The First Storyteller

by Varun Gwalani

  Our lips touched, and the song was inside me.

  I was a diamond in the ground, to be dug up and revered by admiring hands. I was a swan, newly emerged from a mother’s womb. I was a flower, with its petals newly opened. I was the virgin lily, never touched. For a glorious shining moment, I was that beautiful girl, I was her song. I was pure, unadulterated, untainted beauty.

  It made me whole. It destroyed me.

  When we broke away, her face was flushed. “Is that the something more you wanted to show me?” She asked breathlessly. She froze when she saw the tears.

  “No, you didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, pre-empting her as I stood up.

  “What is it, then?” She asked, standing up as well.

  “I need to leave,” I said, unable to face her.

  “Please,” she pleaded, touching my shoulder. “Tell me what’s wrong. I understand you have to go on your Path, but I can go with you. We can travel together. I can have a better life with you.”

  I turned to her, my heart crying out. I was not her. I was a piece of a glass that had been stomped on. I was a flower with all its petals plucked off. I was a lily that had been torn apart by violence. I was a swan, and I was singing my final song.

  “You’re beautiful,” I said, “Not just your voice, not just your appearance, but your heart. Living in your own little world, you’ve managed to be sheltered from the horrors of the outside. If I take you outside with me, I will corrupt you, darling. I will destroy you because I will be affected. I am an unstable, emotional person who you will not know how to protect, who you will not know how to save. Because maybe I can’t be saved. But I can’t put that burden on you. You’re a rare beauty, because no one has seen how beautiful you are. I can’t risk corrupting you. I... can’t, I just can’t be responsible for hurting you, because I will hurt you, eventually.”

  “If the world is as bad as you say, doesn’t everyone hurt everyone eventually?”

  I looked up to see the tears in her eyes. “Yes. But I can’t be the one doing it to you. I’ll say it’s because I love you too much, or because I’m some sort of godforsaken do-gooder, but the truth is it’s because I’m a coward. I’m scared of what another destroyed soul will do to my conscience. I’m scared that I’ll never be able to forgive myself, that this guilt, this sorrow, this anger, this pain, it’ll kill me and I don’t want to make you feel responsible for me dying!”

  I was ranting, raving, crying, flinging my arms around. I leaned against a tree, crying into my hands. I wiped it away fiercely after a few minutes. “Stupid bloody idiot. Crying all the time.”

  She had been standing there silently the whole while, watching me sadly. “You’re not an idiot,” she said. “Like you said, I don’t claim to understand how you got here, or what I can do to help. What I do understand is that you’re hurt yourself. I understand that even though you love me, you’re a stranger to me, because you’re a stranger to love and a stranger to yourself as much as I am. And I know you don’t know what to do about that yet. But I have faith that you will.”

  I nodded. “I’m sorry, I have to go,” I turned, ashamed and started to run down the way to the river, unsure if she was following. The sun had dipped lower in the sky.

  “Hey!” I heard her voice when I got to the river. I turned reluctantly.

  “That’s no way to say goodbye,” she said as she hugged me, the longest, tightest hug I have ever received.

  I sniffed and crossed the river quickly before I couldn’t leave anymore. I resolved not to look back, but I did almost as soon as I climbed on the opposite bank. She was still there, she wasn’t an apparition conjured by the Forest, or some ghost or spectre. She was real.

  Her hair was open and free, her dress was fluttering in the breeze. I locked eyes with her. And for the first time, she saw me. It felt like the first time anyone had seen me. She looked right into my soul and saw all of me, the good and the bad. In the dim light, she smiled a smile with muscles that reached back all the way into her immortal spirit, and it gave me a glimpse into the immense beauty I always knew she had within. It radiated warmth and lit up everything around it.

  I turned around as she started singing a song, a song of two strangers never meant to be together. But I still had that image in my mind, and I held that picture in my mind for a long time after; not at the forefront, because staring at it too long would blur it. Instead, I kept it on the fringes of my mind, just out of reach as she was, so that it would be like a buzzing firefly, shining its tiny bright light at the edges of my vision, lending a warm glow to everything around it.

  That final song wrapped itself around that image, combined with it and created a sublime memory, which served to remind me in the same poignant destructive instance who I was and who I could be.

  14

  Wasteland

  Everything around me was dying-even the very air seemed weighed down, heavy, as if it was both a corpse and the ashes that became of it, floating and unmoving.

  It had been happening for some time now, the leaves had been losing their colour and drooping; the grass was grey; the trees were withered.

  Perhaps it had to do with the heat, which was rising with every step I took. Even though the sun had passed its highest mark and was setting, it was hotter than it had ever been.

  What kind of madness was this?

  Well, if I was only just asking that question, I suppose I was the mad one.

  My body was sweating pellets, the sweltering heat making me feel sticky and wet all over, which I tried to shake off. Panting like a dog, I could finally see an opening through the trees ahead, which was easier than usual to do, considering these trees were bare of leaves and had withered away to almost nothing.

