Yesteryear Fiction

Amongst The Lilies
By Susan Dale


Onwards, he moved while staying beside the river. The river seemed a magnet of life; ever drawing other lives to it. Yet shaky from observing and listening to the firefights, the river was David’s comfort; also his sorrow, ‘all those deaths, so much suffering.’
Letting go of his controls, he was following time to wherever it would take him. Now into gray moments that emptied into a thin blue before sunrise, and the sun-struck impulses of a new day. Birds soared around a mountain pass; an ascending sun caught the pale feathers beneath their wings. It caught too the undersides of tree’ leaves and the silvery currents of a mountain stream. Winds picking up loose soil, whirled it through the air in pastel dances; all part of a new morning.
‘Morning celebrations, like streamers in the winds.’ His spirits rose to fly with the silver streaks around him. Entering his world then, voices of innocence; children’s voices singing songs of peace. He followed the songs to see a parade of children marching on a mountain path; the mountain being bathed in the fires of a rising sun. Wearing white clothes and flower necklaces, the young marchers carried lit candles and moved to follow one in unison.
David‘s heart skipped beats. He thought, ‘doves of peace, and I so yearn for peace.’
Hurriedly, hopefully he ran towards the parade of children. He called out for them to wait. “Wait, wait, wait” from one mountain to another.
But before he could join up with the young pilgrims, they circled a pass that took them south and out of sight. Already, the fires of sun-rise were dimming into glowing embers. Winds whooshed from around the mountain to carry off the last traces of sunrise dragging his feet when he heard an exuberant waterfall splashing down the mountain; its liquid song washed away his disappointment.
He looked to see the river waters changing courses. ‘taking another trip; this time beneath the earth to become an underground river.’
The chameleon river traveled underground for over a mile before it reappeared above the ground; this time as a thin stream. Sunrays falling into the stream colored the waters apricot. His eyes settled on the waxy lilies floating back and forth in the sunny stream. He watched them drift through the waters, and he drifted with them even when he saw his wife, Rita, floating amongst them.
‘Like Ophelia with water lilies surrounding her,’ was his first thought; matter-of-fact and instantaneous___ before the agony of he and Rita hit him full-force in the gut. He jumped in the stream to follow her. Behind her heavy hair; remembering it falling to wrap around her shoulders, falling to wrap around the two of them in the throes of love.
‘But if she is floating downstream, why is her face being mirrored back to me in the waters? Her face; that wonderful face of old masters’ beauty; Botticelli features, crimsons touching her cheekbones. Eyes of Renoir’s blue-green. An elegant face; a face contradictory with the sensuality of her thick mouth, the cleft in her chin.
And all of that beauty maimed by the scorn flashing in her eyes for most everyone, but me. For me there was adoration that later turned to desperation. Pleas in her voice when she was telling me she was pregnant. Voice catching on her words; soft, quick words. She kept losing the words, tripping over them. So very difficult for Rita to ask without saying the words ’help me.’
She didn’t know how to ask; no practice. Asking wasn’t part of her. She had everything she could want and so much more … unbelievable beauty, the prestige and wealth of being the only child of a renowned heart surgeon. An abundance of good fortune, hers from birth. She got what she wanted simply by desiring it.
Moreover, Josh would have gone to the ends of the earth for her, and gone in chains. However, she didn’t want Josh. She wanted me. I didn’t want any of it except her adoration and the lovemaking. What resulted from our passionate intimacies, I surely did not want. Not the baby: not a wedding ring. Commitment? Sticky; scary to me. My family, my security gone when I was yet a boy. Stuck in a trailer with my stepmother and her brood. Closed in, could not escape the walls of Karen’s shoddy life. The twins continually whining, Rick’s adolescent moods. Running to get away. Staying away whenever I could manage it, so that when Rita told me that she was pregnant, I fought like a wild thing the together-ness for which she was yearning. What my life had been up to then decreed that I would be unable to face commitment.’
He felt a pang in his heart; it hurt to accept the truths of who he was. ‘And this is what I live with: Incapable of commitment, I am incomplete. Can never be complete. Abandoned Rita, as my mother and father abandoned me by their’ dying. And isn’t that the way it works; the gene pool and/or the biblical scourge? The sins of the father pass from one generation to the next.’
