The Long Road to Creation

It was written, once, that the road to creation was long. You now know this to be true.

You have been twelve weeks on the Helcarathe, the glacial wastes stretching from the northernmost reaches on the maps of men to places yet uncharted by human eyes. Supplies are thin, and the cold is inescapable, cold that numbs the fingers and deadens the legs, cold that would promise a swift and dreamless sleep to lesser men. Not you. You walk.

You walk until the chill has seeped deep into your chest, each breath a knife in your side. You walk until the wind becomes a veil of white, frosting your face and sapping what little energy remains. You walk until you can go no further, and fall to your knees. Looking up, through the whipping snow you think you glimpsed a thunderhead. You think you crawled; you do not remember.

Tuurngaq

When men had been in the Arctic for as long as Travis had, things began to turn strange. Three weeks ago he had begun to experience the sensation of waking up while already awake. He would be walking, sitting, eating, when suddenly he would wake and realize he’d only been dreaming he was walking, sitting, or eating. He hadn’t been dreaming, and he knew that at first, but gradually that knowledge faded too. Thus he lived his life in a perpetual state of hallucination. He would wake at night and see the borealis above him, sweeping in curtains across the night sky, reaching out towards him as if trying to snatch him away, and he would lie absolutely still, knowing that if he didn’t move they would think him merely a part of the landscape, and move on. There was no aurora; there hadn’t been for over a month. All of this he had managed to keep hidden from his guide, an old man of a Yup’ik tribe.

The wind picked up, and dry snow whispered across the ground.

October

Jesse was very high. He told her so; “I’m very high,” he said. Eva nodded her head. Eva was very high, too. Sometimes the leaves held to the trees until the start of November. Not this year; a dry spell had sent them down weeks early, and they lined the roadsides, oak-brown, spinning behind the car as Jesse drove past.  It was windy, and dry leaves skittered across the road with every gust.

Rose

Make your exit with grace.

-Marcus Aurelius

When I awoke, she was dead. I knew this immediately, though the difference between breathing and not breathing is a small one as far as movement is concerned. A person so still is something the mind sees for what it is.

I brushed my hand across her face to push the hair out of her eyes, and felt she was already quite cold. Touching the hand, I could feel taut tendons beneath pale skin; her body was already beginning to stiffen. I found it somewhat unsettling that I’d been sleeping next to something that wasn’t entirely her any more, but rather a poorly fashioned model – cool, waxy skin where warm flesh should have been; rigid, clamped joints that should have stirred, slowly, in the light of dawn. By all accounts, it wasn’t her, not in any way that mattered.

I wasn’t sad; a day comes when one sees it as a passage, nothing more. And yet I had to say goodbye. I smiled to myself. As the undertaker said, funerals are for the living.

I looked for a long moment upon her face. Then, leaning over her, saying no words, thinking no thoughts, I kissed her once, gently, upon her forehead, rose, walked downstairs to the front door, and went out, into the warm spring sunlight.

---

Sufjan Stevens – Out of Egypt, into the Great Laugh of Mankind, and I Shake the Dirt from My Sandals as I Run || 2005/Illinois

Swing

It was a cold spring morning, and the ground was hard with frost. The sun hadn’t yet risen above the tree line, and there wasn’t a sound save for the wet burbling of the spring in the back of the woods, and the crunch of the men’s boots on the grass as they walked through the field. The first man was short, with dark beady eyes and a face covered in grey stubble, and had a keen look about him despite his age. The other man had a heavy maul axe slung over his shoulders.

Around halfway through, Earl stopped, sucking on his pipe. He looked around for a moment, then turned.

“This here’s the spot, boy. Start digging.”

The other man bent down, unshouldering the maul axe. Lifting it high above his head, he swung it down where it bit into the hard earth, icy flecks of ground peppering his cheeks and hands.