wheat and cherries and the world's turning

if you missed me, here is what is happening lately:

"In the tundra, yellow grasses waving goodbye to the warm seasons. Marya Ivanova, grandfather's Masha, Mashenka, trudges over camouflaged hills in winter boots, fur wrapped inside, close tied with leather straps. She is heading to the cool slate forest, stamping down gold seedheads and silver tassels. Masha, Mashenka, Marya Ivanova is walking in autumn to the end of the world."

ded maroz and snegurochka are sneaking in through autumn skies to haunt my dreams and press out of me a harvest of words. it's proserpine and the descent of inanna, godfather death and love like salt, kore and the gears that shift the world. see you on the other side.

Huldra

It is after three. I can hear a drip from somewhere in the house, some faucet reminding me to sleep. I have turned on the music to hide it, but the beat shaking in my bones taps the same rhythm. My skull is a kettle heated to boiling and you are sleeping, responsibly, in your narrow bed so far from mine.

The storm has passed and the rain has slowed. I am waiting on a package. There is nothing at the door no matter how many times I check, not since I discovered the slip to be signed yesterday morning. I want the books inside, but I want the shoes more. Impossible shoes, lacing tight over the arch and nosebleed-heels stretching my calves to screaming. Fuck-me pumps. Fuck-you boots. Somewhere in between, the reality of life in a strange new place.

I have never been good at making friends, only finding lovers. I can only take pictures of my back, painted in Victorian wallpaper patterns. I bend at the waist and stretch imaginary muscles, pull my hair down to cover the emptiness and wear the sorts of dresses that only emphasize my utter lack of humanity. I am not beautiful, no matter what you say, no matter the wisps of thought that escape my mouth on a misty night, no matter the wideness and calm of my eyes. The vulnerable look on my face, they will tell you, is only a trap for the unwary. There can be no true feeling from someone like me.

No. The feelings I have had! They burned me hollow, they were coals scooped from different hearths and set in my skin to char. Piece by piece, how I craved the burn, the ash, the fall. Corded and caught. I have been touched by no one since. Dancing in the forest, dancing in the sea. I dance because of--or is it despite--my lack of an audience, and I will dance for you, if you are unlucky enough to be caught in my gaze. I have so many names, pet names, endearments breathed in my ear at climax, epithets, each a choked whisper bubbling from the throat of a dying man, in all the languages of the world. But I am not a threat, I am nothing, nothing, not even the wind in your face as you run.

Only a woodwife, stained dark and hollow and waiting to fill with someone else's need.

Dryad

I learned to be cruel when I was young,
and my teachers were always older
wiser in the ways of hurt

and we do not hurt each other
before we have learned to hurt ourselves

the pain in your voice draws blood
up to the surface of my skin, welling from every
deep breath, every last thought

of a world without you.

I light candles, each tiny flame a lesser
hurt in a sea of anguish, a tide of hellish loss
engulfing me, dragging me down.

I am heavy with it, swallowing
my own pain like shards of glass
before it can cut you

and I am spent, exhausted
and alone--not alone--
it ticks and chimes like a countdown, brass gears

shifting in an expanse of wretched silence, scarab-back
shining, fleeing the sonar of its own clicks and clacks.
I will beg and I will bargain for you, and never
ever look back. I'm calling you out,

I'd pull you out of hell with the notes of my last dying breath.
Without the light in your eyes I am afraid
my leaves will fall, my little moon will wane.

In the Drowned City

Fish dart between the pillars, where the meretrix once paced; the purple silks of a dissolute age still hang, tattered, from glassless arches. Where the silk has disintegrated entirely, kelp sways in curtains, untouched for centuries.

Long-maligned Ahes walks through empty, sodden streets, an ornate key on the golden chain around her neck. Seawater has tarnished her silver slippers. Iridescent fish scales dangle like grape clusters from her ornaments; her gills are the color of rubies, gentle in their movement and implacable.

Anemone blossom and writhe in her footsteps. Sharks frolic in her wake.

In the well at the center of the drowned city, a voice rises in luminous bubbles. The red-bearded knight encased in coral cannot weep. His tears mix, unseen, with the sea, and his entreaties are lost amid whalesong and the dim clangor of the city's sunken bells.

When the City of Lights falls into the sea, Ys will rise again, a balance long promised, long prophesied. And the Lady of Kêr-Is will walk in her silver slippers in the moonlight, where roses will bloom bloody in her wake. But the red-bearded knight will remain at the bottom of Dahut's well until the sun goes black.

