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[elphyon]

The boy was running alone in the pall of the forest, the day’s last lights falling in slivers and tatters all around him. A lean, gaunt creature he was, nothing on him but a slack deerskin robe tied at the waist with braided bark. His arms and legs were bare and streaked with blood and dirt; in his haste, the boy had forgotten to wrap them.

The forest floor he was treading was uneven and treacherous, the thick brown mat of fallen needles hiding many of its features. Time and again the boy stumbled on some unseen root or  hollow and was reduced to scampering on all fours, looking for a few precarious moments as though he would fall, only to then regain his balance with a series of surging, twisting steps—apparently as a matter of practised difficulty. Mostly his running was steady; body locked into the rhythm of his breathing, heart-belly-mouth, heart-belly-mouth, head bobbing along to scan the ground below and ahead.

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[elphyon]

For three nights the forest had been singing. It was a sad song that it sang, a song of change, of the turning of the seasons, of cold earth and dark skies and frozen waters. Of Death it sang, that great hungerer, devourer; and of Snow its pale long shadow, the nearness of whose clean white embrace struck dread even into the most wizen-barked of the trees. But of Life too it sang, a still small voice against all the howling and wailing that insisted, insisted upon insisting, Spring will come. Yes, spring—so distant a prospect, so faint a hope, but a promise nonetheless.

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[elphyon]

Je t'aime plus que les framboises

[elphyon]

23

I can shepherd the ghosts of my selfhood hither & thither, about the caves and forests of my geography where, I know now, dwells no mythology:

just a cicada, crawled out of itself too early for spring sings.

[elphyon]

Prayer (3)

on nights like this

I can almost hear my soul's aging.

can you hear it?

between the florescent light

& the rainfall.

[elphyon]

Prayer

Jesus & John thigh-deep in the Jordan, water-slicked. a wild, wild dove above their upturned faces.

when did I last see such a bird? circling the sun in the sky after rain-pour; something godly about its wings.

[elphyon]

Love came to me 

as a snake in tall grass.

I gave it my heel 

for fear of nothing better.

Now my blood swells 

like a river under wet sky.

A disquiet follows my soul 

wherever I go.

Life confounds, 

is confounded.

I find no reprieve 

in sleep nor slumber.

Are there others here

who wander as I do,

trekking this lonely path 

between the heart and the loin?

Love came to me 

as a snake in tall grass.

I gave it my heel 

and would give it again, again, again.

So, friends, tell me true: 

whoever loved 

that never did burn?

(2015.04.11 - for use in fiction)

[elphyon]

Such an inspiration.

[elphyon]

Thank you!

[elphyon]

It was the twenty-third day of Dusk.

Lowly the dying sun clung to the eastern skies, a pale and bloody fist grasping at the jagged peaks of World’s Spine. Its light was the colour of blood and honey, beautiful to behold but empty of life’s warmth, silken, almost liquescent, spilling onto the...

[elphyon]

A Bright Mourning

It was the twenty-third day of Dusk.

Lowly the dying sun clung to the eastern skies, a pale and bloody fist grasping at the jagged peaks of World’s Spine. Its light was the colour of blood and honey, beautiful to behold but empty of life’s warmth, silken, almost liquescent, spilling onto the world as in libation.

Beneath that bright mournful light, the earth, long since withdrawn from the dying sun, all its rooted children withered and drained of colour now, took on the appearance of something half-formed, not altogether real but still palpable, still and yet not altogether lifeless, like something the gods of creation might have dreamt of before setting out to their work.

But this half-world, too, Horace Shaw knew, standing atop a low country hill and leaning lightly on his walking stick, would soon vanish with the wayward sun. When the sun drowned in Sinner’s Gulf in less than a week’s time, when even this meek, beggarly light of Dusk ceased to be, Night would come and engulf the world. Surely as one lived and died.

He was a tall man heading into his fortieth year on earth, with wide shoulders and long, muscular limbs. His hair was coarse and black and cropped short. The beginnings of a mostly dark beard framed an angular face, high-cheeked and dark-eyed. He wore a fraying coat belted at the waist and a pair of worn leather boots. A large rucksack slumped from his shoulders.

