(people, or no one at all; markets packed with sounds she can’t hear and faces she can only vaguely recall; rolling hills furred over in jade green grasses, and cliff sides made from slate and blackened stones that cut jagged lines into the coast; endless deserts that stretch like sepia-toned paintings into a cloudless sky so blue it hurts; fogged over forests of wintergreen where her hair mats against her skull and the bark on the trees seems to breathe mist)
-not much that she can remember, but there is a sensation that remains. A feeling that haunts her bones and nestles in her skull until her mind fills with fuzz.
A beat.
A pulse.
A rhythm.
She’s riding. Sometimes the animal beneath her is walking, but most the time it runs, hairpin trigger pulled tight and shot out. Her body is crouched low, hunched over in an awkward arc, eyes squinted against the wind that whips her hair into a frenzy and bites at her cheeks, her lips, her ears. Each step rocks in her hips. Her thighs ache from clutching their mount to stay on, and her calves are stiff from steadying herself. The reigns are loose in her hands because her mount is already racing, beating the surface beneath it as it propels onward.
Is there
A destination?
The Dao that can be known is not the eternal and unending Dao.
But.
It is part of it.
She had a dream once.
Or maybe it was a trip.
Could have been a vision.
Maybe a memory.
She had a dream once, though.
Had it a thousand times, really.
In it, she was -
(running away from; running towards; wandering the world in a meandering path, watching and waiting and there. In that place and time, she existed, possibly, just for a second, more real than any other concept or sensation. She was. She is, and was, and will be.)
(Maybe)
-moving, always moving.
Never still, not truly.
And in her head, in the flesh that drapes itself -circumspect and ungainly- across her bones, she feels it. A dream, a memory, a vision, superimposed over her waking world. It layers itself in a way she struggles to voice. Her perception is split, here before you and also in a place that doesn’t seem to objectively be. She opens her mouth to speak, to act, pushing past that vertigo-inducing split-
-and forgets, just for a moment, which place she is.
A beat.
A pulse.
A rhythm.
She breathes.
Acts.
Because the Dao that can be known is not the eternal and unending Dao.
But.
It is a part of it.
Here or there, someplace in between, she doesn’t know. Can’t be sure. Gets caught between, riding that beat, that pulse, that rhythm, which stretches between the two. The morality of the situation is questionable because her actions ripple out and her words cause words cause words cause nothing on the other side of the horizon.
She trails off, uncertain. There’re words she wants to say, but she is unsure if she should say them. Context is everything, and she always second guesses herself. She isn’t certain if the tone is right in her voice, or if she heard theirs correctly. She can’t get inflection, or mood, or state of mind. Culturally, she can’t be sure that it is appropriate; if she has gauged their relationship correctly. Should she be speaking at all? Is it burdensome? Is it too much? Not enough? There is a measurement system here, a formula that nobody recognizes as such, but always uses.
The sounds that rested on the tip of her tongue shrivel and this time, she does not bumble her way into a cover sentence or fumble with nonsensical stutters. This time, it all grinds to a crashing halt. This time, the words simply die.
She feels her chest clench with the solid ache of failure as her eyes wander back from the corner of the room to look at her co-worker, who has paused mid task.
She looks away.
There is only silence.
‘I’m tired,’ she thinks to herself.
She looks it, too. There are shadows beneath her eyes, and wrinkles collecting at the corner of her mouth and in the furrow of her brow. Her hair is thinning from where she pulls it back out of her face, and her bones ache. Sleep helps, sometimes, and so does caffeine now and again, but not much. This is different. This is bone level;soul deep.
‘I want to stop.’
Her fingers ball into a fist at her side, hidden beneath the table. On top, dice are scattered over hard cover books and loose character sheets. This is supposed to be her fun night, her time off. She’s supposed to be enjoying herself like she does on this day every week.
But some nights, more and more, it feels like she’s going through the motions. She keeps trying to find a way to let out whatever is festering inside her, to work through it and overcome. She’s worked until her body has given out;her joints aching and legs shooting pain through her day in and day out. She’s tried changing patterns and behaviors, escaping her routine to do something new. She’s tried talking about it with close friend and family, tried seeking help. In her younger years she tried for years to work with a therapist, tried taking pills, tried everything.
She keeps trying, keeps going.
But she is so, so tired.
More and more she thinks about stopping. About running away on a pointless quest, spending all her savings to travel like she said she always wanted to. She doesn't even know if she still wants to, or if it’s a way to prolong the final solution, the stop she can’t take back.
She thinks about it, has six or seven plans laid out, but she’s scared. She always scared, always afraid, but this… this isn’t another social failure. This isn’t disappointing someone. This isn’t a house on fire because she didn’t check the stove three times or lock the door twice.
This is the long nap; the forever goodbye. It is the simplest, most selfish, most permanent fix for her dilemma she can think of.
It lingers, in the back of her head. People would heal. People can move on. That is life. They can keep going.
She doesn’t know if she wants to.
“Roll initiative.”
Her free hand reaches out to pluck a black dice up without thought, and an idle recall passes through her head. It’s an interesting character her friend made. A hyena with bangles of gold, fierce and unrelenting. She thinks of how delighted she was to listen to him tell her of it; how smart and kind he always is to her.
She rolls the dice. A bronze four stares back at her.
“Mod six,” she says, forcing her lips back over her failing teeth in a smile.
Under the table, her nails bite into her palm.
‘I’m tired,’ she thinks distantly. She considers going to the woods, wrapping a blanket around her head to negate the spray, and forcing lead through her skull. Four is a bad number, a sign.
A hyena. A friend.
Fear.
‘Keep going.’
---
When she was little, her parents used to take her to church. She remembers lots of things from these stucco temples of wood and plaster. She recalls singing songs of praise she didn’t understand, remembers stories of people with unwieldy names, and being one of the best at reciting passages on command.
In modern times, she knows what happened there was a type of conditioning. It was indoctrination, in a way, though good or bad she cannot say. Though she does not practice faith, some grains stand out still. She went for a very long time, after all, and recognition does not equate negation.
It may have been where she first considered the soul.
In this religion, souls went to heaven or hell. Very black and white. Later she would learn different religions and study separate faiths, or lack thereof. She would consider such things as reincarnation and ascension of self, purgatories and nonexistence. But back then it was simpler. Either you were were saved or you weren’t, and there was a scale to measure such things, though she does not know if it is or was ever agreed upon that humans should know it. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, yes? Judge not lest ye be judged.
And no one, no man save for perhaps Job, was or is perfect.
But souls. That sense of identity, everlasting and beyond physical matter. She learned it there, likely. A thing that was her without having substance.
Later, that idea would be challenged in some intro to philosophy class at a community college. Was there an immortal self, or an egocentric grey matter piloting a beautiful mess of a biomechanical machine?