  I stepped through the trees and it felt like I had left the Forest, the Path, everything I had known of myself behind. The vision of the deep valley burned itself onto my eyes, and that was almost literal, because I fell to the ground immediately, clawing at my eyes and screaming, trying to erase the image, trying to stop the pain. I rolled too much to the side and then I was falling.

  Even though the drop was long, it felt like I was falling for an eternity, my mind unravelling, strips of cloth that were wrapped tight around it for protection, peeling off as I turned and turned in that impossibly long fall. Finally, like a ragdoll, I hit the ground painfully and bounced a few times. It felt like I had been buried under an avalanche and was only now getting out. Everything hurt, mind, body and spirit.

  I struggled weakly to my feet, surveying my surroundings. To say they were dismal would be to grossly understate it. Yet all of it seemed strangely familiar.

  The land was parched; like it had never seen a drop of water in its entire existence. There were deep cracks running along its entire surface, but none of these cracks seemed to open. There was a sprinkling of colours, but the colours didn’t stand out, they blended into the reddish-brown tint of the land. There were rows and rows of flowers, but there was no gold here, no bees. There was red and white. And, of course, black.

  I stepped closer. Red roses, coloured with the blood of the guilty; white roses, mourning the unending life of their fellows; and black lilies, harbingers of doom. The roses had an unnatural number of thorns all along their stem, and the lilies were scattered between the roses, although with no discernable symmetry or in any coherent pattern. They smelled like death.

  A little further, the lakes were present as well, only they were filled with a yellow, putrid liquid, which had stagnated, surrounding it with flies. There were no plants on the lakes. As I walked closer, I made to check the distances between them the lakes I realised that they were out of sync. Their positions had flipped, with two lakes on the left side and one on the right. An inverted triangle.

  I had been here, of course. But it had been different then, it had been beautiful and magical. It had also been an illusion, because that kind of beauty did not exist, and the Path of good intentions had led me here, to the Forest’s true self. T
hat kind of wildlife could not have possibly survived in the scorching heat and oppressive Forest, but this could. The flowers, the lakes, the atmosphere, they may have been dismal, but they were real, and I understood them, making them much easier to accept.

  I started walking once more to the centre of the triangle, and once more a bird alighted on my shoulder. It was a lark, and it started singing a soft, mournful song. It was a song sung in ages past by the first sacrificed child on the mountaintop; by the first woman burned on the pyre for the sin she had committed in an already-age-old story; by the first scared man who was killed for fear that he would denied salvation; and by all those who heard them singing as they died, and kept passing it down through the ages. It was the song that started small, from a bird on a traveller’s shoulder, and then covered a valley, where the land reverberated with it.

  There was no ancient oak in the centre; instead the six trees were here, three on either side. As I approached, a dozen ravens flew out of the trees. The trees themselves were...fighting, there’s no other word for it. No fruit hung upon their branches, they were spread out and entangled in one another, coiled around the branches of the tree next to them and across them, forming a sort of malicious canopy. I stepped into the only shade in the valley, and my mind was instantly assaulted with images of darkness, war and madness.

  The trees were etched with those symbols, split apart, but the surfaces of the barks were reddened, scratched at until they were laid bare.

  This was the truth, then. The Forest had once again destroyed my illusions, destroyed the possibility that there could be anything good and pure in the world. In a fit of fury, I whipped out the clay idol from my pocket, which had been slowly melting for some time now, and threw it on the ground. It shattered, and the ground cracked open, inviting the pieces to enter within. I stamped furiously at the ones that didn’t, pushing them in.

  The lark flew away after I finished, and the song stopped. The sudden emptiness and silence was too much, and I ran out of the canopy, stopping short once more at the edge of the Forest. An apple tree was growing there out of the core that I had planted. Although caution forbade taking anything from a land as corrupted as this, I defied caution and plucked an apple from the tree. It did not seem rotten, and I brazenly bit into it. A sort of sadness spread through my body, and I sensed I was now privy to a knowledge I never should have known. There was no God. Loneliness was my God now.

  I dropped the apple and walked on, the sun at the beginning of its descent into the very opposite of dawn.

  15

  Knife’s Edge

  Too much. Much too much.

  I couldn’t take it anymore.

  I was hunched over and hobbling along when the final thought hit me and my back snapped up straight.

  Then I started to run but I had to stop thinking but I couldn’t stop thinking but I had to escape the thought so I had to keep moving so that I could escape the thought I had to keep run run running not letting another thought another obstacle stop me because because in stillness lay disaster.

  Faster I ran until the branches grew lower and blocked my path but those stupid little branches weren’t going to stop me no no no so I quickly crouched like a wee little toddler learning to walk running from death and I walked as fast I could with the branches closing in because the bastard Forest knew only how to make things hard hard hard just to mock and to tempt because at the end everything has to be good or else what was the point? What was the fucking point!

