SJD Conall

 Bone Flute

Ma pauvre muse, hélas! qu'as-tu donc ce matin?
Tes yeux creux sont peuplés de visions nocturnes,
Et je vois tour à tour réfléchis sur ton teint
La folie et l'horreur, froides et taciturnes.

                               --Charles Baudelaire

I wake

and we are falling.  Limbs tangle and my head cracks into someone’s knee as we drop out of a hole in the sky.  People scream.  Falling faster.  Someone grabs hold of my arm, scratches me and screams into my face, the cries mute against the rushing of the wind in my ears.  But I am helpless to save anyone, and he screams and screams and I am silent.  I can think of nothing but the Eternal Now.  Tumbling and twisting and hard to tell which way is up.  My head is splitting.  I can only wait.  Surely we cannot fall forever.  I fear that soon we will wish we could.

Finally, I hear the splash of bodies crashing onto a surface far below.  The pitch of screams swarm about my head faster and louder in desperate fervor.  Crashing.  Splashing. The people land into an endless sea that spreads beneath me.  And a second later I too plunge into the writhing waves.

Rushing numbness.    

I slip beneath the surface amidst a fury of bubbles, my body stiff and still as all breath is wrenched out of me.  At last my dead legs kick, and then I open my eyes.  Even from beneath the water, I can still see the glowing hole in the sky from which we fell, appearing as a bright disk of crimson.  Arcing silhouettes of arms and legs dance against it as survivors flail upon the surface above me.  I kick and struggle to climb up from the depths.

My head breaks the surface and I suck in air.  My legs thrash furiously to stay afloat.  My body is battered from the tangled fall, and my back hurts.  My head is splitting apart!  But I live.  Those not so lucky bob about in the water that surrounds me, their limbs displaced, necks twisted.  All face down.  A few other survivors tread water in wide-mouthed panic.  Some clutch at the dead and look for faces, only to sink, then surface again, coughing, bleeding torment from swollen eyes.  My chest tightens.  Memory.  I realize only then that I have been separated from my son.  I swim and search frantically, but I can't find him.  We didn't fall exactly together, I know.  But he barely went seconds first.  Surely I should have caught up to him.  I swim and swim, the salt-sweet water claiming all my tears.  Where is he?  I listen but cannot hear the baby's crying.  He's so young, so fragile.  I search for his tiny form among the floating bodies.  The truth of his fate hovers just beyond my ability to submit to its acceptance.

Waves suddenly pound and crash around me, and I realize it is from the violent splashes of others still falling from the sky.  If someone lands on me I'm dead for sure.  So I swim away aimlessly and furiously until the sound of the crashing bodies weakens.  I don’t want to move too far from the drop point.  Must go back to search when the falling stops.

My voice is choked as I try to call for him; my sound melts into all the other cries for friends and loved ones until it is no sound, no voice, and I am utterly mute amidst the panic.  Son.  I search the area, but realize I am swimming farther away from the falling bodies.  He could have drifted off.  I must find him.  The screams of the others begin to numb and fade as survivors like me swim away to assess their fates.

The hole in the sky is suddenly occluded as the great machine that dumped us maneuvers beneath it.  I can't quite see the details of the flying ship, only sharp angles of shadow.  The bulk of the ship somehow folds up as it enters the hole, grows tiny and finally disappears into the disk.  Our captors have abandoned us.  But are we left for dead, or are we just being detained for future harvest?

I am tired.  But I do not stop searching.  At times I float on my back to rest, breathing in steady gasps and filling my lungs to keep from sinking.  This water is thick, with greasy streaks shimmering on its surface.  Strange, I sense that below the surface, below my body, the dark water is immeasurably deep, and that if I sink I would go down, down for days.  How many miles of nothingness below?

My eyes are finally adjusting to the darkness. I realize now I am not in any sea or ocean at all.  The hole in the sky is merely an opening in a vast ceiling of an immense tank that holds us.  The walls are far, far away and so dark they appear as cliffs of shadow.  The scene is mostly drained of color, and my eyes perceive only grays and mottled browns.  I swim a bit and search again.  My son's body is so small, but I’m sure we fell near each other.  I should find him soon.  My panic settles into realization:  Yes, he's just too small, too young to have survived the fall.  Of course.  My heart pounds so hard that its momentum seems to be the only thing that keeps me afloat as my limbs dangle and my lungs refuse to breath.  The side of my head cracking open seems like it’s struggling to find a way to breathe on its own.

My son is dead.  I know this now with solemn certainty.  How could there be another outcome?  Slowly, conserving my strength, I swim to find something big that is floating, something to hang onto.  I'm tired.  My body threatens to sleep if I let it, pass out from exhaustion.  Sink down forever into the depths.  But I need to find him first, find whatever is left of him.

Constantly I bump into clumps of floating bodies that trail shreds of clothing.  I realize how my own soaked clothing is weighing me down.  Treading water, I pull off my thick shirt.  The water grows colder.  But I am lighter now, can swim easier.  I rake through the rolling bodies, looking for one so tiny, so fragile.  Where are you?

My eyes can barely make out the great, curving wall ahead.  Need to rest.  The dark wall might still be a mile away.  I float on my back and kick.  A bloated body gently sways beside me.  I look into the man's face.  How many days are you dead?  Weeks?  I wonder then how long will I be down here, how much longer will I be alive at all?  I refuse to die, I vow, until I find my son.  Find his body.  So cruel, this new world they’ve dropped us into.  I just want to hold him once.  I slowly tread water, immersed to the chin, while my harms hang empty at my sides.

As I swim and float, I can hear the distant screams and moans among the dying.  Staring up at the glowing disk as the water laps at my ears, I hear murmuring voices close by.  Tilting my head to empty my ears of fluid, I see a cluster of people treading water twenty or so yards away.  Their faces are sunken shadows.  But they are alive.  Just as I am about to shout and swim toward them, I hear one of the men let out a crooked laugh that hollows my flesh.  What if they've been down here a long time?  What if they've become wickedly insane?  I quietly float away from them, fingers entwined in the hair of several corpses that I allow to conceal me.  The dead bodies bob about and help keep me afloat.  I silently make my way toward the wall.