She can’t say. She doesn’t think anyone can. There hasn’t been enough research, enough data. By definition, a conceptual or spiritual self such as this denies being quantified, and therefore a tidy summation and reasonable answer cannot be (currently) reached.
A query: If she dies, by self or happenstance, is there something after?
Following queries: How does the concept of an after apply to her in the event of a termination of self? Of a happenstantial death? Of indirect causation compared to of complete accident?
There is no answer, she thinks, for it cannot be concluded there is a such self in the first place.
---
When she was eleven, her mother tried. She remember it. Remembers the substance abuse before and after; the treatments that didn’t work.
It’s one of those silvery fish, molded again and again and again.
She tried to shape it, but she could only ever forget details. She couldn’t change the foundation of this memory itself, only those little things that made the shape of its fins and tail. She isn’t sure she ever truly wanted to forget it.
She knows it was warm outside, and there was pea gravel in the backyard. She remembers a shout, of trying to ignore it, but fear and guilt mingled inside until she submitted and went inside.
She remembers her father and mother. Remember the barrel of a shotgun, flat black with no gleam. Remembers all these little details as her heart thudded in her chest as she cried and cried and cried as her parents wrestled on the bed. She did as she was bade. She called the cops.
And at some point she looked up, into the mirror that lay parallel to the bed. She saw herself, though she can’t remember the exact face she wore.
She just remembers thinking that she got it, why crying was so bad. It was useless here. It did nothing but fade her words and steal her breath. It didn’t help.
She remembers thinking not again. Never again.
---
That promise, too, she broke.
Good or bad, she cannot say.
---
Sometimes, she feels for pulses. On herself, and on others. She’s seen to many corpses; knows the sound of a death rattle and the smell of those in decay. She knows the stiffness of the newly dead, and the liquid pliancy of those days passed.
There are many traits of death she is familiar with, many qualities that mark that other state.
Yet something about a pulse draws her unconscious mind. A steady rhythm that drums beneath her feather light fingertips. She innocuous searches for it without meaning to, ghosting her hands across her lovers neck and sliding her knuckles along her sisters wrists.
There’s bite marks on her skin, swollen red welts that were once indentations, shaped in the imperfect half circles of her lover’s teeth.
She blinks lazily, exhaustion in her bones. She hasn't slept more than a handful of hours in two days, catching fleeting naps between hard labor and long thoughts. If she keeps up like this, if she can keep up like this, she will end up collapsing or something equally dramatic. The human body can only take so much, she is told.
She can still take more, she knows. She can still stand. She can still move.
It's some sort of tic, maybe. A trick her mind plays on itself. A priori knowledge, an innate instinct that says it is not a choice. That she must stand. That she must move. Keep going, it says. Burn until the fuel gives out; flow until the world stops.
Her head shifts, cheek digging a little deeper in the borrowed pillow of a rented room. The mussed sheets of the bed bunch underneath her, the smell of industrial cleaner ever so faint on the threads.
Beside her, a phone buzzes, and the faint sounds of keys being tapped sound in her ears as her lover texts another lover. Their free hand smooths itself down her back, and she blinks at their image, cast gold in the light filtered through the curtains.
They are nice, she thinks. Kind and comely, a good conversationalist, and better companion. Open and honest as well.
Not one of the three of them does not know of the other. This was a choice, discussed and evaluated. They are all adults, and before the day is done, her lover will leave to be with the one sending the texts.
She knows this. Accepted and made peace with it. The other two are each others before anyone else's, and she will remove herself if the feelings run too deep. They came first, and in her mind, she will keep them Each other’s, but not hers.
When she kisses her lover goodbye, she does not mourn. She licks her lips and tastes sweet ash; wonders if it’s from the cheap peach Cheyennes her lover smokes, or if the candle she is burning at both ends has sugar on its wick.
She catches herself, feels the sting of bite marks beneath clothes, the weight of her flesh on her bones and the sun on her skin.
Sleep, she thinks.
She shakes her head.
She can keep going.
----
There is an ongoing argument in philosophy about the metaphysical subject of knowledge that's lasted as long as the subject itself. In short, technical terms they call it a priori and posteriori. In layman's terms it's nature vs nurture. Save for a select few, most agree that what we know (if we can know anything) is a combination of both.
As a self taught student, she has garnered enough expertise on the subject it to argue it all ways. A true sophist in action because she still isn't sure what she believes, and it is far more utilitarian to know how to take any side she chooses.
(What do you believe? What do you want? What do you feel? What do you what do you w h a t d o y o u-)
“What do you think?”
She turns to face the speaker several years before she takes the lover and miles away from where she ends up. Her best friend chews thoughtfully on her fried zucchini, cherubic cheeks full. Her chestnut hair is cut short and messy atop her head, cupid's bow lips pursed.
“What?” she remembers asking.
Her friend sighs and rolls her eyes, used to her conversation partner mentally checking out. She no longer comments on it after all this time, but she feels obligated to react in some way.
“Pitbulls. They have breed traits and characteristics, but ultimately training can temper behaviors. I don’t think it ever all gets taught away, though. The owner can influence a lot, but to what extent?”
Her friend watches her frown, stuff another mouthful of cheap pork dumplings in her mouth, and chew. They got paid this week and are relishing the feast time before the famine at the end of the month.
“Can you quantify that?” she asks around the mouthful. “ How much is intrinsic and how much is conditioning?”
“I don’t know. I asked you.”
She pauses, swallows the food, and looks around the cheap faux asian restaurant they are in. They have been coming here for years. It's an echo of places she frequented as a child, a knock off of dining rooms with lazy susans on their tables piled high with a thousand condiments and dressings. The chopsticks feel comfortable in her hand, more familiar than a fork or spoon.
She thinks of dogs and nature. Thinks of long standing habits and the wood in her hand. Is she here because she has been taught to like this place, because she learned her enjoyment from another? Or is it deeper? Is there something about the flavor and setting that heralds back to her bloodline, a genetic factor that makes her crave certain nutrients in controlled amounts, presented in such a way? How much of each, if so? Is it any less an individualistic action if it is influenced by either? Is it any less her?
“Oi,” her friend calls. “Well?”
“Any living creature must adapt to survive,” she answers after a moment. “I mean, I would trust good training, but I am still not going to trust a cattle dog around a screaming, running toddler. Especially if the owner isn't there.”
“But good training is supposed to stand even when the owner isn't there.”
“You're playing the devil's advocate, babe. You're the one who said you don't think it all gets trained out.”
“So you agree?”
She hums noncommittally, and her friend grins, moving on the bloodlines of the australian cattle dog and why so many have a white starburst fur pattern on their forehead.
She nods along, enjoying the pork dumpling taste in her mouth and the cadence of her friends voice. But in the background of her mind, among the white noise of the restaurant and the tenor of her conversation partners tone, she keeps wondering.
