(no subject)
everything that i've made an effort at writing since... well, since the loss of moira has been tainted to a greater or lesser extent, and this is one of only three such written things, being the only story. Even after Shakena's review of it, i felt it could be salvaged, however, if i were to sit down with it long enough to get it signifigantly edited. that never happened, and i dont think it ever will. so it stands on its own i suppose. maybe if theres ever cause to put together a book again i'll resurrect it.
THE TWO SPHERES
Picture a sphere around you. It’s big enough that on it’s smooth surface, somewhere, there’s a spot for every image you can imagine. In order to hold all of it, this sphere is big enough to be your whole world. In fact, this sphere IS your whole world in a sense.
Now, imagine further, a noise like ice under pressure and a crack. Faint lines spiderweb their way across the surface, then more and more. Pieces break loose and fall, but those pieces break up further, even as they fall so that what lands where the ground should is a fine silver dust. One of the images, floating somewhere above the immeasurable horizon retains its shape for longer than the others. It’s a face from a memory burned into the mind. In the end, though, it too rains silver dust, and is gone.
Nothing remains but a black gulf, hungry and empty, without star or constellation or firmament. Even the silver dust has vanished.
Such was the dream he dreamed every night, and with every experience the wind in the empty space blew colder, and the darkness felt hungrier and more demanding. Upon every iteration, the duration of the dream increased so that in his sleep he was suspended in the endless night for minutes, then hours, then ages it seemed before he awoke, screaming, in terror of a fear that could not be constrained within the vowels and consonants of his native tongue. Every day, the world around him seemed thinner, the people less real. In time he became afraid to venture far from his dwelling and it’s close surroundings for fear that the world would shatter, as it had in his dream, and he would be left floating in the void, waiting only for what he could fear but not describe to come. Or perhaps it would not come, and that might be worse.
But this is not the beginning of his story, nor it’s end. As with many troubles, trials and tribulations, it started with a girl. Who she was is not important, and neither is her name, for in the end he had forgotten even that, though he remembered that he bore towards her a never-ending deep red malice which was the only thing stronger than his fear of what he believed to lurk in the dark space behind reality. He could not remember her name, or where he met her, and had only vague recollections of what awful thing had happened between them, yet he hated her with all his soul (which he suspected he had lost somewhere along the twisting paths of life which had brought him here). He might have desired her life or her head, but he did not. He judged these to be merciful in comparison to what she should suffer to pay the long-forgotten debt and make things right again.
He had been left alone, after that, to his books and papers, to forced solitude and thought turned inwards on itself. The things he had once loved lost their appeal. Melodious musics lost their harmony and became discordant to his ears, jarring and offensive. Art reverted to collections of pigments and papers, ink and canvas. Marble was rock, and every joy a burden, and it was there that the dreams started.
They continued for days, then weeks. In time, the weeks stretched into years. He had marveled at the perfection of the great sphere which possessed qualities which only dream-objects can possess, such as being many different colors, all at the same time, or being both transparent and opaque. As the days wore on he made out the pictures and to his amazement he was able to recall an occurrence for each frozen image, each snapshot out of time. They had grown like mushrooms and populated the curve of the marvelous sphere which never grew too small to accommodate them all.
It was peaceful in his dream, and he had awoken contented. Night after night, he recalled the memories, happy and sad, but the sadness could not hurt him and was bourn with detachment of one analyzing abstract data, to a degree which is only possible when freed from the constraints of physical stresses and concerns.
Then the night had come when the sphere around had glowed with warm, white light, and the noises from outside had started. The next night, the sphere had shattered.
From that night on, the white light that had bathed his dream like liquid warmth was never there again. Just the sphere, crystalline and cold in it’s perfection and the images, sharp and clear innumerable, frozen in their laughter or tears, their monotony or stark significance; the sphere was a dwelling of shadows, and a cold wind whistled and moaned inside it. Then, it would crack as though it were glass, fall as if it were powder and leave him naked and alone in the midst of not-quite-empty infinity.
On the last full moon of the year, he didn’t wake up.
He screamed in terror of something he couldn’t decide for certain was actually a thing, but the airless wind had risen to drown his voice and the dream would not end. It eventually entered his understanding that he was being drawn in a certain direction. Faint variations of black coalesced around him and became a corridor lit with shadows, stretching forever in front and behind. Along this black way he was drawn, or perhaps he did not move and it moved around him until he came to a point where the corridor no longer existed and never had, and in that instant were nebulous suggestions of innumerable eyes and teeth and claws, indescribable appendages and amorphous shapes. The time they were there was too short to be measured and at the same time an eternity into which all the lives which have ever been lived could disappear without notice or comment, so great was the discrepancy of time. In that infinitely short moment, something happened which his consciousness would not register, and then he was somewhere again.
