The Spear Cuts Through Water

by Simon Jimenez

Her words forever married to the musk of her cigarette and her bone-rattling laughter; so much so that whenever you think of that place, long ago and far away, you cannot help but think of smoke, and death.

for some tales are too large to be told by one voice alone. This is the tale of your land, And the spear that cut through it.

Poisons of the head and of the heart had no effect on princes or emperors. But poisons of the bone and of the flesh still had their purchase.

You thought she was teaching you not to be rude, as was lola’s job. But not this time. This time, she was teaching you how to survive.

How right they were—for the emperor’s death had redirected the currents. Where once all roads led across the water, now, that night, they led somewhere else altogether—unbeknownst to any of them, that was straight to the unlikely doors of Tiger Gate Checkpoint, where the course of the week to come would be determined, by fire, and blood.

It is an agitating sensation, almost pleasurable—the feeling of coming up to a steep and impenetrable deadline. It puts you in mind of the egg timer, which was your lola’s favorite toy. She used that cranked ovoid contraption when she steeped her tea. She used it when she baked with the clay oven. She used it to startle you awake from a nap. When you think of the egg timer, you think of old hands, white-knuckled, winding the spring. You think of tension wire, held at a gasp between two opposing poles. You think of its insides ticking, ticking away; a sound that has never left you, just as she has never left you; you hear it now, in this very theater, distant but unmistakable; the clicking of its aluminum tongue; the tapping of this moonlit body’s foot; we wait.

Believe this truth. There is not enough time for you not to. The Smiling Sun is no more. He is as dead as anyone has ever been, and this world will soon fall gloriously apart. And that wagon over there is the hook that will ensure its unraveling.”

Bone slid into brain and in that bright firework behind his jellied eyes Vogo was propelled out of his body, as if two hands had shoved him off the edge of the last precipice of this world, his spirit crashing through the heavenly bands, the banners of color and sound that lay like sediment between these choruses, until he dropped into the churning waters of the Sleeping Sea, where upon the cold detonation of its surface he scattered, like pieces of a dropped porcelain plate, into the hours that bind our days, and I thought about my mother who jumped from a cliff when I was little, and I wondered if this was what she saw when she ended things, as I ended things, what remained of Vogo gone far away, and yet not far at all, as the crisscrossing waves closed over these pieces of him like linens folded by a pair of loving hands.

You never thought it was a love story, for in his story there was no love. There was only a long road of bodies.

“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.”

You know this place. You had seen it yourself, not in person, but as an oil painting, done in the style of Old Meridian, where the lushness of the natural world was the focus. Even in your youthful disinterest at the time you remember the intense beauty of the image: the light that fell in great shafts through dramatic cloud breaks, draping over the mighty thrusts of land. Trees erupting from stone in thick, verdant brushstrokes, and mists that rolled down these hills like curls of gray hair down an ancient shoulder, making mystery and danger of the dirt roads that curved around these towers of rock like thin knots of twine around a dead god’s fingers.

These people less than bugs to the First Terror, who had been raised properly on his diet of royal sycophants; the sort of man whose depressed mood was helped by the eradication of these small wooden blights on the land. The trees shattering in their wake. The river waters breaking upward like frightened cats, the furious horses galloping underneath these watery arches as they, by the Terror’s hand, cheated their way through the sun-fried land, the sons following the father on his mission of blood.

Our mess was everyone’s mess; the Daware man’s life was fair trade for the success of our mission. He sighed. “If that is how you expect me to think, then you have been teaching me the wrong lessons these past six months.”

The theater is cacophonous with the shrieks of the dead. You hold your ears tight, but it does little to block out the screaming. The tortoise’s head shrinking back as it watched this broken man collapse in on himself, and we, the people, the ones this bastard had struck down and burned and shot, we swirled around that pretty little skull of his and we clawed at the walls and we wailed and we said do you remember us, you demon, do you remember spilling our blood at your taloned feet and now here you are DOING IT AGAIN, and he groaned as he clutched at his head, his throbbing eye, and begged them to cease the pain, begged them for their release. “I—I’m s-sorry…” The hatchet at his feet now long forgotten, the young man now a boy shuddering on the floor.

Many deaths stain your hands. Their blood runs deep in your soil, prince’s child. But now you are here, trying to clean those hands in whatever water you can find.

They were soldiers, far from home, and shadowed by the presence of death; the deaths of others; of their own. They were youths, proud and strong, some of them cruel, many of them scared—of course they drank themselves under the table; of course they broke windows and smashed bottles and seemed always ready to beat someone into the ground. They were bottomless, drinking all the wine in the compound, grabbing at any body that might come near, farmer or not, their hunger rare and frightening.

It would become a thing he could return to in his mind when he pleased, elaborating on the details, giving life to the still image, and in this way it would become his, for this was the fate of all fantasy.

Soon I will die,” but before I pass from this world and return to the sky, “I will end my sons,” my greatest loves, “who love me so much they would devour me whole.”

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.