(What was I taught? What did I learn? What came from my blood? What came from my breed? How much is perception? How much is perception? Temptation and opportunity? What are the quantities, the ratios? How much of me is me?)
----
There’s warmth in her past. It was there. A strange type of love, poisonous and consuming, but a type none the less.
The things they never tell you -one of the most difficult to figure out- is that it isn’t always completely any one way.
When she’s small, starring at the blood dripping from her nose from her father’s open handed slap, she wonders about it. The iron tang on her tongue is heady and thick, cloying on the hot summers days, and she recalls snorting and swallowing it down rather than spitting it out. Remembers thinking that those same hands hefted her on to his massive shoulders, where she was queen.
In her father’s arms, she could be anything.
Later, older, she will think that anything is a very big category. Anything could be ash just as much as it could be gold.
Then, there, she only thinks that the blood running down the back of her throat doesn’t make her sick any more.
----
“Man, you wanna take a break?”
She pauses, blinking sweat and drywall dust out of her eye, turning to look at the one who spoke.
He is a good technician, Ord. He has a solid work ethic and amicable disposition, and isn't afraid to get dirty. Even better, he is smart, a thinker who realizes more than most. She likes him both on a personal and professional level, has gotten to know him a bit.
Which is why she knows that even though he is sweat slicked and dirty, he isn't asking to take a break for his sake.
Outwardly, she grins.
Inwardly, she thinks she needs to get better.
“Go smoke man. I’m good.”
He grants her a small smile, but she can tell he thinks she needs rest. Maybe she does. It’s day five of a stretch of long shifts, anywhere from ten to fifteen hours. They traveled out of state to work emergency floods and she has been hauling equipment and doing demolition every day since they arrived.
Her bones ache. Every muscle is tired. At night she fills out paperwork in a humid hotel room on the jobs she has led, cramming vending machine food in her mouth as she calculates square footage and man hours. Sleep comes in spurts, two or three hours here and there, and then she is up before the sun for another round.
“Come smoke with me,” he cajoles.
She laughs but doesn’t move, save to grip her fingers tighter around a sheet of drywall and tug. The saturated material crumbles in her hand, a section tearing free of the studs and slapping to the concrete floor.
She wants a cigarette, yes. She wants rest and peace, too.
But she can't. Not when there's work to be done. The other crew chiefs… the other men she works with…
Most are not as nice as Ord.
So she has to stay. Has to work. She has to be better and faster and stronger because if she isn't, if she fails, she has no social insulation to save her. They already isolate her, belittle and demean her style, her personal beliefs, her life.
She won't give them a reason to belittle her work as well.
“In a second,” she says. “Just wanna get this wall done.”
Then the next wall, then clean up and hauling debris up another set of goddamn stairs and setting equipment and taking pictures and getting readings and sanitizing and making sure documentation is written and shared and then a new jobsite-
“I will wait.”
“No,” she assures him. “Take a break. You’ve been busting ass all day, dude. Smoke a cigarette and chill. I’m good.”
He gives her a dubious look, and she meets his eyes with a reassuring smile.
Maybe its something she learned, maybe it's in her blood. Doesn’t matter. She can’t stop. Not won’t: can’t. Not until she’s better. Until she is enough.
The look Ord gives her tells her he knows as well as she does her words are a lie. They both know she isn't good.
She screamed in defiance. Or at least, she remembers she tried to. Her brother had her folded like an origami crane, his weight settled on her feet, the soles of which were flat against the back of her shoulders. Looking back, her only saving race from serious spine injury was her weekly gymnastics classes and fierce adoration of the stretching warm-ups.
She remembers the sound she made. Wet and gurgling, nothing at all like a glorious battle cry. It was bubbles through gravel, the pressure rising in her face to make her blood roar in her ears. Wet spittle fell on her lips as she desperately scratched at her brother's forearms, drawing jagged lines on the skin the beaded red but didn’t budge him an inch.
She remembers the instinctual panic, the fear. She can’t breathe, can’t think. She needs air, needs it because her vision is fading around the edges to gray and she can’t hear words anymore. She can’t even feel the pain of being bent like this. Just dizziness even though her belly is on the ground. Spinning.
She can stop it. She can tap. Her brother was practically begging for her at this point.
She doesn’t.
She must have woke up no more than a few seconds or a minute later, face on the floor, head cocked toward the leg of a table. The old green carpet under her nose smelled of pet dander and feet, rough and oddly oily, but she remembers her body contorted and laid flat
Remembers pushing herself on shaky arms to all fours, head strangely quiet.
Now, though, she doesn’t know if her brother was there. She can’t recall with any certainty anyone was there afterward.
She just remembers she got back up.
Her parents always encouraged her to fight.
Whether it was handling guns or practicing the proper form with blunted wooden knives, sparring with her brothers or the local children, or sharpening her words on pages and pages of defense on why she should be allowed to just be, she learned. Little lessons began accumulated: how to stop crying out for help, how to struggle past the bite of pain, how to distracted and feint and push herself.
Over the course of years, she shaped herself around, molding herself into a form that could survive it. She twisted and morphed like the silver fish in her head, unrecognizable from what she was.
Maybe the seeds of it were already in her, though. Maybe she was the product of hundreds of years of selective breeding that nurtured traits like aggression and physicality. Her forefather’s forefather had been brawlers and killers, her mother’s mother’s guerillas and widows. Maybe it was just meant.
Whatever it was, her parents never did like it when she fought them.
The truth is that she never really recognizes truth. She tries and tries but it never clicks, never is just there. Fact is only fact for so long until it fades and twists, a slippery memory warped and unrecognizable.
But she can’t stop. She has to keep learning and going.
Because here’s the thing; maybe she doesn’t recognize it. Maybe it’s never a hard or solid, capital ‘T’ truth. But all the little truths, all those small pieces. They add up. The layers keep growing.
And so does she.
There’s a thousand hurts she can list. A hundred million aches and pains, wounds still bleeding and raw. Sometimes she doesn't understand why they are there, never knew she got them when she did.
Because that's the thing about these hurts that aren't physical. These are different from the bloody noses her father gives her, the welted backside and bruised arms. They aren’t the same as the pockmarks from her mother, little rises in the shape of wooden spoon holes. These can hide and sneak away. The pains of the soul -injuries to the psyche through mental and emotional trauma- they can linger, unseen. They can bleed all over your life and cripple you until you don't realize you're walking through your life with a metaphorical leg blown clean off.
Half the trouble, she has come to realize, is recognizing they exist in the first place.
The other half is split into quarters. You then have to draw attention to the wound - because it’s there and it is bleeding and raw, but people won't look at it and will tell you it doesn't exist- and then you have to try and heal it.
