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Tales of the Old Country; of ruined kingdoms and tragic betrayals and old trees that drank the blood of foxes foolish enough to sleep amongst their sharp roots; any tale that could be told in the span of one quickly burning cigarette.
the truth was she was just surprised by how quickly time had passed. Your youth wounded her. It made her want to protect you, and to kick you out the door.
You are from a time of posters and propaganda. When news of the war effort fluttered down the painted walls of crooked alleys. Sun-draped and salt-scented ocean views disrupted by the silhouettes of warships in the blue distance.
“From peak to peak, the pagodas of the palace stood on the tips of the Westward Mountains,” she said. Her fingers shut and then opened again, the pattern of the thread rearranged. “A dozen bridges of finely hewn stone spanned these peaks, connecting these pagodas in a marvelous web. Bridges that turned on giant axes, like the hands of a clock. By the emperor’s whim, and the power of his god gifts, the bridges moved, and the layout of the palace would change.” Her fingers kept closing and reopening, the pattern of the thread born anew, the connections shifting.
Without turning in His chair, He merely held up a finger, and the attendant went stiff, as if my spine had turned to stone, I could not blink my eyes, hot tears rolling down frozen cheeks, the emperor’s fingers making shapes in the air, the attendant’s body contorting in accordance with these shapes, my scream breathless and silent as my arm twisted out of its joint and my leg snapped back, my heel pressed between my shoulder blades, His fingers weaving the invisible threads in the air as my body folded inward and inward, until all that remained of the man was a box of twisted flesh that
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some just listened to the night, as if hearing it for the first time, amazed that it could be so loud and so alive. It was like we could hear the world again. Others turned and twisted in their restlessness and coiled into themselves like fists. Like every part of our bodies was activated.
It is an agitating sensation, almost pleasurable—the feeling of coming up to a steep and impenetrable deadline.
And Commander. Thank you for your good service. And your company. He raised his hand to the gate. But I’m coming in now.
We were moths to her light. It was the only light we could see.
as the crisscrossing waves closed over these pieces of him like linens folded by a pair of loving hands.
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.
“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.”
The old ape with the joint did not celebrate the warriors. He sat without energy on a thick branch that only just supported his weight as he gazed down at the brawl with something close to pity, as he puffed and streamed smoke from his wide, scarred nostrils.
weed ape for emperor
“For the greater good.” Your father said this without hesitation, as if it were printed in ink from the telegraph of his mind, delivered by some cold and distant signal.
“A warrior of the Daware Tribe never shares his schemes,” Keema said. “This is so the only one who can foil his plans is himself.” “Keen words improvised on the spot.” The Defect shook its head. “In simple words: bullshit.” Keema laughed. “A wise tortoise, aren’t you?” “Not that wise…. after all…this one is here, trusting you.”
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.
His words had infected us. We would’ve done anything he told us to do. We would’ve barked like dogs.
The string, tensed to its limit, begged for mercy.
We of the Thousand learned when we were young that one cannot row a river with a distracted mind—the world was waiting to swallow those who did not step sure across its surface.
We all knew to never go into the grass. Even if your boat was on fire and the water was filled with biting fish, you never go into the grass. “I’ve an uncle who stuck his hand in there once,” one of the more even-tempered fishermen said, when he noticed Keema staring into the thicket. “Did it as a joke, he did. Said he could feel a water-fae’s tits. But when he pulled his hand back out, all the flesh was gone. There was just bone.”
“You have my condolences for this loss, warrior.” 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.”
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.
Keema felt the bile rise in his throat as he looked upon the gargantuan shell of the tortoise god, cleaved in two. Half of the creature’s face yet uneaten, its mouth opened as if in mid-scream, the flesh all but gone. The god had been hollowed out like a tajeline.
I told them that I was sorry, but I had eaten the god they were searching for. That it took a long time. There was so much…flesh.
