(Originally posted to simplefeelings.com February 2003)
There was something in the way she carried herself, eyes leveled at just the right angle, hair falling in simple patterns which communicated a demure state. And whenever she entered a room, parsing the intricate beaded curtains at the entrance, people took notice. It had always been that way, and there was nothing she could do to avoid it.
She was raised on the trails in the woodlands and meadows which encircled her family’s meager property. She felt the trees and stones of the river speak to her, in their own disparate linguistic tongue, lilting through the vegetation in wild syllables which grounded her, made her turn her attention to the way gravity felt, to the attraction between the magnetite in the banks of the stream, the spots of green moss and lichen adorning the massive rocks near the pool.
It was as such, being tied into the roots of the place, the old speech, the eldest of the sensibilities, that Amber became loosed from that which her brethren considered acceptable. It wasn’t her fault, of course- she was merely a victim of circumstance, as all are the world over, yet she was punished and racked for days on end in a world of bitter fire and readily available, thinly veiled contempt from her peers.
“Amber is onto something,” her mother would remark while putting the dishes into the cabinet. “She’s too idealistic. We need realists in this house, not ideologues. Pragmatic means to an end, and I don’t see any of that in her way of things.”
Her father would sigh, tired from a day out on the fields, put his spectacles down next to his freshly brewed cup of coffee, and cough into his elbow- it was a dry cough, one induced by the ever-prominent dust, and the veins in his wizened forehead expanded and his round red cheeks puffed out as if he were really exerting himself from the simple respiratory act. He could never go without his evening brew.
Amber would sit upstairs on the wooden balcony, listen to them speak about her in the third person from behind the bannister, which cast long shadows across the carpet, and the upstairs hall was like a row of jagged teeth, with its perfectly carved doors and their uniformly lit interiors. Doors bothered her. Precise angles of any kind bothered her. Angles, she realized, of a perfect geometric sort, appeared very infrequently in the natural world.
She radiated the unpredictable, then, in the way a sphere seems to defy one’s understanding of geometry, in that no such thing as a perfect sphere exists in our imperfect universe. Amber made people nervous in that she expertly relayed what a perfect sphere could be.
In her room, late into the night, rather than falling asleep, she would sing hymns to the moon outside her window in the strange language the trees had taught her, hymns in some ancient dialect which existed long before her family had taken root here, long before the town or the village or the first shed had been placed, when these hills were still wild land populated by nobody, coated in thick brush and roamed by strange carnivorous mammals.
Her eyes would become transfixed on the Sea of Tranquility and she would repeat, in rough approximation, the tale of the shadow men who came here looking for resources and found none, and left as abruptly as they had arrived, leaving strange artifacts in the glades and dales she explored on a routine basis, even at this very moment glowing terribly while scattered in her drawers and closet. Her mouth would become dry from the ceaseless speech and her limbs would fall limp to the sheets, and she would murmur, involuntarily:
Ruennen hul ganata verete, wethr
Eres ganata queret luot cioticil
Ferethial sole hul quolethe cere...
Every morning on her long walks, her feet would kick up tsunamis of dry leaves, the dead harvest of the maple trees which lined the front drive, and her attention would be transfixed upon the little details of every leaf, every vein and juncture, splitting off from the first in exponential abstraction. Then the leaves would rise about her, follow her and become tangled in her hair, and she would remain like that for up to five minutes, surrounded by the levitating things in an ideal and consistently balanced wind.
“Amber’s sick,” her father would say, watching all this from the living room. “Sicker’n most, I guess. Nothing to do about it. Let it sit, take its time. It’ll pass.”
“And what if it doesn’t?” retorted her mother. “It very well may not.”
“Well then,” he said, musk on his breath. “It don’t. And we keep on.”
Amber took the long route, always, because she valued time, and valued the proper use of time. She spent hours traversing the gray marshes, crossing the county line which was denoted by the barbed wire fence, staring vacantly at an orchard miles off before setting out to reach it. Her gait was ideal for such journeys- measured and timed.
