by Kelly Link
A pink flash criss-crossed the blue, shouting hello. I opened my mouth and I tried to answer it, but a strangled cry came out. I don’t know if it heard: it glanced briefly at me and then it went on its way. I stood on shaky legs, watching it get smaller, as if it was somehow embedding itself in the blue the way I had been planted in the earth.
The Ape’s eyes were manufactured to affect people in a particular way. He strode on, fixing them on the ground with the delicious consciousness of deliberate denial. He knew, without looking at the people, that their faces would be slack with boredom.
Since his switching on, he felt that he had been born in the wrong age; he did not belong in this dull city. For the millionth time, he contemplated travelling to a place where they had proper choirs who sang for the sake of it, where they appreciated a voice with genuine pitch.
A strangled cry wrenched him from his musings. Annoyed, he looked up and caught a child’s eye by mistake. The kid jumped up and down mindlessly and the crowd cheered. So predictable!
But the kid’s mouth had been closed the whole time. It had not made the sound.
Countryside! The sun had not burnt it all away, or maybe it had grown back. I had seen the endless graffiti of streams and mountains and jungles; I knew all the songs. It was one thing to sing about it, another to be there. The real outside smelt strong—wet plants and bark and dark soil, grasses cutting into my palms. I forgot about being alone. I wandered under the protection of a canopy of trees and smelt and touched everything until I was very tired.
I only remembered that the pink creature had not stayed when it got dark.
I stood shivering for a while, trying to sing the Earth Songs. My voice came out odd and strangled after all of those hours in the dark—not quite proper words yet.
The parade doubled back and stopped outside ‘A Peace of Earth’. A big crowd mooched in the stands behind a low barrier—the guards had taken precautions this time. The people brightened up when the Ape was led inside and his hands were untied.
The Ape wished that the spectacle had to do with singing. That would show them!
The guards pointed to the big treasure-X beaming onto the soil. The Ape fell to his knees and began to dig.
He dug with his face turned down, still refusing to make eye contact with the people. A chill wind with a touch of artificial autumn blew up from the ground vents; and the crowd drifted off to buy refreshments and scarves with pictures of the Ape beating his chest.
Tonight, the experience of feeling cold and watching the Ape dig was not having the desired effect on the crowd. The Ape knew that they wanted to look into his eyes too. The bastards!
But when they get bored, what will they do with me?
They will switch me off forever.
The Ape shivered. He looked up. His eyes deliberately sought those of a small child.
The kid looked into the Ape’s eyes and had the idea to dig too, as if it had thought it up all by itself. It clambered over the barrier and edged as near to the treasure-X as it dared. The crowd tittered as it knelt and dug its hands into the soil.
Aping the Ape. Typical!
The people followed, slipping over the barrier in small groups until there were too many to stop. The guards stood in a circle, their backs to the treasure-X, keeping the crowd at a safe distance from the Ape.
One by one, the people began to dig, enjoying the novelty of the soil on their hands; they broke their nails and got dirt on their faces and forgot about the Ape.
For the Ape, it was a rare moment of solitude. Usually the cameras watched over him between the spectacles. And when he came on, the crowds were always there, cheering wildly at first and then trying to stare into his eyes.
His makers had informed him that the eyes were the supposed windows of the soul. His were made of wet matter fused to his circuitry. He had looked at his stiff mouth and his ‘alive eyes’ in the mirror and felt the stirrings of what was, he deduced, pain.
The Ape continued digging, eyes downcast, careful not to attract attention from the crowd. He was not like them at all, bred to shop for cheap thrills. Much as this thought cheered him, it also meant that he was one of a kind, alone. His metal hands made the soil easy to dig into and soon his hole was deeper than the others’.
The Ape found his treasure long before the people. When he was hidden from view, he heard the strangled voice singing to him from far away—a voice that belonged in a proper choir—and he took his chance: he worked his jaws until there was a small split in the tape; he placed his mouth close to the bottom of the hole; he started to hum.
Above him, cracks shot through ‘A Peace of Earth’. The guards and the crowd began to run.
They started as soon as the sun came up, the ape songs—low vibrations calling over time, lost animals drifting out of the mist, as if each had stepped from its skin a long time ago and was only now taking shape again.
I slowly found the notes and my body became a fresh ocean, my cells the creatures swimming in it. I had come up from the ground with memories of a dying earth; now I became a real seed and I grew.
The Ape’s voice split the tape and he sang at his true pitch, loud and full, to the accompaniment of the girl far away, as the earth re-arranged itself around him.
Mother had prepared me for the future. “Pretend you are a seed,” she’d said. “Like this.” She curled up on the floor and closed her eyes.
I stood defiant, arms folded. “How is this going to help? How?”
She opened an eye. “Curl!” she said.
I did not want to curl. She was going insane with the guilt, like the rest of the adults.
“No,” I said. But I curled up before she could get vicious; her gentle nature had started to change.
It turned out that this was one of her good days: she was making sure that the kids chose me.