Six days he had been on the road, coming from a small farm hidden in the depth of forests of Paletree Downs, and in those six days he had seen nary a soul. Only empty houses, empty villages, and deep tracks on the road of men, cattle, and wheels, like aged scars.

He had helped himself into the empty dwelling for shelter and whatever was left to eat and drink. It seemed, he’d thought more than once, that the world of men had simply disappeared and left him to inherit all that was left.

That wasn’t true, of course. Only an idle thought. He knew where people had gone. When the Vigil’s beacons sent up dark plumes to the sky to signal the beginning of Dusk, twenty-three days ago, all settlements outside of a Flame’s reach had been swiftly evacuated. All across Providence, hundreds upon thousands of people flocked to one of the eight cities that could shield them the coming Night. For Horace and all those whose dwellings he had gone past or into, it meant the city of Havertham: the bulging, twisted heart of Providence. The people hadn’t left him to live out his days alone—they had merely gone ahead. The leavings of the world of men were not for him. He was only the last sheep in timeless transhumance.

The knowledge did little to dispel his sense of utter solitude, however.

It had made him want to sing, the feeling that he was alone on God’s wide earth with no one to hear him but himself, but he’d shied away from the impulse. He was not a singing man, nor was he an impulsive one. He might have been the latter, once, perhaps, when he was young and unbloodied, ambition leaping in his veins like a wild horse, wanting to rise above the station of his birth and take what he wanted from life. Those days were long past. Another life, almost.

The problem was that he had been alone too long, he knew. He’d spent most of the long year in that forest in Paletree Downs, tending the farm, watching poppies grow even as his own life shrunk into a rigid pattern of sleep and work, work and sleep, except for a handful of visits to a nearby village to trade for supplies and hear news from the city. In such a life, crystallized by the combined weight of solitude and wilderness, thoughts had a way of getting loud in one’s head. Very loud, in fact, until they were almost entirely a voice not your own.

It always spoke of the past, that voice, the way ghosts might, dry and uncaring. Exhuming memories he had buried away, memories he would have preferred remain buried, and forcing him to scrutinize the makings of his own wretchedness. So many failures and deaths, where so little goodness could be found.

Presently, as he made his way down the hill and toward a turn in the road, the voice spoke of Antor of House Sirramark, a boy of nineteen years, who had died in his arms shortly before he left the city for the farm in Paletree Downs. Hands clutching at his throat, desperate and vain, soft hands, unmarred by a day of labour in all his days, blood leaking through the fingers. Mouth agape in horror, those immaculate teeth flashing red, trying to scream but only able to gurgle and hiss. He had told the boy, not ungently, who he was and why the boy was choking on his own blood in an alleyway not far from his father’s mansion. Sheer, utter disbelief in his eyes then. The boy could not believe what was happening to him even as the light departed from his eyes and crossed the threshold between life and death. Then he was just a body, rolled into the canal with an unceremonious plop to be carried into the river and found a day or two later, among a score of waterlogged bodies that washed up on the banks of Mother Forlorn each and every day.

He had thought about the subject often in the past year, in those pale hours between sleep and waking, about the unintended, unforeseen chain of events in the wake of the boy’s death that had led to open violence in the streets of Havertham and ended with the public beheading of one of the most powerful figures in all of Providence. And, of course, about the part that he had played in all of that, however unwittingly, in the labyrinthine schemes for power and influence among the Old Bloods.

But he had never, he realized, not once, actually thought about the killing itself. Until now. Well. He searched within—that was what the inner voice demanded, always, implicitly—and found, for once, that there wasn’t any regret, now as then. And why should there be? The boy had deserved to die for what he'd done to Abelia. One life for another. That was fair. Just. Perhaps, the voice pointed out then, he had acted in vengeance, not justice. But what did that matter, if he had? He’d served one by serving the other; they were two sides of the same coin, justice and vengeance, or had been, at least this once. One life for another, where law could not be counted on. Fair. Just. Righteous. Sometimes—and this was the hard truth of his existence—the end justified the means. Dictated it.