In the evenings, while her parents spent the long slow decrepit voyage of middle age playing cards downstairs at the kitchen table, Amber arranged the artifacts into a formation which caused them to glow softly with violet and emerald hues. She could control the saturation or contrast of the items depending on their position in relation to the others. Slight amusement- a smirk crossing her face, ever so slowly, a hint of satisfaction at what she had achieved.
And then, when she heard her mother climbing the stairs to say goodnight, making that familiar creak, she would gather the items up and store them away behind her shoes and in the pockets of the dresses she never wore and in the floorboards, and she would feign drowsiness to avert suspicion. Her mother was always tired.
One night, after this ritual of sorts, she was in the mood to once again permeate the nocturnal threshold, and so she got up, single mindedly determined to achieve her goal, no matter the cost. She dangled precariously out the window and leaped onto the meadow beneath, the grass cushioning her fall, rolling to absorb the impact. It was twenty feet yet she made the jaunt with little incident, save a small bruise on her left shoulder.
She ran past the dew-coated thistles and milkweed pods, the thistles in particular tearing at her arms, the sensation making her dizzy, as she hurtled beyond the veil of stars and aimlessly into the ravines and gorges of the old forest, her feet skipping at 5 solid contacts per second, her mind enshrouded in mist. Her route was erratic yet sublime.
The Superior reclined at the edge of the third pool with an expression of pervasive melancholy- her features were marked by decades and perhaps centuries of wrinkles, made less visible by the peak of her shroud, which flowed long and illustrious across the sprawling roots of the old cottonwood.
“You came,” she croaked in her rasp. “I didn’t expect you so soon. Admirable.”
Amber stopped, vacant, her pupils fully removed, all senses glazed over and sharpened to their fullest extent, every molecule in her arms and tactile extremities poised to the exact temperature of the air, breaths in quick succession as her limbic functions were heightened by the Superior’s presence in the inky gloom.
The Superior removed a golden chalice from the folds of her all-consuming garment, dipped it into the lazy waters of the pool, hoisted it up, and in her wizened talon she offered it out to Amber, a gesture of solidarity, a quiet grin shared between them. Amber took the chalice, noticed its weight and density, and the ornate patterns around its rim, then raised it to her malnourished lips and drank deeply.
It tasted like rot, and like old things, and Amber’s brain was lit on fire.
Amber was nearing the age when her peers all moved out and became secretaries or makeup peddlers, gawked like pelicans at the sharp pastel mirrors in the salon, yet Amber remained concerned only with the natural order, and finely attuned to the imperceptible subtleties of life.
She had taken on an orange temperament, orange being the third hue of the great wheel, that code which cannot be broken, as the Superior had explained to her time and again, manifesting torn scrolls from nowhere which displayed vast charts, tables, metrics of value and meaning. She was orange, there was no doubt to it, and in accordance with that, she donned a burnt umber vest most of the year and spoke in tones which evoked the hue.
This made sense- it fell in line with the leaves she collected and hung on her wall with tape to form triangles and converging lines, the ones which followed her everywhere like expectant pets, and the deep autumn trajectory she was determined to continue down.
Her mother was apoplectic in these days.
Her father had become sick, terminally bedridden, was confined to one room on the second floor where her mother would periodically check in and pat his forehead with a warm cloth. He would make strange noises, hoist his index finger over his head and point it towards the ceiling as if denoting some important task. Then he would fall into a dreary slumber.
“You’ve got to start doing things now,” her mother would tell her as they sat around the dinner table, her father barely able to shovel a spoonful of potatoes into his mouth. “Got to start taking responsibility around here, because I won’t be here forever and neither will he and I think deep down you know that as well as I do. Think about that a while.” She was staring into her steaming bowl of pea soup now, its green depths so akin to the wetlands she loved exploring-
They didn’t know it, had no way of knowing, but the further she went from town, the more her head reeled in limitless possibilities and permutations. It was as if her mind was a walnut being cracked open to release a million little scattered glass shards which would join her swarm of leaves in the air, point her in one direction with their triangular certainty. Her vision glimpsed infinite whorls and loops, descending layers of arranged squares and parallelograms which gave way to more, and every time it seemed she might be approaching the bottom, new ones rose up from the limitless chasm.