She has set bones before. Stitched wounds. She has pulled debris from gashes, injected antibiotics, and sat watch over more than her fair share of head wounds. She’s more than capable of lancing an infection or treating a blunt force trauma injury.
But she can't heal these other wounds. She cant fix mangled psyches and battered emotions. She can't fight them.
She doesn’t know how.
There’s a trick here, a dilemma no one talks about. Some of these wounds, some of these mental obstacles… She thinks she was born with them. And there’s this hurdle no one addresses because the behaviors hinder her, but ethically, morally, scientifically diversity is necessary for life. The differences are supposed to enrich and enlighten.
But the divergence from normal thought processes hinders more than help. They make it difficult to operate in a culture and society built for people shaped a little differently than her.
So she copes. She adapts, and she tries and tries and tries and tries to shape the world around her the way it shaped her. To make it something a tiny bit more livable.
She fights and fights and fights the world. She kicks and screams and snarls because that's what she knows. That’s what she has at that point, and it is a cold comfort, but a comfort nonetheless.
The only other option is death, and that is always on the horizon. It is an inevitable and unavoidable fact, as much as she can recognize one.
There's no need to rush toward it. It will come on its own time.
She remembers her parents fighting. They did that a lot. This, at least, is something she can confirm happening from multiple sources. It was real.
When she was young, it used to bother her. The noise and tension itched under her skin, and the lingering, imminent threat of that energy being redirected toward her or her siblings used to terrify her.
But.
But it was always going to happen. One way or another it would twist and turn, in and out like the tide. Her parent’s ire rose and fell like waves, crashing all around them and saturating every person in their life.
Someone would get shouted at. Someone would leave. Someone would get hurt. Sometimes cops or coping or lingering, oppressive silence everyone was too afraid to break.
At ten she is an old hand at it. She has played this game time and time again, but she is usually more moved by it. Usually, there’s a keener sting when he mother cries. Her father is usually more terrifying than this. The prospect of her family -the only thing she has been taught to count on, the one familiar, the thing that is hershershers- breaking apart is terrifying and heart wrenching all at once.
But. Her mother said to grow a thicker skin. Her father said tears did nothing. Her brother said crying was for babies.
Her brother is crying. Her sister and mother and father are.
She sits on the couch, watching her parents fight, and knows when they turn she will draw their attention away. She and her brother will bounce their ire back and forth until they tire themselves out, whether they mean to or not.
For now, she watches her brother's ugly face, twisted up and snotty as he silently bawls. She holds her young sister close, bouncing her on a knobbly knee as she bawls, her own eyes dry.
And she thinks, this once, she’s won.
There’s something about a fight, to this day, she thinks is pure.
Not pure like untainted or unsoiled. Fighting, by nature, is dirty work. Whether’s it’s physical or verbal, hell, even emotional, it gets dirty.
It’s not like in the movies or media. A lot of times, from the outside, it looks stupid. Nobody has cool faces or sweat glimmering in the right places. There are unattractive grimaces and awkward grunts, holds and grabs that are only distinguishable from sexual by the intent behind them. When you’re exchanging blows it’s not like they show. It’s skin and pressure, eyes tracking guards and muscle movements. If you get really good you track environment too.
In the heat of things, what she remembers most, is that it’s all about opportunity. Either finding it or making it.
Regardless, there’s something about that mentality. Black and white. Fighter vs. opponent.
Fighting, she thinks, is clear-cut in a way the world seldom is.
In high school she joins a fight club.
She remembers they all thought they were very cool for it, having just read Chuck Palahniuk's novel under the same name. Mant seemed to enamored with the violence, the concept of making soap from fat and explosives to book.
She remembers wanting to fit in, but clenching her teeth and letting secrets lie quiet on her tongue. She carefully and purposefully does not say that this is nothing, that this is weak. That her parents made the Blackbook edition of the Anarchists Cookbook required reading at twelve and only expounded on it since then.
Regardless of the words she never speaks, she gets invited to a fight club. She has a friend now, a few, but this one is the referee. They know her, know she’s considering amateur MMA, that she’s been in Muay Thai classes for a year and a half now.
They know she’s angry. That she wants to hurt people. That she will.
So she goes, because she is all those things and it sounds like fun. They meet up in an empty warehouse with broken glass on the ground, and she remembers picking a piece up. Remembers thinking that she has to be the most dangerous. That she has to make this impression last.
(She’s scared. What if they get found out, what if they get in trouble, what if her parents know about it- but they do because she told them and they laughed and said win-)
Looking back it's cringe-worthy.
“Can we use weapons?”
“Uh,” her friend replies. “No.”
She drops the shard, shrugs, and waits for her opponent.
The people there -kids, they were all kids- stare back and fidget. No one wants to fight her. Probably because she is a her.
But one steps forward. A linebacker. Mikey. He is shorter than her but strong. He’s angry too.
He nods. She returns it.
They touch fists, and their makeshift ref holds a hand over theirs while reciting the rules of fight club with all the fervent passion of a captivated teenager. She remembers her heart racing in her chest, remembers quieting her head and calming it.
The ref removes her hands. They step back. Circle.
She lunges. Fists and legs and everything she can manage. He gives back just as hard. They exchange blow after blow, but he starts giving ground. She presses forward, guard up and eagerness in her heart as the others clap and cheer. She wants to win. Wants to fight and hurt.
He twists away and she lunges again, seeing an opening, but not the back of his fist that whirls with all the momentum of his body. It slams into the side of her head and she drops. Win by TKO.
But.
When she looks up, blinking on on the ground, he smiles and offers her a hand up.
She smiles and takes it.
“Tap out!”
Her sister writhes, squirming in her grasp, but she isn’t strong enough. She won’t survive if she keeps up like this, too stubborn and proud to admit she sucks at fighting. That she is weak.
And god, god had she tried to teach her. She tried to teach her to stop crying and whining and just grow up. Her parents are going to eat her sister. The world is going to devour her.
And that is...unthinkable. This is is her sister. The one whose weak little fingers curled around hers when she was an infant. She remembers the pride in her heart when she first held up her own bottle, fat, tiny arms struggling. She remembers the way she used to beg to be played with, the wails she used to make when she had a bad dream. She loves her, wants her to win, wants her to fight.
But her sister can’t. She won’t listen. She’s soft and doughy and weak.
She will force her, show her that you will lose. That you can lose. That sometimes you have to submit.but you can get back up.
But the terror on her sisters face is so clear, so crisp. She can see the panic there. The utter fear that wracks her little body as she flails. Her sister doesn’t even try and scratch and bite or pull hair. She just flops like a fish out of water, bucking her weight around, already taller than her older sister.
It doesn’t work. Won’t work. She’s stronger than her sister, has a better technique and trained more. She’s a better fighter.
Her sister doesn’t tap, but she unhooks her arms from around her neck. Pushes her away.