What had followed that death could not have been his responsibility. Not truly. Those deaths, those days of chaos and murder in the streets he had only heard about, that was not on his soul. He had ruminated on this point over and over during his exile, whenever his thoughts turned to Antor of House Sirramark or Abelia, the boy and the girl now linked forever in his mind by two acts of violence, because he had wanted, needed to know that he had arrived at this conclusion not through cowardice. And he was certain, as certain he could ever be in a matter such as this, that he hadn’t been manipulated to kill the boy. He had acted alone, and not impulsively. Had weighed the risks and accepted them, and then planned, carefully picking the right place and the right moment for the deed: halfway between the hippodrome and the Sirramark mansion, in the frenzied aftermath of the final race of the season. The only exposure he had risked was punching an elated Whites supporter to start a brawl outside the hippodrome, to separate the boy from his entourage, which, as it turned out, had hardly been necessary. If certain people had seized upon the boy’s death and altered the balance of power in the city and beyond, then the death must have been a serendipitous occasion for them, not an engineered one.

But there was something else now, in the place between the absence of regret and the hard, grim satisfaction of justice met. He remembered the boy’s blood on his own hands, hot as broth, and his own voice, steady and low, not unlike the one that had developed in his head of late, asking the boy if he recalled a young prostitute by the name of Abelia. Then he saw in his mind’s eye, looking into the boy’s mortal ones across the chasm of memory, a flicker of regret. It was gone almost instantly, swallowed up by the shock and disbelief and the agony of death, but Horace saw it now and was certain that it had been there when he took the boy’s life.

He was surprised to feel pity then, a great surge of it, which was not for the boy, or himself, or even for Abelia.

It overwhelmed him, that pity. Uprooted him from the hard place where he had resigned his soul all those years ago and left him on muddy grounds, confused and weak. Why, he demanded of himself, what was the point of this? He wanted to weep, wanted to scream. Had to stop in his tracks and fight to regain control. A deep breath, a curse under it, and a drink of water from his leather canteen.

When he began again, at length, it was with a slow, simmering anger dictating his steps past stony hills and empty fields toward the city of his birth, the capital of the known world, where he might drown out the voice in his head with those of a thousand others.

Only later, much later, he would look back on this moment on a dark road far from the bright Flame of that city, only a torchlight separating him and his charge from Night’s unfathomable darkness, and realize, suddenly and with a fierce joy that was also sadness, that he had forgiven himself, of himself, and of the imperfect, fractured world that had made and unmade him so, alone on that hillside under a bleeding sun on the twenty-third day of his final Dusk.

[elphyon]

All the pretty

I am dying

Of all the pretty girls

all the pretty boys

all the pretty lips

and all the pretty hips

all the fit jeans

all the lit screens

all the lean meats

and all the thin eats

all the neat ads

all the chic fads

all the rad scenes

and all the mad memes

all the dim lights

all the grim sights

all the tight porn

and all the right corn

all that is wrong

all that is wrong

all that is sold & bought

for fuck’s sake

all that recklessness

all that heartlessness

all that disingenuous   

speaking in tongues

I love them all

I love them all

all the pretty things

all the pretty things

[elphyon]

Dear Mr. Weatherman

We’re getting poorer

hungrier

and fatter all of the time.

I think Heaven is a mouth that does not speak

and this city has no ears, no eyes.

Dear Mr. Weatherman, please;

Tell us what the sky holds

and for whom the rain falls—

Falling forth,

falling

forth,

we hear its music

and do not understand.

[elphyon]

The Eulogy (pt.1)

It is time. He steps up to the pulpit and adjusts the microphone. The eulogy is in his breast pocket. He shouldn't need to have it out, he knows all the words, but he takes it out anyway, unfolds and flattens the pages on the pulpit. The first word is “I.” The second one is “loved.” He pronounces them in quick succession into the microphone, but the speakers put out a harpy’s shriek instead, an ugly electric cackle that makes everyone flinch. He takes a step back while someone from the funeral home fixes the soundboard. And when he steps forward again, he is suddenly aware of the quiet, the deadened calm, the reverent waiting. He searches out Emily’s face among those of family and friends and colleagues and other acquaintances, and finds her eyes unsympathetic. Yes. All she can do is stare inwardly at her own pain. She can do nothing for him, nor he for her, that which has bound them together all the long years is gone—their son is dead. But it’s not the same, he thinks, honey it’s not all the same, you’re not the one standing here expected to talk to all these people about Milton in the past tense, when he is lying just five feet away from me in the confined darkness of ash and oak, wearing the two-piece suit I had custom made for his eighteenth birthday, looking as though he’s just sleeping, except his complexion is all wrong, they’ve made him too pale, the morticians who worked on him in Seoul, they’ve turned him into an Irishman almost, when he had so much of me in him…

He opens his mouth, and his tongue is a fat ashen larva: when he speaks he will speak in moths, and they will flutter through the air and then fall dead on the carpet like last week’s rose petals.

