A Bright House

What are years going to amount to when a person is running for dear life? Even the term “dear life”, seems to thrum with Ray’s churning legs as they piston through cranial agony and field grasses. He has long known of and believed the truth of layered realities sharing the now of all that exists, but during this survive-or-else dash to the weird flowing cloud mist, Townes is nothing but pain and momentum equaling flight. He doesn’t want this particular answer, not yet. His work is not finished and every component of the amazing design that makes up his physical soul-housing falls into alignment with that ironclad truth. He runs through sheets of pain and an interior fog to match the billowing illumination just ahead, pouring through the trees and spreading out as though intelligently guided.

A sickening haunted recall is pounding the earth in time with his footfalls, as though this very incident has looped around to catch up with him, albeit decades older where this memory will only reawaken in the present act of fleeing. He feels more than hears it, every wing stroke closing the gap, their two shadows playing out in angles behind them. Whether or not Ray’s lifespan has been but a bridge back through “time” to this particular decision point of fate, he cannot know during the sprint into glowing white mist that poses yet another unknowable. How apropos that he has been reading so much recently about these glowing anomalous time warp manifestations, and so soon afterward he finds himself hurtling into precisely this mystery.

Ray is sprinting rapidly over uneven ground but inevitably he senses the nearness of Thunderbird’s power. He is twenty yards from the rolling perimeter of brilliant white fog when an awful double impact befalls his shoulder blades an instant before becoming the agonizing pierce of talons into the front and back of his upper body. His feet are still pummeling, propelling forward in the initial seconds of capture, but the horrible power of puncturing gripping lifting force exerts itself over his fleeing inertia. Ray’s shoulders and head lurch back into this reduced speed, even as his feet continue to move across the earth, but now he is lifting away. It is a sickening pain unlike the electromagnetic nausea already present; this is both a recycled terror of nightmare and a recalled buried memory. This is the crystal moment of prey becoming aware that there is no flexibility within the immutable laws of nature.

When his feet leave the ground entirely, Ray tilts his head further back into the awful field of view that is the massive raptor’s belly and chest. Its neck is outstretched, head slicing into the beginnings of milky white fog bank as they lift off. He can see Thunderbird’s muscles moving in the sheer might of those broad wing strokes, dimly but horribly aware of both lancing pain in his shoulders and the no longer available earth upon which he had been running. For the first seconds of this lift off flight, Ray’s arms hang limp and useless. The density of mist increases, as does a pressure in his ear drums that seems to decrease the buzzing of carbonated blades in his cranium. With no way of knowing how far above ground he is, Townes comes back to physical life with a sudden thrashing of both arms. Fingers finding a roughly calloused ice cold talon, then with both hands pulling the jacket open in an effort to fall out of it. He feels and then hears the fabric ripping, followed by the worst pain of all, that of his flesh at the front and back of each shoulder giving way to this tug of war between Thunderbird’s lift and gravity’s pull.

This is blind panic and the accumulation of every cell wanting to stay alive. It is encoded within every living thing, no matter a hive-minded creature or a so-called self-aware being under a guise of individuality. Townes struggles furiously, coming somewhat back into his lucidity through the pain and terror of it. This is how he falls free of the mighty hold of Thunderbird, with a frenzied thrashing and both arms ripping away from the jacket in those lethal clutches. His outer layers of flesh and epidermis lacerate in a horrid scraping fire but he feels the bodily disconnection between hunter and prey. For that moment as he drops away, his eyes find the fog shrouded massive silhouette of wings and body continuing forward, fading into the milky cloak of unknown origin. Just before the heavy impact of Ray’s crash landing, perhaps a five second fall that seemed much more, there is another shrieking sound from Thunderbird. Ray’s brain has a split second to process the different tonality in it as compared to the previous cry, and then his entirety of senses collides with high velocity impact into what seems to be a coniferous bush.

There is a clashing of his teeth. A badly bitten tongue. His entire head thrusting through narrow branches and their needles. A futile effort to position his arms forward in a skull sheltering gesture but the velocity is too great, the angle steep. Split seconds of I am going to die wrapped into the subsequent inertia of his body, positioned in a grotesque fifteen degree angle belly flop, as it smashes through the shrub that has saved his life for the moment. Next there comes the uniquely indescribable instant of being knocked utterly unconscious; an eyelids closed concussion with the hard ground that flares crimson heat lightning, billows the breath out of his lungs, and quickly melts into an all encompassing wrap of pure black nothing. Before he leaves behind every cognitive awareness, Ray has a taste of his own blood, a need to vomit his soul into the grass, and seems to hear a very distant wail of “oh, no” in a woman’s voice.

left

starting to the left

is it in the skull? along this ground?

left and it slithers, what?, around the front of me, a sound snake

no, it is

a left hand

mine

in the palm, that feels like stones and grass

then it is the other hand, too

so fucking dizzy

such pain all around

i don’t want to open my eyes

i heard someone, a woman, far off

oh no, she was saying

have i been seen?

can i see?

oh my god

everything feels broken

i can’t see anything but this little bit of ground in front of me

in all this whiteness

Some gradual slinking awareness bleeds back into the blood in his mouth. First his face is on fire, then the shoulders, and all the dizzy disconnect a knocked out brain can perceive through... what feels to be his own moving body... he has been crawling on his stomach, for how long? Unconscious yet crawling with the vestiges of animalistic willpower to survive whatever it is that is happening to him. Immense pressure anew in his ears, like that of an airplane cabin but more intense, and in this thick aural rhythm of his pulse, no other sound can reach him. That same slowly growing outside perception of a cold morning field floor beneath his grasping and pulling hands, becomes the barest flickering strobe of recall.