Rita amongst the water lilies, in a dream state floating down the stream of memories, swaying amongst lily’ leaves. Downstream, an eidolon of bright colors. Versus, the lonely colors of his life. Mirrored back to him in the glassy waters colors darkened with regrets; shadowed with his shadowy life. Colors blurred, flying by in the currents. Always on the run, hanging on to no one. Rushing along. No commitments to nobody. Colors solitary, sinking with sadness; going down, drifting away. Pink and yellow, white too, the water lilies floating Rita along.
Slowly did he lift his head. More slowly did he step out of the river narrowed into a stream of memories. ‘I meet tomorrows here, but couldn’t change melting arvin’s intentions. Can‘t change a moment of my past with Rita.’
Sighing his soul back inside his body, he slumped his shoulders around his chest. He shaded his eyes to look off into the distance and see what lie ahead. ‘I already know the terrible miles behind me.
Ahead, the stream wanders into channels that close off, one after the other, to form small peninsulas. The waters alter the shapes of the land; therefore, determine the way creatures of the earth will travel
them.’
Circling the peninsulas, David followed the stream. Above him birds singing slow songs telling of a sultry afternoon. Ahead of him the currents came together to curl into spunky waters that foamed and babbled, as they rushed around the walls of a crumbling temple. In front of the temple the waters came together to rest quietly in a round basin where stood a holy man having his feet bathed. Loin-clothed, with a stringy body of blue veins, the man stood mesmerized with eyes closed in prayer. His palms he turned outward to the sun in a fixing of his soul to the light of the heavens.
His prayers carried beyond the basin; David felt them reaching inside his being to give him new courage to face old dreads. He jumped back in the memory-laden steam to finish off the tragedy of he and Rita. Shadows were lengthening and widening to wrap up these sad moments.
Mirrored in the waters, her advanced pregnancy; weighted, engulfed in hormones. She was saying, “If you could stay as a special forces’ instructor in the states … “
Words carried in the back of his head, carried from upstream to be with him now. Words foaming over the hard rocks of his determination. Coming up against a stubborn shake of his head. Stopping her cold.
She went on, regardless, giving him another chance he didn‘t take.
thinnest of voices; sounding as though she had rehearsed it.
“We?”
“Me and the baby … I mean when the baby is born. Ah, ah, the baby; yours, err, ours.“
And his reply to her expression of wanting him, needing him- “You’ve taken everything else, Rita. Now you want to interfere with my career?”
The waters lie motionless in shock; an ice cold current ran through them and over his feet and legs. Shivering, he remembered, ‘after my words, she rushed off. Left her pride behind her. Tripped over her last hope. Running in an slow way; intentions stronger than body; one body carrying two. Out the door. Into her car. The jag squealing down the street to the stop sign she didn’t heed … to gone forever. Gone with our unborn son.’
Above David, litanies of bird song. Inside, a requiem of Rita; a dirge played back to him in the liquid verses of the stream; the stream foaming with the soldier’s tears; with Rita’s tears. ‘Enough tears, enough sorrow for the waters to flow through me eternally.’
And in the slow cosmic rhythms of high noon, the waters began closing off. But David wasn’t watching the landscape changing courses. He was deep down in remembering; so wishing that he could go back but for a moment or two and change his words to his wife, which would have changed her rush out the door. Thereby change the accident at the stop light.
‘It’s like an anchor in the stream holding me to the moments. But I cannot change one iota of one moment. Rita is gone. But not gone, that grim time I so regret. Worse than losing Melissa, White Horse, and scout patrol; losing Rita is the most difficult for me to carry because it was, it is I who am responsible.’
All of it done now; the entire scenario: the waters running clear. Nothing, on one looking up at him. Rita downstream, lost amongst the lilies. ‘Enough of the stream of memories; way more than enough.‘
Stepping out of the stream and walking along, he felt the land beneath his feet turn gritty. He changed courses__ from looking inward__ to looking outward; outward and down to stone-filled grounds waving with clusters of mountain poppies. The poppies waltzing with tall grasses blushing pink.
He realized that now he was leaving the wet lands behind. ‘These poppies and grasses are the vegetation that grows where lands are dry.’
Onwards he trod: past barren mountains and their striated peaks. The mountains, three of them, rose in a triangle; the mountain furthest back was deeply fissured with dark stone faces that grimaced down at him. And as he walked, he was within a silence so vast, so complete, he could hear the heartbeat of the universe; he heard it beating heavy. A universal heart; its arteries filled with the troubles of humankind. His heart and the heart of the universe beating together in a rhythm traveling from there to here, and back again.


