We climb the tallest stone.
It's very cold (my gloves have no fingers)
It's very cold and very quiet. Light too, the snow an effective reflector. There's the sheep, sleeping I think, shoved up close against the stones, the roots of a tree.
In the roof of the tall stone is a shallow pit. CC crouches there - silver and gold,wet shoes. He fills the hole with a handful of stuff from his pocket. Makes a pile of feathers, black thread and shreds of paper. Tight letters, kind of visible.
"Blood or cum?"
and I laugh because the temperature makes it a no-brainer. He smiles, shrugs. My fingers are too numb to open my knife so I tear at my bottom lip with my teeth, already scabbed and split some, ever resourceful. Drool some pinkish saliva onto his soon to be pyre. Pretty meagre -
"Uh - sorry"
He squints at it, shrugs again.
"It's - symbolic I guess? Not like - a chemical reaction"
- but looks unimpressed all the same. He wobbles precariously as he shifts to fish out the lighter. A blurry picture of a demure Vietnamese girl dressed in a smart blouse. Once, when you twisted it one way or the other, the shirt kind of dissolved to reveal some kind of utilitarian underwear. Now she remains resolutely buttoned up but with a ghostly bra permanently superimposed on the outside - like a prim superhero.
He touches the flame to the tiny hearth and it flames instant and bright. A kind of brittle greenish fire. We warm our numb fingers at it.
"Happy birthday" I whisper, and he smiles.
Magic.
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you're a magician with words
ReplyDeleteNo need to repeat my praise for the wordpainting, is there? Kind of a given...
ReplyDeleteCouple of things really had me stumble, so I kinda fell out of your otherwise beautifully summoned dreamscape:
"CC crouches there - silver and gold,wet shoes." I had to stop and wonder what was silver and gold about CC. His clothes? Is he wearing some kind of 1950s SciFi suit? Maybe snow and water droplets on him? Is there the kind of sunlight that would produce such an effect? Until then I imagined this as some kind of misty, overcast winter scene...
"My fingers are too numb to open my knife so I tear at my bottom lip with my teeth" In my experience, lips are actually kind of hard to bit all the way to blood, unless there is some impact, like a blow to the chin. In any case, purposefully biting a lip hurts like hell. It can be a deliciously good hurt, sure, but it would register enough to show up as some kind of intense emotional reaction in the tale. (Biting the inside of the cheeks is a much less painful way to get blood in your spit, more blood, too, usually, and you've got much more strength in your jaw back there, compared to front teeth. At least IMExperience. But still enough pain to somehow show up in the mood...)
"It's - symbolic I guess" I had to wonder if on a symbolic level the lack of sacrificial effort wasn't much more detrimental to the ritual, than it would be for a cook-book type recipe.
"Now she remains resolutely buttoned up" I imagined this as one of these old fashioned wanna-be holograms with the riffled surface. But I never thought they could actually lose their togglability, since that comes from actually two pictures being printed on the tiny triangular ridges. If you'd somehow rub off those ridges, wouldn't both images disappear and you'd just have a white (or whatever colour the underlying laminated cardboard had) spot? Maybe something could flatten the ridges all in one direction so that only one of the two images remained, but would that then leave the ghostly bra image at all? Whatever, once I got thinking that stuff I was sorta out of the story...
But to disprove whatever I wrote in your last two comments, this one is pretty heartwarming. :P
- but my card tricks suck @nerstes x
ReplyDeleteFox! I sure missed you - no-one else makes these cheeringly pedantic comments :) OK - it's night, it's snow - you know? the moon, the blond. it's kinda trite n' romantic? i kinda wish he'd been wearing the 50s sci-fi thing though.
it is really easy to make yr lips bleed with your teeth. especially if they're all fucked up already, like it says in the story. you don't know, you don't even HAVE lips.
prim Vietnamese-girl lighter is a real, honest-it's-there lighter.if she's somehow transcended her material reality then yr gonna have that as proof of cc's supernatural powers.
Pedantic am I, huh? Well, if you say so, Mr. Anti-OCD. :p
ReplyDeletebtw, I'm assuming you can solve the riddle to get to the message I sent you. ;)
It was a compliment, really :) umm - i will try. thank you.
ReplyDelete