He stares at the eulogy, all his words neatly typed out on five creased pages, single-spaced and back-to-back, written in the vacuum of time between the boy’s death and his body arriving at the airport, three weeks, three maddening, harrowing weeks that might as well have been three years. And it stares back at him, the eulogy, with all the sanctimony and indifference of Times New Roman twelve points. It is inadequate, woefully inadequate. Thirty years would not have sufficed, no amount of time would have, he might have tried until the end of time and still fallen short, miserably short, of doing his boy justice, of bringing him back to life, resurrected through language and love, language that is love, if only for the fifteen minutes that would take him to deliver the eulogy. It is one thing to talk about people through the miracle of fiction, through all its tricks and secrets and necessary falseness, but how to address a person whose sanctity you wish to preserve, is your duty to preserve, because that person is your son, and he has taken his own life at the beautiful age of twenty and three? How not to fall silent then, other than to utter utter bullshit?

So in the end he cannot bring himself to read from the page, or recite from memory, because it will be too painful to hear those words spoken aloud, because his heart is a wretched, fragile thing that can only kill him. So he wings it, delivers a meandering speech about how wonderful Milton was, how kind, athletic, smart, and visionary his son was, Milton he himself can no longer recognize, a Platonic Milton, expunged of all life’s shadows and delights, who is clearly not the same Milton that took his own life, because, how could he be, this perfect dead thing, his son? He was too good for this world, he tells the mass, though it was not pride, no, he was a humble person, always, since he was a child, but rather I think it was just a sense of… of unbelonging, a sense of being set apart, yes, you could say he was holy, in the biblical sense of the word, qadosh…

[elphyon]

but words are more impalpable than bricks; reading is a longer and more complicated process than seeing.

Virginia Woolf, from "How Should One Read A Book?" in The Second Common Reader

[elphyon]

They were lying face up on the false bottom of a fishing boat. The river rumbling in their ears like a drawn-out thunder. Cold briny water sloshing about their backs. It reeked of fish and who knows what and it was dark but for a sliver of light trickling in every now and then as the the boat rolled. Barely enough to make visible the seams of the wooden plank half an inch above his face.

Horace?

He opened and closed his mouth. The he opened it again and tried to find his voice.

I’m here, he said.

The boy breathed in the damp air and held it in. Then he pushed it out slowly with a low elongated hiss as if he was spinning a gossamer out of thin air.

What’s the matter, he asked.

The boy shook his head. He felt the boy’s wet locks on his arm. Like the inflorescence of a yorkshire fog after a day of rain.

Nothing, said the boy.

Then they just lay there silently like two waterlogged corpses. Waiting. Biding the time.

After a while the boy said: I’m scared.

You don’t sound so scared, he said.

I am.

Well what are you scared of?

The boy shook his head again. I don’t know. I just have this feeling… like something bad is going to happen. I don’t know what it is or what to call it or anything but I think it’s always been there and I think it’s getting worse all the time.

He waited for the boy to go on.

It’s my fault, isn’t it? First the train crew and now Mr. Haddington… It’s all because of me.

The boy started sobbing. He let him cry for a good long while. Then when the boy had quit crying he said: You need to smarten up. Don’t take on burdens that’s not yours to carry. It wasn’t your fault what happened. None of it. Do you understand? You can’t quench your thirst on other people’s tears and expect to live. You just can’t.

The boy turned his face away.

Besides, we don’t know what happened to Josiah. That shot could have gone anywhere.

What’s going to happen to me in Havertham, asked the boy.

He held his thought for a moment. Then he told the truth. I don’t know, kid.

It can’t be anything good, said the boy.

You’ll be all right.

Do you really think so?

Yes.

