Sleeping Horses

Rupilee told me once that inside every cucumber was a thousand more, identical to the first. I didn't believe him, of course, but when I asked my grandfather about it, the old man said it was true. I spent the rest of the afternoon smashing cucumbers and found out it wasn't true at all. We lived for a while with my grandfather, in the farm belt on the equator, not far from the irrigation canal. I'd never seen so much open water before and it was along time before I saw any again. My father never got to see it because one person from every family had to stay behind to watch the glaciers and keep the houses from sliding into the cracks in the ice. I wanted to stay with my father, but it was mostly because I didn't like doing field work. We worked the fields until dark everyday and had to sleep with the horses. Rupilee and I got separated after the first week and I spent the rest of the season sleeping with the sheep. I didn't know that horses slept standing up.

Those days were golden but we knew they couldn't last because the ice was moving again. My mother told me to soak up as much sun as I could and Rupilee laughed so hard when I asked him what to use that he threw up and my mother put him to bed for the rest of the day.

Everybody had to help load the sleds. They were big, really big. Probably a mile wide, and we packed them forty feet high. They left for the caves,each as it was filled; the horses straining against the chains. All that food was supposed to feed us through the next cold snap, although it didn't look like enough to me. I heard my father say that this one would be a lot longer than the last one, maybe twice as long. When the last of the sleds were gone and the fields were empty we headed for home. I felt bad, though, because there weren't going to be enough cucumbers to last until it got warm again, and my father really liked cucumbers.

Soliloquy

When they came down out of the mountains, the first thing they did was build a lodge. It took them three weeks to finish it and when is was finished they began to plow. A thousand years later the city fell to disease. Crowded and dirty, they lived like rats, on top of each other, the streets awash with filth and it was inevitable. Another thousand years passed before it was dust again and lost, no histories to remember that they'd ever been there at all. In a way, though, they infected the soil, not with their disease but with their desires and on the shore, where the river bends to the south I felt a resonance in the rocks, a reverberation in the ground that they walked on and the valley could recall their descent and, equally, their ascent. I never intended that. It was an experiment, nothing more, but I won't try again. I like it quiet, like this. I like the solitude and I like to be alone with my thoughts.

In a Dream

In those days the earth was a lot smaller. I tried to walk all the way home, once, by going in the opposite direction, but when I didn't make it home for dinner my dad tracked me down and I got a beating right there in front of Mr. Strubbe and his cock-eyed kid. We knew everybody on the planet, in those days, which made it really difficult to hide things from my dad. You had to hide things from him, though, because he was such a crab back then. When he caught me and my brother, Rupilee, pissing on one of the glaciers he nearly had a fit. I couldn't sit down for two days. The world was a dangerous place, I suppose, but I grew up dodging hail stones as big as my head and could jump over a fifteen foot crevice in the ice. And then it got cold. Really cold. I didn't really get time, back then, but I swear it must have been cold for about a million years. I just kept my mouth shut, though, because my mother would invariably tell me to put on a sweater if I complained about it.

My favorite place to go when the world was bugging me, which it seemed to do just about every day, was the Naarq Keil, which was a huge basin carved out by a meteor along time ago. Now it looks like a dump, which it is, but when I was a kid it looked like a porcelain soup bowl with broccoli floating in it. I would sit on the edge and dangle my feet and imagine that I was a giant just home for lunch from the factory. Now that I think of it, though, I don't really like broccoli, so I probably would have just spit it out. If I had some time I'd find an old piece of scrap and slide all the way to the bottom. It took forever to get back up but it was worth it. The hill was so steep I probably got up to about a hundred miles an hour on the way down.

Since Rupilee died I don't get to go to the Keil too much. I have to help my dad with the day-to-days, and besides, he never lets me out of his sight. Sometimes I dream about lying under the trees, looking up at the veins in the sky and I wake up crying and I don't know why.

Apostle

I can feel the texture of his cloak on my fingertips. I can smell his sweat mixed with oil. I can feel him looking at me from across the fire but when I look up he’s not there. All of us feel it. None of us can remember who he is, or was, but then we don’t know who we are either. The fire burns but never goes out as we try to remember what it is we’ve lost along the way. For a while, we had long talks, trying to fit together the clues, for each of us has a fragment of a memory that we can’t fathom but we haven’t talked for a very long time. Each of us is alone in our exile and we wait. We wait for someone to tell us who we are, we wait for an end to this confusion, we wait for the return of the humanity that has been stripped away from us, we wait to face our accuser, we wait to earn his trust, we wait for an end and a beginning, we wait for all eternity, bound by our failure to never know how we failed, or who, but I can feel the texture of his cloak on my fingertips and I can feel him looking at me from across the fire.