Archive for the ‘Trent Walters’ Category
Form Prayers to Broken Stone
Friday, November 19th, 2010
This is the third in the four-part Hollow Men series. Although this could be appreciated alone, three others have appeared (now revised): part I, part II and part IV.
I trudged for a day in a direction that had not existed the day before. Tramping to the bleak beacon was like plowing through mounds of slushy snow seeping through your boots. When the pair of shining black beams smote me, the going slowed to a crawl.
I’d passed beneath the beacon’s lower angle of the lantern room’s reach before the sensation in my goose-pimpled flesh returned.
A white-bearded dwarf exited the base of the beacon waving a replica of the lantern squatting above. “Turn back! Look not into eyes!” His voice was the grinding of gears.
The journey had worn my patience, so I toppled him. He fell back flinging his lantern behind. He hit with a clang; the lantern’s hinged glass door swung open and cracked against the rocky soil, and the cold, coal-black flame soared, guttered, and winked out in the indifferent wind. The man groaned as I carried on.
Years of severe weathering had pocked the formerly sleek obsidian surface of the beacon. I ran my hand along its rough flank and steered myself up the inner winding. The rotting wooden planks protested my weight. I pushed wide the trapdoor.
Inside the lantern room, I swung open the glass lens and slid shut the iron vent to suffocate the coal-black flame. Ice crystals formed in the cracks and spread across the vents.
The giant lens separated into smaller, distorting glass blocks–each chanced to point at the spire that had been my home since my days as unformed crockery. From this vantage, it looked little more than a mossy screw, but each lens block also pulled it in some direction that made my attachment to it laughable–fat, skinny, hour-glassed, warped. Watching, I noticed the screw turned when the hollow men climbed its slope. In fact, hundreds of screws turned just beyond this one. I daydreamed of erecting a bridge to cross the gaps so that no one had to fall off. Vertigo filled my skull and numbed my fingertips.
Pivoting to the opposite direction, I gazed across a broad desert, into a land leviathan’s slow blinking gaze.
“You fool!” The dwarf was hoisting himself up on the floor. “You’ve opened the misery gate!” The dwarf lisped the words, so it was hard to tell if the gate were a “misery” or “mystery.” He brandished a dagger, slashed and thrust.
I dodged. “Wait.” Again, the dodge. “I see your point. Please. Let me open the door, so the flame can breathe, and men won’t look in this direction.” With an elbow, I cracked the ice and slid the door open, careful not to let the chill black light fall on me.
The dwarf tilted his head back, basking in the light.
Yanking him off his feet, I tossed the dwarf’s heavy metal frame into the flame and slammed the door shut.
Eyes We Dare Not Meet
Tuesday, November 9th, 2010
This is the second in the four-part Hollow Men series. Although this could be appreciated alone, three others have appeared (now revised): part I, part III and part IV.
We could not buy the hollow men ascendant over us the aware, yet clearly we had a blind spot to scrub. We sawed drinking straws to different lengths, and I drew, reluctantly, the short one. We hypnotized me into a deep and dreamless sleep. They heaved me off the cliff.
I did not wake until sometime after I hit. Chills crawled through me–an icy wind that strips heat from your body, yet the air had not stirred. I tilted my head back enough to spy a bleak beacon on a distant hill casting a pair of black beams across the drought-scarred countryside.
I closed my eyes, willing myself back on warm, grassy slopes, soaking in sunlight and considering existence. My eyelids flicked open. Far from the familiar, I had already learned more by leaving.
I dusted myself off and removed shards of clay from my back. Amid the scattered straw and pilled cotton stuffing, the shadowed ground was covered with the baked crockery, crunching under my every step. How many of these former men had I trod upon? Each footfall made my skin feel like the disinclined shifting of continents colliding and tearing apart. A strange dream or notion popped into my head: Assemble these broken crockery into one giant man, healing and annealing the pieces–imagine what one could do. The dream wilted as I pondered its improbability.
The air was dank and full of mildew digging roots into my clay shell. Under the grassy spire, shapes flitted among the darker shadows; tiny claws scratched glass. An iridescently reflective yet empty pair of eyes stopped to gaze at me, sniffed the air, then moved on. The beacon’s bone-cold beams swept through me again and passed on.
A dead man–cracked but not broken–stared sightlessly into the abyss of night sky, clutching a scrap of paper torn from a missing notebook. I fingered my own fissures and winced in sympathy. I bent, pried loose the scrap and read, “I’m dreaming. I dare not meet those eyes.”
Was I dreaming? Were there eyes I dared not meet? I glanced at the bleak beacon on the horizon, lying dead ahead in a fourth direction–a heretofore unseen cardinal point. I cast a longing look at the beckoning grassy spire, then turned in search of eyes.