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Susan’s poems and fiction are on Eastown Fiction, Ken *Again, Hackwriters, Yesteryear Fiction, Feathered Flounder, and Penwood Review. In 2007, she won the grand prize for poetry from Oneswan.

A Cosmological Battle
Susan Dale


He was wondering where to go next when a thundering surge of water hit him full force. Pushed backwards, then startled to standstill by the water currents rushing at him, David fell to his knees. He was within a chaos of swirling waters. Expelling waters from his mouth, he was, simultaneously, shaking water from his hair. Then he heard another roar. More rushing waters. They took him from his knees to flat on his back. Covered in water, he kicked to stay afloat.

From a distance and moving closer, the deep sound of drums booming. David could feel the thuds of marching feet. ‘And now I’m hearing tambourines too.’

With body underwater and eyes peering in the direction of the commotion, David saw a parade of tribal men marching forward while shaking sheepskin tambourines and beating drums. More booming, shaking, and marching … and these loin-clothed aborigines were in chest-deep waters. They stopped outright.

David thought, ’What strange-looking men! Even in my previous dealings with mountain tribes and cave dwellers, I have never seen such primitive tribes. I do remember hearing tales of primeval peoples that have forever dwelt in ancient rain forests; unchanged from one generation to the next. I thought them tall tales. Now I know they were accurate summations.’

Living far from civilizations for thousands of years, these aborigines were descended directly from the demonic Mara. Short and stocky with eyebrows joined over flat noses, under their noses puffed thick lips. Wide, round eyes peered out from their swarthy faces.

‘They are presently involved in bringing forth a climatic conclusion of some sort. The drumbeats are becoming louder and more intense to reach a crescendo that, low and behold, are parting the waters.’

David, being thrown backwards with the parting tides, saw, but could scarcely believe the amazing scene being played out before him. ‘What’s this; waters parting?!’

He was so astounded by the waters rolling into two giant waves, one right and one to the left that he forgot to paddle to keep afloat. Glub, glub, he began sinking.

He set his feet to paddling motions that kept him afloat. ‘Is there, could there be any relationship between the drums beating and the waters parting?’

And while wondering, debating, adding up, and discarding, to his profound amazement, up from the parting waters weaved a strange creature. ‘It looks like a giant serpent or a dragon. What can it be?‘

David rubbed the waters from his eyes and looked again. ‘Still there; whatever it is. What is it? A serpent? A water lizard? Ten foot tall by twenty foot wide, whiskers around its mouth. Body and fins covered in moss and seaweed. Heavy enough, powerful enough to shake the forest floor into parting waters.’

Now he was seeing the breath of the dragon-serpent expelled to blazes that scorched the leaves and grasses.

Weaving, as it rose upwards, the serpent was swaying in rhythm to Mara’ drumbeats. His gestures most kingly, as upwards he rose, swaying in slow, regal motions; back straight and head high.

David thought, ‘lucky for me, the Mara are so involved in showing obeisance to the serpent king that they are not looking my way.’

At first, he was greatly relieved that no one of the fierce primitives had taken notice of him. But then, he was overcome with doubts. ‘I can’t be sure of anything anymore. Moreover, the realities of my previous life have not prepared me for what I am now observing. Are the Mara’ ancestors too involved in high drama to bother with me? Or have I so metamorphosed into the environment that I am invisible to other humans? What kind of humans are they anyway? What kind am I?’

He looked first at his hands: he counted the fingers ‘… 3,4,5 … 8,9,10.’
He ran his fingers around his face. He wiggled his toes. ‘All here; here to me, anyhow.’

His focus reversed from his fingers and toes to the Mara. And as he watched, he saw the Mara offering the serpent king the sacrificial fish flaying about on the forest floor. With drummers beating behind him and a ringing bell in hand, a Mara bell-ringer ding-donged while chanting worshipful rites to the serpent. And as the serpent ascended even higher from the flood waters, currents were rising and forming little circles.