Huáng

I hear the day break. It cracks
just at the horizon, scarlet like yolk seeping
through the knife-edge, and I am still
twined around you.

I am heavy with sleep, tired of time.
When I wake, the night is rising around us,
the fires you stitch into my skin still building.
Where would I go, with this heat,

but into the ice-white gleam of the moon?
I dreamed of the sun in your hair, the depth of light
it must contain. I dreamed you pressed your paints
into my mouth, gilding me for the sacrifice.

My hair grows ever greyer. Soon I will be ash,
a lump of incense you must hand deliver
to Heliopolis. Soon, perhaps, I may
no longer rise in the night,

soon I may greet the day, and burn anew
with stolen knowledge,
burn that the moon misses me,
and that you never will.

--
For the Scriptic prompt exchange this week, kat gave me this prompt: "There's a sun I'm eager to see, but the moon still longs to keep me."
I gave November Rain this prompt: "'Kiss me and tell me it's not broken.'"

Ordinary Disasters

When the moon disappeared, we were flung headlong into a story. Not one of the good ones, though. The world, wobbling drunkenly across the sky, has a new set of tales to tell.

This is the story in which the Beast tears Beauty into bloody strips and devours her whole; the story in which the Blue Fairy plays cruel jokes on innocent puppets. The one where Sleeping Beauty sleeps, forever, because without true love's kiss we are left with the thorns. They slice like knives and put out eyes and clutch in closer every year.

It wasn't a hundred years before we began to break. It wasn't even one.

Here is the story in which the crane maiden lies bleeding in the forest and no one binds up the wound in her breast. The carven wife never comes alive, the nine-tailed fox is killed, savaged by hunting dogs. Here is the part where Inanna, descending, is stripped bare to the bones and never returns. The sun sets on Hansel and Gretel in the forest, or in the oven, or in the witch's belly, breadcrumbs still stashed in the pockets of the pants that were carefully cut off and discarded in the corner before the grisly feast.

Godfather Death eats and eats and never stops to admire himself in the glass at the foot of the bed. Ella falls to blood poisoning, ashes and lye and glass shards embedded in her battered feet. There are no Seven Sisters, no Penelope, and Oz becomes a dream in the poisoned desert, the fevered ravings of an absinthe drinker.

The moving finger writes, and having written, points directly at its audience in condemnation. We cover our faces with blood-red veils. We tattoo the old inscriptions with ash and mud from the bottom of the lake. We patch up our wounds with paper, the ink mixing with our blood and tears until we are smudged the color of the hole in the sky, black and moonless and bereft. The end is not coming.

The end is already here, crouching beside us in the dark.

--
For the Scriptic prompt exchange this week, Christine gave me this prompt: "Take a familiar book, story, or fairy tale, and rewrite the ending. Feel free to change the setting, time period, characters, etc., as long as the original story is recognizable." Of course, since that is kind of what I usually do, this became rather more of a challenge.

I gave SAM this prompt: "'You're nothing but a deck of cards!'"

Musica Universalis

Summoned, they stand in a line. Their eyes are fixed firmly on the floor beneath their predecessor's feet, the finely figured black-and-white tiles laid over wide, cold space. They are not frightened of the empty spaces between the tiles; they do not quail at the rushing constellations that pass within inches of rough, bare flesh. Oh, she loves them, the Ophanim. Her children, the living embodiment, the material crossroads of imagination and desire.

She is safe in this space--space is a hall made of calligraphy, cradled in a lotus inscribed with the nine thousand names of the holy. She is the bearing upon which time itself balances, and every avatar, every incarnation stands, patient, waiting for her direction. She reclines, listening to the distant murmur of women.

When Lailah wakes, the scent of burning sugar mixed with perfume still hangs heavy in the air. She pulls her makeshift bedroll closer. The floor creaks gently as she curls under the window of the abandoned house, the stars keeping watch. She grips a dirty twist of waxed paper in her left hand, singing under her breath:

"I will make a new clay bowl and inscribe it with the names of those who have cursed me, I will fire it in the flames of the house of bondage and the house of weapons until you call back the curses, until you call them back in the names of the angels, until you bless in the names of the angels, until you repent in the nine thousand names of the holy, amen amen, selah."

