The Spear Cuts Through Water

by Simon Jimenez

What is the sound of the voice of the oldest tree? What is the song of the Moon?

I trusted this person with my life.

But you know as well as any guilty party that no one thought stands alone. That there is a city within you, populated by both high- and lowborn beliefs, interjections, prayers, rantings.

What are you still doing here? But on you go. Your movements automatic as you live through each day and sleep through each night. You know what it is to be alone. You’ve been too scared to be anything else.

“There can be no blasphemy when the god being blasphemed is dead.”

I got hit with a fucking ladle!

And in their heightened state such contact was like the meeting of two exposed wires.

“I am not afraid,” she said.

The world and its timelines had been mapped, and the Tapestry’s Fray was the border of that great work. The worried edge, and the unyielding hem, that held the image together.

“Judge not the parent who keeps silent to their child’s cry. There are too many reasons in heaven and earth to disappoint the ones we care for.”

He surprises you when he asks you if you are proud to be of its people. The question seems to come from nowhere, but the way he asks it tells you that this question is no frivolity. He needs an answer. Your instinct is to lie, but the truth comes out before you can stop it.

You tell him that most days you do not think of the Old Country at all. That it would be a lie to say that you hold the place close to your heart, that your ancestors speak to you in any profound whisper of the spirit.

You tell him that you have lived a strange life. Easy in some ways, difficult in others. You are kept awake at night by a rattling shutter you don’t know how to fix. Some days you are so alone, you think you will collapse into a hard and dense rock. You tell him that you wish things were different. That you feel as though you have a sack over your shoulder, heavy and dragging, but you have no idea what’s inside the sack, or who gave it to you. It’s just there. It’s just yours. And you regret so many things. You’ve hurt people, you’ve embarrassed them, you’ve embarrassed yourself. You have made so many wrong turns that it’s a wonder that you’re still walking. It has been a strange life. You say it again, and again.

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.”

“We need our children to find their place in this world. Without a place, they are lost.”

He knew their boat would pass a village that was filled with men and women who, upon one sight of their tortoise cargo and their imperial insignias, would have slaughtered them. So he slaughtered them first.”

Somewhere, long ago, a young boy clawed at the windows to play with his brothers. He whimpered to be included.

:((((((

Sleeping Sea

finishing the last days of the Emperor’s Summer with two weeks of unending rain.

Cleansing the world anew

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.

“Except for that arm. And now I cannot help but wonder why you were not remade whole again.” “I am whole,” he said flatly.