2004-03-30 - 10:18 p.m.
Thanatos Removed
A gleaming crystalhangs in the air,
A precarious balance.
Beautiful, yet futile,
An attempt to beget
Order from life's Chaos.
With the blink of an eye,
A crack yawns open,
Just breaking the polish.
A spray of chill water,
To help fill the gaps,
But the damage is done.
The cracks stretch,
Spreading fast,
They meet.
Drowsily, the gem falls,
Slowly at first,
then quickly plummeting-
Plummeting to shatter
At the lowest point,
Scattering broken shards.
Now free of reason’s bonds,
Settling in confusion,
Finally they come to rest.
Each sliver on its own,
Complete in its isolation,
For a moment of silence.
Twin Lands
Stories seem born from nothing, growing, encountering other stories, intertwining so closely with each other that they begin to blend until finally it is no longer possible to tell where one starts and another ends. A small boy, terrified of cats, awakes one day to learn that his family’s pet really has been trying to kill him. For his own life, he slays the beast in defense, only to find it returned the next day. Life goes on like this until one day it simply disappears, and is replaced by another. This new cat becomes his friend however, and he soon finds that he cannot quite remember just why he was so afraid of the animals. He is then untroubled— for a while at least.
Stories are beginning and ending in a place that the boy saw in a vision, though to him it was just the bathroom of his house, perhaps not quite as it should have been. In this place, a pregnant woman chooses to give birth to her child. The child conceived by the man who had kidnapped and raped her, the man she had stood against in court and seen executed. She had kept this child, believing that it would not bare the curse of its father. Yet she was naïve to the rules of her land, unfortunate soul! She did not know she had been raised in darkness. In that place, the cycle of violence cannot be broken, and the descendants of sin follow their forebears’ path. She cannot escape, for this alone is the reason that the world has allowed her life.
The woman screams agony as though the child rips at her, his cage. It is in fact the child that chooses this place, the white porcelain tub, to come forth into the world. Moments after the pain starts, it ends. The woman lies still, covered in blood and gore as the child, already a toddler, sits cross legged on her belly, giggling as he licks his fingers and smears the blood across the once pure surfaces. The mother’s story has ended, and the son’s has now begun. Yet though a killer, the child is still a child. He is incapable of understanding this evil, and he will not remember by the time he is a young man. The troubled land around him nourishes him and teaches him to survive for its own purposes.
While the two boys grow, one fearing the darkness, the other raised in it, many other stories begin and continue that must join as one. These stories, like so many scattered blades of ice, melt and flow together, mingling in a great pool from which a single new crystal will someday awake. It is the quality of these individual stories and how they interact that will determine the nature of this new whole.