She spits between her forked fingers and pulls the pipe from her sleeve. Her thin, pale fingers scrape the sticky black opium from the waxed paper, rolling it into a ball. She sticks it to the pipe and lights it, placing her lips to the mouthpiece and breathing in prophecy.

Selah.
--
For the Scriptic Prompt Exchange this week, Chelle gave me this prompt: "Time stood still as he/she watched..." and I gave lisa this prompt: "Puffy and Tina."

Gosling

Face pillowed on her strong arms, she dreams. The long muscles of her legs twitch as she races around the long-vanished track, outpacing her girl-companions. They are all mothers, now, in the waking world. Even her, once. Now, though, there are only the dreams, brilliant tapestry patched together out of a thousand memories. After the race, a feast, the feast decreed by her father for the winner, roasted meat and bone, slick fat dripping onto the coals of many braziers and ascending in smoke to the gods.

In the way of dreams, by now she is no longer in her racing garb and no longer a child. She reclines comfortably at her father's table, the scent of the black broth, prize of warriors, wafting from boiling bowls, the edge of her hunger growing sharp. In this moment, she is refined, a precious blade from the north. Honed to perfection.

Here in her room, she is no longer sharp and ready, but curled loosely upon the cushions. Her well-muscled hands twitch after the dreamfood, and her rose-tinted lips part, a coral blush rising in her full cheeks. Her breath comes short now, and her muscles strain toward unfathomable delight. Her servants, her guards, turn away, fearful of visions sent by jealous Aphrodite, but we gaze on.

The table is set, groaning with the dishes of her youth, and she tucks in, greedy with long deprivation.

Soft and pungent cheese, drizzled with amber honey. Precious oil carried from the Athenian groves, golden-green and thick, grassy on the tongue. Crumbling wheat-cake and chopped herbs. Grilled figs, sour-sharp olives, tender meat and crisp pomegranate seeds. Wine, oh, wine, black like the sea until mixed with water from her favorite spring, wine that flowed redder than blood, redder than crimson, redder than madder-dyed cloth.

Twice-abducted Helen sleeps through the long, hot days. There, she cannot know regret for her vanished lifetimes. There, in the memory-court of Tyndareus, she devours the bread and wine of dreams. There, no husbands or suitors, no ill-tempered gods, no daughter and no siblings torment her with obligation, and even in the midst of war, there is no one who would grudge her this escape.

--
For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, The Lime challenged me with "delicious food is involved", and I challenged Lance with "Detective Puppy and the Case of the Missing Knickerbockers".

Pele Comes Devouring

This gorgeous image found at LUA Technologies' Tumblog.

The drums were pounding, louder than the earth's heartbeat sounding in the womb of Kilauea. The chanting on the crest of the House of the Moon carried deep into the caverns where Pele slept. The music and the drums, the cheering of the people, they drew her out, blinking and rubbing her eyes in the bright sun of the day.

Kahawali was chief of Puna, brightest and best, bold and sure. He stood atop the sleeping volcano they called the House of the Moon and looked at the people. Dancers swayed gently to the drums, decked in flowers. Wrestlers strained against each other, muscles turned into teak knots or rooted into the very earth. His people, he knew, were the best of all possible tribes, and he was the best of them. Kahawali was a proud chief, with wives and sisters and sons standing tall behind him, and his closest friend Ahua at his side.

The drums and music continued to build, and Kahawali gestured to Ahua, allowing him to begin first. Ahua's holua sled was second only to Kahawali-the-chief's, its gleaming wooden runners and narrow corded base sturdy and swift. Ahua lifted it high in the air and ran full-tilt at the holua course, flinging himself onto the sled at the very last second. The crowd breathed as one being and that is when Kahawali, proud and impetuous, took his run. He flew down the slope after Ahua, easily outdistancing his friend. The dancers cheered, the wrestlers shouted. The musicians played ever more loudly, and Pele drew nearer.

At the bottom of the slope, where a spear marked the end of the racing course, the two men laughed together. They picked up their holua sleds and began to hike back up the mountain. When they were halfway up the slope, Pele took the form of a woman of Puna, an elder, but common. She stepped out from behind the rock that hid her cave and planted herself in front of the noble pair.

"Let me take your sled," she said. "I want to race."

Astonished by the woman's presumption, the chief brushed past her without a reply. She appeared to crumple slightly, and Ahua helped her up the slope the rest of the way, to join the rest of the tribe at their festival. When Kahawali shouted to Ahua to hurry, saying that he wanted to race again, the woman grasped Ahua by the shoulder.