But the truth of the matter was they fought because Jun was grieving and Keema was terrified and Jun was exhilarated and Keema was joyful and Jun was exhausted and Keema was repulsed. They fought because it was the easiest language they spoke.

“Nature would see me drawn and quartered.” Jun’s voice had taken on a flatter tone as he said this. Neutral. Matter-of-fact. Certain. “Nature would have me gutted. Nothing in this world will ever meet me and not want to slit my throat, because I wear the mark of death on my face. Because I had served death proudly.” He looked at Keema. “I envy anyone who can still trust nature. But I am beyond nature’s grace.

She bowed her head. “I hope that their end was mighty.” “I’ve yet to witness an end that was,” he said.

“I have lived a long time,” she said. “And the longer I live, the more it surprises me, and saddens me, how wise the young must become to live in this world.”

From far away, the laughter was a crackle of noise, like some distant fireworks lit in honor of a hero’s passing—and up close, it was almost overwhelming, a bright and wincing joy that would make one realize there is no correct way to shake hands with pain.

“It’s not a weakness,” Keema said. “Oh?” “Fear keeps you alive.”

There is much of my experience in those days that I cannot translate into human speech. Beauty and terror unutterable to your muscled tongue. Believe me only when I say that the world back then was like that of the ripest berry, swollen and bursting in the teeth.

Up until the days of humans and their dances, I had lived for a very long time. The surface of myself had become pocked and cracked and cratered, and I knew that if I let myself remain in that form any longer, I would disappear; a new Moon would take my throne, and it would no longer be my light that the animals and the forests bathed in. It would no longer be to me whom the dancers presented their finest arts, but some other lesser creature who would not be able to appreciate and love the same things I did; and such a thought I could not bear. I would rather there were no Moon at all.

“I hear them all now. The tortoises’ messages. Their memories. I can even smell what they smell. The silver fear that lifts from the people’s shoulders. Their red fury.

A most urgent business, Mother. Because now that I’ve had the taste of one god, I find myself hungering for something a bit more substantial.” He looked up at me with wide eyes. “I think I’m going to eat you.”

I had seen what happened to all of those sons I gave birth to. How they were molded by the world they had been given, for even the man who had started it all did not know why he made the choices he did. It is all a spiral that feeds into itself with the gathering weight at the center we call Power.

You can fault the dancer, but more often than not, it is the dance itself that has to change.

He was an ugly thing when he cried. In the heights of his overwrought tears I wondered how he could be in any way related to those first people who danced under my moonlight—how this back-bent dog of battle was worthy of his own breath.

When he turned to the person who spoke to him, he saw cold gray clouds driven with black iron nails—he saw a stormcast sea swirling around two dark whirlpools—and he felt a profound vertigo, as if he were looking into the heart of an endless chasm, and it was like he was falling, his breath caught in his throat, until he put his hand on the ground to steady himself, and he realized that all he was looking at was nothing more, and nothing less, than the gaze of Jun’s eyes.

The stories are everywhere, you cannot avoid them. Every day you tell a story to yourself; the details of your day become a part of your myth. It is reordered. It is made sense of. Your lola told stories about the country she had come from; your father told you the stories of himself, his destiny for greatness. They are private stories told on stages behind thick curtains, seen only by the teller, and no one else.

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.

Twisting wordlessly in on himself until he was able to postpone the feeling that he was missing something vital about the world.

And we were louder in his head than we had ever been as we told him that this was the fate he deserved. We were his guilt, and we would rob him of every intimacy.

Their unearned hope that once they reached the outskirts of the Divine City, all would become as it was once again—a hope for a return to normalcy, even if that normalcy was fear and distrust and hunger, for at least the fear, the distrust, the hunger were familiar.

“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.

What is the place we go to when the last seconds of our life have been spent? Perhaps your eldest brother summed it up best, in the words he etched into the bark of the courtyard tree, before he ran away when you were little. The End.

Redemption was out of our reach, but we could at least step toward it, and if we died on that long road, then all the better, for everyone. She said we did more harm than good, sharing this earth with those who deserved it. She said it was time to move aside.

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.”

“I would’ve won,” Keema said. “If we had ever had a proper duel. Fully rested. I would’ve won.” Jun smiled. “Fuck off,” he said, which, to Keema’s ears, had the same melody as I love you.

When Jun took his hand, Keema wanted to laugh, because for his whole life he wished he was brave enough to ask this question, and in the end it was so easy. The meeting of their hands seeming almost inevitable. Jun followed him in the steps that had no name, at least not yet, for the story was still writing itself.

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 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 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.

Whatever nightmares used to haunt me, this young man kneeling before me was not that nightmare. I didn’t know who he was.

“I thought I had found it,” he cried. “A good death. A death more glorious than I deserved. I do not understand…. Why am I still here? Why am I still ugly?” His voice was wracked, almost indecipherable. “What reward is this? What punishment?” “I do not know if this is a reward,” Keema said. “Or if it is a punishment. But maybe it is neither.” He pressed his forehead against Jun’s. The heat immense. Alive. “Maybe you are just here.” And here, they found each other.