by Mat Laporte
The old woman stopped her story there. The rice smelled like it was cooked. She untied another burlap sack and pulled out a cooked and half-eaten cat carcass from a pile of salt. Balamir salivated uncontrollably. He wasn’t sure if her story was finished, but the smell of rice and the rotisserie cat distracted him and all he could do is hope that she would offer him some.
She took a sharp hunting knife out of a sheath and started to carve chunks of the cat into the pot of cooked rice. The old woman was ignoring Balamir and he sensed, with disappointment, that none of what she was preparing would be shared with him.
“That’s not the whole story,” the old woman said, not looking up from the pot. “Sandy destroyed the boulders. She saved what was left of the Council but the other Grandmothers were deeply offended. They called a meeting. You see, Sandy was one of the Seven and she had acted on her own against them. That wasn’t allowed. They had to work together or not at all, and it was their decision that it should never happen again—Sandy’s insubordination to the Council of Grandmothers, yes—but more importantly, the people should never be allowed to make weapons or exploit each other like that again. So the Grandmothers held a vote on what would happen next…” the old woman trailed off.
Something about the emaciated cat corpse, his hunger, and the vividness of the pictures that the old woman’s story evoked, triggered another chain of traumatic memories inside Balamir. He saw his parents’ faces burned in the wreckage of their house. He saw fields and forests and livestock burn. ‘Den of hypocrisy,’ he thought, not knowing why. Then he saw red and yellow streaks against the night sky above his village, burning embers under translucent skin, as the Council of Grandmothers screamed and laid waste to his entire village.
“Den of hypocrisy,” Balamir said again, this time, out loud and the old woman stopped what she was doing, her knife hand poised where she was hacking at one of the cat’s tendons, the steam from the rice rising in her face.
She started to laugh.
How could she laugh that loudly, Balamir asked himself? Her laughter echoed in the courtyard and shook him to his filth-encrusted backside, as he realized that he was hearing more than one old woman’s laugh reverberate off the stone walls and floors of the over-grown courtyard.
So Balamir ran. He bolted so quickly he didn’t know he was running until he was down the staircase, back into the church basement, scrambling over the piles of paper he had organized earlier that day, up another flight of stairs and out through the busted front doors, into the church parking lot. He planned to keep running, but he couldn’t resist looking one last time at the Church of the Original Grandmothers, where all the stories and secrets that he craved were stored.
A sweltering gust of wind blew in his face. He looked up at the sky, which he thought too dark for that time of day. The old woman from the courtyard hovered in the air above him. Her bones were glowing orange and red beneath her skin. She was suspended in a living bubble, the membrane that the Council of Grandmothers travelled in for protection, microwaves extending from her outstretched hands, causing the air to thicken around her.
If one of them died, they all died. The fact that the old woman is alive means that the Council of Grandmothers is still intact, Balamir thought, and then he fell to the ground and covered his head, bracing for impact, as the other six Grandmothers ripped through the sky towards him.
Freeze Frame
‘Living things crawl out of our frozen bodies every day…’ those words arise in me again, though in an eroding tone of voice, twice removed from their original source. Yet the words persist, ignorant of their own decay, and it strikes me that that’s the way things are: ‘so that some may transform and others merely persist.’ Those words also strike a sickly bell that resounds within me as I use my perfume gun to float up the stacks of paper and old books covered in dust to look them up.
With one befrilled hand I work the perfume gun that keeps me hovering in one place or, if I want, shoots me briskly across the rows of books to where I want to be.
‘Living things crawl out of our frozen bodies every day…’ and all day I perfume-gun myself from one shelf of books to another, trying to find the origin of those words and with them, the secret to unlocking the second major iteration of the world.
Finally, I become tired and perfume-gun myself back to bed where I’ll sleep for an hour or so. In my half-sleep, the smell of the ancient perfume issuing from my perfume gun speaks to me among the other reveries of sleep. It echoes those famous last words: ‘so that some may transform and others merely persist.’
I wake up from my nap, screaming, “The words are transmitted by smell!” This means that the whole library I’ve worked so hard to preserve is more valuable than I’d previously reckoned, except it isn’t the words that carry within them secrets of the second major iteration, but the menagerie of smells seeping out of them, like a briny soup of nascent instruction, waiting to be snuffed up in order to be understood.
I strap on my nose guard and immediately set to work, as dream transformations start piling in on me.
I’m free-falling toward the Earth with a message, a message that will be resisted and denied by many. I’m pursued mercilessly for this information and when I finally relinquish it, those who hear it will hate me forever. But the good news is they can’t bring themselves to actually kill me. Instead, they hold lengthy public tribunals in which people qualified to do so will decide whether I should live or die. They decide that I should live, but that I should not be allowed to live on Earth, an ironic thought as I hurtle toward it.