"I want to race," she said again.

Ahua was a kind soul. He smiled gently and handed Pele his holua sled, gesturing to the crest. "Please take my turn, honored elder." He turned back to the end of the course to mark the winner and Pele ascended to meet the chieftain once again.

Kahawali snorted when he saw the old woman approaching, but held his peace. There was no magnanimous head start this time. The chief and the old woman leapt for the course in the same heartbeat, equal in speed and skill. Kahawali was astonished and began to use every trick he knew, deftly weaving across the dormant cone, letting the wind rush across his body, waiting for the moment he could pick up speed.

And then it happened. The second-best sled that Pele had been given jumped--just a little--over a rock instead of sliding smoothly across it. The great goddess lost her balance and fell.

Kahawali laughed, loudly and derisively, as he slid into the end of the course. The people cheered. Pele, her disguise still intact, stood and brushed herself clean. Turning to the chief, she offered Ahua's sled, smiling.

"To be fair, now we should exchange sleds and run the course again," she said.

"Aole! You have no rank, woman," Kahawali cried. "You want me to exchange sleds? Are you my wife, that you should be allowed to touch royal property?" He turned and headed back up the slope once more.

Pele followed, remaining polite but insistent, growing ever more furious as the haughty chief continued to refuse, and even mock, her requests.

Kahawali ignored her and defiantly ran for a third time down the course, and that was it. Pele stamped her foot, her disguise falling away, and the people fell back in awe. Thunder rolled, and lightning struck wherever the goddess turned her wrathful eye.

The earth shook in warning, and Kahawali looked back over his shoulder. When he finally saw the true face of what he had been mocking, it was too late. The sleeping volcano had awakened, and Pele's wrath was boiling toward him, red, viscous, and relentless.

--
For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Jester Queen challenged me with "Deftly, he wove in and out of the cones, letting the wind rush across his body, holding himself coiled for the moment when he could pick up speed." and I challenged Bran macFeabhail with "Earthy Watercolor Blog Mom meets Biting Invective, the Prime-Number Raccoon."


I didn't want to make this too long; it's already longer than my usual entries. However, the ending of this story is really the best part. I could go on with the many ways Kahawali attempts to escape Pele's wrath, but (spoiler alert) Ka wahine 'ai honua, the Woman who Devours the Land, eventually prevails. At one point, she even surfs down the volcanic cone on her revenge lava and hurls red-hot stones at him, killing everything he loves, including (I kid you not) his favorite pig. Hawaiian mythology is rich and fascinating. If you have some time to spare, you should check it out!

Charybdis

I am the ocean's daughter,
adrift still on all these years.
Waist-deep in murky water--
is it rain I feel? Or tears?


First attempt at a tanaga, this month's format challenge, for the Imaginary Garden with Real Toads.

The Point of Roughness

Midwinter spring is its own season, each day in grey and smoky green on muddy snow marching in sodden boots toward the solstice. It's cold in small bites, then suddenly warm, every breath of air fastening its teeth in a lover's ear, whipping loose hair across the face, then the shock of ice down the neck.

It is a fleeting season, fleeing before the gnawing specters of the longest night, the coldest months.

There is a hedge along the hill, still green against the rocky drifts, and it is covered in the wind's scattered offerings, blossoming not with petals but perfect geometric crystals. If you came this way, taking the route you would be likely to take, from the place you would be likely to come from, you might never notice the difference. This is the hedgerow that held out handfuls of honeyed blossoms in the hot summer when we said goodbye.

It is not the end of the world. That lies in England, or so I am told, by many a poem and song, somewhere behind a headstone, somewhere in the fog of the night's passing. Somewhere in the mist let out like the breath of green and living things. And there are other places, which also are the world's end, some at the sea jaws, or over a dark lake, in a desert or a city, but this is not why we are here, not something to speak in words on the shortest day of the year.

So we go behind the hedge, past the rocks in the hill, crooked old teeth of the earth standing still in a cast circle. Taking the hand of the person next to you in your own is an act of contrition, tribute paid to the dead shaking and sweating under our feet.

There, yes, there and then, what the dead had no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead:

The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living. They whisper their threats, only just inaudibly, into the black and terrible night. We refute them with our pulse, with the song of living breath, with our stories and laughter held bright against Godfather Death.

