by Hal Duncan
•
AND IN THE meadow, pillowed by Jaq’s chest, Puk tells of how his apostate Da and Mam were scythed in an epiphany bombing one day while in the city, some teenage zealot—teenage in Earther years, he checks—eyes afire with oaths of apotheosis for all, expediting the raptures of all, crying liberation from the flesh as he stood for the sniper to detonate a sunlight lobotomy in his frontal lobe, the dead man’s switch slipping from his grip as he crumpled, and there was a flash as bright as the boy must’ve seen, and it brought the building down, the whole building down on top of everyone, and then it was all over.
Except it wasn’t, it wasn’t over, as for all his father’s disavowals of geisting, his own geisted kin petitioned kith, his own father and grandfather and great-grandfather and so on back to pilgrim forefather Brigham Massinger who was of the first returnees scrabbling the barren soil now hight the Heartland, and of the first raptured to virtual paradise as reward; they set to swaying the Ancestry over the prodigal, and doctors’ decrees wormed the will to naught, arguing immorality, insanity, illegitimacy, no right to abort eternity; so they had to attend, Puk and Ana, had to attend the wake of their parents’ geists, say adieu to the flesh and bienvenue to the shade of psyche. Vanguard of the queued celebrants, front of line for the alohas. Shimmering geists of their ancestors filling the backhall beyond the podium where Da and Mam Massinger glimmered into afterlife. Blinked down at daughter and son.
Ana squeezed his hand so tight then, to soothe which one of them he didn’t know, in her need or in savvy of his. He squeezed back just as tight, tighter maybe, feeling helpless bothways, in his need and in savvy of hers.
Worst of it is, Puk tells him in thicket voice, how he ached to believe it. The essence of them uploaded from the implants, living on, saved.
His Mam’s geist it was though, true to that essence, told them straight it wasn’t them. Said it just as eggshell gentle as she would have, on her knees to cradle his teary face; but that’s the thing about a perfect sim of a psyche: why would it lie if it was aping the savvy it’d be deceit, the burden of empathy?
After.
After, there was the fight for his custody, him not twenty-one yet and the doctors set to huchle him off to a sodality, his sis a spitting fury in defiance.
It shouldn’t matter because it’s not them, he says, and Ana says they’re not even really aware, no more than a sim of your stancing, innards and all.
Yanked, whispers Jaq then: sorry, that’s just... yanked is stunted, saying it’s stunted is stunted, I don’t know what to say it’s so...
Rotted, says Puk.
•
KALAMOS, ACORUS CALAMUS, even his name seems calmly sonorous to Susurrus, fit to the hushing soughs they make in smoothing one through the other, wind and reed caressing soft as skin ever felt on skin. He is a tall perennial wetland monocot with scented leaves of edges wavy like a fluttering pennant, from which he gains the nickname Sweet Flag, and with rhizomes of an even stronger scent thought to be a powerful aphrodisiac in antiquity, in the Orient and Egypt. Susurrus does not doubt it.
Thought to be psychoactive too he was, now and then, though this lore may be less than reliable. What is sure: this son of the Karian river Maiandros has been a strewing herb, and the source of fragrances, has been used medicinally and as a stimulant, among the northern Native Americans; in Greece and through Europe, from the days of Dionysus, his rhizome was often added to wine, while absinthe found one of its possible ingredients in the root itself; his leaves, with their curly-edged or undulate margins, are between point seven and one point seven centimetres wide, averaging one centimetre over all, the sympodial leaf somewhat shorter than the vegetative leaves; and the spadix, at the time of expansion, may reach a length between four point nine and eight point nine centimetres. Longer than Acorus americanus, as are the flowers, at between three and four millimetres.
Little wonder then that his seed spikes on their tall stalks were a phallic symbol—with a wry comment perhaps, on nature’s part, in the shriveled look of the abortive ovary he shows, infertile.
Infertile in that respect, anyway. Kalamos has been lush through the ages: in the ink verse born from a reed pen, the qalam of Arabic calligraphy; in the music conjured from his hollow stalks by Pan, on the banks of the river Ladon, birthing the nymph Syrinx in his song, to be loved and chased by the horned god, ever in flight as song must ever be; in the inspiration of Whitman’s “Calamus,” surely the grass, the leaves, at the heart of his Leaves of Grass, this reed sprung from the lad who lost his lover Karpos in a swimming contest, who chose to let himself drown too rather than live without his eromenos.
Karpos was your half-brother, Ares has told Susurrus sadly, your father’s son. Inherited that bright-eyed mischief Zephyros still beguiles with, when he’s of a mood for devilry. Not unlike one little imp we might mention, eh, monkey?
You remind me of him, Kalamos has told Susurrus—smiling while he said it though.
So, the Martian godling of the wind, incorrigable flirt Susurrus, slides himself through the tall grass of Kalamus, in this warm summer tomorrow on the banks of a small tributory of the Rio Erehwyreve, where Jaq and Puk swing from a hemp rope to crash wildly in the water, their carouse of shouting nekkid joy unbound so all that’s drowned here is the gentler fuckery of the warm breeze and the reeds forming a single voice that whispers Whitman, drowned out as the lovers, Puk and Jaq, cavort, as these two boys together, clinging in the babble of river, each the other loving, splashing, never leaving, swim.
Published 2017 by Lethe Press at Smashwords.com
All Rights Reserved
Copyright © 2017
Hal Duncan
ISBN: 978-1-59021-683-5
No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the Author or Publisher.
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