When Jupiter Sighs
by Bethalynne Bajema
When Jupiter Sighs is copyright ©2000 Bethalynne Bajema. All Rights Reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law. For permissions contact: [email protected]
Foreword
I was a very dreamy young woman, immersed in comic books and strange fiction, and all I wanted to do was be among those people who wrote those stories and illustrated them. These ideas were my first fully realized stories in that regard. They deal with my air fairy imagination, my sprawling dream-space, and my over active imagination. These stories are the product of being told I needed to come down out of the clouds and move among the regular world. I put up a small fight.
I've written quite a bit in my day, but these are my very first short stories that I saw through to the end and I really adore the nostalgia they have for me. More than a decade ago I pulled them together into this collection. Since then they've had a bit of editing and other short stories added to create this finalized version of the collection. When you read them keep in mind I was a girl born in the seventies who spent her young years lovingly shackled to the eighties and then found a whole different world when the nineties came around. Comics that weren't just about superheros were finally a thing. The internet was just being born to the general public. It was a wonderful time for me.
A few of these stories are born of dreams, while others are just strange ideas that came to me when I was here or there. They're purely fantasy based. They don't ask too much of the reader except to sit back and hopefully enjoy them. And I hope you do exactly that! -- Bethalynne
Table of Contents
* * *
When Jupiter Sighs
Apples & Muses
Water
Snippets of Babble
Delirium's Nocturne
The Dreaming
Feathers, Flowers & Death
Baptista
*
When Jupiter Sighs
The woman looked dark and feral; like a long lost creature who acted as a guardian to a dead history that any one of us should have tried to remember, or at the very least made up.
She wore flowers and skulls within her headdress and her eyes were a pale shade of nothingness. All of her emotion was kept tight in the movement of her lips. Because of this, it was hard to place a proper understanding on what and who she was.
No one here would stand against her. All that was 'we' stepped to the side and allowed her to walk in. There was a very stark silence as she moved among us. I personally, could think of no words.
Her blanched eyes looked towards us before moving skywards. Her lips began to move as she whispered what we could only consider a curse in a language long since forgotten from our world. She spoke to a celestial body so far away many of us couldn't even claim to understand its influence.
"When your false worlds find themselves at a pause, at a sigh, my planet Yuggoth is there to whisper to us all that the universe has forgotten. After all those dark whisperings I hear my own celestial being making suggestions while I sleep. They come to one place and I understand my being and where I am in this life. A world of porous creatures you could never understand..."
I felt so small, so insignificant as I moved towards her. I fell down to my knees and felt an overwhelming sense of emotions overcoming me. I just wanted one creature to understand, whether it actually understood or not. I reached towards her and gave into my fears.
"I waited so long to say this... to admit this... I understand. I have for so long listened to the night sky and only Jupiter's voice found me. So aggressive was his language that it has exhausted me. I waited for that one moment where I could lift my eyes from the sky... to look away. It took a moment when Jupiter sighed to break free of his language I cannot understand. It brings me to this point with you. Where I am happy to let go and maybe... just maybe... go back to as normal a life as I can hope for."
My words stopped there. I dared not look up in my fear. Had I saw what was taking place I would have seen a sympathetic set of eyes, ears, and an understanding.
I felt the presence of someone near me as I cowered. A hand that so lovingly touched me and felt my issues as they plagued me. This hand touched my hair and stroked my cheek. It spoke to me directly, silently, and gave me the response I needed.
"So listen to a few of the small tales I have to tell and we will let you go. When the great giant truly sighs, you will be free of this..."
Apples & Muses
The sun is whispering. This is a soft sound like the rumbling of a hungry stomach; low and deep. This an authority not to be messed with. I can take a hint, I see the threats very well. Unlike so many others, I’ll never be a sun worshiper, at least not in the normal sense. If I were to offer praise it would be quiet and respectful, politely offered from within the protective walls of my home. I’ll give him a nod and a thanks for all the wonderful things he helps grow and sustenance, but I won’t lose my mind in him.
You see, it’s his vanity that gets the better of him. The other men—Mars, Jupiter, Pluto and even Saturn— wear their beauty like a polished badge. But in the cover of darkness and sight too weak to truly see, those of us here on the good Mother Earth do not notice. It is he, Ra, Roshone, the Sun who is the most demanding celestial body in our heavens. And for this he will allow our adoring glances to no other. What of our appreciation, our praise? What reward do we get for our devotions? Skin that falls to tan leather or cancer that creeps under our covers. He rewards us with pain, as it is in his sadistic nature to do.
