#a throwback from the hazy depths of 2013 | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

jtrahan · 6 years

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Summer

I fell in love with the summer that year. Sunlight fell across green fields like a caressing hand, and the earth arched like a cat in response, blossoming into life. It was the most beautiful season I could remember.

“I'm in love with you,” I told Summer. We were walking down in the gorge, dipping our toes in the water. I was carrying my socks in one hand and my sneakers in the other. Summer, of course, had no shoes. She was wearing a long dress, which seemed to be woven out of wildflowers and baler twine and Queen Anne's Lace. Where the dress should have dragged in the water it instead dissolved into sunlight, dappling the creek bed before rematerializing as Summer stepped up onto the rocks.

“I'm in love with you,” I said again, because I thought she might not have heard, and Summer turned to look at me. Her hair was the color of cornsilk, and there was dirt on her nose.

“So?” she said. And then, perhaps seeing the look on my face, she hastily added, “I don't mean to be rude, you understand, but you must know that a lot of people have loved me. Loads and loads of them. It just gets a bit numbing after a while.”

Summer's eyes contained bands of color, the brown of good earth and the green of cut grass and the blue of a clear sky, more and more colors the deeper you looked. If you started from the outside and counted the bands going inwards, it didn't take long to feel as though you would never reach the middle no matter how much you stared. Her eyes were looking at me now, and there was an expression in them that I couldn't quite read.

“Didn't you love any of them back?” I said.

“Of course,” said Summer, and she resumed walking along the edge of the creek, squishing her toes in the mud. I could hear the faint roar of the waterfall up ahead of us, although it was still hidden around the bend. “I loved them and I left them, as I must always do. It's the way of things.”

“What happened to them?”

“Mostly they went to asylums,” she said. “It's not an easy thing to be in love with me, and they pined away into madness in the long months when I was gone. The less love-struck ones got off easier, though they still took strange notions into their heads sometimes, and went dancing naked under the moon on fine nights. Some folks said they were as touched as the ones in the madhouses, but that is as may be.” She stepped daintily over a crayfish.

“I could be different,” I said, which I knew was a lie. “Isn't there any way I can convince you to stay?”

“I've been kept a time or two,” said Summer. “There was one lover, long ago, who trapped me in a glass and kept me here long past my proper time. She paid dearly for that. The world withered in the heat, fruit rotted on the vine, and all the rivers dried up to nothing.” We were closer to the waterfall now, and she raised her voice slightly. “After I escaped, none of my sisters at all visited this place for a very long time.”

“What happened then?” I said.

“Nothing,” said Summer. “That's kind of the point.”

She had strayed back into the middle of the creek. The water was up to her knees now, and the lower part of her dress had turned to light again, light that moved in the water like cloth and startled the tiny fish that flashed around her ankles. I looked at her, and felt my heart crumbling like the shale in the canyon walls.

“Take me with you, then,” I said. “If you can't stay then I want to go with you, to wherever the seasons go when they're not here.”

“You don't want that,” said Summer quietly.

“I do, though,” I said. “I want it more than I've ever wanted anything.”

Summer looked at me for a long time. There was something like pity on her beautiful face.

“You must do what you must do,” she said at last, and without another word she turned and began walking towards the waterfall. I followed her.

There was a path that I had never seen before, leading up and around the edge of the falling water. Ahead of me, Summer's bare feet picked their way over moisture-kissed rocks. We passed behind the waterfall, and I blinked, momentarily seeing rainbows as I tried to clear the droplets from my eyes. As my vision cleared I saw not a rock wall or even a cave, but a series of hills, rolling green and endless toward the horizon, beneath a sky dotted with milk-colored clouds.

Summer was still walking, and I hurried to catch up. I had dropped my shoes, and the grass was soft against my feet.

We followed what looked like an old cow path up the first hill, and down the second, and up the next again. Occasionally we would come to a fence, and Summer would step lightly over the stile while I clambered up behind her, wondering how she made it look so effortless.

Something was happening. I glanced up as I dismounted a fence and discovered to my surprise that the clouds had changed. They were now huge white sheets that covered the sky. When I looked up again, seconds later—surely it was only seconds later—the clouds had shifted again, becoming tattered streaks that clung to the heavens like the banners of some defeated army.

“Summer,” I said.

She looked back, briefly. Her dress was starting to come apart, flower petals and dandelion seeds drifting on the breeze.