As I come upon new death, I search every cluster of bodies for my son.  I look in the folds of arms and clothing, beneath backs, behind heads.  His body would be easy to conceal.  I find nothing.  Strange how they all seem to float, even the freshly dead.  This water is thick indeed, dense like a landlocked sea full of salt.  I take in a mouthful.  Salt, yes, but also ammonia sweet.  The wall nears and I realize it does not seem hard surface at all, but soft, as if made from so many layers of flesh.  Close by, I see the dead body of a man who has webbed fingers and the head of a crocodile.  Curious, I slip nearer to him.  His long tongue clacks against the inside of his gaping mouth as the water laps against his head.

A huge drift of bodies is piled up where the water meets the wall, a jagged coastline of infinitely reiterating limbs.  I notice some people are alive, standing shakily atop the mountains of wet flesh.  Their voices whisper like hollow breath through carved bone.  As I swim, I scan the dead at the perimeter of the odd shore for a single body.  Nothing.

The people stare at me as I search.  I am tired.  I just want to float.  But with my last strength I submerge myself once more, then pull myself up out of the water and heave myself onto a shelving of greasy death.  A reverse baptism.  A birth into a new world of the Eternal Now.  My breath wheezes in and out of exhausted lungs.  Staring up at the hole in the sky, I feel helpless against the future now that I have lost so much of my past.  I am dizzy.  Unseen hands remove what remains of my clothing, and I feel at once free and ashamed. 

Then a new sensation washes over my entire body, and my perception shifts; the world of water whirls about me and beats out tiny measures of time that makes me more and more dizzy.  I must be dying, I realize, I think, I thought, I wondered as my entire sense of time shudders, shimmers—shimmered strangely.

I remained on my back, fully awake, for what seemed like hours. Time continued to pass strangely, locking me into thoughts of a past I could not escape.  The present was gone.  Only in memory was solace.  Memory was all.  Several people walked near me, some peering into my face as if daring to see my reaction to them.

"And I waited for this?” a woman whispered beside my head.  “We need to just kill him.  Not worry."  I realized she was the one that had removed my clothing.  “Look into his face.  He’s smiling!  He’d stay here forever if he could.”  Strange, so much hate from such a melodic voice, I thought.  I didn't even turn my head to look at her.  Far out in the water, a cackling chorus of men began to shout and splash toward the shore.  They were the same crooked voices I had earlier heard and from whom I had hid.

"See,” said the woman.  "I told you.  He's probably better with that group after all."

I was right, then. The people alive down here prey on each other.  This was their only world.  Desperate survival.  Again the swimming men cackled, closing in on the corpse shore.

Finally I sat up.  The woman startled, jumped back.  She landed atop a giant's lifeless arm, a limb easily the length of four men.  I gazed at her uncaringly.  Her features held a look that seemed familiar, a face worn thin so I could not quite recognize from where I could have seen her.  She must have sensed I was no threat and picked her way across the swollen bodies closer to me.

"You’re pathetic," she announced after studying me like I was so much washed up rot.  Her body was lithe and pale.  She seemed not the least bit modest by her nakedness.  Her mouth twisted into a sneer, and she turned her face from me.

Another voice whispered, "We all look pathetic to her, so you need not be offended."

I saw an old man squatting several feet away, his body nearly enveloped in a curtain of dead limbs.  Certainly he had been hiding, for I knew I had seen only corpses when I swam up.  Then I noticed beside the man, propped up by his aged arm, stood a small child.  The little girl looked at me with careful and amazing eyes, one crisp blue and the other hazel.  She smiled at me, a gift cast into the dark.  Grief bit my chest.  In such a place as this, dropped here so violently and waiting to die or to be tortured again, how was it that a child could still find the light of kindness to shine for another human being?

I then realized our captors were wrong.  We humans did not live our meager lives with extravagant waste, hastening through corridors of inept meaning, rushing spitefully toward oblivion.  The children were the meaning, their new eyes transforming something wondrous out of whatever they discovered.  And even in such a brutal place as this, the little girl standing before me had transformed the horrible into . . . well, the Ordinary.  How my arms ached to hold again my son, alive yes, but even dead.  Yes, even dead.  To again feel the weight of his ordinary body in my ordinary arms.

“We saw you searching," said the old man.  He gestured toward the young woman who now roamed along the legs of the giant's body.  “She there thinks that any who search for loved ones haven't understood the lesson of this place.”

I surely did not understand.

“The lesson from our captors,” the frail man continued.  “She thinks we all just need to lay down and die, never hope, never seek.  I’m sure if you ask her, she’ll go on for hours explaining.”

“You're an idiot, old man,” the woman shouted.  “I never said we should die.”  She now sat, perched atop the boulder-sized head of the giant, feet resting in the vast, empty eye sockets that seemed to have been pecked out by huge birds.

With utter disdain, she stared at me as she combed her long fingers through matted hair.  “You search for the dead, sifting through bodies like trash, and yet you don't even register that I am near you, that I am alive!”  She ran her hands up over her greasy shoulders and neck, stroked her cheek.  “You'd rather find companionship in the dead than see me here and rejoice that I have survived!  Like you!”  She nodded at the old man and the child.  “Forget them.  I hate them.  You’re the one I’ve been waiting for.  Now take me somewhere.”  She spread her arms wide, indicating the expanse of dark water. . . . “All this—“

Her attention stole away as a shout arrived from the group of cackling swimmers.  I stared out at them.  Four men clawed and pulled at the bodies at the shoreline, trying to find a way up. A fat, naked man climbed up the dead giant's leg.

The woman who had been speaking jumped off the head, delicately stepped toward me, away from the approaching group. I wanted to tell her to go, swim off, get away fast if these men were a threat to her. But she crouched beside me, as though I would protect her. She wrapped her arm around my leg, pulled close as though trying to merge her body into mine. I shrunk from her, modestly pulling away.

“Oh yes,” announced the fat man, voice booming.  His weight crushed and broke smaller limbs as he walked upon them.  “Babes is running away from me yet again.  It’s no use.”

