Wind swirled into the canyon. It gathered
spray from the falls to douse sunburned skin. Brandy shivered. The muscles in her uterus
lost their hold.
Nothing lasts, the vacuum
whispered.
Nothing lasts, indeed; the sentiment left
her cold.
Shifting
from below him, Brandy rearranged herself, intermingling limbs (and dreams) with
Simon… until she sensed him drift beyond her grasp. Loathe to let him go, she rushed
in pursuit:
into a viscous medium…
sounds resembling murmurs…
everything sedate…
everything bathed serenely in a rubicund light.
‘Do you feel that, Brandy?’
‘What?’
‘The flow.’
‘Huh?’
‘Bloodstreams.’
‘Where?’
‘Inside us.’
‘How? I'm lost. Will you make sense!’
‘I'll try. Just listen. ’
‘Heartbeats?’
‘And?’
‘And nothing. Water falling, maybe. All around, but
really muffled.’
‘Do you see things?’
‘No, it’s dark.’
‘You don't see me?’
‘No. Yes. Well, sort of. But it’s black as
night.’
‘Not red?’
‘Okay, it's red as night; same difference.’
‘Take my hand.’
‘Okay, but—Jeezus!—I feel every crease in your
palm.’
‘It seems our senses are heightened
here.’
‘Are we going somewhere?’
‘Deeper.’
‘No, I don't think I should come. I mean, I really
shouldn't be here.’
‘But you are. You would be
anyway.’
‘Hey, you don't think… Are we dead?!’
‘Calm down. You’re safe.’
‘Why have you brought me here?’
‘I thought we 'came'
together.’
‘That's not funny. I just followed.’
‘In a very real way, you led. Had I
been left alone I might never have reached this level of understanding.
I only sniffed the Poppy, Brandy, never saw its petals, never mingled pollen or merged
with its pith.
It's so clear now!
Like the mirror's flip-flopping images
me, relieved of Self, becoming you.
Then you and I made Us
I with I transformed to become this We.’
‘Simon, I have no idea what you're talking about. Where
are we? Am I dense, or what?
I hardly understand how we can speak, ask these stupid questions.
Weren’t we making love? That’s all I remember.
It was special, I'll admit, but this is… weird.
Unless… We must have fallen asleep; thus is just some daydream.
Yours or mine or somehow both, but not things before.
Not like loving one another.
You know, in real life.’
‘Real life? What's that?
Why discount our dreams because they don't conform to the day-to-day monotony?
Life is everything conceivable. Why set limits? Why make rules?
Why clip our wings or blind the mind's third eye?
Aren't we holding hands this instant?
Do you feel our lifelines intersecting?
Don't you know they've crossed, and that our fates are forever sealed?’ |
Their bodies, for the longest time, lay as in suspension,
indigenous to the setting as the landscape to itself. The sun’s eye passed, its heat
abridged by shadows' slow advancement… creeping up to… onto… over roseate
torsos… limbs… now faces… one awakening from the inner hues diffused
beneath his lashes to behold the jagged cliff-edge overhead.
Brandy,
hand left empty like a severed paw, stirred lazily. Then, aware of Simon's absence, got to
her feet.
|
Odd, the way
this sun has suddenly bleached the surrounding scenery, definitions run like pigment on
soggy parchment… blurred… displaced by a virgin white grown ever more intense at
the horizon… brightening… ground beyond it sloughing off… reclaimed as by
the sea… come closer… Earth itself about to dematerialize… up I soar…
my arms outstretched… released at last to… |
"SIMON!"
Brandy’s
cry stood out above the canyon's constant tumult. Simon, plummeting from the waterfall,
reached the earth with shocking speed…
"Oh
God!"
Brandy
rushed to the spot where his trajectory should have carried him, and, indeed the
castle bore a telling imprint. It lay crushed. And yet the body that had evidently
flattened walls and turrets, that had left its clear impression on the moat and sculpted
mounds, that Brandy witnessed with her own eyes fall headlong (hers was no fantasy) to
collide with a sickening THUD that she (beyond all doubt) had heard, was (as she
looked on dumbstruck) nowhere to be found.
‘This can’t be happening.’
"SIMON!"
Once
more Brandy’s frantic cry competed with the uproar, triggering shrill reverberations,
carbon copies of itself, before its decrescendo drowned in the all-pervasive din.
Numb
with shock and grief she began her search.
*
*
Brandy had been spared...
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