Thu, 19 May 2005

dried hives
Up on the waves, I saw the trunks of dead trees pierce the icy black water, unwound ropes lashed as a net between them where two old women built a home of ships torn open on the reefs, lines trailing into the current, mirror-shards used to fool and catch birds now set to blind anyone stupid enough to approach. I was that stupid, then, on my raft of dead sailors, bloated and sealed in brine, the mouths sewn shut and the eyes staring toward the ocean floor, where they knew they rightly belonged, so as optics and logistics allowed me to approach I granted them what they wished, and severed the ropes and stabbed holes in their distended stomachs to that they filled with water, and sank, as I climbed up the tree to seek the council of the fish-women. “Leave us be!” they shouted, throwing broken crockery and buckets of spoiled stew at me, though I was too quick for them, and lept from branch to branch until I reached the net-house. “We will open the cabinet of your chest and feast for days on the organs within!” they shrieked, shaking strange metal blade-machines in the air, which rang like finger cymbals, and made me dizzy to hear, as when I had eaten hashish candy and spent days in some faceless woman’s bed. I used the power of my eternal will to close off the sound in my ears, and tied my feet to the planks beneath me so as not to fall back to the ocean, and roared “I have travelled for months through every hell offered by soil or water, forsaken cross and crown, hid within another man’s skin and left children to starve in the snow so that I could seek your council! I will not be turned away now! You will tell me what I must know!” The two old women spoke to each other, quietly, in a series of coded tones, and then replied in a single voice that they would answer a single question, and then be done with me.
(12:23.05.19.2005) [/scrytch] #