The old man shouted, “You've tormented her long enough.  Why can't you move onto another game?”

“Hah! This one ain't a game. I'm just getting to enjoy this place. The lesson is: Survival of the FATTEST!”

Laughter leaped among the voices of the other three men who had caught up to where he stood.  They all seemed to be men the same age as myself, following the fat one as though he was the leader.

“Babes, just give me my piece, like you know it always has to be.”  The fat man licked his lips after he spoke.  The woman still cowered beside me.  I almost felt guilty for not putting my arm around her to offer some kind of reassurance.  Truth was, I was still so shaken from the loss of my son that I witnessed this new scene with odd indifference.  I barely pitied the woman.  What happened to her sneering pride that had been thrown at me so spitefully?  She should have saved it for this group.

Fat yelled, “Give me my meat!”

The old man whispered something into the little girl’s ear, and at once the child ran off.  She darted up over the cliff of bodies, away from us and disappeared.

Fat yelled after her, “Someday soon for you, little porkchop, when I get bored of my Babes here.”  Fat then looked at me; his bloated face twisted with pure and utter hatred.  I did not want to fight him, not for things like this.  I was new to this place and I wanted to keep alive just long enough to find my boy.

His gaze softened, and he said to me almost gently, “You're a man.  You know how this all works. Just watch how we love it. You can get some of her, but only when I'm done.”

“Me,” said another of the men nearby.  He was a skinny, scarecrow of a man, fidgeting and biting his nails nervously.  “After me,” he added.  He shook a scolding finger at the fat leader.  “He gets her after me.  I won't tolerate any unfairness with all I've done to get us to this place.  Got that your Piss-Ass Majesty?”

The other two men said nothing.  One of them, medium build, simply stared straight ahead, eyes focused on nothing, an automaton.  His face held utterly no emotion.  Cool and dangerous, I thought, perhaps more of a threat than the fat one if he ever cuts loose.  The last man of the group was completely the opposite. He had tears streaming down his face, choking sobs while shaking his head mournfully. Every limb quivered.  He obviously was the reluctant member of the pack.

I raised my hands in front of me, not wanting to become involved. Slowly and awkwardly, I stepped away from the woman.  She was fighting back tears.  Her eyes bled raw pain after me, and I looked down to my helpless hands.  The nervous, pissed off man giggled and spoke to himself.  How long has all this been going on?  I moved near the old man, and he looked at me shamefully. I am nobody's savior, least of all my own, I wanted to tell him.  I found my own place away from them to sit, to hide.

When Fat was done with the woman, and the nervous man was having his turn, Fat came and sat beside me, nodding to me almost sheepishly.  He then leaned over and grabbed a clump of flesh from the oily shelf of bodies beneath us.  Looking at me quite deliberately, he started gnawing on the soft tendon and skin.

"You better get to know how to survive here," he said. "You die fast if you don't eat."

Then I'll be dying fast, I realized.

“You old man!” yelled Fat.  “You get over to her after Weepy is done.”

The old man had been quietly disgusted by all that was happening, having turned away from events. “I'll pass just the same, thank you,” he said courteously while staring up to the hole in the sky.

I looked at him oddly, wondering why he was being so polite to these maniacs. Then I realized the sad truth: survival. The old man stayed alive because he didn't want to cause trouble. He was resigned to live out his life on his terms, not sacrifice his humanity to animal survival as this group had. The child was now perched safely atop a group of dead little men wearing little golden uniforms with little golden shoes; they had large, gray heads and tiny faces.  She stared at the scene with the same innocent eyes as before, but I could see now that those eyes held back a flood of emotion that a single person could not possibly amass if they had lived a hundred lives.

The young woman now lay motionless among the bodies, alive yes, but I realized more dead inside now than any of those stacked beneath her.  Her stabbing gaze bled a constant river of silent pain.  And I had done nothing to stop it.  Rage began to swell up inside me.  Nothing.  Just like I had done nothing above, when we were being crushed, beaten, demoralized, chastised, broken and tossed away outside the edges of the earth through this broken hole in the sky.  I did nothing but allow an eternity of deceit. 

I looked at Fat stuffing his face, then at the Weeping man hysterically crying as he raked slivers of tendon through rotting teeth and ate.  But they will surely kill me if I ever try to stop them.  Fat sat between me and the girl, ready to drop his gobs of meat he was devouring to snatch me up and snap my spine if I so much as made a move.  My hands dug at the body I sat upon as I fought back my rage.  Do something, part of me wailed!  But I could only blindly dig with my fingers, ripping pieces of skin from the leg of the body beneath me.  Through a slice of flesh I exposed the thigh bone; soon I had rubbed it raw and white with my thumb, rubbed at an old, old fracture on the bone, over and over.

The Automaton man stood nearby and with his thin fingers chiseled some flesh from a nearby slab to eat, his plastic face betraying none of his sins.  As Weeping man groaned and sobbed as he ate, Fat slapped his own meaty belly to keep time with the rhythm of his own chewing.  The skinny Scarecrow man laughed and laughed and laughed.  Their feast sickened me.  I stared off, toward the child.  She looked at me and nodded slowly, more to herself.  The old man still stared at the hole in the sky.  So this was eternity. 

My fingers dug away the rest of the meat on the thighbone beside me, and at last I pulled it free, glassy and white.

#

I woke

and the four men were gone.  Behind me, the old one spoke with the child.  He hushed when he noticed I was no longer asleep.  I expected the young woman to be lying dead where she had been raped, but she was down at the edge of the corpse shore, treading in the thick water, eyes empty.

My son is dead.  I just remembered it.  Dizzy, I put my hand to the side of my head and realized that I was still somehow stuck in the past, cast off from any resuscitation of the present.  I closed my eyes and took in a sour breath of this new reality.  How much time?  Did I sleep for three minutes, or three days?  The waves lapped at the bodies of the shoreline.  Or three hundred million years?  Nothing seemed to rot here.  The bodies in the water were bloated, faces disfigured and swollen, but nothing rotted.  Another mystery to add to the powers of our captors. The glowing hole in the sky blazed like a moon, reflecting its disk upon the waters like a brown scab.