The younger girl gasps. Chokes. Coughs once or twice.
“Don’t!” she rasps. “Don’t do that! I hate you!”
She doesn’t remind her sister there was another way out. That she could have tapped. They both know.
“You’re the worst!”
She doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t fight this.
Her sister leaves, likely to cry or tell their mother. In the suddenly empty room, she is left adrift with her own thoughts, the blankets pooling around her ankles and slipping off the edge of the mattress that rests directly on the floor.
I couldn’t see the submission bar on your other blog, so I sent it to this one, if that’s alright
Weird! Both seem to be open, but whatever works! I’m sorry for the late reply, and so very thankful for this. I love the bioluminescent aspect of the pic, and the near tear-like markings on the dragons face. Also, Ryu’s eyes are like, hard core piercing in this.
There is this thing that will pepper her life, a practice that ends up flavoring her waking moments with confusion and instability. People will say a great many on the subject. In different tones and voices, bodies slouched or straight, backgrounds contrasting as much of the direction of their words. In the end, it all boils down to the same;
Be like this.
The subject of this changes, though, variable from person to person. The ‘this’ is never constant. Even if it's the same individual, they may shift what they said depending on time or mood. Never the same and always the same, these critiques, as inconsistent as the shape of smoke ut always coming in a relentless onslaught.
She doesn’t know what she wants from life if anything at all. A great many people say they do, but their actions, their words, everything about them will tell her that maybe they don’t either. That maybe they just think they do.
Sometimes, she isn’t sure what she thinks. The silvery fish of her memories are too molded, too changed and warped by countless influences to distinguish what her initial drive was. Her thoughts, likewise, are chaotic enough that they simultaneously inform her that the latter statement is a lie, and also somehow true. Wonders every time how she should respond to this advice, these implied orders, she receives.
Sometimes, she wants to shout that everything is repetitive, that the human brains are geared toward patterns, and who is to say one pattern rises above another? Who made the grid? It doesn’t exist, it’s all made up.
Sometimes she wants to take them by the hair and grind their face into the ground, feel the slick slide of flesh against an unyielding surface, and hiss that life is uncertain and random at times. That the Uncertainty principle exists, and it never makes sense to her when it comes up so who are they to deserve such privilege? This isn’t a novella or short story. It’s not a book to critique. This is her life.
She’s supposed to be like this, whatever ‘this’ is at any given moment and time. Not constant, but fluid. Malleable and changable, taking any shape they give her. She’s supposed to be hard and soft all at once, rushing and yet still, like water.
In the end, she tries not think about it.
She never stops.
She almost drowns.
It’s funny, really. Funny in the way that isn’t said with laughter, but with a wry twist of the lips that’s some cross between a sneer and a smile. Funny in the way that isn’t truly humorous at all.
It was hot, the pavement beneath her bare feet scorching the rough, callused pads of her small feet. She remembers the bright sun overhead, blinding in a sky that held only the faintest wisps of clouds. There’s no name for the hotel in her mind, only a seamless stucco building rising behind her as she holds her father's hand, watching her brother run ahead toward the gate.
She doesn’t know if the smell she recalls is real. Can’t tell if the smell of heavy chlorine and the dust-laden air is true, if she actually remembers the plastic scent of pool toys or if she made it all up.
Here’s what she does remember;
Her brother, tired of playing with her in the shallow waters, swimming to the other side of the pool. It is okay, and she understands. She has other things to occupy her time, seeing how long she can dive underneath the bright blue liquid, eyes stinging as she watches the alien world beneath the surface. She keeps pushing herself, diving from the shallow steps as far as she knows she can while still being able to make it back in time to stand and gasp for air when she rises again. She doesn’t know how long she does this, only that she gets tired. That she wants to push harder.
But.
She can’t swim. Not really, not enough to keep her head above water.
She looks out to her brother, far away at the other end of what must have been a modest pool at best. Her mind conjures another child -a cousin, perhaps? Another tenant of the place they have come to?- but she doesn’t know if it’s real. She just remembers her brother, four years older and treading water like he was born in it, his hair as black as her own, face turned away from her.
Remembers the blue, blue, blue of the water, the stinging of her eyes from the chlorine.
She must have had a reason, a plan. When she dove under the water, she was smart enough to cling to the terracotta wall like a goldfish following the glass of its tank until she could no longer plant her feet beneath her. There must have been a thrill in that, something. She doesn’t know.
What overshadows that moment is the tiredness in her limbs, the shaking of her arms, how hard it becomes to keep her head above water.
She’s small, so small and young. Doesn’t have the control to think above her panic. It never occurs to her that she can use her arms to drag her body through the water to the safety of the steps. She doesn’t think about resting and gathering her strength for a moment.
All she knows is she wants to get out. That’s she’s tired and her body won’t work, that even though she’s pulled herself up and over ledges countless times before, for some reason, this time she can’t.
She muscles her way up to peer over it, arms shaking. Sees her father talking with someone -her uncle? A stranger?- and cries out for him. Shouts “Dad!” as loud as she can. He doesn’t turn. Her muscles give and she drops like a stone into the water, the force it forcing her down and under. She sinks, toes touching concrete bottom, eyes staring at the side of the pool in that alien underneath.
Her feet flex and she rises. Bursts from the water, snatches the ledge, pulls herself up just enough to see her father. Screams for him. Drops again.
Up and down, up and down.
One, two, three. Six, seven, twelve.
She keeps trying.
Her father doesn’t hear her. Nobody hears her.
She’s crying, up and down, up and down, sucking water and air in equal measure. Her body won’t work. Where is her strength? Why is she so weak?
She screams, shouts. Her voice gives out.
And eventually, on an upswing, she hears a reply. Hears sandals against the pavement, feels hands as big as her ribcage plant themselves under her armpits and lift. She cries and coughs as her dad holds her, dripping water onto his clothes and desperately grasping onto his shirt. She thinks she might have vomited water up. Doesn’t know for sure though, just sort of forgot.
After that, she forgets how to swim altogether, too.
Water is important.
There was a lake not to far from her house, fed from cold mountain rivers, and she remembers it’s murky, brownish waters well. From it, below the damn, ran a small river with burbling rapids. Near her school, there was a small pond with scum lined banks and burr filled briars, thick with the kind of stinking mud that would cling to her shoes for days after. They’d drive to the coastline, sometimes, and the waves would swell and crash over her, sucking her into the sea.
Rain was scarce where she grew, but every time it came she’d watch the sky with something like wonder. There was something magical about seeing the drops get sucked into the dry earth, dust and baked clay thirstily sapping any liquid that touched it.
Water is important. This is what she knows, even though the memory of how she learned it is a compilation of misshapen memories.