He stood at a crossroads, in a desert. The sands were silver, like the dust which the sphere had dissolved into, and above one of the gates which stood closed a little ways along each of the paths hung a sickle moon, cold and timeless. He walked forward and pushes on the gate, then grips it’s black metal bars and pulls. Nothing happens. He can see mountains and lights through it in the distance. He tries to leave the path, to walk around the gate which seems to be the only obstacle in his way, but he cannot make his foot step off the path, and frantic experiment confirms that the other paths are equally closed to him. His mind is working at full capacity, and he realizes that this should not be happening in a dream. Slowly, dreading each painful inch of the revelation, it occurs to him that it cannot be a dream after all. He must somehow escape, he knows. He still has duties to perform, though he can no longer remember what they are.
As the moments stretch into an all-too-un-dreamlike eternity he becomes well acquainted with the singular fact that the gates do not care what duties he believes himself to be bound by.
Somewhere, where normal reason and laws of causality still hold sway, there is a hospital room. There isn’t anything in it of special importance or value to distinguish it from hospital rooms the world over. A priest is just leaving, having been slightly put off by the pentagram worn on around the neck of the man lying in the bed. The priest only saw with his eyes and would not have been able to comprehend the respect in which he would have been held had the man been conscious.
A woman remains in the room, among the chirping and humming equipment. She hadn’t said anything while the priest was there and says nothing now. She could be called beautiful by conventional standards, but her brown eyes are cold and tinged more by annoyance than sadness. She is here because she, too, has a duty to perform. She brushes her dark red hair out of her eyes and reads the letter that she’s holding again. It isn’t very long, ending barely a third of the way down the page, and there’s a signature and a curious seal consisting of a circle and four equilateral triangles, which take up another two inches. The name is signed in gold.
When she finishes, she stares at it for a long moment, and then another. Eventually, with a sound that’s not quite a cough and not quite a sigh, she folds the letter up and replaces it in it’s envelope, which she slips into her pocket.
She walks over and studies his face, which she had never really done before. It seemed subtly changed in a worrying way that she could not quite put her finger on. After a while she bends down and quickly kisses him on his forehead, worrying for some curious reason about being seen in a compassionate act under these circumstances.
She pauses for a moment, then turns her back and leaves, as quickly as a spring unwinding, her red hair flying out behind her. She knows, as she hastens back to her own world of solids and spheres and definites, that she will never see him again.
He doesn’t respond. The nurse had quietly told her that he never would again.
Eric Atkinson, 20 July 2008
THE TWO SPHERES
Picture a sphere around you. It’s big enough that on it’s smooth surface, somewhere, there’s a spot for every image you can imagine. In order to hold all of it, this sphere is big enough to be your whole world. In fact, this sphere IS your whole world in a sense.
Now, imagine further, a noise like ice under pressure and a crack. Faint lines spiderweb their way across the surface, then more and more. Pieces break loose and fall, but those pieces break up further, even as they fall so that what lands where the ground should is a fine silver dust. One of the images, floating somewhere above the immeasurable horizon retains its shape for longer than the others. It’s a face from a memory burned into the mind. In the end, though, it too rains silver dust, and is gone.
Nothing remains but a black gulf, hungry and empty, without star or constellation or firmament. Even the silver dust has vanished.
Such was the dream he dreamed every night, and with every experience the wind in the empty space blew colder, and the darkness felt hungrier and more demanding. Upon every iteration, the duration of the dream increased so that in his sleep he was suspended in the endless night for minutes, then hours, then ages it seemed before he awoke, screaming, in terror of a fear that could not be constrained within the vowels and consonants of his native tongue. Every day, the world around him seemed thinner, the people less real. In time he became afraid to venture far from his dwelling and it’s close surroundings for fear that the world would shatter, as it had in his dream, and he would be left floating in the void, waiting only for what he could fear but not describe to come. Or perhaps it would not come, and that might be worse.
But this is not the beginning of his story, nor it’s end. As with many troubles, trials and tribulations, it started with a girl. Who she was is not important, and neither is her name, for in the end he had forgotten even that, though he remembered that he bore towards her a never-ending deep red malice which was the only thing stronger than his fear of what he believed to lurk in the dark space behind reality. He could not remember her name, or where he met her, and had only vague recollections of what awful thing had happened between them, yet he hated her with all his soul (which he suspected he had lost somewhere along the twisting paths of life which had brought him here). He might have desired her life or her head, but he did not. He judged these to be merciful in comparison to what she should suffer to pay the long-forgotten debt and make things right again.