But nothing, and no one, lives forever. Not even gods. We are mighty, but we are not invulnerable. Death simply must work harder to catch us—another few hundred years, a few thousand perhaps, until from our fallen corpse a new god is born, like a molting, and whatever we once were disappears. Our likes and our loves gone, as a new order rises in our stead.
The main issue I was confronting was that being a small bird was somewhat useless. This was not the bird’s fault. If I could have inhabited a person, I would have, but the unwilling mind of a human takes great effort to wrangle; I did not have the strength to wrangle, only coax, and the bird happened to be the only creature in reach who was open to my whispering.
It made eating the god all the more worth it, because I’ll tell you, that was hard work. The weeks of eating its chewy, tasteless meat.” He let out a high and fluttering laugh. “I kept it drugged so that its meat wasn’t tense when I ate it, and it slurred like a drunk as it begged me to stop. But how could I stop? Every bite brought me closer to a kind of…becoming.” He shut his eyes. “I hear them all now.
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.
And so, as Luubu snarled and finally wrapped his hands around Saam’s throat, I brought my own hands together and with those hands compressed the air around my sons. Folding it and folding it, like sheer Induun fabric, until they fell into each other’s arms, their last sound that of Luubu’s small and terrified gasp before I brought my hands together one last time, and smashed them together into a single small coin of flesh. A royal copan. And no sooner had the coin dropped to the floor than I picked it up and swallowed it.
And you understand that whatever sleep the man was having, it was a bottomless one, many leagues beneath the surface of the Sleeping Sea—trapped in a dream as restless as wolves.
And so he lay down that night by the dying fire with little thought as to the inner workings of his body—the chemistry of bequeathment and inheritance that began as the acids of his stomach met the gnarled and potent flesh of a god.
“I ate a god,” he said. Araya’s eyes widened. “We have only just met,” she said, “so forgive me for saying that that does not sound like a very wise decision.”
But what might seem a pointless loop along the long line of this journey would, come the opening of his eyes, remain in the unspoken text of him, for he had taken part in the consumption of a god, and no mortal in this earthly domain can resist such almighty transformations.
It occurred to both Keema and Jun, as they looked at each other from across the ashen fire pit, that a door had been opened, and a threshold crossed. They could hear each other’s story. That inner narration. The same narration that you can hear in this very theater.
There were times in your life when you wished your mind could be read, or tuned to like some frequency on a radio. Times when you did not want to do the work of speaking your piece. Like when you and Jadi fought that day shortly after your lola died, scrappy, bruising, and afterward you knew it was your fault, the fight, but you didn’t know how to tell your friend that you were sorry. How easy it would’ve been, if you could’ve just opened a door and let him walk inside and see the mess for himself.
It was a rocky ride. Their shoulders bounced together. And in their heightened state such contact was like the meeting of two exposed wires.
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.
to which the elk replied that there were things that sat along the edge of heaven, born from the darkest fissures within the earth, whose lives were spent in waiting for someone to follow their scent; waiting for someone to walk up and fall into their arms.
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 come what may, there is a path you can walk that does not lead to your end just yet.” This moonlit body touches his shoulder. “You can choose to live. And none of these people here can tell you otherwise.”
Even if nothing changed; if it all played out the same way. Would you want this life?
“For so long has the Water missed the Moon. Centuries of yearning that manifested itself as a gathering swell beyond the eastern horizon. It would stop at nothing to honor Her bones. Come midday, even the sun would be blotted out by its yawning jaw.” The light outside the window begins to darken. “The end was coming.”
But we soon saw that these were no mere humans. The air seemed to shake off of them as blood does from a wicked sword.
all of his stubborn history fell off his shaking shoulders as he became acquainted with the parchment-thin divide between breath and stillness.
The wave was rising, and the world was running out of time, and it seemed that no one quite knew how to spend it.
day swore to seeing the two of them kiss before the water took them, but such gestures were not too uncommon between men in those days in moments of great spirit. “In my eyes they were but brothers-in-arms,” a pilgrim told her.
just like enkidu and gilgamesh. just roommates. brothers in arms. sacred band
“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.”