I still held in my lap the long thighbone I had pried loose.  Before sleeping, I had cleaned it of all flesh, and now it gleamed wetly in the faded, silver light.

The old man scampered down from his place and to my side.  “You were dreaming,” he said.  Then he grabbed my arm, showed me a scrape near the elbow.  “You were thrashing about, cut yourself.  The girl down there came and held you down until you settled.”  He pointed to the woman wading in the water.  The man then waved to the little girl, and she came down to join us.

The child immediately grabbed away the polished thighbone I held, scrutinized it like a scientist would some artifact.  She smiled and returned it to me. I cupped her chin and smiled back.  Despite the shadows, I could still see her eyes distinct colors of blue and hazel.  Shyly, the girl backed away, then mimed to the old man by tracing a finger on the sides of her lips.

“She wonders about your smile.  Not many people smile down here.  But you do.  When you sleep.  And when you look at her.”

I nodded, the grief of my son's death knifing me again and again. But I guess I was still smiling.  Strange.  I wondered why the little girl wasn't talking, why she mimed.

As though he heard my thoughts, the old man said, “After a time, you get to figuring out what she means.  Since I found her, about three days back, she never did speak.  Wonder if it's just the shock of the Capture, or just born like that.  But oh she tells me plenty, all kind of things that hearing and words just can never say.”

I couldn't help but smile at her again, as if I was remembering something about her in the future. 

“You're pissing on everyone again, Pops,” the woman said as she approached.  “Thinking you’re conjuring hope.  No one cares, don't you get it?”

“Now understand what she goes through,” the old man said to me in a half whisper.  I nodded.  Understandably, the woman was the constant victim of the four monsters I had seen yesterday.  But why doesn't she just swim away? Escape? Or maybe she already has, and they just keep finding her.  No wonder hope was sickening to her.  Hope was a thing of the far future just as much as memory was a relic of the distant past.  I certainly understood why she craved the Now.

The hole in the sky darkened as one of the flying ships slipped down through it.  I stood up on a mound of shaky flesh and stared at the craft.  Any moment now, people will start spilling out of the machine, screaming and falling.  I watched as it glided closer.  This machine was very unlike the one that had dropped me the day before.  Lights on its surface outlined a different shape altogether, wings of twin crescents held in the center by a huge orb.  Floodlights scanned the water below the ship as it moved closer.  It swooped up close to our wall several hundred meters away.

“Get in the water, NOW,” the old man yelled.  With great agility for someone his age, he ran down steps of bodies and dove into the water.  He swam away from the shore. 

The little girl looked at me with panic in her mismatched eyes.  She banged herself on the chest and pointed out to the old man, and then ran off to the jagged coastline.  I carefully made my way down to the edge, looked for the woman, then saw her already swimming beside the old man.

Down a ways still, the floodlights of the ship scanned the piles of bodies at water’s edge.  Billowing red light trailed the shore in the ship’s wake.  Other people who had been hiding spilled out into the water like roaches fleeing a burning carcass.  Yes, the shoreline was indeed on fire about a quarter mile down.  The flying ship sent out streams of flame into the bottom of the wall where the dead had piled up and any pockets of survivors had gathered.

The ship crept slowly and I felt the heat of its flames on my face even though it was some distance away.  The glazed surface of the craft, its slick beauty mesmerized me.  Shaking off the pulling distraction, I dove out into the water, away from the shore.  Swimming furiously now, I realized I still held the ivory thighbone.  Soon I was far enough away from the curving wall that the rushing flames weren't a threat.  Then I noticed the second ship.

The other ship swooped down toward me and hovered mere meters from the surface of the water. The rays of its floodlights waved like feelers searching for prey. I swam away from it fast. At last I caught up to the little girl. Her bared back shined pink as she dove down into the water, then surfaced again. She looked at the ship, then at me, took a deep breath, and dove down again. Don't waste time doing that, I wanted to yell.  Just swim on the top.  Then I understood what she was trying to signal me to do.

The second ship was searching the surface for survivors. The floodlights scanned the drifts of corpses. Where it found life, it shot out a bolt of pink light that skimmed across the top of the water, leaving a burst of foaming waves.  With all the illumination from the ships, and the fires, I saw for the first time the place I was in: a huge, circular chamber, the size of ten stadiums, with walls curving up to the domed ceiling with its single access hole.  And as far as my eyes could perceive, this holding tank was completely filled from edge to edge with the same thick fluid, everywhere dotted with bodies alive and dead.  Now these machines were going about their mindless cycle of final cleanup.

I could barely swim anymore.  My arms and shoulders were hot with fatigue. Clutching at a nearby bloated body, I rested as I paddled. The child was right beside me. She kept pointing with her free hand to get down, get under. She peered at me across the floating body we both held to see how fast the laser skimmer was coming. She then grew calm all of a sudden, as though resolved that escape was useless. She snuggled her head close to the corpse and seemed to relax. The skimmer closed in on us.

Wide floodlights swarmed about us, and I pulled the corpse against my cheek. My body below the surface floated limply. The machine's light then came to rest, warming a circle of several meters about me. At once the little girl took a huge breath and sunk beneath the surface.  I did the same. Just in time. As my head went down, a sizzling heat crackled above me, and pink light burst down upon the water. I saw the girl, floating at my face, staring at me through the pink liquid with wide, calm eyes.  I could not help but give her a slight, breath--held smile at her cunning and bravery.  The floodlights finally left the surface above us and we shot up and coughed for air.  I then grabbed the child and hugged her, the best thanks I could convey amidst my wheezing.  So this is how people survived.

The two ships began to move toward the ceiling hole. The circular walls were now clear of bodies and debris. The few pieces of coastline that still flamed quickly slid down and submerged, their orange light blotting out.  Unburned bodies that had been farther out in the water, as well as the new killings from the laser skimmer, began to cluster against the curving wall, stacking together.  I tread water with the child beside me.  The old man swam up to us, the woman in tow.

“Almost got us that time,” he panted.  “Lucky they just make one pass, else this’d been over long time ago.”