There’s a history book she can remember, a picture of a map made in lurid off-tone yellow and blank-screen blue. There’s a symbol for a city in between two cerulean lines, a cradle of life and civilization tucked between two rivers. More maps, more books, and the pattern is the same. Where there is life, there is water. Civilizations flourish at its banks, and empires rise and fall on its whims.
More schooling. Arrows the color of blades of grass, showing a cycle. It changes shape, inconsistent but always there. Liquid, Gas, Solid, it flows and flows and flows. Humans need it to survive, basic biology teaches her. They need it to drink and bath, to stay cool when it is too hot, to control the tempature of their very planet. Water is a base line nessiscity. Water is important.
She doesn’t know how to swim.
The first time around, she can’t remember if they taught her to swim or if they put her infant body in the water and she just knew.
The second time she doesn’t think she will be able to forget learning.
It was on the banks of the lake near her house, and she was content to while away the day at the edges of the flooded parking lot. There was a rocky outcropping within wading distance, and she found shells there while she watched the bluegill play.
Not this time.
This time large hands take off her water wings, pulls her deeper. She crawls to get in position on her father's back. Sometimes he would do that, let her hold on his shoulders while he moved them through the lake.
Not this time.
He twists his giant hand, thumb pressing on the yeilding flesh of the underside of her wrist. It hurts and her grip breaks, but more concerning is the terror that fills her. Her feet can’t touch the ground and all the keeps her adrift is her father’s grasp, his big hand a painful anchor held high above her head.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” her father tells her.
She claws at the water, kicks her feet. She thrashes and panics as it floods over her ears and mouth. Her head sinks. Desperate, she goes deeper, kicks off her dad and darts toward where the shore is. Her lungs burn and the water is brown and murky, but she must make it.
He stands in the water when she turns back to look, a behemoth of a man. Orders her back.
She hesitates, fear overcoming fear, and he sees it. His face grows red, his eyes cold. His tone is so gentle, but his eyes are furious. She knows that look.
She shakes her head.
There’s a countdown from ten and she knows, knows she can’t escape him. She knows how this ends.Still, some animal instinct pushes her toward her mother. Her mother who is mostly safe and warm. The one who doesn’t cover her mouth and nose with too large hands. The one who only watches when the switch comes out.
Her mother isn’t as strong as her father, but she ha longer nails. They scratch when she goes for the same hold her father used, and she can’t quite instill the instincual freezing the larger entity does. But she’s still and adult, and she snatches her up and drags her toward the water.
There’s fear, she remembers that. Remembers wailing as they go deeper, flailing as she dangles from her mothers grasp and her footing gives way. The water is too deep. She can’t swim.
She can’t remember if she is struck or not in this instance, or by who. Can’t determine how many times her head fell under liquid, or how long it took to swim out to her waiting brother and back again.
She just knows she learns to swim again.
She swims. She drowns.
She swims and drowns and breathes air and water in equal measure, becomes accustomed to the familiar burn of air running out. There’s a burning that accompanies it, a fire in the lungs and a thrumming that pounds inside her skull. There’s an animalistic fear that she can’t get rid of, can’t barricade away, that desperately cries out to live.
It’s a thousand things that do her in. Her brother’s games of predator and prey, pulling her under by her leg because he’s bigger and stronger and their father taught him by throwing him a pool and holding his head under when he wouldn’t listen so this is a game. A game where he plucks her from the surface and tugs until her ears pop from the pressure and her vision greys in silty waters and then he lets go and darts of into the murk. A game you win by surviving. A game they play every time they swim
It’s the ocean, with rip tides and currents and nothing but ignorance in her head. She laughs, rides a crest, and gets sucked under. She tumbles like clothes in a dryer, beaten against the rocks and sand, so disoriented she doesn’t know which way is up. She opens her mouth, desperate, and saltwater rushes in.
It’s lake water that rushes over as she desperately tries to ski, sucked beneath the tow instead of rising above it. It’s the gurgle of the river that’s deceptively placid on the surface whose current rips her feet from beneath her and whose temperature steal the air from her lungs. It’s the suffocating washcloth she puts over her own face in the shower, waterboarding herself because some people use torture and if she conditions herself maybe it won’t be so bad when somebody else does it.
But she swims, too. She learns to keep just her mouth and nose above the surface, a hard to spot prey for when her brother feels playful. Her father takes her out into the brine, shows her how to count her breaths and dive beneath the oncoming waves and emerge unscathed on the other side. Her mother teaches her how to curl her toes around slick river boulders, how to spear branches in their depths to check for things beneath.
She gets good at it.
When she ages and the years steadily accumulate beneath her belt, the day comes where she seeks water out all on her own. She chases a storm out into the center of a lake with her best friend, rides a dancing buoy that bobs and sways in the chop. Lightning will crash far too close for safety, and the rains will pound with how heavy they come down, but together they will laugh and whoop in delight. She learns to surf, learns to canoe and kayak and boat. She learns the breaststroke and the butterfly and a thousand different dives.
She swims. She drowns. She swims again. She never, ever stops fearing the deep.
The first time she is told to kill something, she can be no more than three or four.
It was a mouse. She can still see it, alive and breathing where it is stuck to the glue trap, wriggling desperately in an attempt to get free. She remembers petting its soft, warm fur with her finger, remarking at the mystery of it all. It was not like her brother's rat with its coarse tail and thick coat. This was small and downy, with cute button eyes that stared up at her as she cradled it in her palm, trap and all.
She had been enthralled with something she had never seen before and loved it instantly and ferociously as only a child could.
And she can’t remember everything clearly, the memory of it faded and hazy, missing parts that time consumed, but she remembers showing her father.
She remembers her father telling her that he could not free it, and if left alone it would chew off its own legs to be free. Remembers him telling her that the kindest thing to do would be to kill it.
And she remembers crying, begging, and being handed a stick. She recalls her father watching as she took the trap outside. Remembers the wet red clay of the small incline that crept up. She remembers the night, dark, so dark. Blacker, it seems, than any night she recalls as an adult. She remembers the brisk air on her wet cheeks, gut churning, and heart so, so heavy.
She remembers crashing the blunt end of that stick down and missing.
She recalls trying again.
Only on the third strike did the mouse die.
Her father -with his clean, stickless hands- ruffled her hair and told her she did the right thing.
Her memories are only as reliable as any others. In the quiet of her mind, she can admit that her recall - as much as any others- is warped.
She can admit that it is perhaps more warped, too.
It could be reasoning, justification. It could be an excuse or blame. It could be all the above because nothing, it seems, is ever just one thing.
But her brain, her mind, her thoughts -they are nebulous as any other humans- but they were shaped. By circumstance and training, by culture and society, as much as any school. The shape of them is slippery, a silvery fish out of water that she can barely grasp with her hands.
And if the thoughts are a fish, then preparing the fish -gutting, scaling, cooking or just serving plain- is where she falls short. Too often her words come out, and they are unpalatable.