We will speak of their dim lands someday, surely, but not today. Today we keep vigil for the extinguished sun, the brightness descendent into the underworld to speak with the dead in our place. Here, the intersection of the timeless moment between one year and the next, one inhalation of deep night exhaled into blue-banded dawn, inhaling: never. Exhaling: always.

So it goes, never and always. Earth and air, fire and water, incense rising from a burning cup into the last pale stars. The inexorable dead are silent for another three-quarter turn, the dead who rattle their bones against the dreams of held hands and gentle kisses. Implacable and resolute and tasting of despair.

Silent, yes, the dead may be, but they still make their motions in my sleep. They dance under my feet and leave me wakeful, wakeful. Thick yarn dangles from wooden needles, and there is Earl Grey tea in a white teapot under the world's blanket of snow, until the winter melts away into spring. I want to grow roses in blue clay pots. I want to write arias, bridges belling, belying the flutter in my stomach, in my heart. Then the newness of the year steals away all the words I might have had.

Summer has never returned the favor of my vocabulary, even in the Communion chalice of red-staining blackberries, hand-picked from martial canes, the juice mixed with blood from thorn-pricked fingers. I dance with the dead and hold silence in my heart.

There are reasons, but what they were I cannot say. They rely upon words I can not now speak in any comprehensible fashion, for last year's words belong to last year's language. And next year's words await another voice.

--


For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Tara Roberts challenged me with "New Year's resolutions - your own or a story about keeping or breaking resolutions."


The italicized lines are taken from T.S. Eliot's "Little Gidding," the fourth of Four Quartets.

Carthago Delenda Est

The arrow-threat of occupation sighted firmly on my high-walled city, a looming specter of dissolution above the harbor. A pyre built of memories and shame. Pile it up, then, throw oil onto my fires and let the world burn as I do. As for you, Tyrians that were, people of my people--lash his children and all his people with your hatred, give me their suffering as a gift, a holy sacrifice to these ashes. Let there be no affection between these peoples, let there be no unbroken treaty between our tribes.

Now the couch that we shared is ablaze, the fragrant oil burning blue where his dark head once rested, the hungry flames advancing to my seat. As I rise to greet the stars at the dawning of the world, may every god bear witness. The sword is sharp. My time is short. Let the shore make war upon the shore, waves against waves, weapons against weapons; let those fools and their descendants be at war forever. Let them rue each smear of char, each drop of royal blood.  

And you, O avenger, unknown. May you rise from my bones and make them regret. Make them remember. With the strength of my hatred arisen from a wretched heart, make them pay this funeral gift.  

Like Tanit I arise to the night in flames, singing of the sea.

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Major Bedhead challenged me with "I don't want the world, I just want your half. - Ana Ng, They Might Be Giants" and I challenged Floreksa with "I hate strategy games."


Queen Elissa of Carthage, more famously known as Dido, makes her most dramatic appearance in Virgil's Aeneid. I found a glorious translation of her final speech (by Mike Salter at Ars Latet Arte), which appears to not only be my favorite part of the whole book, but his as well. If you read that (you ought), you will note that I based this piece heavily upon Mr. Salter's translation, because it was so perfect.  I encourage you to visit his site and read the Latin to yourself, out loud, repeatedly.

Agave

I grew up in the desert scrub with my sisters all around, drank the cold light of the stars like water in winter, grew tall and strong. I took up the pen at twelve and tore songs out of my heart like leaves from my sisters, leaves we would twist and knot into thread and clothing and homes. Women dressed properly, then, tying their headdresses in gaudy knots, and made pulque in the shelter of rocky overhangs.

I could not.  I tore at the earth and watered fields of doomed flowers with droplets flung from bloody fingernails. I cried out to Xochipilli Chicomexochitl with every breath I took, and he took notice. He followed me down into the hardpan waste and kissed my scars and open wounds, the scraped flesh quivering under his painted lips like the great serpent, rising in flame from under the world.

"Mayahuel," he sang to me, "one night you will bear fruit and disappear into the earth, and all the world will mourn the loss of my favorite poet." His singing melted my bones like boiling chocoatl and we were fallen down onto the ground again, lost in the night all around us, snarling and tearing at each other like jaguars.

