The Spear Cuts Through Water

by Simon Jimenez

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.