And still he whispers.
I cannot see her, but I know his lover is there, washed out in the others harsh light. She sits quietly alone, the woman hidden behind the man’s throne and she listens. She listens to his apologies, his promises of better things to come. These are false tales he’s practiced since god smashed his hands together and brought them into creation. She knows they are empty words, but they are pleasing to the ear. Making the brash man seem more humble, more like the warm creature she loves.
She might still his whispers by telling him she is faithful, for there are no words that she can utter that he would not believe. In all her long, so very long, time in the heavens, never had she truly forsaken him for another. She had humored the flirts and enjoyed the endless gathering of celestial men who had come to swoon and coo over her. Yet in the end, when her time in the night sky came to a close and that bright lover of hers loomed on the horizon, it was always him she thought of. It was always him she wanted to be near. How could she not? The sun's borrowed light was what made her glow.
I could only sit and laugh softly to myself. The lady night was my teacher, my tutor, a great creature who taught me—through her actions—how to ruffle the feathers of a man. And now she offered one more lesson on the nature of a pleading lover: Give him time to wallow in his needs, give him time to remember that lonely period before he met you. Only then, after the whispers have turned to pleading, did you give him one petal of your flower to fuss over. One frail piece of hope and forgiveness that might be forthcoming.
The whispering stopped and the moon said something softly to him.
Then silence, as the two were content with one another again.
A smile plays at my lips, the silence like a soft melody. Sometimes there is no greater sound than simple silence. Simple nothingness. But soon the silence gives way to the clinking of the keyboard. I'm supposed to be working.
A face stared back at me, mockingly, tempting me to do her justice. With a subtle movement of my hand I offer my middle finger to the figure on the screen. She seems to smile all the harder. Then I feel foolish, loo
king around the empty room as if the house ghosts would really care if I cursed my own drawing or not. I look back and for a moment Na’chen looks as though she might be sympathetic. But as quickly as it comes is as quickly as it goes and again she is nothing more than a smirking diva on the screen wearing too little clothing and too much mascara.
“What to do, what to do...” I mumble to myself.
Jezebella perks her ears up, wondering if the senseless babble from me is meant as an invitation for her. In the end, though she’d adore the attention, she decides to stay where she’s at. The will to move is beyond her. She lays her head down and falls back into her catnap. If her mistress needs something fuzzy and warm to cuddle, she knows where to find her.
Now the sunbeams were getting in through the slight slits in the blinds. Hazy little beams showing me just how many invisible bits were in my breathing air. One beam is poking through the curtains and pressing against my back. I feel like the cat that can’t quite make it through the sunlit spot on the floor without falling asleep. My lids are growing heavy, my limbs a bit too watery, and my eyes feel like they haven’t closed in days.
To my right on the wall is the odd shadowbox sculpture of Kilby, my poor silent ejiyn girl. I painted her in metallics and placed her among a dry flower bed, putting a halo of fire behind her head and a pair of peacock feathers for wings behind her shoulder blades. My beautiful surreal butterfly. She closes one black eye to wink at me. She leans forward and points a delicate porcelain hand towards my computer screen. I shake my head, I’m growing much too tired to try and decipher her sign language, but her sharp jabs toward the monitor were becoming more urgent. All the while my eyelids drooped and the engine light in my brain dimmed. She'd just have to forgive me for not understanding the secret languages of inanimate objects that choose to animate themselves.
Kilby gave up on her signals and instead took hold of the frame she sat in. She braced herself for whatever event was about to occur. I should have taken the hint or at least recognized her clues. Falling to the dream at night was calm and sweet. The daydream was another beast all together. Swift and fast, tugging you under by some massive undertow that wouldn’t let up till your body hit the daydream water’s floor.
The room tipped.
Quick and sudden the room shifted its reality and in this reality I was not sitting on the right floor. The room moved forward and my chair rolled. It only came to a stop as it hit my computer desk and became wedged there. I was not quite so still though, and kept moving as the chair stopped. All that loomed before me was the computer screen and it seemed to be getting larger by the moment.
My eyes fell closed. Not that I didn’t want to see where I was going, but the sheer heaviness of my eyelids wouldn't allow them to remain open any longer. I feel the slight bump as my body hits the monitor screen and then the even stranger sensation as my body passed through it.
I didn’t open my eyes as I fell through the wires. The nastiness of technology and electricity pressing itself against me; it was enough to make me nauseous. Thankfully it didn’t linger for very long. The wires and miscellaneous contraptions I had no names for gave way to air and a fine mist. Through the mist I fell till the ground reached up to greet me.