I gave birth to many daughters and suckled them, fitting delicate words into the puzzle of strict meter all the while. My flower prince went singing into the night, the songs I made for him sweet on his lips like the aguamiel in my heart. My children went out into the desert scrub to drink the cold light of the stars like water in winter, and I began to lose my language. I wrote in rhyme and in free verse, hymns and platitudes and holy beckoning. I let blood from my wrists in the hopes that it would sing in the silence, but it fell flat to the earth and sluggishly dried, still refusing to speak.

I churned within, seeking aubade or threnody, wailing couplets, unrecognized, into the dust storms blowing through our desolate home. I began to diminish.

One day, when the sun blazed down, drying the shine from my thick black hair, I lay flat on the ground. I pressed my scarred hands into the red dust and began to stroke pictures of the words I still wanted to sing. I could no longer rhyme, could no longer call up jewel-like painted miniatures from the arid scrub, the wizened twigs that were all the words left to me. I turned on my side and wept bloody tears, all the moisture my body still contained flowing into the dust, sticking to my burning skin.  I gave up.

The earth rose up around me like an embrace, its benevolent chill soothing my blackened flesh. I could not sing its praises, nor tell it my story, nor even weep. My body drifted deeper with every hour, my head and hair pressing out of the ground like my doomed gardens bearing fruit at last. I was dry of all meaning, drained of all my life's work, and I was alone.

When Mictecacihuatl rose from the mud beside my face, her flayed bones sheltered me from the heat of the sun, and I saw her jaw open to devour the light. I could not say, then, why it was so beautiful. No matter how hard I tried, I could no longer wrap my tongue around the iambic pentameter of the comfort of darkness, standing tall against the dreadful light.

For the IndieInk Writing Challenge this week, Indie Adams challenged me with "No matter how hard I tried, I still couldn't get my head around iambic pentameter" and I challenged Lance with "The apothecary's daughter."

Eurydice at Dawn

 "'Oh, I don't know,' he said. 'Πελλαίου βοῦς μέγας εἰν Ἀίδη.' This was something to the effect that, in the Underworld, a great ox costs only a penny, but I knew what he meant and in spite of myself I laughed. There was a tradition among the ancients that things were very cheap in Hell. " --Donna Tartt, "The Secret History"

I know all the things you've never told me. I know the late nights and the gnawing feeling in your chest, the dreams from which you wake, clawing your way out of tangled bedclothes. Gasping for air.

I know the jobs you've taken and the ones you've refused. I know the desperate twin chains of inertia and fear, the fear of hurting someone who truly cares for you. Sitting up at night, you think of me, but only when you can't distract yourself. I'm still waiting, though. I've been down here a long time, but I'm doing okay. Getting around only costs me a penny, and everyone in this place knows just what I'm going through. I'd never leave you if I had any say in the matter, you know.

Some nights I think you'll find your way home to me, follow your heart down here. Then I could make my escape. I could touch your hand and all the years we've been apart could dissolve into nothing more than the swirling rainbow film on a puddle of water in the parking lot. I could make you remember. I could make you forget.

I remember you, upright in that leather jacket. I played at vegetarian disgust and secretly longed to be folded into your arms. I didn't actually care that you were wearing a dead cow. I have this thing for writers and percussionists. The craziest guys come down here, and it's true, I have my fun. You're not here, so, it's true. Every time I close my eyes, though, it's you. Always you. I wake up from my dreams in tears, muffling myself in the pillow so I don't disturb whichever one is in my bed this time. They don't matter, only the dreams. I dream of you and your hollow days, pushing on in denial. Other times it's of the past, of the comfort of apples, the weariness of love.

I think you are refusing my calls, refusing to believe that I could still be here, burying yourself in the meaningless pursuits of the upper side. Cowardly, clinging to the sunlight you never loved. You don't even play your music anymore. You never write to me, for me, of me. I think you've given up hope. I think you've sold the dream for her scraps of passion, and worse.  Even in a Hades market, I think you're selling the dream too cheap.

--

For this week's IndieInk Writing Challenge, Billy Flynn challenged me with "Selling the dream cheap", and I challenged Diane with "Old Scratch and El Salto del Colacho.  Make it funny if you can--if you can't, make it terrifying."

There is an interpretation of the Orpheus myth that colors him a coward, afraid to die to be with Eurydice forever.  Instead, he defied the gods to retrieve her, because he wasn't ready to leave the upper world.  I find this rather less romantic than you might think.