He had been left alone, after that, to his books and papers, to forced solitude and thought turned inwards on itself. The things he had once loved lost their appeal. Melodious musics lost their harmony and became discordant to his ears, jarring and offensive. Art reverted to collections of pigments and papers, ink and canvas. Marble was rock, and every joy a burden, and it was there that the dreams started.
They continued for days, then weeks. In time, the weeks stretched into years. He had marveled at the perfection of the great sphere which possessed qualities which only dream-objects can possess, such as being many different colors, all at the same time, or being both transparent and opaque. As the days wore on he made out the pictures and to his amazement he was able to recall an occurrence for each frozen image, each snapshot out of time. They had grown like mushrooms and populated the curve of the marvelous sphere which never grew too small to accommodate them all.
It was peaceful in his dream, and he had awoken contented. Night after night, he recalled the memories, happy and sad, but the sadness could not hurt him and was bourn with detachment of one analyzing abstract data, to a degree which is only possible when freed from the constraints of physical stresses and concerns.
Then the night had come when the sphere around had glowed with warm, white light, and the noises from outside had started. The next night, the sphere had shattered.
From that night on, the white light that had bathed his dream like liquid warmth was never there again. Just the sphere, crystalline and cold in it’s perfection and the images, sharp and clear innumerable, frozen in their laughter or tears, their monotony or stark significance; the sphere was a dwelling of shadows, and a cold wind whistled and moaned inside it. Then, it would crack as though it were glass, fall as if it were powder and leave him naked and alone in the midst of not-quite-empty infinity.
On the last full moon of the year, he didn’t wake up.
He screamed in terror of something he couldn’t decide for certain was actually a thing, but the airless wind had risen to drown his voice and the dream would not end. It eventually entered his understanding that he was being drawn in a certain direction. Faint variations of black coalesced around him and became a corridor lit with shadows, stretching forever in front and behind. Along this black way he was drawn, or perhaps he did not move and it moved around him until he came to a point where the corridor no longer existed and never had, and in that instant were nebulous suggestions of innumerable eyes and teeth and claws, indescribable appendages and amorphous shapes. The time they were there was too short to be measured and at the same time an eternity into which all the lives which have ever been lived could disappear without notice or comment, so great was the discrepancy of time. In that infinitely short moment, something happened which his consciousness would not register, and then he was somewhere again.
He stood at a crossroads, in a desert. The sands were silver, like the dust which the sphere had dissolved into, and above one of the gates which stood closed a little ways along each of the paths hung a sickle moon, cold and timeless. He walked forward and pushes on the gate, then grips it’s black metal bars and pulls. Nothing happens. He can see mountains and lights through it in the distance. He tries to leave the path, to walk around the gate which seems to be the only obstacle in his way, but he cannot make his foot step off the path, and frantic experiment confirms that the other paths are equally closed to him. His mind is working at full capacity, and he realizes that this should not be happening in a dream. Slowly, dreading each painful inch of the revelation, it occurs to him that it cannot be a dream after all. He must somehow escape, he knows. He still has duties to perform, though he can no longer remember what they are.
As the moments stretch into an all-too-un-dreamlike eternity he becomes well acquainted with the singular fact that the gates do not care what duties he believes himself to be bound by.
Somewhere, where normal reason and laws of causality still hold sway, there is a hospital room. There isn’t anything in it of special importance or value to distinguish it from hospital rooms the world over. A priest is just leaving, having been slightly put off by the pentagram worn on around the neck of the man lying in the bed. The priest only saw with his eyes and would not have been able to comprehend the respect in which he would have been held had the man been conscious.
A woman remains in the room, among the chirping and humming equipment. She hadn’t said anything while the priest was there and says nothing now. She could be called beautiful by conventional standards, but her brown eyes are cold and tinged more by annoyance than sadness. She is here because she, too, has a duty to perform. She brushes her dark red hair out of her eyes and reads the letter that she’s holding again. It isn’t very long, ending barely a third of the way down the page, and there’s a signature and a curious seal consisting of a circle and four equilateral triangles, which take up another two inches. The name is signed in gold.
When she finishes, she stares at it for a long moment, and then another. Eventually, with a sound that’s not quite a cough and not quite a sigh, she folds the letter up and replaces it in it’s envelope, which she slips into her pocket.
She walks over and studies his face, which she had never really done before. It seemed subtly changed in a worrying way that she could not quite put her finger on. After a while she bends down and quickly kisses him on his forehead, worrying for some curious reason about being seen in a compassionate act under these circumstances.
She pauses for a moment, then turns her back and leaves, as quickly as a spring unwinding, her red hair flying out behind her. She knows, as she hastens back to her own world of solids and spheres and definites, that she will never see him again.
He doesn’t respond. The nurse had quietly told her that he never would again.
Eric Atkinson, 20 July 2008