(..)
Toby stood outside the field her feet buried to a pond and a
slingshot away stood the cave, green and dry.
(i)
A woman was carving sequential images upon the bone of the
cave. Images that looked singular, simple and intricate, all that at once. She
turned to see the intruder. There came a hint of recognition to her face. As
her head moved from left to right, in successive motions, in twitches, the
recognition went lost and she went back to doing what she was doing: Carving
patterns hither and thither, in the empty space, as well as the solid object.
The resoluteness and diligence with which she did what she was doing must be
remarked upon as: She did it with the perseverance of an adept coder of soft
machines.
‘Can…can aa—’ said Toby, her expression curtailed by a snap
inside her head.
She wasn’t responded to, not a word, not a look back. She was
either tone deaf or she thought it was her way of singing a song and not
responding was her way of forbearing her presence, perhaps.
A bout of tinnitus befell her and when it passed she heard
noises over her head, like from the roof above, that which she wakes to every
time from slumber. She looked up and there was blankness.
She brought her attention toward the bowels of the cave. There
seemed to be nothing there and the nothing sent shivers down her delicate spine.
She wasn’t moved so in tangent she moved outward. From the mouth of the cave,
when she turned and looked, sloshing the ever-present water underfoot, it looked
deeper and looked much better. A man emerged from the atrium of the cave,
adorned in teeth and nail. A priest? He must be. Upon seeing her, he grew the
same expression the carver had up her face, upon seeing her, and in a tick that
vanished, too. She could not see the man’s form below his torso. She thought she
could see his knees from one blink to next and then she could not. The staves
that rested under his axillae were made from the bones of giraffe or some such
animal. The presence of the man was much too much intrusive and one more look
into the innards of the cave she deemed would be detrimental. She couldn’t
bring herself to sing, ask, or whatever it was she wanted to, again. Her felt
need to flee was masked, replaced by her want to fish, as well as her want to
swim, and she wasn’t certain in what order she should pursue her wants so
instead she went to the farm.
(ii)
Doing sprint on the tracks of farmyard was his third fondest
pastime. When Toby (Nomad) was done with two sets of his usual three, he
noticed a woman perched up the tree, head resting on a branch, eyes fixed to
distant clouds, her peculiar mannerism reminiscent of a person who’d returned
from the Cave. He chose to forego his third set—what if the woman took note of
his pace and judged him—and instead looked for a deviant leisure. Thus he came
to fell a garden lizard, to sit and squirt on its head, where it bore a bruise,
and to draw with his great toe a circle around it, inside which it went round
and round, half dead, dying, mean drunk. He thought he heard a call of rebuke
and came by the trunk of the tree where the woman sat. Her hand was hung below
the branch and he touched it.
‘Don’t’, the woman yelled, shaking her hand off his clutch.
‘If I touch, it adds to your trauma.’
Then she jumped off the tree and stood in front of Toby, on one
side her hand missing. She peered into the pond around Toby’s feet.
‘Can I aa—’, said Toby, looking down his feet, and further
said: ‘Why are you raining down my circle of water?’ having been stirred, her
falling drops of tears creating ripples around him.
When he looked up, the one-handed woman held her head tilted
high up, her mouth wide-open, at the verge of birthing an earsplitting scream.
(iii)
Below the rocks, where the sandy expansion emanated, was a
place Toby (Nomad) Barn liked to visit and squirt because it was a remote,
desolate land where she could do it standing and as she was standing and
squirting, though the place was devoid enough to allow unchecked individual
expression, there was an oncoming presence in the form of a noise. When the
noise grew closer to her focal hearing point, she brought her palms against her
ears and pressed hard, for the noise was unheard of, and she noticed the
ripples around her feet to magnify before looking up to find a boy falling from
the sky, screaming, dashing against the ground, animating the dust below.
‘Oh’ she sighed, in disbelief, rubbed her eyes, and saw
something germinate in her field of vision.
It was an image of a woman and a boy, the boy attached to
her belly by way of a cord. An image frozen in time and space, it was the
closest thing to a painting she’d witnessed, a rendition of a life form
incomprehensible to her still jaded mind. Then… The image began to move, coming
to life, breaking free from the coils to which it was confined. Her hair was
blowing in the air and she, it seemed, was asleep. He was afloat in his fetal position,
unmindful of any presence whatsoever, his eyes blinking at a steady pace,
awake. When she opened her eyes, he closed his and the cycle repeated itself.
She emaciated, emaciating, he grew, growing. At a juncture when their eyes
respectively were closing and opening, at that mid-juncture, they relapsed to
the former state of being frozen in time and space, to be once again: Image.
When the dust settled, she saw the boy bore a wound to his
head, losing his blood from it, and she took him for a boy who came from the
Farm, his torso now dissipating.
‘Ka… I ask—’, she said, her hand against his shoulder,
empathizing.
‘Thrown down … hunters …’ he uttered, before his torso
vanished, taking part of his vocal cords with it.
Toby stood there feet to the ground, questions in her head, and
as she fruitlessly ruminated, the water beneath her feet, admixing with the blood
from his head, traveled far and wide to fill the desolate expansion that lied
below hunting ground.
(iv)
Above the riverbed was a field that hooves had beat flat
where Toby climbed often to plunge himself into the river. There was no one
hunting the other there, like in days past, though in the atmosphere was an air,
the whiff of admixed bitterness and hope, so tangible, it gave the impression
at any moment there could materialize severed bodies and burnt bridges. Toby undressed
himself and when he stretched his arms, he saw the Carver materialize before
him, beside her was Priest Nature. She held in one hand a tablet of patterns,
on the other something that couldn’t be seen, and it could be said with speculative
certainty that something that she held was Void.
‘It’s a perfect day’, she said.
She reached and
pulled open his drawers of chest, placed the something in there with certain
meticulousness, and shut the drawers. Then she reached his back, opened his shelf
there, placed the tablet, and shut the shelf.
‘Kaa…ask something?’, said Toby, again curtailed in his
effort to articulate, with a hint of prescience as to his eventuality.
‘You can ask what you want but you wouldn’t likely be
answered, even less likely be given’, the Priest said, shifting his glance from
Toby’s forming face to the Carver, whose face by now was fading, nodding.
She took Toby by his hand, stood him by the precipice, and saying
ta-ta pushed him.
The noise above his head amplified, a bout of splitting
headaches overwhelmed him, and then slowly but steadily his head cleared, the
noise above faded to blank and it was quiet, like calm before the storm. He was
caught in a vortex and he whirled in it, up, down, side-to-side, like a thorn
in a clock whose motion was unchronological.
He saw the Carver standing there, still standing there, but
now: Headless, her stretched hands overhead
pointing to the sky above, feet pointing to the earth below, tiptoed in posture.
Seeing her, seeing what was left of her, seeing his place in a seemingly
unending circular current, he began kicking his feet in the water.
The water had him in it for what seemed like an eon and then
it broke. When he woke up, he was lying on the wet ground, his head pressed
against something that wasn’t sand or weed. It was soft and warm and felt like
the innards of a cleft. He wanted to touch it but couldn’t move his hands. He
grew an inexplicable urge to thrust it with his head. He didn’t know where he’d
go if he made the thrust, he just wanted out. Just as he wondered, he felt
something wrap around his head. Roots? Perhaps. But supple as hands? And pull.
He saw the cave or the cave saw him, or it was both, and the
unseen of light, tiny at first, at its tail end grew bigger and bigger. He
wasn’t himself anymore, blinded by the rush of light, the floodgates having been
burst.
(..)