Green Harvest

"Jesus said, 'I am the vine, and you are the branches,' but I am in a position to tell you this statement was not entirely accurate. The Old Testament brings up vines a lot, the Chosen People being vines and wheat ears and, I don't know, whatever else the writer was eating for lunch that day. Ridiculousness. Even if you leave the Eucharist out of this, we still go back to the Greeks, all the way back to whichever tribes settled down and planted. I probably don't have to tell you about wine as the sacred blood of Dionysus--unless they lost or dropped that aspect of the Mysteries? I don't keep up with current events in archaeology, to be perfectly honest. Even with the internet, I've been so wound up with business for the last forty years that I only have the sketchiest of ideas about what you people think you know. Not even mentioning the amount of sheer physical effort that running this place still takes.

I mean, it's a big family, it's not like I have to do it alone, but someone has to be in charge, right? Well, I've always been assertive. It was one thing when we got here to build the vineyards and kick back, and another one entirely to start harnessing all our fruit and manpower to manufacture this business. Of course I'm proud of it. My whole life's tied up in these vines...

...Pressing the grapes for the first time was hard. It was like raising children specifically to take and sell, a slavery of sorts..."
                        --from the final interview with Moriah Landsdown, 1996

She is, or was, a thin brown woman with eyes the color of the underside of a leaf on a stormy day. She looked (or looks) about forty, and had for the last six hundred years. She said that she settled on forty because she was tired of being harassed by so-called gentlemen, and at that time, hitting on a forty-year-old woman was like molesting your grandmother. She was arrested and tried as a witch approximately sixteen times, due to occasional mistakes with the neighbors or knowing things she shouldn't, failing to take part in searches for missing persons, and the general run of "she cursed 'em" accusations. Of course, this was a long time ago, and records would show that it's not the same woman we spoke to, because that would be impossible. Regardless, these days, the only neighbors are all closely related.

The Landsdowns own most of the parts of California, Arizona, and Nevada that the government doesn't. The P&A vineyards are not the sort of wineries that give tours. You can call ahead and see if they'll show you around, and if one of the daughters (it's always one of the daughters) is not out in the fields, she'll talk to you for a while about irrigation and terroir, hybrids and tannins. She'll talk to you about inconsequentials long enough for you to get bored, drink some wine, and thank her profusely. Then she'll talk to you all the long walk back to your car about the details of winemaking, shake your hand in both her strong, blunt-fingered ones.  She'll stand in your wake, wave good-bye, smiling widely all the time, and you'll go home vowing never to set foot on their property again, lest they talk you to death.  You go home as fast as you can.

Unless you don't. A surprising number of visitors to the family vineyards immediately decide to move away, to take jobs overseas, go on spiritual retreats, take holy vows. Those visitors abandon their previous lives quickly and quietly, and most are never heard from again. Wine can have that effect on some people.

The vines in their vineyards are not the scraggly, stick-like things you see tethered to posts in other vineyards. They're green, more green than you would ever believe, and they are unbound. They run riot, winding in incestuous tangles all up and down the hills, all coiled snakelike in the field, their violet-black grapes modestly covered in brilliant leaves and guarded by the swirling of the vine. They make a wine as rich and dark as sin, red as blood. It's salt and slick in your mouth and ends thick, burning caramel on your tongue with lingering sugars. The family jokes about a superstition that if too many visitors come onto their lands, the wine will become thin and bitter, and they'll tell you, this is why they discourage tourists.

They're pretty good at staying under the radar. They've been producing wine as Peel and Ampelos for centuries, the family growing and extending tendrils across the globe. It's nothing new to them, the wine business, and the matriarch of the family usually heads up advertising and publicity. When Moriah gave her last interview, they were able to keep most of the controversial stuff out. Though, as it turns out, it didn't really matter. She'd been called crazy long enough that the interview was heavily edited, and all the incriminating bits were laughed off, or worse, pitied as the first signs of dementia.

It was easy.  There's no reason to believe she's sane if you do hear the original. She talks about leading the missing people into the field under the dark of the moon, allowing them to lie down beside the vines. She talks about the sound the vines make as they draw the people into their embrace, the sighing sound. It's so clear, the way she imitates it.  She can tell you about the ecstatic moans of the visitors as they are absorbed into the rich dark soil, or the occasional shriek of terror as they rouse from the afterglow of their orgasm only to realize they are being consumed. It's an odd thing to listen to, the longing in her voice. It's a compelling thing, that interview, her café au lait voice reaching through the tangle of websites that sprang up when she disappeared. You can still find clips of the oddest parts of her diatribe, the pain and pleasure parts, mostly dubbed over S&M videos by fetishists and disseminated through forums and porn sites.

