The Vorrh

All he needed was a locked room, ink, and sheets of virgin paper. This was his anchor, and he embedded it with the few scraps of energy he had left. He instinctively knew that memory and imagination share the same ghost quarters of the brain, that they are like impressions in loose sand, footfalls in snow. Memory normally weighed more, but not here, where the forest washed it away, smoothing out every contour of its vital meaning. Here, he would use imagination to stamp out a lasting foundation that refused the insidious erosions buffeting around him. He would dream his way back to life with impossible facts.

One solitary tear crept through the scars of his face, through the diagrams of constellations and the incised maps of influence and dominion. A liquid without a name, it being made of so many emotions and conflicts, each cancelling the other out until only salt and gravity filled the moment and moved down through his expression.

white men always told you where they were. They sent out a bow wave, so that the earth and its animals would murmur, well in advance of their arrival. Their wake was immense. Crushed and contaminated, the land was forced to repair itself, even after the gentlest of their journeys.

For so it is among those who shed lives every few years: they keep their deflated interior causeways, hold them running parallel with their current useable ones; ghost arteries, sleeping shrunken next to those that pump life. Hushed lymphatics, like quiet ivy alongside the speeding juice of now. Nerve trees like bone coral, hugging the whisper of bellowing communications.

The ship ploughed through the darkness, a pinpoint of light skimming the great curve of water. A million beasts rolled, fled and laughed in the vast distance beneath it, while the stars multiplied and roared in the perpetual silence above.

No, it was something else, something with human tendencies, which, of course, made it terrible in a different way.

Why anyone would find cause to shoot at me remains a mystery. My dealings with other humans are decades past, and all before that is erased. Only my wife keeps the memories in her flesh and moisture, both of which live in my bow.

He knew the hollow longing and guilt were growing stronger and that there was no money or memory to hold on to. There were no facts to grip and the fictions were worn out. He then realised it was time to die, and he did.

Walking into the night, he was in control of his world. He would shape it with the gods and demons into an understanding of forces, each with its own price, marked in blood.

The young have left for the cities and for slave labour abroad. They are underground, digging fossils for other people’s heat. They are in venomous sheds, weaving chemical cancer. They are automata in chains of industry that do not need identity, language, or families. All their saved money is endlessly counted as escape.

The Frenchman had never had any feelings of masculine protection for the fairer sex, even the few he had tolerated and liked. He and his paid companion had been locked in a crude democracy forged from selfishness, desire, and humiliation.

Complexity has crippled me before, and the healing from it took too many years.

She went to the window and walked out into the glittering night. The city was already sleeping and the heavens took up the sound of the creatures below, the stars making a notation of their trills and bells, which rang in the darkness like glass. Whispers of Satie joined them from the room, and there seemed, in this inimitable moment, to be an agreement between time and the proximity of all things, as if clumsy humans might have a place in all this infinite, perfect darkness, if only they played at the edge. Out of sight, blindfolded, and in agreement.

He sat by the fast water, enjoying its speed, its splendid indifference, and its rippling sound, silently observing and wading birds with their shrill curl of beak and voice. He drank deeply of life so that he knew the taste of it here, knew the vibrant wealth of its dominion, knew exactly what he was taking from the man who would die on this ground.

The ancient black hand shone in the flickering light of the small campfire, its tattoos of spirals and sun wheels spinning as it passed through the circular clearing of the forest. It moved past the two men sitting close to the flames and whispered in the dancing shadows, stroking the cheek of its grandson before vanishing out of the circle and into the night.

During the night, lightning can be seen far out at sea. Above the horizon, soundless dendrites of storm flicker, marbling the curve of the earth on their way towards here and the waiting dawn.

The vibration passed through them, through the turning ball of life, through the furniture and the floors, and all the way down to the well, where its harmony increased and spun, igniting tiny engines that ignited tiny engines that ignited tiny engines.

Just for a moment, he heard a distant flock of birds sing from her dripping and distorted mouth.

They had witnessed the flowing winds of the Vorrh, long, singing currents of turbulence that flew and rippled between the contoured ground and the vast canopy of still leaves. Its profound, limited hurricane was still in their lungs, the cleanest air ever breathed; sharp as lime, soft as new snow.

He knew that he had invented everything in their lives. Maybe in the world. Sometimes he thought he had dreamt reality itself. Dreamt it outside of sleep, which now eluded him continually.