  Then the branches got so low I had to go on my hands and knees like a bloody baby which was good because wasn’t I big baby all the time anyway going wah wah wah running from this and that like now running hard and fast from a stupid little thought which was the stupidest thought ever known to babies which was death because they had just been born and those who had just been born should not die instead those who want to die desperately and have been begging for death with all their stupid moralizing and preaching actions should die and suffer and DIE ALREADY!

  The branches cleared and I was stumbling down an empty hill because I done that thing so much it was like I can make a sport out of it which would be good because it would finally be a sport I could play and win at because all the other times I was a loser with a big L hahaha loser me!

  This hill was different and amazing because I didn’t stumble down it I slid like that little slide they had in that village next to us that we were not allowed to play with because we were too dirty but now I’m even dirtier than the people of my village and how awesome is that but this slide in the water was awesome and it ended with me sliding till I splashed and submerged deep into what looked like a lake in the three seconds I could see it.

  Silence.

  In a mother’s womb the water flooded my mouth and lungs and mind and bliss overcame me. But stillness is death right oh look I made a reference to me previously so clever so my stupid body started to flop around because it could not bloody well stay still for a few moments and my body started to rise and I screamed and bubbles shot out but my body still rose and I wanted to cry but my tears would melt into the water and I did not want to cry anymore I would not cry anymore so instead I screamed at my body for not helping me in my decision for death and the water for not choosing a fucking temperature to stay at and instead just being neither hot or cool and therefore being boring.

  I broke the surface and my traitorous body breathed several gulps of fresh air and coughed out water even though I wanted to stop coughing and choke right there and then in that damned lake but instead my hands pushed me to the surface and I got up and I saw that it was a stupid lake that was fed by many streams and when I turned I jumped up again only instinctively because consciously I wanted to die but I jumped because I had seen a monster on the hill.

  It was a horribly ugly and distorted monster with big red eyes that had cracks running all over them and some sort of dirty and discoloured thing come out of its head that was probably its pathetic imitation of hair and it was differently coloured all over with reds and blacks and blues in so many places and weird bumps and boils and other disgusting things which made want to throw up all over its tattered ratty coverings because then it would look better and be better covered than it did now.

  I should perhaps maybe probably mention at this point that it was me.

  My first thought was that it was one of those ghostly apparitions of me conjured up the Forest to teach me some sort of pathetic lesson and I had resolved to strangle it till the life escaped its eyes if it was lesson be damned but all it actually turned out to be was a reflection in a waterfall.

  I laughed like I was possessed with the howling spirits of the dead and I know my laughter reached their graves and made them envious because I laughed loudly and I laughed louder than I had ever laughed in my life and I clutched my belly and laughed and I dropped to my hands and knees and laughed and I laughed till my body ached which wasn’t very hard to do because my body was perpetually in pain and that thought made me laugh and the only reason I stopped laughing was because I was about to cry and I had resolved not to do that and I always keep my resolutions don’t I?

  Long ago when I thought I knew what pain was I had resolved to die if there came a day when I had gone through enough to die and it looked like that day was finally here and I rejoiced because it was.

  I had calmed but only enough to execute a plan so I could execute myself haha so I checked my knife but it was too blunt which was typical so I made a knife right there from scratch because I was so brilliant and I waved the knife at the reflection which waved it back at me like the smug arrogant bastard that it was.

  I put the knife to my wrist and bright lights went off in my mind they burst in the sky of my mind because my mind was so bloody big and I wished I could destroy it and here was my chance so I slashed and I cut and sliced and I kept swiping the knife across my forearm and wrist until it was soaked in blood and I showed it to the reflection which had its own hand of blood and it was giv
ing me such a nice smile.

  I saw the features on my disgusting face which were the features my parents had given me and I hated them and I was glad they were destroyed beyond recognition but I wanted to give my parents a present of my own so I cut off my nose and pierced my ears until I could hear the water no longer and then I decided to give myself the best smile of them all.

  So I put the knife to my left ear and grinned wider and then quickly swiped to the other ear and it was beautiful because it was a wide gaping grin that extended right across my neck that opened wide to reveal its red luscious gums underneath.

  Of course none of this really happened because of course it didn’t because all the fun things only happened in my imagination because of course they did but right now I was looking at something far more important which was the reflection of me with the knife framed to look like I was standing on the knife’s edge.

  A magnificent bloody epiphany hit me at that moment that summed up my life and it terrified me because I had lived all my life on the edge of that knife. Whenever something bad happened to me it made me slide down its edge but I never got so badly cut that I wanted to die because something would always slide me back up just before I reached my lowest point until I was balancing on that knife edge again. Then if something good happened I was floating away from the knife almost escaping its grasp before I was brought back brutally onto its point.

  What was there to do? I had to make a choice between giving up hope completely and just ending my life or keep hoping that there would be a point that I would escape that knife edge completely.

  I didn’t need to make that choice now.

  I looked at myself in the reflection and looked over every injury and tried to recollect how I got them. I remembered everything I had been through to get here. And that was why I couldn’t end my life just yet. The day that I wanted to hurt myself because I had gone through too much was the day I didn’t want to exactly because I gone through too much.