The kids gave me the best room, separate from where they’d put the adults. It was a calm-weather day outside as far as I could tell through the slatted windows. I watched the mechanical antelope leaping over the gates of the mental institution.
The kids came to visit me. “You are the mystery,” they said.
“What?” I said and I curled up on the floor.
They looked pleased. “You are the mystery,” they repeated.
It was some sort of koan, I thought at first, to stay sane for as long as possible; all of us kids knew we would get ill once we grew up, even if it was not us who had made the sun too hot.
“If you are not part of the problem, you must be part of the solution,” said the kids.
As if I needed reminding!
They left me alone to learn the Earth Songs so that I could warn any survivors in the future, when I woke up. I swam in memories of polluted air and water, planes flying endlessly, the starving Africans and Australians, the ones who couldn’t afford the airfares, the ones who didn’t make it through the angry crowds at the airports, the last real tiger alive in a zoo when I was very young . . . .
You are the mystery, they kept saying. You are the mystery. As far as I could tell, I was pretty ordinary, a future sinner, just like the rest of them.
The Ape blocked the falling earth with his body and sang as loudly as he could. His purpose was to form the choir. Somehow, this singing thing far away belonged to it. He sang until he reached a frequency that melded his atoms into the configuration he knew that he had been born for. His voice travelled through the soil. It shook the ground where the girl stood. She sank back into the earth and the Ape gathered her particles to him.
“The mystery, the mystery,” I chanted to myself all night, for Mother’s sake, staring at the moon outlined in a thick ring of blood.
It was no good. I did not want to be their stupid mystery. And how could a mystery save anyone?
“Mother, Mother,” I called, but Mother had gone.
They’d hung her up in the square. Her crime: she had done nothing.
The anger had grown on the faces of the kids and they’d t
urned sour, even though they were young. Green plastic fumes filled the air. Why they were burning plastic trees, I don’t know. They would never burn a real tree! The gleaming surfaces reflected back their stiff faces as they carried her to the scaffold.
The kids say the Earth Soul has long departed. But sometimes I think that I did see it in Mother’s eyes. She taught me how to curl. She saved me. And the adults were sorry. They invented the seed capsules for our future, just not enough to go round.
The girl is back under the ground, choking, held tight against the Ape’s metal chest as he digs upwards towards the sky. He claws through the last layers of soil and hauls them to their feet. His notes have tilled ‘A Peace of Earth’ and they are standing in a dark field, its furrows stretching out to meet the wind blowing in strong and cold from the countryside.
Earth, you sang yourself into me as I sat on a heap of paving stones and watched Mother’s body swinging slowly back and forth, the third in a long row. You poured burning sun on my back as the clouds moved in like memories of how things used to be. You cried rain and I held up my hands, although you were burning little pocks in my skin.
You must have thought that I was mad to sit and burn, mad to be outside. But I was the only one left in that square and I needed to understand what had happened.
Were you angry with your children?
All I could see was the love in Mother’s eyes before she hung still.
I ran to summon the kids; they already worshipped me.
They slouched in the shade of the crumbling buildings on the edges of the square. I called them out and lined them up in rows. I made them stand for hours, heads bowed, their cheeks blistering black, while I sat on the scaffold and sang them the Earth Songs, the stiff bodies behind me protecting me from the sun.
I made them stand until they were stripped naked like trees from winters past so that the sun could judge them, while the blood of our parents ran back into the soil.
This would speed their ending. Before they became ill, I made them put me into the earth.
The guards have switched on the floodlights and it almost feels like day; rainbow colours refract off the freshly dug earth like early morning dew.
The Ape and the girl sing of an ancient countryside, fresh and green, of blue skies and birds, of the ghosts of animals becoming solid, of starting again.
The people creep back and surround ‘A Peace of Earth’. More arrive until there is a massive crowd.
At first, the Ape avoids their eyes. Why should I waste on them what they cannot understand? The bastards!
But the songs genuinely move them and the Ape glances at them in disbelief as they begin to laugh and weep. They are not bored, he thinks, and he willingly meets a child’s eyes.
The Ape and the girl’s voices swell to bursting on the wave of the people’s feelings.
The child sees himself reflected in the Ape’s eyes and he understands for the first time that the countryside is in fact real. He understands that the countryside is real and that he must be kept away from it.
The child wipes his eyes and picks up the first stone.
I remember the kids standing in the square, the sun slowly melting away their pain and their guilt. I lie on the freshly dug earth, in the arms of an ape. I dream of being a pink bird, of flying away through the sea.
The girl lies in a puddle of blood, not the first blood the Ape has seen, but the first time he has seen so much.
The people have left and are hiding.
“Mother,” whispers the girl and the Ape hugs the warm weight of her against his dented body.
It seems as if the sun is setting as the lights in the bars go out one by one. The Ape lifts the girl’s head and they look towards the countryside, and then out at the dark sky and the stars and the planets. The Ape can feel the girl’s heart thumping, pushing out her blood. He holds her close. He begins to hum.
