The Spear Cuts Through Water

by Simon Jimenez

Such was the quality of night in the Old Country, or what they then knew as the true dark, which, when the sun fell from its daily perch, was total and unyielding. What else could they have hoped for, with no moon in the sky? Your lola put a cigarette out on the wall. When she pulled the cigarette away, there was left on the cream-colored surface a small black scorch mark. “They called it the Burn,” she said. The hole in the tapestry of the sky that the Moon once called home, or so went one of your lola’s less likely tales; how, after one of the First Men unstitched the Moon from the sky with the tip of his spear, freeing Her from Her determined place in the heavens, She offered him one wish, and that wish was a kingdom. A hole in the sky like a cigarette scar, the Burn was why the checkpoints shut their gates after nightfall, why the animals burrowed deep into their nests, why so few people braved the roads at dark, for there were far greater dangers than brigands that stalked the fields of a land stripped of its moonlight.

It comes on you suddenly as the dancers and this moonlit body clear the stage: the day your father told you the tale of the stolen Moon, and Her journey to reclaim Her country. You do not remember why he told you this tale, after all, he seemed perpetually annoyed by your lola’s efforts to share with you everything she knew of the Old Country, but what you do remember is the great pains he took to describe the battles and the swordplay, and how he kept interrupting his own tale to assure you that this wasn’t a love story. That it was about camaraderie; that it was about a revolution; the important things. And to you, it seemed strange of him to bring any of this up. You never thought it was a love story, for in his story there was no love. There was only a long road of bodies.

Please be a princess bride reference

“The old men would have you believe it shook out one way. That the road was but pain and glory. Sometimes, perhaps, life whittles itself down to these essences. Sometimes there is nothing we can do but sit in it.” She took a long drag and blew gray smoke up into the ceiling, where it lived like an opaque and swirling cloud of shape and texture. “But listen well when I tell you that your father, and your granjo, are wrong.” What were they wrong about? you asked. She shrugged. “This is a love story to its blade-dented bone.”

Unlike your time, where masculine pride is propagandized to advance the war effort and certain arrangements of the family are idealized over others to encourage the repopulation of the ranks—your grandfather, for the limited time that you knew him, was preoccupied with making sure that you and your brothers had what he deemed appropriate appetites—the joining of these like bodies was not disparaged in the era of the Eighth Emperor, who was known to have had an expansive and welcoming taste when it came to the lovers he took to bed, and broadcasted such sentiments out through his tortoise network in the days when he hoped to bring to his threshold the most attractive lovers in the land.

“The last six months I was given the order to guard the Wolf Door. Do you know of it?” Keema shook his head. “It is a door, deep below the palace. It is the most treasured area of the capital. And it is where She was kept.” He nodded to the back of the wagon, as if the She of his tale needed any clarification. “Every six months a new guard is ordered to stand before the door, and for six months, that guard is the only person who stands between the world and the heart of the Throne.” He shrugged. “It’s more a symbol than anything. A rite of passage. It was my turn to be that guard before all this started. It was the proudest moment of my life when I was selected for the duty.” “What happened then?” Keema asked. Another shrug, this one more defeated. “She changed my mind.” “And then you killed the emperor?” He nodded at the back. “She did.” “With a blade?” “With Her mind,” he said. “She blew him up. Like a sneeze. Painted Him against the walls of the cavern.” “That is incredible,” Keema said, shaking his head. He then furrowed his brow. “I thought the emperor was all-powerful.” Jun nodded. “So did He,” he said.

Fathers leave in all sorts of ways. Some of them leave in the dark. Some leave only in their heads, while their bodies remain, staring at the world around them forever distantly. Others fade out over time, like an old photo rubbed raw. Many, gone in an instant.