The woman scoffed.  “And why is that lucky, you fool?”   She said it with the same voice of contempt I had expected.  The old man just shook his head and smiled, bemused at her intolerance.

As more bodies continued piling up against the circular wall, we four made another landing and climbed up, exhausted.  I lay against a dead woman and teenage boy, trying to keep my lungs from wheezing by breathing slow.  Strange, with all that happened, I was still clutching the long thighbone.  I examined it carefully.  It seemed almost a perfect sculpture, pearly white, except for the jagged fissure from the old fracture.  One end was open and hollow where it broke as I had pried it loose of the corpse, the same corpse that was now a burned husk drifting miles below. 

As the hours passed, the old man and the child amused themselves playing hiding games amidst the bloated bodies.  He seemed so eager to play with her that at times, as she tiredly brushed him off, I wondered who indeed was the child and who was the adult.  I busied myself hollowing out the rest of the thighbone with a piece of copper wire I had found holding together the emerald diadem of a faerie--winged corpse.

Working with the wire for a time gave me an idea.  I searched the few clothed bodies and extracted several yards of string of one sort or another.  Pulling my tired legs into the water again, I found several corpses that were nicely bloated enough that they floated well on their own.  With the wire as a needle, I laced through the slackened skin of the corpses with my newfound thread.  About an hour passed while I crudely stitched together half a dozen bodies side by side.  I then roused all the strength left in my arms and pulled myself up atop the connected bodies.

“Well lookee there,” shouted the old man at me from the shore.  “Invention shakes free from the tangle of Despair.”

I waved to him from my raft, then lay flat on my back and breathed a wheezeless breath of satisfaction.  My head hurt, and I pressed on it.  The little girl tumbled down to the water’s edge and dove in.  Soon, she was beside my raft, crawling up a crooked elbow. She lay beside me. We stared up at the hole in the sky for a time, and then I sat up and continued hollowing out the thighbone with the wire.  The girl pulled for herself a bone free from the raft and I broke off a piece of the wire so she could mimic my craft.  We hollowed out our art projects for many hours, she napping from time to time.  At the shore, the young woman argued with the old man tirelessly.  He was forever patient with her, and I wished I could wrap that little bit of him up and hold it to me forever.

Another ship came down from the hole in the sky.  The girl didn't seem at all alarmed.  This must be the same ship that had dropped me, I thought.  It was an oddly shaped tube, twin engines spiraling around themselves in a double helix.  Sure enough, as I watched this new ship hover near the roof of the massive domed holding tank, another load of captives was dropped down.  As the dark shapes fell, they appeared to be just a shadowy cloud of tiny specks, their little screams lasting forever, abruptly ceasing at the water’s surface.  I wondered how many hours it would take for the first of these survivors to reach us at the walls.

The girl and I paddled our raft to the shore of drifted bodies. I stepped off, looking for the old man. He was hiding from the woman, I gathered, but then I realized he was concealing himself from the approaching swimmers. Several people splashed about toward the shore. That was fast, I thought.  No.  These aren't the new captives. I heard a loud cackle, and my suspicions were confirmed. The four men from yesterday had returned.

The fat one was wading to shore.  Quickly, I ran down toward the raft and the child.  I gestured with my hands for her to stay atop it, and with my foot I pushed the raft away from the shore.  The girl paddled with her hands far enough away from the group of men.

Fat climbed to shore, bellowing, “Babes, I need my meat!”  He kicked at the head of one dead body, breaking the skull apart and sloshing through the brain.

The woman was seated high up on the drift of bodies, picking at the hand of one corpse that had been fastened against a beam of wood.  Her emotions seemed riveted with the same strange fear and resolve as yesterday.  The child paddled farther away from the shore, and I felt certain she would be safe.  I clutched the thighbone tight in my fist.  Then I stepped between the woman and Fat.

“What's this, got you a new boyfriend?” he yelled at her.  To me he screamed, “You finally taking some of her, after all this time of me begging?  Well, TOO LATE!”

He came at me with more speed than I thought possible.  Rolls upon rolls of fat undulated as he leaped at me.  When he struck, the force knocked the thighbone from my hand and it tumbled down to the edge of the corpse shore.  Rolling with me atop the bodies, Fat grabbed me in a hug and squeezed hard.  My heart seemed to burst through my face.

“You too fun to kill,” he said as he stood up, all the while still hugging me and bouncing me up and down.  Fat licked my forehead with a slimy tongue.  “After I train YOU to be one of my boys, you'll be lovin' ME something fierce.”

No air.  My chest was convulsing with pain and my head was splitting open trying to breathe.  His slippery grip loosened and I dropped.  Laughing, Fat tossed bodies aside and broke bloated heads together as he proceeded to ignore me and climb the drift of the dead toward the woman.  I couldn't move.  My ribs were surely broken.  Better to die this way than let the machines kill me.  I noticed the old man.  He was hiding between the coils of a huge, horned serpent.  The frail face stared at me, almost a look of wisdom on his features, serene and calm.  Patience and resolution.

And I understood.  It is not better to let these excuses for men kill me.  The machine might be cold and dispassionate, ruthless in its destruction, but it was in a way innocent, acting out a calculated purpose without regard to conscience.  Human beings are supposed to master their animal selves, triumph as they clutch at the wings of a spirit that hopes to raise them.  To be murdered by a man such as Fat, who has willfully succumbed to his animal nature, would be the worst death of all.  I stood up, shaking, looking at all the dead piled where wings of machines had dropped them.

Fat grabbed up the woman by the hair and dragged her down a neat stack of a dozen child corpses.  He saw me standing again, and then threw her down forcefully.

“You want it?!”  His eyes snapped with raw hunger.  Hatred fed him.  “Then take it like I been tellin’ ya.”  He bellowed a loud laugh.

Thinking of the old man’s lessons, with patience and resolution I slowly shook my head.  No.

And the hate made Fat swell to twice his size.  “Fine!” he roared.  With one hand he picked up the woman by the throat and lifted her in the air.  She squirmed and screamed.  The fat man then brought up his knee, and slammed her down upon it.  A massive crack burst from her body as her back broke open.  He roared laughter and threw her.  She tumbled limply down to my feet, twisted, dead.  Her face held strange serenity, final peace.  I nearly recognized her then, before Fat’s words empowered me.