With a thud. “Ouuww!” was my reaction.
“Nasty trip isn’t it? That’s what you get for sleeping during the day.”
A nymph? One of my celestial men, or perhaps the Queen herself? But no... it was only my muse come to call.
“Hello you. We do have to stop meeting like this.”
He smiles and offers me a hand, which I take. Using the support I haul myself to my feet and dust my clothes off like some indignant cat who’s fallen off a ledge. Upon standing and looking around I can see the landscape is not so appealing. The images seem too bright and lacking in many details; like a bunch of pastels on the TV screen where someone has turned the brightness up. It was wearing on my eyes.
I rub my eyes, blink and do my best to shake off the glare that’s threatening to place itself over my irises like some hazy contact. Then I look towards my friend.
He stood there, swaddled in his blacks, arms behind his back, rocking slightly forward to back as he waited for me to get my bearings. I straightened the logo on my jersey so it lay square across my chest, gave a tug to the bottom of my shorts to still the creeping hems in the rear, and called myself good. I pushed away my afternoon-untidy hair and grinned—absolutely lacking any mystique.
“So what are we up to today?” I ask.
He grins, something in part natural, in another part mischievous. “I’ve been creating music. Well, I will be creating shortly. I’ve been inventing a new machine that makes music. Music that is so strange it will make the eerie moans of my beloved Theremin seem natural. ”
“Can I have a look and listen?”
“Of course.”
He motioned towards a doorway off in the distance. The door sat there neatly in the middle of reality and would lead into unreality. Perhaps if I wasn't moving among the daydream this would seem rather odd. It was all quite natural though. In this place doors could be found anywhere—even in the middle of one endless expanse to move you to a completely different one.
A strange thing was taking place in this reality we stood in though. A cold wind was blowing and with it came the smell of cinnamon and gasoline. It nipped at my nose to the point of pain. And the brightness was falling away to a type of living blackness. Curiously a moving blackness that was lashing out across the sky like some great artist’s dark paints had toppled over. The liquid color was wiping away the pastels and brilliance. When the thunder rocked the ground beneath my feet, and the lighting cut through the sky, I had the sickening feeling my daydream was falling rapidly to something more sinister.
My companion was undaunted and smiled away as if the dream sun was still glowing brightly. He put his hand to the small of my back to get me to moving. He lead me towards the door. “Come now, shouldn’t keep my little contraption waiting, should we?” but a small note of nervousness was betraying his calm.
“What the hells going on?” but he doesn't hear me. The wind was blowing so furiously that it ripped the words from my lips the moment they rolled off my tongue. Beyond that the thunder still raged. “But I just got here...” I whisper. It was too soon to have such distractions.
My muse has no time for the growing darkness and quickly ushers me through the door from that moment of dream reality to that place of dream unreality beyond the doorway. What awaits me on the other side of the door is something I find hard to put into words.
My muse tells me he's created a machine that creates music, but this is no simple musical instrument. This massive thing is a beast of distorted proportions. It is hard for me to get a sense of what I'm looking at and what pieces of the machinery are meant to power its workings and what pieces are the things that make music. It also seems to be moving in a slight and subtle fashion that played tricks on the mind. I wasn't sure if I was mesmerized or terrified by the thing.
"What in the unholy world have you created my muse?" I whispered.
My muse beams over my reaction and moves towards his creation. There is a strange moment as he moves towards this thing when the nature of predictable movement and perspective are turned over. The illusion is so very brief I can't be sure I saw it or if I imagined it. In that moment the muse was suddenly bigger than his machine. He towered over it like it was little more than a music box at his feet. Then roles were reversed and he was so tiny as to look as though he were standing next to a monolith.
"What the?" I manage to say before an extreme sensation of vertigo hits me square between the eyes. I wobble this way and that and find myself at the edge of the door, falling to the ground. My fall triggered an avalanche. I couldn’t see the weighty green things as they fell down around me until the rampage stopped. I opened my eyes to see myself buried in green apples, in a volume I’d never seen before—not even at the fruit market.
; “Good Lord! I feel like I’m in the damn Yellow Submarine movie! Please tell me I'm not about to turn to stone!”
My muse hurried back to me, trying very hard not to laugh at the pile of artist and apples. I moved my hands with a violent thrust back and forth sending produce flying everywhere.
“Is this suppose to be a statement?”
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