“You are a bitter old thing,” the Defect said. And then it entertained Her not a moment further, choosing instead to ruminate some more on the nature of beauty and the joy of counting the blades of grass, and fish. But the empress was successful in reminding the creature that this was all fleeting. It did its best impression of a sigh. When the Defect was first born from the inverted womb in the Shrike Room beside the heat beds, it received, all at once, like a waterfall, the memories of all the tortoises that had come before it, and all that now yet lived. The first few weeks of life were akin to the storms of the abyss as it learned to parse the assault of imagery and sound and sense, to understand the context it had been given and its place in the world. But with enough time it was able to attain an awareness of what it meant to be a tortoise, for all the memories it had been given were those of pain and humiliation, of themselves and of others—and yet there were precious few memories of joy. The cicadas rattled. The frogs skipped. “This is a beautiful morning,” it said. The creature pocketed the memory. The quiet river and the rolling clouds and the tall yellow grass. It pocketed the sweet smell and the light snoring of the small humans who flanked its shell. It pocketed the fiery sun and the green-gray water and the sound of directionless birdsong. Turned it into a memory worth keeping. And it promised itself that one day, when it was safe to, it would share with its ...

Even the Third Emperor, the softest of my boys, turned cruel in his later years. In those days I was a more active parent; I even delighted in teaching my sons the way of the world. The Third and I spent much time in the Bowl, where I showed him the secrets within its waters. The worms that emerged from the spout of the Sleeping Sea; worms that spun silk in their bellies. And together we wove fine carpets and tapestries the likes of which I think are yet to be matched in quality. He was, perhaps, too soft. Those who craved his power beheaded him. I took our revenge, and afterward I sewed my son’s head back onto his body, but I saw that ever since then he was not the same. He shied away from the things he used to like to do. He let the people weave the carpets and he shrunk away from the light. Fear weighed on his shoulders every day. Once, on the banister of the pleasure boat, a small bird landed gently, and my son flinched, and I watched him as he, without a word, used the power I had given him to break the bird’s neck. The creature dropped into the water like a rock. “There is nothing left to fear, Mother,” he said softly. Blame is an endless circle. And I seemed to be standing in the center of it.

Let this then explain his dream. Why upon the shutting of his eyes, he fell immediately through the heavenly bands, as a rock might through endless sheets of colorful parchment, a silent scream on his yawning mouth until suddenly he stopped, and he found himself standing at the edge of the Last Road of this existence. You know this road. You remember it from her stories. It is the road that marks the border between this world and the next. A road on a high cliff that overlooks the endless roil of the Sleeping Sea. The Red-Cloaked Fisherman once sat upon the edge of this road, with his stool and his rod stringed with the unbreakable strand of hair plucked from the head of his true love. The same road that the solemn warriors of the fifth heavenly band would walk, cutting down any coward soul who yet clung to the cliff’s edge, not ready to fall. It was the road for wanderers—for those who had never known a home, not even in themselves.

The sun rose to a sound as sweet and sharp as a sugared lemon. Light streaked across the valleys east of the Bowl in thick strokes of gold paint. The sea green and hay-yellow grass was flooded with heat. A barrage of butterflies shattered the light off their wings as they peppered themselves over a thatch of wildflowers. Keema could smell the perfume powder of their wings, the musky sweet nectar they drank from ecstatically colored pores, but he didn’t know that was what he smelled—that his nose had become so sensitive to such a small detail of the world. All he was aware of was that something in the air smelled vaguely sweet, and made his mouth water, as he lifted himself up from a dream he could no longer remember.

Now that Luubu was dead and the web that bound them had crumpled, the creatures had become distant lighthouses to one another in the dark, able to send and receive only the most basic of information and images; and it was in such a dark place that they received, from somewhere, from one of their number who no longer was, the image of a morning spent drifting down a calm and sun-touched river. A morning spent alone, in the company of oneself, unattended by sentries or diplomats or generals. No sniffing the people they did not want to sniff. No reading of thoughts or emotions, no picking out treasons theoretical and real. There was only the river. The sky. And itself. And this alone was enough to make the creatures reconsider the chains that bound them to their wretched watchtowers.