Every now and then, she'll become a sample in an indie band's song, the near-whisper of her explanation being pushed further into the grasp of myth, the lascivious anticipation in her voice raising the hair on the back of your neck or the ghost of a nipple against your t-shirt, right before the drums crash in tribal ecstasy and the guitars begin to wail like cats in heat. She draws that kind of music. Some people just have that gift.

I still have the tape that she spoke so clearly into, her dark green eyes boring into mine as I took notes, simultaneously terrified and aroused by her clear interest in the pale skin showing above my too-low neckline. I went in thinking I shouldn't have taken the assignment, and I was right. I never took another. I never told anyone that I kept the original tape, that I mailed in a copy out of some obscure desire to hold on to that sultry whisper, to keep her in my hands.

Me, I don't know what happened to Moriah Landsdown after that interview. I don't want to find out. I stay in the Midwest on the shores of dirty lakes, far from viticulture, deep in city centers and industrial pollution. I erase myself from the internet religiously. I am learning to avoid notice by example, using tactics from the very competent family that became Peel and Ampelos International.

Last night, I read that 75,866 km² of the world is dedicated to the cultivation of grapes, that the area dedicated to vineyards is increasing by about 2% per year. I tossed and turned all night, thinking of white bones desiccating under a riot of grapes, feeling the sweat rise on my skin at the thought of her voice only to shiver when the chill of unsought knowledge turned my own hands, hovering at the juncture of my thighs, into the grasping of her many daughters' sweetly callused fingers.

I don't want to go back, I don't want to go to their home place. I don't want to go into the field at the dark of the moon, but I have these dreams, you see.

The Flood of the World that Was

"Hail to thee, O Nile!

Who manifests thyself over this land, and comes to give life to Egypt!

Come and prosper!
Come and prosper!
O Nile, come and prosper!
O you who make men to live through his flocks and his flocks through his orchards!
Come and prosper, come,
O Nile, come and prosper!

Hail to thee, O my god, Hapi of the North and South, lord of fishes and birds of the marsh, husband of Meret, Naunet, Nekhebet, Wadjet, father of our beautiful Kem, king of Ta Mery, hail. Hear us, great Hapi, and have mercy. Have you been detained in the world of the dead? The black sweet mud of your banks is drying to blow out over the red lands, and our people cry out their bone-deep hunger. We have given you jewelry and meat, sent our children to call you home. We dry into hollow reeds, hard and old, suffering the lack. Hap-Meht or Hap-Reset, god of Ta-Sheme'aw and Ta-Mehew both, attend your people, do not let the flood fail-- "

The tablet ends there, its voice silenced forever by events unknown. Iterw, Neilos or Nilos, the Nile we know today is not the same, never the fulsome blue god with overflowing breasts, rising from the Elephantine Isles, traveling through the world of the dead to bring life.

Kemet is no longer Herodotus' gift of the Nile, black shining jewel of the desert, the fruitful land. We have traveled deep into the red lands of the desert and cannot return. Hap-Meht or Hap-Reset, papyrus or lotus, Upper or Lower, neither now will hear us over the growing roar in the lands below, the sharp sounds of missiles and airstrikes, machine guns and hand grenades, factions and fundamentalists.

There, in the mist and the silence that hangs over the yearly inundation of the great delta, the relics of the father of cultivated lands are hidden in the mysteries of other gods, hidden under centuries as heavy as damp wool blankets. Now we are Egypt. Now we are Masr, and the glyph of our name that meant not only "precious blackness" but also "the ending of things" is hidden forever beneath the Greek and Arabic and English of the future tense.

This week's Indie Ink challenge comes from The Drama Mama, who left me a fragment: "...because the river runs through it, an even divide, the old world on one side, the new world on the other like a mirror of past and future."  Which seemed very sad to me, in the context of ancient civilizations and rivers, and who better to articulate this sadness than the prototype for all desert river civilizations?  Hence, my elegy to the world that was.  The fragment of a hymn that is the first paragraph and the names of the ancients are as accurate as I can make them--everything else, I made up.

At any rate, my challenge went out to Kerri, and you can read her response here.