The Superior had given her some texts to pore over, hefty tomes which couldn’t be easily concealed, which told of the history of the shadow people and their voyage over the sea of mists in the days before days, of the exile from the realm of dreams and the subsequent magick they brought. She dove headlong into this without restraint.
In the winter she would listen to the cold winds blow outside and the old forest plunge into sub-zero temperatures, and she would wonder how The Superior was doing, who never left that spot beside the old pool and who she never even witnessed eat or sleep. She thought about how The Superior probably constructed a field of warmth around herself by sheer will, and Amber looked forward with heady anticipation to the day she, too, could achieve such a feat.
She would put on layers of coats and scarves to stay warm, click down the trail, her boots producing an audible crunch against the fresh morning snow, and trek down to the river, making sure to think warm thoughts, thoughts of burning fire and roasting flame, and doing this she never felt cold, because in her mind there was always a cozy hearth.
The sky would darken, accentuated by wisps of billowing brown smoke from the northern industrial reaches, and she would watch her breath condensate on the current that carried it amid the falling snowflakes. She would shiver, displaying a momentary bout of weakness, then regain her firm resolve. She stayed out for entire nights like this, watching the reflections on the frozen surface of the stream, and the little fish swimming in pockets beneath the ice.
“Here you are,” said the Superior, mounting the summit to join her. “So peaceful out tonight. Quiet. It’s in quiet that we can hear the best things. Don’t you agree?”
“Yes, that’s true,” she replied. “Absence initiates presence. Universal principle.”
It dawned on her, then, that the Superior was no longer at her usual spot by the shores of the pool- for the first time in over a decade, the hag was up and alight, staring down at her with those violet irises which adjusted in tandem with the lunar cycle. Shrouded in a pale mist, snow collecting on her shoulders and hood.
“Oh, this,” she chuckled. “Just- thought it was time to move on. That’s all. Time I should be going, places to see and a world to explore. Long road ahead of me. So many things to consider.”
“But my education- the things you said you would provide-”
“You’re educated,” the Superior smiled. “As far as I can do for you, anyhow. You’ll need to educate yourself further, but I have faith in your resourcefulness and I think you’ll apply yourself wherever necessary. You’re my protege and I don’t choose such figures lightly, wouldn’t have appeared to you in the beginning if I didn’t trust you.”
“I’m going to miss you.”
“Well, absence initiates presence.”
They sat, side by side, until the sun rose, at which point Amber had momentarily fallen asleep, her right cheek buried in a foot of heavy snowfall, yet somehow it lacked the numbness or blood loss which would typically accompany such an incident. The Superior had vanished altogether, leaving only her imprint and a set of footsteps which tapered off until about twelve feet from the stream, at which point they stopped entirely.
Amber sat, hands clasped in her lap, contemplating the way the early morning clouds glistened off that rising disc in the east- and how, tonight, the moon would rise in such a similar fashion, framed by parallel clouds in a distinct mockery.
She staggered warily to her feet and walked along the gravel path towards home, looking down into the valley with the little town, the houses like miniatures caked in icing, the people little gingerbread figurines dancing merrily to their imminent consumption. It was distant, refracted through layers of atmospheric aether- reminding her that she was in a world removed from those petulant concerns, and would be unable to resume contact with them.
It was five years after the Superior’s departure that Amber woke up freezing. She thought it was to be a day like any other, a day of adventure and learning, a day to celebrate life, as were all days in that roaring period, but to her surprise she felt cold for the first time in a long while, and this was strange because the seasons had shifted around their zootrope again and it was now the middle of an insufferable July, the worst on record in decades.
She felt the chill accumulate, putting her hand to her forehead to check her temperature, going into the medicine cabinet to grab a thermometer, confused because given her level of prescience there was no way she could be coming down with anything, she hadn’t been sick since her youth, all that was behind her now.
Something else must have been weakening her clarity, bringing on this insipid, terrible fever. A bout of nausea gripped her, but she retained her composure as she shuffled down the stairs to greet her mother, who sat at her usual place in the kitchen, an idle glass of orange juice clutched in her manicured palm. Amber went around the cutting board and remained silent while her mother’s eyes followed her.