(Was it two? Or three? Four or twelve? There were minnows once. She liked to steal from the bucket and hold in her hands. Too young and ignorant to understand this hurt them, she ran her fat fingers down their spines and watched them squirm before putting them back. They’d come out again later, and she would apologize under her breath as she speared them with hooks and cast out her line.
She does not begrudge a fisherman his bait. She simply remembers.)
These unpalatable words, these slippery fish; they are all she has to tell communicate. But they are shaped. Were shaped. Always being shaped, by her or life or some other thing.
She remembers the shaping.
Here’s what she is sure of, as sure as she can be of anything. One was not allowed to feel, to express, without justification. There must be reason behind action. There must be cause that can be articulated clearly and concisely a purpose.
At four. At six. At seven and ten and sixteen there were papers. Debates. There was a forum where a little girl stood and defended a three page paper on why she did what she did, why she should be able to feel the way she was, why she was allowed to be, to the jury of her father and mother.
At five. At eleven. At nine and twelve and fifteen, they would pretend to listen but never hear. They could critique and twist until she looked like a fool. Until shame burrowed in her heart like a treacherous seed because she should not. She should not cry or laugh or do other than what they wanted.
She never even knew if they wanted her at all. Couldn’t figure it out. They spoke of the times before she was born with something like nostalgia and distant awe, where there was money and time. But Children, they taught her, were expensive. And dreams are cast aside when one has children because they must be.
When she was young she thought she knew. They didn’t have because she was, because she existed. They dreamed, but not of her.
But as she got older it became one and the same with the fact that forever and ever, they could not decide what they wanted.
At some point she puzzles something else out, too. She takes` the words they forced into her head, learns the slick ins and outs of tone and body language, and she figures that you can make anything look like anything. If you twist enough, agitate enough, work enough, you can make reality warp. You can paint the whole world in different colors with words, and it will never be a trick at all. It just is.
Save for the fact that it isn’t, or wasn’t. She can’t tell with somethings, not sincerely. It’s too twisted, the scales of all her thoughts and memories sloughed off, their rib cages broken and reshaped by another’s words and eventually her own.
Because she learned like they wanted. She learned words and tools, how to shape up and act. But the performance was lacking (she was lacking) if she couldn’t make it real.
She wanted to please, to be everything asked of her. To meet every demand.
And if she could not justify her feelings in a twisted court, if she could not be what they wanted, then she would remake herself. For years and years until she looked at the fish in her hands -the thoughts, the memories- and could no longer recall what they were in the first place.
It would be a hollow victory.
She and her brother flick bugs to spiders.
The days of the summer are long and everlasting, bright skies the kind of blue that only exists in memory. They turned sunbaked stones over, searching, for little things to add to their collection of sacrifices. Centipedes they avoided, terrified of the bite and sting. Earthworms were too heavy. Jerusalem crickets too ugly and painful.
Locusts were okay, grasshoppers too. But more than anything, there were the roly-polies.
Slow little arthropods with smoke grey shells and no stingers or teeth. All they had was tiny armor, nothing in the face of a child’s hands. Together, they would collect handfuls at a time and dump the creatures into any available container, gathering them up in mass before parking under the steps of their front porch or the quiet corners of their garage.
And then.
They’d flick. And toss. And place.
Ever so careful, they would run through dozens until one finally, finally stuck in the sticky web. They’d watch it squirm and struggle, thrashing in a way that seemed slow to them but was rapid fire for it. They’d watch the web shake, minuscule vibrations drawing the crafter from wherever it had paused.
Some spiders crept, slow and careful to their gifts. Some dashed, fast, so fast, across the wide expanse of their web. Some spun the thrashing pill bugs first, caccooning them in squirming silk before continuing. Some bite first, and the squirming would slow-slow-slow until it stopped altogether.
They spent years doing that.
She wonders what lesson they learned.
She can’t remember the first time she shoots, and she doesn’t know if it’s because she was that young or because the memory has been shaped past repair.
What she does recall is a BB gun rifle, an old style pump and shoot. A pellet gun, one that broke the skin. She recalls game-guns made for paintball filled with frozen ammo and marbles. Recalls a .20 gauge rifle for her tenth birthday, a .22 for her twelfth. A .380 for graduation.
And those were just hers. She recalls so many guns, learning how to shoot a moisson, the weight too heavy for her arms to hold for long, her pride too strong to let it drop. She remembers pride at the speed at which she eventually was able to cross draw, the seconds it took for her to unlatch, unsafety, sight, and shoot. She still can feel the cool air on her face, the tall yellow grasses swaying as she leans forward into larger guns, can remember the ugly purple bruise of an ill held weapon on her brother's shoulder.
She remembers knowing that she had to be better. Had to be more.
(She never gets bruised by recoil.)
What can she say on this, though? What can she tell? The smell of old brass, hot as it leaps from the chamber? The smell of spent casings and powder, or the feel of bullets in her pockets and hands? There’s a taste that comes with older ones, iron on the tongue, cool wood in hand. Later, lighter plastics warm to her touch, and finicky magazines slap into place with a click that feels too satisfying to name.
Here’s another thing her father teaches her, something her mother repeats like a drone without words of its own.
Count your shots, know your clips. Short burst for semi or fully auto fire. Anticipate where your target will be, if it’s moving, and count for wind with long range. Breathe, squeeze, it’s easy.
There are some days where it’s nothing but that. Hours of plinking cans and ripped up targets. They hone and hone and hone that skill, but it never amounts to much for her. Not aim wise. But she’s decent at firing just about anything, can pick up most guns and use them. She can set a sight and dial in a scope, and knows deep, deep down that it only ever takes one bullet.
Intersped with the guns is ballistics, old-time knowledge of outdated explosives. She learns how to build a pipe bomb fairly young, tubing filled with powder and fuse cartoonishly long. Her father teaches her that she can make this laughable thing terrible, that she can secure nails and metal shards inside and out. That if she smears feces on the metal, the rate of infection takes more lives.
When she is twelve, he gives her a book on such things. He has many, and it only seems logical that she receives some along the same vein. Inside is how to build mines and traps from wood, nails, and bullet casings. She reads the delicate theory behind creating nitroglycerin, and the math of small, sticky, plastic explosives.
What can she say on this topic, though? What doesn’t sound made up or insane? It never seemed odd at the time, never out of place. It just was another facet of life. She played in the gravel and dirt behind their home, went to a nearby public school, and sometimes she’d go through boxes of ammo trying to learn the feel of a foreign gun in her hands. Sometimes, they’d go to church. Sometimes, she and her brother would learn how to make napalm.
Come with me and I will show you what waits within the fields. I will take your hand and pull you out into the fescue and the bramble, waist high and barren in its wait for spring. Be watchful, my friend, of the thorns that never fall.