“And now I think it’s time for me to break in my little porkchop,” Fat yelled.

I hadn't been watching; the other three had swam out and pulled in the corpse raft. The nervous, skinny man now held the little girl by the hair as Fat had held the woman.

“You, you, you tellin' we can have her, Fat,” the skinny man stuttered, cackling fiendishly.

“Why, after our guest of course,” Fat yelled, pointing at me.

I didn't have a chance to react.  Fat lunged at me as before.  This time he just pounced and slammed me down to the ground.  I tried to roll away but he was on me again.  The surface of the water lapped at my ear.  I searched around with my hand.  Up the shore of flesh, the old man nodded sternly from his hiding place.  Resolution.  I grabbed the hollow thighbone where it lay beside my head.

Fat bodily picked me up threw me into the water.  From beneath the rust colored surface, I could see his shape diving atop me.  I took his bulk full force, and it pushed me down, down into a cold dark. Not an ounce of breath in me, I fought fast to the surface.  But just as I was about to break my head free, a monstrous, fleshy hand grabbed the top of my head and held me down.  Got to have air!  My limbs thrashed.  The world numbed.

And he pulled me up.  I gasped quickly, but too late, he forced my head below the surface again.  He's just playing with me, I realized.  Thick water, and not air filled my lungs.  God, no, I will not die at the hands of another man!  No thought, just action, as my arm shot out as though it was raw fire.  I plunged the thighbone up under Fat's ribs, punctured through blubbery flesh into his lung.  I pushed deeper.  Air sputtered out through the other end of the hollow bone, filled my face with a pink gush of bubbles.

I fought to the surface, climbing up a mountain of blubber. Fat was gasping and gagging. The bone was still lodged in his ribs, and after the air had deflated from his lungs, Fat's chest filled with water. He clutched at me, but I wormed free. Red water puked out of my lungs as I tried to breath. The weight of the water filling Fat's own lungs was enough to finally pull him down, far down into the depths where he could never crawl back up.

I lay on the shore, heaving and sucking in air and water and clots of corpse hair. The child stroked my head to comfort me. She stared into my heaving eyes, calmed me. Soon I was breathing air again. She grinned at me that everything would be all right.  Suddenly she turned and dove into the water away from me, went down and was gone a very long time.  I shot a look of worry to the old man who had scurried to the water’s edge near me.  Finally she bobbed up out of the water with a silent gasp.  The child waded over to me.  Then she placed in my hand the hollowed thigh bone that she had pulled free from Fat’s sinking body.  Brave girl, I knew.  Brave in ways I could never be.  She smiled at me carefully.

Slowly, I sat up and looked around. 

“They're gone.” The old man's voice. “You scared them good, seeing their bad boy get taken out like that.  But mind you, one of them will start getting stronger now and take charge, so we best be careful for when they come back.”

I nodded as if pretending to understand.  Does another evil always come to take the place of the one defeated?

My lungs wheezed for a long time.  I didn't care.  I was alive.  Amidst all this insanity, I was still alive. But then my mood crashed as I thought of one tiny life that I could never save. No amount of patience, no amount of bravery on my part would ever bring my son back to me.

#

I woke

and the little girl was paddling wistfully near the shoreline on the corpse raft.  I sat up and looked around for the old man. He was perched three feet from the newest body on the shore; thick waves lapped at the face of the woman I had failed to save the day before.  But I kept the bastards from the child, I reminded myself.  The old man seemed lonely, no longer having the woman to chide him, keep his patience at such a high level of mastery.

A bared human thighbone rested upon my lap.  I picked it up, and pointed it toward the silver disk in the sky.  I noticed again the bone was scarred with a rippling ring of ivory, the broken bone early in life.  Yesterday this bone had been a weapon.  Not now.  Not ever again.  Before sleeping, I had tried my best to transform this branch of bone, keep it from reminding me of the fact that it had been used to kill.

Strange, I did not think myself a hero for saving the little girl.  And the old man, too, I suppose.  I merely acted, and now I was detached from it all.  My boy was still dead.  I was a failure when it mattered most, not saving him in time.

I held my fingers over the new holes I had carved down the sides of the thighbone.  Then I brought the jagged edge of ivory up to my mouth.  My tongue rested on a porous, notched hole I had scraped out below the ivory scar.  I exhaled.  The sound that came from the bone’s other end was deep and sonorous.  I raised my fingers from the holes, breathed through it again, and the tone changed. The old man stared at me. Back and forth, my fingers now laced their way up and down the open holes in the bone, carving a sorrowful melody into the damp air.

The little girl was at once beside me.  She could not speak.  But as I played my slow and careful tune, she opened and closed her mouth as she heard the notes, as though in her silence she was in fact singing the words to my song. 

The old man just smiled and nodded.  “That’s it, now,” he said as I ended.  “Art takes wing from the nest of Invention.  Soon it will be time.”

I looked at him carefully, not at all understanding.  The larger puzzle was how I was playing the bone flute when never before in my life had I ever picked up a musical instrument or learned a thing about music.  My head did not hurt so much when I played, and that’s all that mattered.  The mystery was for my captors to figure out when they next decided to map the folds of my brain.  I needed to stop caring about the logic of their design.

“Time for the machines to come again,” the old man continued. “Your plan may well work.  I don’t mind waiting provided I see you working toward something.  No fate is worse than worthless waiting.”

Yes there is, I wanted to tell him.

I picked up another hollow femur bone I had freed yesterday and threw it to him.  The old man caught it and put the tube to his lips.  He blew, and bits of marrow and fluid erupted from the other end.  He seemed pleased.

“Yes, your plan may work.”

I closed my eyes and again put the bone flute to my lips.  I played my son’s song from memory, the song of his joyful cries that had filled my night of dreaming when he had still been alive.  I wanted nothing more than to hear his song again.  Awkwardly, I recaptured it and sent its melody out over the lapping waves, up into the hole in the sky.  The wavelets below lapped chattering against the cheeks and teeth of the many mouths below me.