It was a rocky ride. Their shoulders bounced together. And in their heightened state such contact was like the meeting of two exposed wires. Keema gripped the rim of the wagon’s entrance. He was embarrassed by how happy he was, to be sitting next to someone. He tried to hide it, his delight, but it was too expansive. I was unused to such touch. It flowed over the lip of his soul and onto the floor. Jun, not being as deprived as Keema when it came to the nourishment of physical contact, took notice of the pleasure radiating from his friend. He pressed gently into Keema’s side; Keema pressed back. They sat together with elbows touching, with lightning on their skin.

And it was near the end of some long and little-visited corridor where Keema, with trembling lip, showed Jun a memory he had never shared with anyone, for he knew that if he did not share it now, it might stay locked within him forever, and that was a possibility too unbearable to entertain, and this was how Jun learned of the tale of Keema’s lost left arm. And when he did, he looked at Keema with reappraising eyes through his mask, and he said nothing, for some memories do not need commenting on. You may wonder what it was that Jun saw behind that memory-door. What pain, and what bloodshed, that was secreted away for so many years. But this was a tale meant for him and him alone, and matters little in the scheme of the story told on this stage tonight, so this moonlit body will leave it where it lies. If this does not satisfy you, then imagine this: Imagine a great battle in the courtyard of a towering fortress. Imagine a sword, whipping out of its sheath, and a leap of blood as Keema, wide-eyed, watches his arm fly across the battlefield. Imagine whatever lie you like.

I love a disabled character getting privacy from the reader

You call it many things. It is the place that lies below what is known. Your lola told you it was called the Sleeping Sea. She told you it is the place we of the Old Country look to when we are lost, for it is the place from which we have come, and the place where we, in the end, must return. Many of her age called it by that name, the Sleeping Sea—preferring how the title evoked both mystery and an abundance of life. It was a name that gave them comfort. “It is a holy and beautiful place,” your lola said to you from her bed, in a state of mania, her grip on your wrist painful. “I will leave this body, and as water is taken into the soil so will my spirit be taken into the land. And in time I will find my way there, that Undersea, and then I will return to this earth, born anew.

They moved on. The jungle path became a strand of hair. A long black strand as wide as the Road Below, and which curved down into a tapestry of stars; more stars than Keema had ever beheld in his life, and more worlds than he knew existed. Worlds where energy springs and spoils. This strand of hair winding into the deepest depths of the supposed Tapestry, where the roots of flowers erupt and coil around the dog moons and firebrands in the sky, and in the stars were etched the pantheon of giant cats and wolves and bears who watched the five of them pass with ravenous eyes, as if waiting for permission to leap from the dark and eat the small interlopers who had gone where no mortal should ever trespass. They walked this strand of hair until they disappeared into the scalp of this long-dead giant whose name is still writ large in the blood of the guilty. And in that nest of hair, the path became a shallow river, walled by the tallest of grass. Here, the world was alive with the sound of rattling bugs, the air textured with the click and the whir of insects flitting between stalks, avoiding the thrown tongues of toads from the dark. The elk’s hooves clopped down the avenue of water. The river’s surface was so still that their reflection was like that of a mirror, clean and articulate.

The only sound in this still and quiet lake is the light splash of its step as it walks the two warriors down the avenue of lit braziers that float suspended over the dark water and lead up to the mouth of the structure that sits in the middle of this interior place. The center of this ribboning existence. The Inverted Theater. The hairs on the back of your neck prick up as a murmur ripples throughout the crowd; a questioning. It cannot be—they are not—I do not believe it. But all of you know it to be true. In this place outside of time, and location. They are here.

One might think it amazing that in the face of such overwhelming evidence, no effort was made to save themselves. But though I cannot help but wish that when the world quirks and shudders, we have the wherewithal to listen, even I cannot deny how difficult it can be, to accept that sometimes, to survive, we must change our course.”