Astounded to truly astonished, with mouth dropping open in disbelief, David observed the bubbles popping open. He rubbed his eyes again. ‘What the hell!?!’

Emerging from the rounded bubbles, to pop up before David’s wide eyes, were miniature dragons. ‘Horns rise from their heads … and across their backs run zigzag points; the points as bright-green as the dragon’ bodies.’

But before David could digest these strange realities, these little creatures were skimming across the waters, even as drums and tambourines were keeping time to the drama playing out on the jungle stage.

Then another disturbance. ’Sounds like this one is coming from the trees.’

His eyes shot upwards to see leaves a’ flutter on the tree branches. And when he heard eerie cackling from above, he knew that these scary hissings were coming by way of the tree spirits.

When the tree spirits hissed, the Mara pulled water pipes from the waists of their loin-clothes. Puffs from their pipes produced curls of smoke rising to call the tree spirits to battle.

From out of the treetops rushed the spirits with cackling warnings: they seemed eager to do battle for the fish flapping about on the flooded forest floor.

The miniature dragons zip-zipped across the waters to circle the giant serpent. With mournful calls so loud, as to be seemingly directed to the sun, the serpent was preparing the dragons for the oncoming battles. The dragons chattered back in concordance. And in the next moment of these un-moments, the dragons turned to zip-zip-skim across the waters to head towards the tree spirits; the spirits with fangs in their mouths, bald heads, and claws on their feet.

The drums were booming louder, tambourine rhythms skittering fast to faster. David shivered in anticipation. In between the drums and the tambourine rhythms came the pregnant pauses, which held the beginning of battle escalations.

His head twisted back and forth to take it all in. ‘Dragons are shooting flames into the trees. Hissing announces the tree spirits; claws extended and pointed teeth snapping. Back and forth; the cackling of tree spirits; the flames of dragons. The spirits are jumping from the branches with talons unfurled. They too want the fish flopping about on the flooded floor and are more than eager to battle for them. A cosmological struggle is taking place.’

The forest floor resonated with the struggles for dominance. Trees shaking, and spouts forming to spin through the waters. The winds moaned with battle furies. The tree spirits jumped to land on the dragons; their claws dug deep into dragon’ skins. In retaliation, the dragons turned to spit the fire that would sizzle the spirits.

‘Talons and horns, versus shooting flames. Ripped dragon’ skins floating on the waters; tree spirits screaming as they burst into flames.’

The serpent shook his tail at the spirits and sent them into watery graves.

Collisions, entanglements.

The green breath of the spirits shot out in such powerful blazes that they crumbled the dragons that came in contact with it.

Screaming, horrendous howls. Snarling, scorching, hissing, scratching. The serpent tail snapping sharply. Legs and horns, claws and feet tossing about in the air. All tumbling across the waters, then splashing and sinking.

‘Such calamities!’ David marveled.

Then the serpent noted the tree spirits gaining ground. More, than more dragon skins were floating across the waters. He beat the waters with his clawed feet. He snapped his tail and brought forth the water spouts that shot the dragons into the air where they met the evil spirits on the tree branches.

Fast motions: spinning: tails and feet shooting out: fiery breaths flaming to scorch the spirits, to set the tree leaves in flames. The spirits tumbled from the branches to fall into the waters where they were beaten with the tail of the serpent. And in the background, boomed Mara drums to bring encouragement to the serpent and his band of miniature dragons.

From his vantage point in the waters, David, dumbfounded while being held in paralysis, watched with wide eyes. ’These are some tremendous goings-on.’

Scorched by the shooting flames, more and more spirits were falling from the treetops. With feet and tail, the serpent beat the waters with such ferocity, that after the spirits fell, they were slapped into death. Glub, glub, gurgle, gurgle: they fell to the bottom of the flooded forest.

The water slowly began to rescind … and the Mara figured that now was the time for them to jump into battle. Stomping forward while drawing their swords, they drove the tree spirits under the waters. The other spirits, the Mara drove to the trees with their swords. These spirits ran rapidly up the trunks. To the branches they skittered, then up further to take defeated refuge within the leaves.