After a time the ships came.  The winged machines swooped down and headed toward the curving walls.  The old man, the little girl and I lay atop the corpse raft.  We paddled away from the shore.  They each held tight hollowed bone shafts, and I my flute. The raft floated well enough.  I had with wire and string sewn up these newer bodies’ mouths and nostrils after inflating the dead lungs with my own breath, and the pulp that collected at shoreline formed the perfect seal to keep the air from escaping the crude stitching.  We three quickly paddled with our feet as the first ship hovered nearer the shore.

The entire scene suddenly lit up with orange fire.  Dancing slices of shadows rose up the walls from the flaming shore. We had paddled well away from the ship. I slid off the raft, treading water while watching the girl and the old man slide down to do the same.  Soon the second ship neared us, feelers of floodlights searching the surface for signs of life.

We waited patiently, nervous but brave.  Soon we would die.  Or live.  This is the Now for which I craved.  The child clung near my arm to rest a bit, and my legs kicked heavily to keep us both afloat.  The old man twisted his fingers in a mass of trailing hair from the raft.  The girl then grabbed a handful beside him.  The searching skimmer was a mere twenty or so meters from us.  Immediately I gave the signal.  Before its floods could spot our living bodies against the dead of the sea, we three sunk below the surface, beneath the raft.  Calmly, we snaked our tubes of bone up to the surface and breathed through them.

The floodlights cut a path across our raft as the ship came close.  I breathed very slowly, fingers tight around the flute's holes, keeping water out.  Between the limbs of the raft a pink light seeped down on me.  Both the girl and the old man held their eyes tightly shut.  The light scanned the raft forever.  But the bursting, pink glare never came.  At once the water above us was dark again.  The plan worked.  The ship moved on.  We all surfaced.

The old man gave me a pleased look as he blew liquid from his nose.  “The inventor does it again,” he said in a low voice.  I gave him the slightest crease of a smile.  I still could not help but feel detached from everything.  The child beamed a wide smile, absolutely trusting in me as she swam over and hugged me tightly.  My arms floated limp at my sides.

We paddled beside the raft for a time, not sure if the ship would return.  As we waited, we saw new bodies collecting against the walls, creating a new jagged coastline from the infinite number of limbs.  The skimmer ship moved farther and farther away, floodlights scanning the distance.  Finally we started to climb back atop the raft.

But other people were already waiting, had climbed up before us.  A loud cackle of nervous laughter chilled my water-filled ears.  The little girl tensed, scared; she let out an awkward choke, a silent cry of danger.  Too late.  She was grabbed up out of the water.  The nervous Scarecrow man crowed in triumph.

“We, we never forget who, who we play with every day, little girl.”  He pushed her to the floor of the raft, where she cracked her head into a dead skull.  “Nice boat you made for us.”  The Nervous man chewed his fingertips, gave me a triumphant, disgusted look.  Then he looked beyond me.

Another man was standing on our raft behind me, so silent that I hadn't heard him.  I turned quickly, ready to block an attack. The face I met held no emotion, was without humanity.

The Automaton said, “Your logical faculties are severely suspect if you believe you can out-think me as you did those machines.”  He flashed whitest teeth into a straight smile.  “I’ve now watched you for the last thirteen and one-half hours.  Fat always underestimates you, but I can out-think you, out-guess you, out-invent you time and time again. I have before, and I will forever.”

He was right, I noticed.  Beside our own raft was another, larger assemblage of linked corpses.  These bastards had been busy.  Their raft was composed of over a dozen bodies; the skin and faces of each of the heads had been shucked away, leaving only the bared skulls whose teeth foamed brown pulp.  The raft was fastened together with ropes made from braided lengths of hair and scalp.  Piping of fused spinal columns curled from out and beneath the raft to allow the men to breath from under water.

The Weeping man of course wept as he stood over the girl.  He created a large loop in the end of a hair rope.  I dared not move.  He tied a noose around the neck of the girl, and moved to do the same to the old man with another rope.  I held the bone flute tightly in my hand as I stared at the stone faced man.

“I'm better than you in every way you can think,” the Automaton man droned on.  His chest was plated with armor made from polished shoulder blades and broken skulls.  He pulled from behind his back a huge bone spire that twisted to a sharp point.  “Play your pathetic flute now while I punch holes in your face with this.” 

He lunged.  Quickly, I dropped down to the surface of the raft.  It tilted up and almost toppled over, slapping down to the surface with a splash.  And he was atop me.  With all my might I held the sharp end of his bone spire away from my face, but it was like fighting a solid machine, a man whose body was metal and beneath the gleaming bone.  He pounded me with his free fist as I held onto his weapon hand.  I could not block the blows.  He was strong, far stronger than Fat had been, despite having half the body size.  Again and again his fist jammed into my face, until I weakened.  The surface of the raft was soaked and dipping in places beneath the surface.

Ever confident, my blank faced attacker stood up over me, held the spike of bone high over his head.  I braced for his final blow, sure it would come down with robotic swiftness.  He stood and stared down at me, and his perfectly straight smile seemed to gloat in his apparent victory.  Then let it come.  Let me join my boy.  I didn't care.

I held the flute to my lips.  Need to hear your song again.  The man above me gaped as if in mocking realization of my stupidity, a crack of emotion on the stone face.  No.  I only wanted to play my music one more time.  Music for my son.  I blew through the wet slit at the end of the bone, my fingers sliding across the holes.

My tune cried out over the surface of the water, an invocation that echoed across the smoldering walls of flesh.  The Automaton man just stared at me, fingers tight around his spike.  I played, staring into his cold eyes.

Out of sight, the Weeping man said, “Stop that you idiot.  The skimmer.  Oh God, the skimmer is coming back!”

I lifted my head to look at the Weeping man, expecting a sudden stab of bone in my face.  The child was being tied again after she must have nearly escaped. The old man was held down by the Nervous man. The skimmer hummed closer.  Floodlights searched out our raft.  I looked up.