I will pull you beneath the ruins of a once sturdy barn, press my fingers to my lips and point to the last swarms of mud doppers and indigo wasps as they swoop and dive. Do not fret, my dear, for they know you not, and their sting is saved for those that push first.
Go deeper, further, between the tree trunks that cradle pools of rainwater and things unknown. Breathe the mist that wafts like smoke, and ignore those figures you glimpse in it from the corner of your eye. You would not see them if you turned you head anyway.
Be not afraid. Not of the boughs that creak like whining voices, or the crack of leaves beneath some great foot.
These are the woods, and they are as they will be. You are a visitor here.
“Simon, we already established that there was a kidnapping and assault, and we can’t exactly go to the police-”
“Yes, hello officer? A murderous, shapeshifting mage got dragged into a dimensional portal, as witnessed by a small boy and no one else. Yes, I can give you my location,” Simon mocks emptily.
“Bane of my youth right there,” Mary comments blandly, nodding along with the hypothetical call.
Maybe he didn’t see this coming, but looking back at it with miraculous and entirely unhelpful hindsight, maybe he should have. He’s never been on the grand magical adventures, only a peripheral character at best in those wild schemes, but he has been Mary’s friend for a very long time. Since before Mary existed and there was only a weird kid named Su.
Support me on Patreon!
I was using the wrong link for this one the whole time! Now you just go here and upvote for visibility!
Arguably it’s a regression, a submission. She wants to think that as long as she simply toes the line she can accomplish what is needed without fully succumbing, but Mary is no fool. At some point, things will get ugly, but if circumstance has taught her anything it’s that no matter how much she tries she cannot avoid the ugly altogether.
“Magic, seiðr, mófǎ, magia- it’s all different nuances of particle manipulation or else the exploitation of some force of in this universe besides gravity, electromagnetism, and strong and weak forces. It tends to be used as some sort of cheap explanation instead of an actual clarification,” Mary extrapolates. “Even if I accept the fact that this dimension isn’t one ruled by Quantum physics, it still needs testing, if only so people will stop with the whole ‘magic did it’ thing.”
The man who asked the question does not respond at first, trying to mull it over in his mind. He rolls the words around inside his head, attempting to parse meaning he might understand from them. Yet after a short while, he stops. He could try and riddle it out for the rest of his life, or he could just ask.
“Sorry, could you be a little clearer?”
God -a being indescribable and ineffable in its existence- shifts slightly. It is a very human thing, thinks the man.
“You come back,” God says again. “Life is created, lives and learns, and when it comes time, it returns to its source again.”
“What source?”
“Me,” God replies peacably.
The man stares forward, slowly realizing the implications, but still rather confused. God, omnipotent as it is, sees this and grants him mercy.
“You came from me in spirit, and you will one day return to me as well. At the end of your days, you shall gather back with me and share all you know. There will be no god and man, there will be only one, and that one remains until it is decided there is more to experience and know and another life is created.”
A quiet follows, and the man considers this. It could be considered good or bad, depending on how one looks at it. It's almost poetic, even.
[WP] The world ended in 2199. Mountains crumbled, oceans boiled, but man survived. Three great cities were constructed, one deep in the earth, one deep in the sea, another in orbit. After 300 years, the survivors emerge and confront one another
Plainly speaking, three hundred years isn’t even a blip on the geological time scale. Really, it’s not even a sneeze. It’s more like the first fluttering of a sneeze, a terrible itching inside the sinuses that pricks at the edges of the mind.
The fact remains, though, that three centuries to humans is quite a long time.
The first thing that becomes evident when they find each other (and the Great Three will dispute who, exactly, found who and in what order it occurred in for literal decades) is that after three hundred years and the end of all that was, nobody speaks the same language anymore. The first transmissions Aquana receives are little more than whirring chitters intersped with something that occasionally sounds like a word. Maybe. If they filtered said word through approximately four tons of rumbling gravel and a vent system.
Likewise, Sub-Terra has no idea what the hauntingly strange song like sounds are supposed to mean when they pick it up. There is something structured in them that seems like maybe it could be a language, only stretched and warbled at notes that none of them could ever make.
In this instance, the simply dubbed New Hope Station will be the key to figuring it out, if only because they sent the strange chittering transmissions in the first place and have the largest compilations of past language data for cross-referencing.
Really, though, it’s Sub-Terra that should get the credit for arranging the meeting. Their advanced technology was built for communicating through the pulsating magnetic fields beneath the earth’s crust, ever shifting with the re-directed magma flows. So without them, all those mysterious stray communications would have forever remained just that. A mystery.
So with New Hope and Sub-Terra acting as the translator and the messenger respectively, it was sort of left to Aquana to take care of transport. And they did, having craft capable of dealing with the crippling strength of several atmospheres, a necessity that came with having built their territory so very deep down in the dark waters of the sea.
Nobody, the future will say, was really ready for the difference that three centuries of divergent evolution could make. Maybe it was the differing elements they had to adapt to, and thus natural selection, or perhaps it was a more selective choice in sexual partners, or else small mutations that had each had undergone to fit their environments better. Maybe it was diet, or culture, or some other influencing variable.
The fact remained, though, that when they perceived one another, what they beheld was strange. Like them, but definitely not.
“On all the stars and planets,” said Nove, diplomat of the first degree aboard New Hope. A recently acquired position, as before now there wasn’t much diplomating to be done on the communal ship. “You are a stout, small thing ain’t ye?”
The translator burbled in the Sub-Terran native’s ear, and its filmy eyes peered forward uselessly, little more that adornments at this point. The coarse, bristly hair that covered its skin picked up on the vibrations the others made as they moved, far more used to closed tunnels than open air.
“Or you both are pointlessly large,” replied Til in her native tongue, a smooth and rumbling sound.
F’shtwa blinked its unsettlingly large eyes slowly, the largest of the three and distinctly androgynous in nature. Nove had the unnerving feeling that is he moved too fast he may trigger the things prey-drive, and it would all end in disaster. It’s obvious they shared more common traits than not -four limbs, faces, ape-like body structure, and generally the same senses- but the differences between them seemed all the more pronounced for the similarities they shared.
“We are suited to our own environs, nothing more,” F'shtwa sang, the notes of its vocal chords oddly resonating somewhere in Nove’s sternum.
“I suppose so, mate,” Nove answered. “Still human.”
“Still people,” agreed Til.
“In one form or another,” F’shtwa said ponderously.
Nove nodded, arms crossed over the expanse of his barrel chest. He inhaled the clean, unfiltered air of the planet that birthed their species millennia ago. It smells strange to him, but then again, this is all strange.
He supposes that humans have never been anything but that, though.
gracieabrams
gamechangershow
2087
turnnoffyourmind
kianamaiart
yousharknotpass
areudirty