By spreading their arms to wide widths, the Mara offered the serpent all the fish that it desired. And after the serpent ate his fill, dipping his head, grabbing the fish, and bringing his head back up to swallow them, the Mara gathered other fish in their arms.

With head held high, the five-legged-serpent took his lead in a forming parade; the dragons followed to march through the flooded forest behind him. Mara drum beaters followed the dragons. And behind the drummers, Mara marchers were high-stepping and zipping across the receding waters; all were heading to the Mara village, soon to be jumping and sizzling with celebratory exuberance.

Drums and tambourines fading into the distance when David filled his poncho with a handful of floundering fish. He was hearing gulping sounds. He looked around to see a gigantic mouth in the forest floor. But he believed. All that he observed today prepared him for the greedy mouth drinking, gurgling, and swallowing.

From his thighs, to his knees, to his ankles in the water, onwards David traveled. He was heading towards the rays of sun that heralded his exit away from the flooded forest. ‘Goodbye to dragons and tree spirits, to mythical peoples, to a serpent. Goodbye to my great, grand adventure, and on to another.’


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Susan writes, rewrites, submits and submits again. She has dreams of her books being published, living in Paris, chapbooks born of her poetry, books of her short stories … etc. etc.

Her poems and fiction are on Eastown Fiction, Tryst 3, Word Salad, Pens On Fire, Hackwriters, and Penwood Review. In 2007, she won the grand prize for poetry from Oneswan.

Grasses of Remembrance
By Susan Dale


His soul sighed off; David felt a magnetic stillness of something close at hand; a stillness near to that what has been. Then, in a sudden whoosh, his soul returned and he was within the moment.

He looked around to see nomads and their Saddhu with a blue rope wrapped around his head. The Saddhu, positioned yogi-fashion, sat cross-legged within a ring of stones; the ring placed in the middle of tall grasses. These same grasses were waving David forward. Their emerald blades stretched tall and luminous. He felt them brushing his legs.

He stumbled. “Whoops.”

After righting himself, he hunkered down on his thighs to read the plaque that tripped him, and thus know that he was walking across the burial grounds of Asian ancestors.

Invisible presences rustled through the grasses to breathe into his being. He felt them emerging from within the earth. He saw them taking shape; amorphous, blurry forms with slanted eyes and bird song voices even as the heat was hammering him into the earth from whence came the Asian spirits. Within the bowels of the earth lie a mysterious underworld, and David became a part of it when his steps rustled the grasses of remembrance. Moving beyond the yesterdays that gleamed with life’s contrasting colors; wandering into yesterdays and journeying into time unknown; uncounted.

He looked ahead to see Asian wanderers on donkeys; the donkeys plodding along in thick, sure steps. He watched them, as he walked an irrigation canal gone dry. But when the Asians and their beasts of burden strode over a hill, he lost sight of them. To the right of him ran a body of water resurrected from a canal gone dry. The river, through time, had wandered off to change courses and shapes to become a river, meek and muddy. The river passing from one life into another, as was David. And when he meandered around a hill of stacked boulders, he saw at the mountain’ base, stone feet shaped in caves that resembled toes, rounded in form.

‘Through the decades the river has eaten away the mountain bottom to carve and form these cave-feet.’

Stone roofs topped the caves; the roofs darkened by monsoon rains. David moved closer to the caves and saw, at one of cave’s entrances, lie a pile of bones. Because the Asian ancestors had gained access to his being from the grasses of remembrance, David knew that these were dragon bones.

‘So, this is the cave I choose for my refuge.’

He walked past the dragon-bone entrance to be enclosed within the cave’s musty walls. Back further he went to be within a darker realm in back of the cave. He squinted until his eyes became accustomed to the dark. Sun rays beamed into the cave to highlight the stakes of long-ago warriors; they were propped against a back wall. The Asian ancestors whispered to him of the stakes being hidden in the cave by warriors, who, long ago, used them in their battles against the dragons; the dragons, whose bones were piled at the cave entrance. Shadows of these stakes moved across the caves with the sun’s journey across the heavens until sundown threw off all shadows of day.

David stayed still and quiet while being enclosed within the cave’s walls; reflecting through a time measured by the numbing silence of an awe that took hold of him. Amongst the cave’ shadows floated forms of warriors and fire-breathing dragons.