Next, I’m being dragged across an iron floor. I’m dressed in an officer’s uniform and have very fine, long hair. Something tells me that that’s why I’m being punished. Some burly guard is dragging me to a shower room, but to my surprise, when we get there, my hair isn’t chopped off. Instead, it’s carefully shampooed, conditioned, and brushed to perfection. Then jewels and trinkets are woven into it, I’m placed in a wheelbarrow and paraded around the campground. People stand and watch as the guard wheels me around. They chuck pickles and cakes and all sorts of other delectables into the wheelbarrow, which I eat. Then the guard wheels me in front of a bandstand, where the camp dignitaries sit. They lead a toast in my honour and then I’m tipped unceremoniously into the bottomless pit.
At first I can’t see anything—just some clouds drifting by—but I’m deep underground, so my brain must be damaged, I think, and those clouds must be hallucinations. The first sign I have that the clouds aren’t just hallucinations is how they smell, something like rotting vegetables + oxidizing chemical. From where I lie on the floor of the cave—letting my eyes adjust to the darkness, unable to move or speak—I realize that the cloud things are interacting with me. One of them comes up close, hovers over me, retreats back into the recesses of the cave, comes back again, hesitates, and touches me with its dank, smelly appendage.
Then it retreats to join the others, clumped together, watching me from the back of the cave. I’m not being restrained or held down or anything, but for some reason, I can’t move or feel my feet at all.
The cloud things start getting excited. They encircle me and take turns touching me with their murk. They smell awful. Then one of them stuffs its fist in my mouth, holding it open, as another cloud thing hangs over me, leaps in my mouth and disappears inside. It is followed quickly by three more cloud things, who insinuate themselves into me in a likewise fashion, one at a time. All but the last who holds my mouth open with its pungent fist.
The taste of them is unbearable and my eyes are watering, but before I can puke them out, the last cloud thing enters through my nose. It blocks my gag so I can’t eject it, and by the sheer force of its entrance into my throat, pushes the other cloud things deeper into my bowels.
The next thing I remember, I’m back in the forest. It’s raining heavily and I’m running for cover, but when I look at the ground I realize that
it isn’t rain that’s falling and drenching the leaves, twigs, and grass on the forest floor, but little bits of wet, exploded animal. I pick a piece off my arm that’s warm blood on one side and rough fur on the other. I burp and the smell of rotting vegetables and oxidizing chemicals reminds me of what has passed before. The taste of them is strong in my mouth and getting stronger. It feels like my bile is about to rush up so violently, it will disconnect my jaw from my mouth. Then my eyes get cloudy to the point of blindness as the cloud things file out of me and escape into the outside world for the very first time.
Finally, I’m hovering on my back in an empty yard as the air blows hot and cold around me. There’s no day or night—it’s just one endless grey haze of both sun and moon shining simultaneously—and everything faintly glows. The neighbour’s three children sneak into my yard. They’re trying to be quiet as they creep up and inspect my face. My eyes are shut, but I’m just pretending to be asleep.
Then I open my eyes and swat at them, missing intentionally. They get scared and run back into their own yard, where they huddle together and watch me from a safer distance.
However, I won’t please them with any more performances and they eventually get tired of waiting around and leave me in peace. I resume hovering on my back, relaxing inches from the ground, in the middle of my uniformly grey yard.
Then some glowing green animals crawl over my fence. That the sun and moon shine with equal dimness in my yard seems to disturb their deeply attuned animal instincts and each of them, not more than three or four inches long, starts to convulse, and froth starts bubbling out of their mouths. This is such an alarming sight that I start to hover a bit higher in order to watch. As the froth continues to bubble out of their mouths, it also cements them together until they’re just one pile of shaking fur and teeth with buckets of froth slopping out.
I hover a bit higher off the ground and summon the wind into my yard. I can hear it coming now and I know the frothy ball of fur can hear it coming too, because it starts to jerk around, blindly, looking for something to anchor itself to. The wind enters my yard, picks up the ball of fur, froth and teeth, and flings it somewhere where I won’t have to see it anymore. Then I pick up where I left off, hovering on my back, admiring my uniformly grey yard in the light of the simultaneously shining sun and moon.
‘Living things crawl out of our frozen bodies every day, so that some may transform and others merely persist.’ Those words reverberate inside my brain, once again, and remind me of a town I once visited in my youth. I can no longer recall where it was or what it was called. Sometimes I wonder if it was just a bad dream I had, or a dispatch from someone else’s life, delivered to the wrong address.
The town, as I recall, was unbearably hot and because of that no one was outside but myself. Every step I took on the paving stones cooked the soles of my shoes and my socks began to fuse to my feet. I don’t remember if I had somewhere to go or was merely killing time, as they say, or if I was lost or cajoled there as part of some insidious plot, or else just by sheer bad luck.
Skinny dogs with prominent bones followed me everywhere I went. I was convinced that they were waiting for me to collapse, exhausted from the heat, at which point, they would eat me off the paving stones, and savour my half-cooked flesh.
I remember scanning every window I passed for a face I might implore for help. Ahead of me I could see a row of windows along the side of a rather plain but inviting-looking apartment block. The drapes in one of the ground-floor windows were fluttering, but I have no idea how, for I am certain there has never been a single gust of wind in this pizza oven of a town.
