The Points Along
I was on vacation last week, so there’s the reason for the lack of posting. This story wasn’t written for any contest and probably isn’t quite finished. I feel like there’s more there, but the schedule dictates.
A man stands at the threshold, longing to come in from the cold, brutal wilderness that had beaten him, tormented him. An ocean of foamy clouds soils the sky above and the consequent blackness blends into the man at the edges, molding him into a skulking shadow darkening the doorway. Decked with furs, dripping with the dampening drops of the choking mist rising like a breath of a grave from the whitewashed, deadened land, he seems more like a beast leaving a fresh kill than a supplicant on bended knee.
The way behind him, dotted with markers and wild spurs deeper into the wood that had not been taken, now stood definitive. It is as it was and could be no other. No matter of earnest wish or deadening drunkenness could erase the steps he had taken along the path. There would always be that night in summer when the heat hung about him like a breathable sea, his motions swimming in the air, his sweat falling heavily, steadily, granting the only sound to the impossible quiet that swelled among the trees as the wet fell upon the pine straw. The wait in shaded hollow seemed unremarkable outside of it, but in it, the buzz and hiss of his own thoughts fought with the pulse of blood in his ears so that he stood in open-eyed oblivion until the moment arrived and his date passed by.
Was it really a wrong thing to do? It was so easy in the end: a quick, quiet step, a hand here, a hand there. Up and twist. No one around to see, a place in the straw to store, and the rest was his. His path continued on, that site was left behind, and now he could live at ease for a time. Or it should have been at ease. Why wasn’t it at ease? Something stuck in him that he denied then, but he felt it now too, standing on the outside, something obscure when it faded from focus, when it was not the matter at hand, but acute and visceral, sharp, precise when it came to the moment of being present in a mote of time, a point on the path. He would shout at the pangs in the past, curse them and denounce them, as the spotlight of his mind wandered over what had been.
But the places along the path are beautiful too. There are nights out in the space between where the mind reels at the majesty. Instead of bloated clouds blocking out the light, the sky flares and streaks with living currents of colors spreading emerald, carmine, and amethyst like a visible breath swirling endlessly across the breadth of the vast black canvas. It’s intoxicating; alluring; pure and mysterious; individual and collective.
Then come the memories again, flooding over the space between his ears, intoxicating; haunting; faded and mysterious. He sees them now as he had seen them then, wherever and whenever then was, or rather he fills in the gaps of what had been then with what has been since, shading then and now with now and then, each evolving into something more than what it was when it was solely itself. The old habited women singing in their own way, plainchant melody, alien meter:
Dark is the dead night; Bright and shining the dead sun; Dead the moon and stars. No fair friends, nor fellows will they be. Find your closer kin, Oh man, wanderer of land, Do not fall feral.
These are not all good, maybe none of them are, but he feels the needles of them pierce him and recognizes it all, welcomes them all. All of what was led him to where he is and he had come here by some grace beyond himself. This he knows and that he should not be let in. Why should he want in?
A man stands at the threshold silently pleading with himself to raise his hand to the door, to escape the gaping emptiness behind him. He pulls it up slowly as though burdened with a millstone and brushes his knuckles against the rough-hewn wood. The sound, if it made any, was nothing more than a soft patter hardly distinguishable from a rattling of the wind. And yet... And yet, as if as desirous of giving as he was to ask, the door opens like a flash, flooding the night with the warm, golden glow of a house and a man is beckoned inside.