First, fell a grape twilight, then night descended carrying her basket of pomegranates; the fruit of dreams floating forth warriors and the dragons silhouetted against a back wall of the cave. He sat spellbound with the burning silence of his thoughts, and something living inside of him, even when he was overtaken with sleep. Sleep and the way it dreams___ into a cave within the gaze of a melancholy moon; the moon sitting directly above the cave to highlight the stakes’ shadows and press them tight against the walls. Asian warriors moving in and out amongst their own shadows? But when night ebbed and flowed to its darkest zenith, night overtook shadows of the moon‘s journey, even as warriors were sharpening stakes and hunkering to swirl swords above their heads.

Sleep eclipsed the deaths of David’s platoon. Sleep pushed to the back of beyond, his mother and grandfather‘s horrendous accident. It overshadowed his father’s murder in a bar in Toledo. Sleep was merciful on this lost night in a cave fronted by dragon bones. Sleep erased too the accident that caused the death of his wife and unborn son.

David, lost in the dark of life, was found with the moon’s silver presence shining above him in a fullness of grace that filled the night, and gave him a sleep of the exhausted.

He awakened to the moon rounding a bend in the skies to clear the
way for the sun’s smile of greeting. Walking out from the cave, he again passed the dragon bones. He was leaving behind the stakes and the strange dreams. He entered a landscape being bathed with the rays of a new morning; dawn widening into sunrise.

He wondered- ‘what is real? The dreams? My yesterdays? Those who wandered back into the present?’

Not knowing but carrying all these yesterdays, regardless, he journeyed onwards. With him, ancestors’ grasses and the dreams of warriors, his yesterdays; the ancestors, and all rounding into the circle of life.


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Susan has poems and fiction on Eastown Fiction, Tryst 3, Word Salad, Pens On Fire, and Yesteryear Fiction. In 2007, she won the grand prize for poetry from Oneswan.

White Moths Fluttering
By Susan Dale


Above the indentation in the earth, the trees and the underbrush shifted position; all together and at the same time. There was a great sound like the earth heaving. Rabbits and deer jumped high before they raced off in frightened flurries.

The eyes of the Cherokee son widened to see the earth cracking open with wide gaps and fierce sounds to swallow the soft circular ground. Crashes and billows of smoke. The earth shook to wide gaps that cracked open and sunk deep. The dry river bed began filling with water. Astounded, the Cherokee son realized that he was witnessing the ground collapsing into a sink hole, half a mile long; a chasm that shook the river back into its long trench. He heard the splashing of water and saw it coming in an onslaught. Hurriedly, he jumped out of the now dry river bed before it filled with water. Then he turned to watch the water fill the trench and splash along merrily.

The smoke puffing above the sink hole cleared for him to see that below the earth that had collapsed lie the barest remnants of a long-ago village; primitive and abandoned to the ages. He saw too the stone steps that climbed down into the ground, as was he. Down he descended to inspect the long-ago buried village now being revealed.

He wondered- ‘How far is the village below the earth; twenty, twenty-five feet?’

All around him a musty smell of the bowels of the earth. In front of him waved the roots of trees trying to climb back into the earth; thin and silvery; struggling to find the ground to sink into. The roots waved eerily above him; they gave him the willies, even as he realized that they were only looking for directions on where they should go.

And when he bent to inspect the earth around the forsaken village, to his amazement, he saw the ground was composed of living soil. The patches of dark, knobby growth that formed tiny circles in the earth was crypto soil, composed of living organisms. He ran his hands over the top of the soil, and closed his eyes to hear the soil speak to him of the primitive village and of its peoples. Once alive, their presences were still within the soil. The jolts of energy coming from the beings once inhabiting the stone dwellings were Asian ghosts with the background of the village showing through their white-washed presences. Here they were before him, eating, drinking, hunting, and hiding from their enemies beneath the earth. Propagating, nourishing their young, etc. The soil lived yet with their present selves; unspoken, unseen. He saw some climbing out of the ground to watch for enemies, to hunt, to forage. Some were coming down the steps for protection from the elements.

Hunkering on the rocks, watching him now.