I nearly ran to the open window. When I reached it, I was a bit too short to look in, so I stood on the tips of my toes and craned my neck to peek inside. At first I couldn’t see anything. My eyes were too accustomed to the brightness of the full sun. Then, as my eyes adjusted to the dimness of the interior, I saw a face emerge from the shadows that turned me into two shallow pools of disconnected cells.
One of these pools of disconnected cells was on the inhospitable moon of a distant planet that no one ever visits; the other pool was floating around in a shallow trench in a secluded cave, somewhere back on Earth.
These two shallow pools couldn’t be farther apart, but through some freak accident, the moon of the inhospitable planet that no one ever visits was permanently exploded and a small piece of it with some of my cells attached travelled to Earth over a period of a few thousand years.
This shard of exploded moon eventually landed on Earth and the shallow pool of cells that clung to it found its way to the trench where the other pool of cells lay in wait. Then those two pools merged, forming me—a living, breathing, three-legged creature, the only one of its kind—who will trot around for another thousand years, sucking the life out of tiny mammals and birds.
The Staring Wall
I sit in the library all day staring at a wall, trying and failing, except in rare moments, to make something appear that wasn’t there before. My father’s nearby, scratching around in his old books. He no longer reads from them. Instead, he spends his days in the library examining every page with his bent fingernail, looking for something beneath the paper that has evaded him for years.
“How’s your day been?” I ask him every night, by which I mean to say, ‘Have you found what you’re looking for?’
He shows me his bent fingernail and the pile of books he’s managed to scratch his way through, by which I think he means to say, ‘I have my work, I’ve done my worst.’
When our workday is done and our ability to do much else is depleted, we turn our attentions to our nightly form of entertainment: sitting in silence and staring up at the faux-diamond chandelier that hangs in the middle of our library, halfway between our respective work places: me at the staring wall, father in a far corner of the library with his books.
During the day, the chandelier is kept hidden under a black velvet hood. There are two reasons for this: 1) So that the brilliance of the chandelier won’t distract us from our work and 2) So that same brilliance will never become tarnished by the harmful effects of dust and sun.
The latter is barely a concern. Father and I are both quite allergic to the sun. So we keep the heavy red curtains in our library permanently drawn. You could say that the faux-diamond chandelier that hangs in the middle of the library is our own personal sun and it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that it is the engine that keeps us in orbit between those four walls.
I had a rather successful day at the staring wall the other day. I was forcing myself to lucid dream the usual mundane stuff—causing stars and sparks to appear in front of me by pushing my palms into my eyes—when a hand touched my shoulder from behind. I looked up to see my father standing behind me.
Except it wasn’t my father. The father I was so used to was still sitting in a far corner of the library, scratching away at his books with his bent fingernail. This person behind me, with one hand on my shoulder and the other hand pointing at the staring wall with a fresh sparkle in his eyes, was my father from another, earlier time, and this person who looked exactly like my father from another time, was telling me to look back at the staring wall.
What I saw when I turned my head threw me into fits of ecstasy and despair: the wall was entirely gone and in its place the sun that we were both so allergic to was charging full-force into our room. It sunk its claws into the book bindings and the glass and polished wood of our bookcases. Hot patches of fire quivered on the wallpaper.
I searched the room for my father, but it was difficult to see through all the heavy smoke that had formed. I finally found him unconscious under a pile of books, with a halo of burned paper and ash around his head. Under his bent fingernail I could see the last page he’d been working on. It was a picture plate of a rich red lunar landscape and underneath it, where he’d scratched some of the glossy photo emulsion off the page, I could see
the underlay of another picture: a cool grey orb that opened into another dimension, another world.
In this new dimension, there were flowers that smelled like raw meat and giant eyeballs that walked around, took one look at me and said, “Go back the way you came!’ Glow sticks made of phosphorescent arthropods hung over all of the entrances to the underground tunnels and a steady thrum accompanied me as I crawled through them.
One of the tunnels I found myself in was very hot and the air inside it was very muggy. Leaves of paper, old papyric texts, were pasted all over the walls and hanging from the roof of the tube. I took one down and started reading from it. As soon as I began to read, I heard something scream at me from the other end of the tunnel. Before I knew it, a giant tunnel worm was bearing down on me. In its mouth was a clump of those giant walking eyeballs, screaming, “Go back the way you came!” and I held up my hands to protect myself.
The tunnel worm came to a halt when it saw the paper I was holding up in one hand. It folded into itself as an accordion does when it’s collapsed and the giant eyeballs in its mouth screeched shrilly from being crushed to death in its mouth.
All of a sudden, I found myself transported: I was flying over hills and trees, reflecting on a career of evil doings. I couldn’t remember which of my memories were mere movies and which of them were lies, but it didn’t matter. There were real cars and trucks speeding away from a real wall of dust, destroying everything in its path. Birds caught fire mid-flight.
From where I flew, I could see a procession of heavy blocks bumbling up the side of a cliff—they were thick cubes of some earth-coloured material, held together by moon rays. These heavy blocks of dirt looked helpless as they bumbled up the hill, but their movements were precise; they knew exactly how long it would take them to climb the hill and arrange themselves on top of it in time for the moon to appear.