We kept walking, and now the hills were changing too: they were no longer green, and I realized that I didn't have a word for the color they were. The fences had begun to lean at crazy angles, and now the hills were tilting too, making impossible intersections with the sky, although my feet remained secure. The color was bleeding and leaking out of the world, forms losing their outlines, the whole universe morphing into something other. And the figure ahead of me was changing too.

“Summer,” I said again, and Summer turned towards me.

I had thought that Summer looked like a woman, but I realized then that that was only because I had been in love with it. Now we were too far out of the world for that to matter. The thing before me no longer looked even remotely human. Its skin was hard and gnarled like tree bark, peeled back here and there to reveal the new green wood beneath. But the skin, if it was skin, was pitted with holes, holes filled with churning earth, soil that writhed with insects, worms, mosquito eggs, plants that rose to sudden violent life and disappeared back into the morass. Life spasmed across its body. Swarms of bees poured from the holes, tree roots grasped like fingers, sap poured from gashes in its side like blood.

Summer stood before me, faceless, enormous, bigger than the universe, older than time.

Go home, it said. This is not a place for you. Go back.

So I did.

***

On the long walk back home, with my arms wrapped around my shoulders, I noticed that the leaves were changing. A chill wind danced down the sidewalk. Summer was over.

#a throwback from the hazy depths of 2013 #seasons #summer #short story #flash fiction #creative writing #writing #prose #spilled ink

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doomedandstoned · 4 years

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A Listener’s Guide to ‘Defying The Righteous Way’ by Cardinals Folly

~By Billy Goate~

~Photographs by Murder Basement Studios~

CARDINALS FOLLY belong to the Reverend Bizarre school of doom, but also takes its cues from '80s Gothic rock. In this way, Cardinals Folly (who started life as The Coven in 2004) and Lord Vicar were among the first to pioneer a sound that soon caught on with other bands like Acolytes of Moros, Caskets Open, and Weird Tales, to name a few. Their style makes for a transfixing listening experience and I've been enamored of the band since discovering their first LP, "Such Power Is Dangerous!' (2011). Who would have dreamed then that the trio from Helsinki would one day be playing Doomed & Stoned Festival?

It's also hard to believe that the doomed crew of Count Karnstein (bass, vox), Nordic Wrath (guitar), and Battle Ram (drums) are now on album number five, with two EPs and two splits also under their belt. As prolific as Cardinals Folly seem, they don't seem to have lost their edge on 'Defying The Righteous Way' (2020). After all, this far into an artist's discography I'm used to picking up on notes of lethargy, with some bands having to really stretch the definition of a "song" just to get another album out there (usually under contractual obligation). When you do what you do for the love of music, the compositional pen flows freely.

Let's start with the title. Defying The Righteous Way is an obvious dig at one of the Norseman's truest adversaries: Christianity. When the religion of Jesus came to Finland it was an aggressive ideology of conquest co-opted by the Catholic Church. The Northern Crusades saw to it that one way or another the Skandanavian people were converts, even if in name only. Before metal, there was still a heavy underground, so to speak, comprised of resisters who may have given lip service to The Cloth, but a very pagan connection to the earth.

The modality of Cardinals Folly quite often marries doom with ancient mannerisms of song, illustrated in the stately Medieval rhythm and the chanting chorus of "The Great Santur." I think it is this aspect of the band's output I've enjoyed the most, as it feels like they're somehow bridging a connection to the past, when resentments simmered for clergy and king alike.

For newer listeners, Defying The Righteous Way makes as good an introduction as any to the band's characteristic sound and style portfolio. Cardinals Folly toggles between fast-trotting songs like "Witchfinders," mid-tempo stompers like "Last House On The Left," and the more traditional slow burners like "Stars Align Again." In this way, they call to mind Saint Vitus (especially the Scott Reagers-era) out of all the Fathers of Doom.

If I have any complaint, it's simply that there isn't enough sadness on the album for my taste, with the exception of "Last House On The Left," which has some very effective moments of melancholia in its second half. Maybe it's because Mikko Kääriäinen's vocals have always hinted of sorrow for me, but they're mostly used to express gravity. I suppose "Strange Conflict" does come closer to scratching my depressive itch. By the way, I do love its Joy Division-esque pulse during the six-minute mark.

While the songs may not pop out immediately in a sing-along sense, the collective vibe does grow on you. There's an undeniable energy about Defying The Righteous Way that reveals a band with finely tuned musical instincts and a damning fire within, still longing to Burn The Priest.

Give ear...