I’ll be all right, the boy said in a mumble, and was silent again.

[elphyon]

They made it to the outskirt of the forest when they came across Martin. He was just sitting there on a fallen tree looking idle. Like a man who had nothing particular on his mind and would like nothing better than to be just sitting there in bare existence. In the pall before sunrise. The rifle leaning barrel up against the tree.

Martin sat up and leaned forward slightly when he saw them. I’ve been waiting, he said.

The boy dropped the lamp. It fell on its side and the light spluttered and went out.

He hid the boy behind him. Josiah stepped forward in front of them both.

Son.

Father.

Martin stood up and dusted off his pants and picked up the rifle and held it across his chest.

I didn’t think you’d be alone, said Josiah.

And I was hoping you wouldn’t accompany them yourself, father.

Martin glanced over at the boy and then at him still trying to catch his breath. Then he looked at Josiah. Well I guess I should’ve known better, he said.

What do you intend to do?

Oh you know what I intend to do, father.

I mean what do you intend to do with me. Given our… current situation.

Martin raised the rifle and aimed it squarely at his father.

Get out of the way, father.

They stood looking at one another. Neither one blinking at all. The smile on Martin’s face slowly tightened into a fist.

You don’t have to do this, Josiah said after a while. Just let these people go and we can figure something out.

Figure what out.

Your wanting to leave. Us starting a new life elsewhere.

Martin laughed a wry laugh.

You’re full of it, he said.

Martin.

But you are right about one thing. About my not having to do this. No, I reckon I don’t. But I choose to.

Son—

Just like you chose all those years ago.

Josiah’s face hardened and his back grew stiff. That was different and you know it, he said.

Why. Because you thought it was the right thing to do?

Yes. Yes it was.

Martin laughed again.

That’s what you tell yourself every day, isn’t it. You don’t have to tell me, I know it is. Well mother might have believed it but I never have. Not for one minute.

You’re walking on some mighty thin ice here, boy.

Martin shook his head slightly and went on. His voice calm and his face expressionless but for the eyes.

You know what I believe? I believe you were just out for blood. I don’t believe you gave two shits about the cause. All that bullshit about rights and freedom and justice for everyone. There ain’t never been anything noble about your war. You were just mad as hell they took away your favourite son and you went out looking for blood. Yeah, they didn't call you Wolfsmaw for nothing. Tell me I’m wrong. Cause I know I ain’t.

Enough.

You were out for vengeance and you left us to fend for ourselves.

I said enough.

Do you even know how mother died? Did anyone ever tell you? I mean exactly how she died?

Josiah began to shake. Don’t you bring her into this, he said.

I was there. I heard it all. I heard the life go out of her. She was calling for you all the while, did you know that? Just calling your name over and over and over as those soldiers took their turn. And then she was calling no more.

Stop it!

Josiah took a step forward. Dirt sprang up from the ground just a few inches from where he stood and the shot rang out half a heartbeat later. A flock of birds took flight above their heads, echoing the cacophony. So rudely awakened.

Martin was quick to clear the shellcasing and feed another bullet into the bolthead. He pulled back the bolt and waited for the noise to die down. Then he went on, almost whispiering.

And for what? Thomas’ blood crying out to you from the dirt? The Union Code? From where I’m standing it don’t even matter why you ditched us. Well whatever it was I hope it was worth it father, because I see you every day pretending you’re still fighting the good fight. All that justifying and lying to yourself. Well fuck that. I am sick and through with it.

Josiah rushed him just then and managed to grab and push the rifle barrel up before Martin pulled the trigger again. Then they fell to the ground struggling over the rifle. Birds took to flight again squawking furiously.

Go, Josiah shouted at them amidst the din. Go now!

The boy looked at the men on the ground and then up at him. He nodded and pushed the boy on. They ran as fast as they could.

  They heard a shot go off just as they emerged from the treeline. And the long echo and the queer silence that followed. The boy stopped to look back but he wouldn’t let him. He tugged him on. The boy resisted for a moment but soon trudged on behind him. He was sobbing.

They were on top of a low hill and he could see the river down below. A dark blue vein flowing in a bed of reeds.

Over on the other side stood the mountains. The skies above them afire with the rising sun.