Chapter 1
The morning sun watched over them tentatively as they passed the fork in the road; The Woman, tied to the feet of The Behemoth with Safrine in her arms. They hadn’t stopped since they escaped from a small tear in The Nest’s belly.
Under the morning light, they had had an unusual perspective, having almost forgotten what the sun looked like when it wasn’t hidden behind the veil of a cold grey August morning.
Great shadows crept across the plains, leaping out of monolithic objects, scattered about the path. Where normally these spots of black would warn someone to caution and address them with fear, on this balmy morning, with their sight pressed by a blaring sun and with little respite between the sky above and their burning skin, the shadows offered a new fractional meaning; shade.
And so, with every hour or so of pained and exhausted marching, the three came to rest under tiny blankets of darkness to catch their breaths and sustain their depleting reserves.
“How much further?” The Woman asked The Behemoth.
The Behemoth looked to the small girl who sat between The Woman’s outstretched legs, picking up warm sand in her hands and letting it run through her fingers, watching every grain escape from her clutches and catch a breeze wiring in and out of the other grains, all moving with the flow of things, abiding a rule, in only one direction, where all things came to their end, with a heap of others. She wondered why something so light couldn’t just float high into the air and continue to float above the coming down where all things seemed to find themselves.
“Make her walk or carry her,” The Behemoth said to The Woman cruelly and abruptly.
“She’s a child. She can’t take more of this marching, she needs to sleep. She needs to eat” pleaded The Woman.
“We have until the fall of the third sun. Until we are on that boat, there will be no rest” he said.
The Woman reined her discontent and her argument. The giant man scared her, he always had. She had never understood what Marcos saw in him and how they had built a strange silent trust. There had never been a meeting that she knew of, just that one day he was there and from that point, he was never anywhere else.
Marcos had spoken very little of him but when she would question him, Marcos would jump to his defense, belittling her and; always in the height of argument, dragging her back to her choice.
The scar on her belly.
The well of his dissatisfaction.
She stopped questioning anything that happened around her in a bid to keep herself clean and dry, out of the past like Marcos had promised, never looking back, moving only into the future, creating new memories, new stories, new love; always under the orange hue of The Forever New Dawn, an image and a specific memory that Marcos knew brought her calm.
And he painted the brand of his philosophy; of his saving grace, in the only fond memory that hadn’t lost to the weight of one choice in her past.
As she focused on the orange hue, her mind slipped in and out of concentration; the sound of loose gravel spitting about their feet and the trampling of The Behemoth’s massive shoes smacking against the ground reverberated in her ears. As she held to the young girl’s shoulders, her mind wandered.
She sat now - in her conscious delusion - in an old sight; something she had lived only once and stored away for a moment quite like this. From the recesses in her eyes, under a cold grey August morning, she could feel her lover’s hand tighten and then pull away from hers as they neared the massive structure he called The Nest.
He was always getting further away it seemed and when he touched her, she felt further from herself, seemingly escaping from the consciousness of their condition; their love.
She couldn’t remember the last time they had made love. It was so long ago before even the light and sound had slipped into the tremors of her dreams, leaving her with only grey abandon; her City, like her lover; tangible in form but inanimate; a City without colour, a man without lust.
The moment she felt his hand slipping, she in turn felt herself slipping into some accepted defeat, taking her place behind the thrill of his step as his ever present.
His acquiescent shadow.
She wanted to grip his hand and her whole being collapsed to one point, to the tip of her ring finger as it curled against her lover’s waning palm. Lead by his direct stare and open hand, her lover abandoned her need for the grace of a man she would never trust. She pulled a plastic smile over her face as her lover turned to her direction, showing her off like a weathered trophy then casting his eyes with the monster of a man to the complex which cast high into the air, shadowing the cold grey August morning.
As close as she was, it seemed he was so far from her and she knew she would never have him back so she must love him somehow, in any way that he would permit, in however he chose, for the choice that she had made at the start of all of this.
The three were greeted by a one-armed man who opened the door and their eyes feasted on a conceptual machine in action. There was movement everywhere they looked.
Men all adorned in black.
Women, in white.
And everywhere they looked stayed a ubiquitous sight, a large white heart.
“You’ve been busy,” said Marcos to The Behemoth.
“Everything is according to your scribe. This is the humanity of your ideals. Shall we?” he said, extending his arm across the doorway and inviting the two into their future.
The Woman was overcome by the enormity of it. How an idea in passing, something her lover discussed over the emptying of wine had fruited; in The Age of Famine, into a perceivable hope.
“This is amazing my love,” she said squeezing his left hand tightly, wrapping both her arms around his, pulling downwards as she jumped and heaved excitedly.
She loved him so much. She couldn’t believe that his concept, his idea was actually real. She always knew it was possible, but in reality, she had never conceived that it was probable.
Just as her hand touched close to his warm skin, she felt in that instant, herself drift further from his necessity and even further still, from the output and stencil of his self-concern. He now had something grander to nurture and she knew that her place was somewhere in the background; as his shadow, willingly at his feet, but never at his sight.
As they entered the courtyard she felt his hand slip one more time and she was sure it would never return again.
“Are you broken?” asked Safrine looking upwards at The Woman as they worked their way along a dirt path, the end of their sight offering nothing but a blue sky meeting yellow dirt as the path before them continued long into the desertion of their hope and expectation.
The Woman had tears running down her face. Maybe Safrine hadn’t seen this before. It wasn’t common for humans to cry, not in The Age of Famine. They suffered only desperation and elation.
The young girl watched the water run from The Woman’s eye down her cheek and then drip onto her shoulder. The Woman; pulled from her delusional absence, leaned down and swept up the young girl in her arms and carried her to her shoulder.
Safrine rested her head on The Woman’s shoulder and as another tear escaped her eye, it fell onto the young girl’s face and swam down her cheek and washed away the bitter stains of her civil desensitization.
Safrine smiled as she felt the warm trickle cast its way from her face to The Woman’s shoulder; hugging tight on The Woman’s body with the three marching onwards through the blistering heat of day, now without an inch of shade as in their sight, shapes formed on the flat line of their wavering desperation; shadows building on the horizon.
“There, ahead. Stay close and whatever you do, maintain your focus. Be At One; be At War; always” said The Behemoth under a crackled dry voice to The Woman and the young girl in her arms.
Onwards they marched.
Utopian Circus Page 2
