Friends are Electric

The whole of the sky lit up with that abhorrent electric glow.  In that instance I saw all.  To the north, looming oppressively, was that infernal sheet of ice.  Far off in the east was the sea.  To the west and to the south was my doom.

As the light faded, I tried to count their numbers,  It was a purposeless task, for just a few could end anything.  There were at least two dozen, probably many more.

These mighty warriors had all but eradicated my people, their relentless tools cutting our hardened flesh.  No defense seemed to affect them.  They always kept coming, kept moving, kept killing.

A lucky few survived. They did not hide, could not hide. They were sometimes old, sometimes weak.  Children were rarely spared, but never were they cut down where they stood.  They were more often trampled underfoot by the advancing forces.  Pointless deaths.

They always took our dead with them.  We have stories about their fate.  Cut to pieces, chopped into chips, burned.  Pure desecration of the dead.

The humans raised their axes. They had reached my side. It was over. I was over.  I did nothing as the blades slashed deep into my bark. Again and again they struck. I felt my trunk breaking under my own weight.

I fell.

“How was your day?” My wife asked.  I had just arrived home from work.

“Uneventful.  But the oddest thing happened on my way home.”

I removed my coat and came to greet her.

“I was waiting for the bus and this couple had a box with a glass lamp in it.  Not the proper box, but a banana box or something.”  I gave her a kiss and sat down next to her on the couch.

“It wasn’t very pretty, I’d only ever expect to see it at my grandmother’s house.  When we all got on the bus, they placed it on the flat above one of the wheels.   The one without the railing.”

“Every time  we turned left, I felt as though the box would come flying off and bring the lamp to a terrible end.  I could feel it.”

“I became so very anxious about the lamp.  It tore me apart.  I had to do something to stop it from breaking, since the owners had abandoned it and sat down elsewhere.”

“Did you do anything?”

“No, I never did.  I just sat and watched with horror.  Eventually it did slip, where the bus does that u-turn.  But it got caught on a screw or something and didn’t fall.  I got off the bus early because I couldn’t take it.  I am not sure what it all means.”

She looked at me reassuringly and put her hand on my shoulder, “Don’t worry about it.  Lets go make dinner.”

I can hear a bell toll in the distance, to the south.  I don’t want to walk south, my destination is west.  But it calls.  The bell calls to me.

Each peal wore on my soul, driving me.  Salvation lies to the east, but curiosity drives me south.

What is it ringing for?  Some funeral, perhaps.  A dead man.  Like a dead man could appreciate a sound so pure.

“Let the dead sleep!”

It sounded again.

It seems to me that each repetition was louder, that each sound echoed around my head until the next came.  The buildup was intolerable.

Silence.  Finally the dead may sleep.  I hold my breath, allowing myself to hope just for a moment.

It sounds again, even louder still.  I can no longer walk.  Before now I had been keeping a slow pace, hoping to escape the sound before it drove me to madness.  But I could see it had other intentions.

“I swear to you, cease! I can take no more and I value my life! Please, for all that is good, stop! Silence!”

I could feel my resolve building.  I was breaking the spell of the sound.

I began walking, the peal rang across the land. It no longer mattered to me.  I was free of its spell for the time.

I saw dark clouds to the south and crows in the sky, knowing I had to get home soon.  Perhaps some day I will follow the sound, satisfying my curiosity.  Perhaps it is not so fearsome as I have come to imagine.  Perhaps, but I fear otherwise.  Maybe if the moon returns I can trust my ears as I can my eyes, but until that time I will fight as best I can.

Since I have such inability to write anything of length with any frequency, and as of yet, at all, and since I often write incomplete ideas down, and since both Nietzsche’s Zarathustra and Comte de Lautréamont’s Les Chantes de Maldoror (both interesting works) use a short format, often a few paragraphs to pages, I have decided I shall do the same.  Not that I am pretending to belong to this tradition at all, but if they can do it, why can I not try?