That he was pursued by the creature, lifted from earth, and struggled free. A mind’s eye replaying of falling forward into the densest fog he has ever experienced.

Elongated half-known epochs of his crawling along the field’s earth, unable to see beyond a foot or two, therefore crawling with eyes closed to cope with a hive of stabbing within without everywhere around. Like a baby. Like a garden slug. Crawling, swallowing the iron laden taste of blood, and dirt, a long rent in his tongue, something hanging from one of his hands. He collapses, chin to grass, tilts his head slightly to barely see an outstretched palm that is still wrapped in the long braid of his biological father. There is something horrifying and reassuring there; it shares realities with the smashed marrow of Ray’s bones, all lit up in damage of a most exquisite parameter.

He seems to resume crawling. Can’t be sure. Perception is diluted by too many nerve ending shrieks. The shroud upon the land and his senses is pervasive, as is an ugly stillness and quiet that clamps down around all but for his gasping, grasping, rasping. Down here inside the swoon of it, he wants to give up entirely. Just succumb to the enormity of whatever has taken place. Whatever it takes to be rid of this wracked body. The slug made man, higher being made tiny, reaches grabs pulls pushes with legs and feet that hold no feeling but seem to be functioning. Time and white mist coalesce into a vacuum. He seems to crawl with something in mind, but has to focus on swallowing the refilling mouth of blood, when he isn’t spitting it out and tugging his chest through it.

so it is the trees

i wanted to get into the trees

maybe it won’t see me if i get into the trees

A looming line of shadow presents itself through the fog. It has mirage qualities as the mist is moving in barely perceptible waves, eddies, clouds within clouds. This is the forest edge. He must have been crawling for an hour. For hours. For days. Since his mother gave birth. Since Delsin Shacapot inseminated a lover’s egg. Crawling to this pathetic broken wretch mystery juncture. With fewer answers than he carried only a day ago. Ray’s shoulders feel as though pinned down beneath boulders. The pain therein has shifted from an upper register scream to something throbbing and core deep. It is agony in a baritone. It has him wanting to puke, to give up again, this time for keeps. If this is it -

is this what i amount to?

a life of trying to help others

slapped down like a gnat

by what?

whom?

why?

Somehow, and this is not fully a conscious experience, Ray proceeds with his slow slither and crawl into the first few feet of tree trunks and shade. He is little more than a moving swoon. A blind bundle of will to live, on the waver. His veins and arteries have renewed that carbonation buzz, to a less painful degree but within the competing context of all else that has been smashed and torn. From some infinite inner space of mind, comes a weak clairvoyant visual of a foot appearing within the marmalade of fog coating the forest floor. It is moccasin clad, ornately stitched and heavily beaded, only inches from his right hand. He reaches and grabs at the ankle attached to it, feeling tree bark, and collapses into a second free fall of impenetrable jet black.

More time snake slither blood taste womb hold. More let it end let it end now cognition of body lightning, forks striking, a trillion tines, a billion times. And cold. It feels within the black wrap, that time of day has been ticking passing bleeding out like the tongue in his mouth. Several times, in durations impossible to know between the openings, his eyelids flutter. The fog is always there. So is the sickening quiet. His breathing feels shallow.

Even the pain insinuates a lower volume, and he wonders if he is dying. It is a weakened wonder, without the self concern that one would expect.

here lies ray

died on a ley line

his work unfinished

ghost parent lies, ray

died on a ley line

From this universe wide enfoldment of collapsing reality, Ray is sucked clean of all recognizable selfdom for what in the initial knowing of it, feels to be an irrevocable loss of individuality and personal subjectivity. There are twofold horrors in this paradoxical shift; he mourns the fading perception of what was a familiar earthly realm, and weakly accepts what is taking place beneath his fallen broken body. That meek acceptance should feel intrinsically vulgar, for it embraces an escape from pain in a way that cheats the precious gift of mortal life. Yet it doesn’t. This makes it all the more horrible when Ray feels himself renew a crawl into the denser forest, now up on all fours with his eyes shut, somehow not hitting tree trunks or becoming snared in bushes. It is from On High, a guided path. One he will never earn the right to comprehend if he does not blindly accept this. So Ray Townes not Ray Townes; he crawls again, some modicum of strength that wasn’t his in the interval after crashing back to earth.

After another barely noted expanse of mocked time, he can feel that what was cool soil and forest floor ground cover is changing into saturated sponge-like earth. The fog here is densest of all. His fingers are barely visible now. With each ten foot and hand contacts, the soil becomes water. An inch, then two, suddenly a half foot all around his legs and forearms. He crawls into a funnel of sorts, because the feeling is that all behind him is closing inward, closing off. The funnel is morphing from a bottle neck into that which stitches and melts itself closed as he moves through it; a no going back law coexisting within a partly three dimensional forest that is possible through photosynthesis as only a fraction of its why.

It is very nearly a euphoric relief to hear the sound of running water. It comes through gradually as his body sinks into the opening pores of soil sponge beneath his weight. Up to his chest now, it doesn’t occur to him to attempt a regaining of his feet. Somehow he knows that his legs cannot hold him upright. There is a moment of sheer panic when he remembers the braid around his hand, and struggles to lift his arm from the water, peering into the fog to see the hair only inches from his eyes. His arm looks distinctly odd. It may be a trick of the anomalous fog, but he seems able to see through his flesh. Can see its new opaque transcendence. Its changing molecular structure. There is no way to scream, then. Not even a true will for it. He stares at the increasing transparency of his appendage, then the still solid appearance of Delsin’s braid, and feels a sudden complete opening of the sodden ground below him.

falling

flying

drowning

dreaming