From the living room, a man entered.
He was large, with broad shoulders, though not quite stocky, holding spectacles and a briefcase. He was dressed in the attire of the big city- lapel, sports jacket, criss-crossed design with bright colors and an expensive watch. Amber’s sickness grew as she looked into those sharp angles- those hideous turns and swerves. His teeth were bright ivory, his grin was overwhelmingly sterile and forthcoming. He put his hand out for her to shake, a gorilla thing coated in hair and bristle. She didn’t move.
“Hello, Amber,” he said. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you. Your mother was just telling me about the- ah- circumstances here.” He opened the fridge and retrieved the carton of orange juice, pouring himself a glass while idling on the corner of the countertop.
“This is Mr. Keillor,” her mother hesitantly announced, visibly trembling. “He’s a friend I met recently. He’s going to ask you some questions. About what you know, and how you think. Like that. I guess I’ll leave you two alone, I just thought it would be necessary to introduce you.” And with that, she glanced over her shoulder to Mr. Keillor, who gave an enthusiastic wink and a jovial nod. She walked out and didn’t look back, shutting the door with a resounding thud.
“Hey, Amber,” Keillor remarked, grabbing her chin and tilting her neck further back than it was accustomed to. “We’re going to be good friends, I think, going forward. This is going to be pretty simple, and it shouldn’t take too long, if you play ball. If you don’t- well, there are other routes we could take. They might not be as preferable. But we’ll get there when we get there.” These aphorisms aside, he put on his glasses and sorted through several files in his briefcase, murmuring various abstract terminology under his breath.
The shards vibrated as one.
“First question,” he placed a graphic beneath her field of vision, which didn’t move. “Reply that you agree or you don’t agree. ‘I am easy to approach.’ Simple question.”
The triangles, none of which had perfect angles bur were rather aware of their microscopic imperfections, their atomic structure lending themselves to all manner of divots, leaps and bounds, stirred ever so slightly toward Mr. Keillor like the needle of a compass. All aligned on fairy string, the thinnest silk in the world, to minute detail by her will.
“You agree or you don’t agree,” he repeated.
The initial chill of the morning wore off and she was feeling warmer by the minute, beginning to feel the wonderful July sun on her shoulders, rising temperatures and the fields outside with the unwatered grass, crickets leaping from blade to blade, mayflies buzzing carelessly, dirt compacted by tractor wheels. The noise of the disc.
Keillor removed his glasses, which had become fogged up, blew on them, took out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his forehead. He grabbed Amber’s hands and pulled her closer towards him, shoving the paper in her face, giving her a sharp slap in a futile attempt to evoke concentration. He was feeling the heat now, too, but it was too late for him to do anything about it. He took his jacket off.
“You agree or you don’t agree.”
The shards were all set loose from their bows, the string made a wonderful snapping noise, the respective weight of each was calculated for maximum effect. They hit Keillor, and as they did his neck whipped back and twisted on its socket with a sickening crunch and he stopped breathing, his scarlet trachea visibly dislodged. Blood poured from the wound like a geyser, his briefcase was filled with the stuff, his hands let loose of hers and began contracting sporadically. His nervous system failed him, his spine buckled and he gave out, slumping forward on the counter like a rag doll.
“I don’t agree.”
It had been long enough, her mother reasoned. The results would be conclusive now. She checked her watch, and then blithely walked into the midst of the hellscape her home had become. She did not scream. She did not let out so much as an audible gasp, because she was reeling from the weight of the situation, and no sound would suffice to relay the chaotic weight that hung heavy over the room.
Keillor lay motionless, his head hanging from one thread of flesh, gaze turned upward, neck positioned in such a fashion as to make direct contact with her, as if to express regret for what they had attempted. His legs hung over the stool, his left foot swinging back and forth, the only sign of motion in this awful still life.
On the wooden floorboards were footprints in blood, each the precise size of her daughter, with that usual gait and marked intent. They stopped right before the window, which had been opened on its hinges, leaving the curtains to drift lazily outward.
She had been carried.
Eres ganata queret luot cioticil...