It would only be later, as people recounted what had happened or what they heard had happened, that they would settle on a title for what the two warriors performed on that day. It was a title that, like the other dances of the land, was described in its own movements, in the way two men leapt in synchronicity and landed on solid feet and held each other against the coming end. And we thought the movements together, and we expressed with our bodies that same thought. We were not ourselves anymore but each other, speaking through our bodies to a wounded and grieving land. And what we said was this: The body holds the body. The arms hold the spear. And the spear cuts through water. The water stopped, as if frozen—as if the energies that composed the wave had gone still to listen to the whisper of the sky. And then it split, right down the middle, like a part in the hair, like a crack of the shell of a tajeline. Like two wings, unfolding.

The young chronicler met one of the escaped tortoises in a hut outside one of the river villages. A kind family had hid the creature there in safety, and at night brought it out to the river to enjoy the sights and sounds of night. The chronicler asked the creature where it and all of its kind were headed, and why, and the creature lowered its head to the ground in mourning, as it told her of the vision of freedom that one of their brethren had delivered to them, of a river, and a bug on its beak, so powerful, so intoxicating, they felt they had no choice but to follow it, and see it for themselves. “This one will travel the Thousand for the rest of this one’s life,” the creature said, “and this one will find that river.” It shut its eyes. “And finally this one will know peace.”

After all, for you, there was no predicting where you are now, sitting in this Inverted Theater. The family spear you had given away now less a spear than a sewing needle, stitching two distant points of time together in one unending embrace. You wondered, as you gave the spear to Keema, why it was you who was chosen to be representative of all the descendants; why you, whose connection to the Old Country was tenuous and variable at best—and, in some essential way, poisoned, considering your heritage. But perhaps now you understand that you are not a representative. That like the spear’s journey through time, much of this dance is dictated by chance. You are merely, crucially, no one but yourself, as anyone else is themselves—mere stewards, gifting recursively over the divide of time this spear, that memory, to the people and the place from which they had come—and who, in turn, gift back to you your strange, and sad, and wide-eyed futures.

And though one yearning was addressed, another stands sprouting from your concrete. “I thought this was a love story,” you say. Your lola’s insistence has remained with you since the beginning, and you say these words in a quiet manner, with a shrug, as if to let these performers know it is fine, it does not matter that much, this thought—that maybe the definition of what a love story is could be stretched to include all that has up till now taken place. You say it like an apology. Like it is a thing to be apologized for. A runaway child, charging through the porcelain shelves: I thought this was a love story. I had hoped this was a love story. You say it with shame, embarrassed at having said it, wishing you could take it back. You say it, worried that you have betrayed some secret part of yourself that does not wish to be exposed—an old gremlin in you, sick and yearning. You say it with hope. Timid and without conviction. The hope of someone who knows they are about to wake from a dream to a reality they do not understand. The pub awaits, as does your empty bed. I thought this was a love story. You regret having said it; as if you know it will lessen the quality of the tale. Rob it, of its smoke and shadow. But still, you say it. And this moonlit body smiles. And from the wings the patting of the drums slowly builds, and the curtains behind the dancers rise. Because you are right, this moonlit body tells you; this is indeed a love story. Down to the blade-dented bone.

“Why are you laughing?” Keema asked, amused by Jun’s sudden giggling. His friend shook his head. “I remembered that there is a theater, somewhere in the lands of the Sleeping Sea, acting out our story.” He rested his head on Keema’s shoulder; kissed the warm skin there. “Do you think they can see us now? Are they performing this moment onstage?” “I do not know,” Keema said in a distant way, his arm locking around Jun’s waist. “Would you stop, if they were?” “No,” Jun said firmly. “They have already seen my life. They have seen my most shameful moments.” The pained look in his eyes quickly faded as he gazed into Keema’s. “Why would I deny them one of my most beautiful?”

This one’s for me

And then, as always, there is your family (and some good friends too). Your arms wrap around them, and you, not wishing to make any of them feel less important than the others, look to them all in alphabetical order: Clarissa, Dad, Emma, Farrah, Ferdinand, Garth, Jason, Kane, Matt, Mom, Nicholas, Quinn, Red, Sara, and Sebastian. And with them in your heart, you remember that, yes, it was all worth it. Every day of it. Today, tomorrow, or the next—your answer is the same. You would do it all again.