For Me, Seek the Sun
Michelle Vider
- yesterday I couldn’t leave my bed till like. after 2pm. and that was a struggle. and I wasn’t asleep, I just. couldn’t be outside the bed
- also I’m gonna be tmi for a minute SORRY
- BUT I HAVEN’T HAD A SHIT SINCE SATURDAY SO I’M IRRITATED ABOUT THAT TOO
- /tmi
+ noooooooooo
+ ARE YOU GOING TO SABOTAGE YOURSELF
+ AND EAT A TON OF STUFF TO ACTIVATE YOUR IBS
- I had coffee yesterday
- and NOTHING
- COFFEE
+ YEAH SERIOUSLY, THAT IS COFFEE’S JOB THO
- it’s cool I should be getting my period soon
- that should really kickstart stuff
+ you should call your toilet the thunderdome
+ and see if that entices your sphincter
+ you should go outside and see if you can terrify your intestines into complying
+ like go out into a field or empty lot with a work of high fantasy
+ try to convince your body that it’s the dark ages and life is too hard as a peasant or vassal to be this blocked up with stress
+ like damn, intestines, there’s cabbage that needs to be picked
+ daughter’s gotta be sold into marriage to a fellow Poor
+ that can’t be done when we’re all blocked up and carrying all this shit weight
- that sounds a lot like getting in touch with nature
- why do you think I subscribe to a CSA
- so I don’t have to touch or smell a farmer’s market every damn week
- there was a beetle in our box once and I got my boyf to empty the vegs and then I threw the box out the window
- it missed the dumpster but it felt really good
- maybe I just need to throw something heavy out the window
- LIKE MY ENTIRE BODY FROM THE WAIST FUCKING DOWN
+ right i meant to ask did you even think of bisection
+ or did you go straight for the coffee
+ oh oh chewy chips ahoy!! their packaging literally says “more than recommended amount may have a laxative effect”
+ i know this for reasons
+ terrible reasons
- I would go outside but I have that condition anthony hopkins has in ‘howards end’
- hay fever? capitalism?
- I have puritanism
- my mayflower ancestors believed hell was located in the sun so the less sin you absorbed through your skin the better your chances of heaven
- which was NOT located in the sun. probably.
+ thank you for the next fake fact i’ll use to troll people at parties
- yes I approve
- please friend, go out into the world
- look upon it for me
- speak my dickish words
- mail me some chewy chips ahoy so I can destroy my rectum
- I will consider these gift and payment for my Pilgrim Facts
+ i dream of the day when you are free to shit again
+ when your allergy prison frees you to spend a day in the sun with your edwardian wife, emma thompson
+ when your home is just far enough into THE COUNTRY that you’re free from the tyranny of the roads
- lol I didn’t even get a cost of living raise this year
- tyranny 4ever babe
Medea
Deborah Walker
It was the dead time of the afternoon. There was just one old boy nursing a beer at the end of the sports bar. But at least the footie was on: Ipswich Town versus Norwich City. And it was 2-1 up to Ipswich. It was going to be a walkover. This was a sweet job and no mistake. “Need any oxygen?” asked Simon, tapping the canister on the bar. Head Office had been on at him to push more oxygen to the punters.
“I’ll make do.” Unfortunately the old guy took Simon’s question as encouragement. He shuffled along the bar to a seat close to Simon. “The writing’s on the wall, and none will see it,” he said. “Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin.”
A fragment of poetry floated, unex
pectedly, into Simon’s head, “The moving finger writes; and, having writ / moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit, / shall lure it back to cancel half a line.”
The old man looked up from his beer, raised an eyebrow. “A student of Omar Khayyám, are you?”
“Not really,” admitted Simon. “I’m more a student of the beautiful game.”
“Omar Khayyám saw things clearly,” said the old man. “That’s rare, nowadays.”
“Is it?” said Simon politely. The ref had given a penalty? Unbelievable. Norwich were going to score. He knew it.
“Earth’s hostile to us, a Malevolent Medea rather than Benevolent Gai. You’ve heard of the Medea hypothesis, haven’t you?”
“Don’t look her in the eye,” said Simon. “That’s the important thing. Always use your shield as a mirror when you cut her head off.”
“Not Medusa.” The old man shook his head. “Medea.”
Simon shrugged. Norwich placed the ball in the back on the net. Two all. This was a disaster.
“Medea’s the opposing principle to Gai. You have heard of Gai?”
“The mother goddess?” said Simon uncertainly. This was a little outside his usual range.
“Consider Earth as a super organism. The seas, the air, the oceans, the animals, the plants, the microorganisms; everything influences each other.”
“Like that butterfly who causes all the storms.” Simon smiled. He was just pulling the old boy’s leg.
The old man ignored him. “Benvolvent Gai is a fallacy. The world is ruled by Medea, the mother who kills her children. How can anyone think otherwise when the air is slowly being poisoned?”
“The government’s sorting out the air,” said Simon. “It’s a worry, but they’re keeping it breathable.” Another line of poetry came to his mind: “I came like water, and like wind I go.”
