golden instead of nigrescent as it would be sooner than he would have liked.












3

Chunks of undigested chargrilled fish littered the floor.

His eyes rolled back and for a second he thought the voodoo had worked but affected the wrong thing.

He saw the dismembered fish swimming in the bile, he saw their gills move as they swallowed the liquid that should be in his stomach, he saw them rejoicing in leaving the organic fish bowl that was his body but not a lake, he saw them whisper to each other their joy in being free, free to writhe on and in the red soil that absorbed the bile together with the sun that here, was a stranger to him.

He wretched again.

The bile was viscous, more acidic phlegm than acidic water and the yellow splashed against the red soil before blending in.

Blood.

Blood, just one drop, one drop or a river, with tears as a consequence of the pain, paired perfectly with the yellow bile.

Together they made a palette, a camouflage of pain that both hid and exacerbated the savagery of the continent.

He didn’t belong here.

He felt his hands pairing with another and allowed himself to be led into what appeared to be an earthen mausoleum. Gnarled, grotesque, wickedly misshapen and tall dark branches of  trees he never wanted to see formed the walls that created what he knew could be his tomb one day, a day that seemed far nearer than he would hoped it would be.

Suddenly he could see clearly again.

He quickly realised someone had placed his glasses on his face.

The shock rendered him numb.

He sat there and inhaled deeply, staring at the thick mud that had been plastered on the branches to make up the outside wall.

He realised he was in a stereotypical mud hut, one similar to the ones people spoke of in intrigue back on the original continent.

“Isn’t it funny” he remembered saying in earnest around the school table as a young teen.

“Isn’t it funny that the descended can live with walls of mud instead of brick and be fine with it?”

“Brother, brick is just mud in its purest form. You shouldn’t judge those people, people will start thinking you’re a wannabe ascendent.” was the reply.

He couldn’t remember who had said it but he remembered feeling as if he was being patronised and already judged when he in fact, did mean it in earnest, in curious naivety.

“No, I didn’t mean it like that. I just find it funny that we have bricks and they have mud then the ascendants have orach-ore and well, basically I find it funny that all three of us basically use the same thing but well, different you know?”

“Brother I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

The mud stank. It was if some nefarious creature was using the mud as a medium to channel it’s spite towards him and in all honesty, he felt such spite was misdirected towards him.

He pulled his now mud stained white button down shirt towards his face and with his other hand, pulled his glasses off again.

The lenses had begun to trap the heat between his eyes and the glass lenses, causing the area around his eyes to sweat, which made his eyes sting.

There’s no hope for me now he thought.My body knows it, my body has succumbed to pure twisted masochism.

Not just masochism, masochism inspired by a nihilism that cried pseudo, faux, satirical tears of joy as if to congratulate the suffering the same way rain lands on the cold glass of a window that continues to observe, be observed, by a night that stares, a night that stared through him, a night that rewarded the windows acceptance of the bitter cold with drops of equally bitter, stinging tears, tears from an omniscient god that started off as the product of ironic joy, then became malformed drops of acidic sweat from a god who had laughed himself into an indulgent stupor.



6

Ethereal lampposts.

Organic beacons.

Celestial spherical arrows.

It made her laugh to think of the audacity of this perspective of the stars. The purest, one true wonder of the celeste, relegated to employment. Unpaid, 24 hour employees of a race that could never even dream of becoming something so excruciatingly glorious.

Then again, did she really find them to be anything but very well placed tools?

One could easily wax lyrical, spout sweet nothings to something one has no fear of a response from, be it a riposte or charming reply to a suave compliment, but did the ease only come from insincerity?

Was her perspective just self affirmations placed in her psyche by the well meaning in society, to force her to view nature and the celeste as flawless beauty, as romantic beauty, sparking and inflaming her first desire to conform?

Conform to what?

A love and appreciation for nature and the celeste was the catalyst for the ascendent race to ascend, a love for it’s beauty and efficacy, efficacy which had peaked in the form of the ascendants, efficacy which had drove them to the celeste above the first true world.

The duality of the ethos was staggeringly transparent. So obvious! So clear and simple. It still amazed her sometimes that they were the only ones to realise and adhere to it.

She stood on her balcony, embraced by lilac coloured silk

Mauve embroidered roses ran along her arms and down her legs, curved thorns lovingly protruding from stems that enveloped her calves and biceps, the petals of blossomed flowers meeting in the center of her chest.

On anyone else the robe would have appeared dainty and ornamental but on her it was more than just fabric.

It was delicate armour dedicated to the suns she harvested through both prayer and science, armour only she was fit to wear because only she faced visceral violence, not due to circumstance but due to to want.

And as she gazed towards the stars continuing to guide ships, people, lazy gliding danya and blissfully ignorant vladir, she wished she could inhale and round her lips,blow, blow, hard and snuff the stars out, and wish the universe it’s final birthday.

7

He felt plastic in his hand and fumbled with the lid on the bottle with his eyes closed. Using all the energy he had, he unscrewed the bottle and threw the lid across the room then raised the bottle to his lips as quick as he could and drank rapidly, crushing the bottle with his hand to get the water out quicker.

He gasped then threw the bottle away, whipped his glasses of his face and wiped his eyes with the palm of his hand rigorously like a child fighting off sleep, desperate not to fall asleep again lest the nightmare return.

In front him smiling, was Arthur in his tan short sleeved shirt and matching shorts.

He found it peculiar how there was no sweat to be found on him at all, how easy he stood in front of him, how comfortable he was in this wicked hellhole despite not being a descendent.

“Hits you hard doesn’t it?” He was grinning so wide he looked as if he had inflicted a chelsea smile upon himself, his eyes twinkling with a smile of the same intensity as the one currently rendering his face asunder.

“Fuck off.”

“That’s the spirit. Up you come.” He grabbed him and hoisted his arm upon his shoulder, pulling him to his feet in the process.

“Just walk slowly, keep breathing and lean on me and we’ll go talk somewhere private and in the shade.”

“My glass-”

“They’re in my pocket. Keep walking.”

Slowly with trails of dust left behind him as his feet occasionally scraped the dusty soil beneath him leaving primordial tire tracks they left the small hut and ended up under a solitary tree not too far from the dwelling space but far enough for their talk to go unheard.