The Cherokee son blinked to the white moths suddenly replacing the ghosts. Fluttering about the stones; white wings to the cave; eternity to the villagers.

Stones were stacked to form walls five foot high to separate the dwellings of the individual families. In the middle of the cavern, over a stack of piled twigs, swung a community pot for cooking. Piles of ashes were scattered below the pot. And to the far left of the abandoned village, stretched other steps; they were going further down. Wondering where those steps led, the Cherokee son walked over to see the steps descending to forty feet or better. He squinted through the darkness to see another dwelling place of stone walls and a cooking pot.

One built upon another. One world over another. Time gone by into time reborn within the living soil. In this habitat beneath the earth, birth and death - sleeping, awakening - eating - consummating. And more. The buried village was brimming with life thereafter. Life to death, and death and life colliding to merge inside the living soil. And all flown into life on the wings of the white moths.

And then, something shining up at him: something compelling him to climb down the steps to have a better look. And in the shadowed darkness, as though it was meant for him, lie a knife with a wooden handle and the long blade that coaxed him down with its gleam. All the way down the steps, he descended to walk over then bend to pick up the knife. He ran his fingers carefully over the blade; his now. With the knife in one hand, he looked around to see but another set of steps.

‘Can it truly be,’ he wondered as he felt his way down yet another set of steps.

The mysteries of time taking him deeper into other mysteries of other times. He was so far down now that he was having trouble seeing. He lit his lighter then jolted upright. There, below both stone villages, one stacked over the other, lie a burial ground of skeletons. Their grinning white skulls and rattly bones lie scattered about in mad disarray. The sight of those picked-clean bones took the Cherokee son from revulsion to speculation.

‘Can this be the remains of a mass sacrifice? Or simply the burial grounds of the village?’

No matter. The anxiety running rampant within him told him that it was time to turn around and go back up the way he had come down. With knife in hand and fear in his heart, he hastened to climb the steps. From one set of steps up to another, and then up another. Up through the stillness of here and gone. Up, and hearing the river of time back in place and splashing into infinity. The river running from and back into time. And the Cherokee son running over the living soil with its breath of life. In transition he was, and within a cyclical bond with the earth.

***************

On the top step it lie coiled in a cyclical ring. Arrested while waiting with coiled muscles; taut and motionless. It waited on the step between exit and entrance; between life-giving sun and the dark village of yesteryears. Between escape and joining the white moths of eternity. Writhed up from the darkness of the underground, the Burmese python waited for him on the top step. A haughty look on its face, as though it knew that the Cherokee son had not a chance of escape. Thick muscled with its head weaving on its neck, it moved with an exquisite grace, ever so slowly writhing while moving forward. Slowly, surely, moving towards the Cherokee son who was zigzag backing down the steps, his heart beating dirges of fear. The snake up quick with a twisting motion. Wrapping quickly, tightly around his leg. Twisting and climbing with utmost purpose, squeezing off the circulation of his leg. His leg burning like the fires of fear that jump-started his heart now beating furiously. Gulping, swallowing his fear. The foot of his freed leg dangling in mid air, searching for escape. The snake inching to the top of his thighs, squeezing, wrapping.

Unconsciously, quickly, and from somewhere not known, the knife came down with a force of rage and desperation into the body of the snake. Spurts of blood flying in the air. But still the snake hung on; heading towards his groin. Again, the knife came down to stab once, twice, and with such force that the blood was spurting everywhere at once. The snake gurgled a death cry and fell back. It collapsed as though the air had been released from its heavy body; the muscles lying limp, lifeless. The Cherokee son let out a wail of release. And looked to see that he was covered with the snake’s blood; baptized with blood into life. He was shaking uncontrollably when he stepped over the lifeless creature. His hands, his chin trembling. His leg numb and hot; he drug it along behind him. Over the bloody snake and out. Silently, he said goodbye to the spirits in the darkness. He was leaving behind the village beneath the earth. Heading into the light of life he was; moving into the sunbeams coaxing him forward.



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Susan writes regularly for print magazine, WestWard Quarterly, Pegasus and Hudson View. Online she has poems and fiction on Ken * Again, Smoking Poet, Eastown Fiction, and Jerry Jazz Musician, Tryst 3, Word Salad, and Pens On Fire to name a few.