The machine man still stared at me as I played my melody.  His smile was gone now.  And as I watched, his face utterly changed.

His eyes opened wide and he gurgled a choking sob.  Tears streamed down his face.

“Stop it, stop playing that song,” he screamed, not at all in the usual, mechanical voice.  His voice was now the Weeping man’s voice.  I looked to the child.  The man who stood above her, holding hair and scalp ropes, was now chewing his nails furiously.  And the once Nervous man, who held the old man pinned, now wore a stone face, cold expression of machine indifference as he stared at the approaching skimmer and did nothing.  Their bodies were the same, but the three tormentors had somehow switched identities.  The old man rolled from beneath his captor.

Immediately I stood up and grabbed the bone spike from the limp hands of the Weeping man.  I threw it far into the water, where it splashed and floated.  The three men stared at one another frozen, confused from their changes in masks.  Hurriedly I pulled the old man and the girl into the water.  She still was tied up with the hair and scalp rope.  We dove under the surface as the floodlights caught sight of both rafts with bright webs of light.

Holding our breath, we stayed under as a pink glow erupted atop the rafts.  Unseen, I imagined the three men’s bodies scrambled into bits, blended all at once until they truly became each other in blood and flesh and then were annihilated.  The pink glow faded just in time for me to get the child to the surface before she drowned.

The floodlights pointed away from us, but just as my head broke the surface I saw that the hovering skimmer ship remained only meters away from the raft.  I did not think.  Instinctively, my body acted on its own.  Quickly, I pulled myself, and then the child, up onto the corpse raft.  The three men were gone, as I had thought, completely pulverized in the pink light.  With my hands I reached over the side of the raft and paddled toward the skimmer as fast as I could.  I looked beside me and noticed the old man was also up on the raft, helping me paddle.

The child lay motionless between us.  My heart lurched in my chest.  No.  Don't do this to me!  Smile, little one.  We closed in on the skimmer, just a meter away from the huge, hooked wing that hovered near the surface.

Finally at the metal wing, I stood up on the raft and made a leap.  My hands met a warm, dry surface as they struck the wing.  The skimmer started to spin around immediately.  Floodlights reached out and locked onto the raft.  My footing was secure on the wing.  I kneeled down and reached for the old man.  Pink light flashed around me. The raft was being chopped to bits in a spray of flesh.

“Take her!” the old man shouted over the roar of the ship.

With his hands he held up the child.  I clutched her to my chest, cradled her and gently set her down on the massive wing.  She was completely still.  I reached down for the old man.

“No, you must get inside,” he shouted.  “I’ve been PATIENT!  I’ve waited for this.  It’s not time yet for you or her!”  The raft was breaking up around him, and soon he would fall into a sea of dismemberment.  “I am resolved to do this!”  The lights illuminated his entire body.  Yet his face was calm, completely serene.  “It is why I am here, to help you.  It’s all right to let me go.”

The ship started to lift higher from the water, as though realizing it was under threat.  As it did, I threw myself down upon the wing.  My hand shot out, grabbed hold of the old man below his elbow.  He struggled, not wanting me to waste my time with him.  His skin was paper thin like that of a newborn, nearly breaking open in my grip.  All the while, I heard the faint, sad melody I had been playing on my flute weave in and out of my mind.  I looked at my other hand.  I still held the flute. The bare wind that passed through the bone was playing my melody, my invocation of hope.  The tune was not in me, but in the bone.  I let go the pitted flute.  Then I found a sudden reserve of strength and managed with both hands now to pull the old man up and onto the wing.

The skimmer ship at once began careening across the water, as though trying to shake us loose.  I held onto the old man and the lifeless child.  The ship began to ascend.  Wind blew furiously as the water spun far, far below.  But we weren't heading for the hole in the sky.  We were heading straight toward the massive, curved wall.  I fought the inertial pull on my body enough to stand.  In each hand I held an arm of the others and I dragged them both down the length of the wing, away from the edge.

The wall was coming up fast. The main body of the ship was a huge orb where the center of the crescent-shaped wings connected.  I pulled the child and the man toward the ball, up an incline.  The ship still climbed and raced toward the wall.

I saw then a hatch, a convex bubble that looked like the orb of a giant eye.  I kicked it.  The ship flew faster toward the wall.  I refused to let threatened panic sway me.  Patient and resolute I kicked the hatch again and again.  Like a pane of glass, the door's surface finally shattered, and a hole broke open at me like a fierce mouth.  The jagged opening was large enough to feed the child in first, then the old man.  We were just about to hit the wall.  I put my leg into the hole.  The ship suddenly veered away from the bony mass of wall and headed straight up.

Pulling myself fully inside, I expected immediately to be blown to bits by the ship's security.  But I would have won.  I would have beaten them and done what no one else had done.  Out the front view screen, I noticed we were being taken up, far away from the wall, the surface of the water, everything.  The ship was entirely empty except for a single seat in front of the forward view screen.  In that seat was an unseen pilot.

The old man lay on the floor groaning and sputtering. Then I remembered. Quickly, I had to choose.  I leaped down beside the child.  I pulled away at the cords of hair and skin that compressed her chest.  Her body was limp.  Her chest did not rise.  I wanted to revive her, but my hand on her chest sensed only wet silence from her heart.  Her lips held in death such a sweet, tranquil smile that I was overcome.  I wept.  So much loss, and so quickly.  My son.  This child.  Even the woman, she who hated every one and everything about this place and even hated me and with very good reason.  I had saved none of them.

The old man's hand flopped down beside me.  He locked his toothless gums tightly together, and stiffened.  No!  I pulled his body flat on his back.  Then I listened for breath.  Nothing.  Not you!  Death was all you wanted, old man, but I won't give it to you. I put my mouth over his, but his jaws were locked. I breathed into him anyway. I had never done this before, and I knew I was doing it wrong, but I breathed, filled his lungs with my air.  Damn!  My fist came down hard on his chest.  I’m doing this wrong, and I knew then that I was dreaming, and that in the waking world I had done this and had done this wrong as well, and that in the dreaming, dying world I’m failing all over again.  Failing, falling.  I breathed into his mouth ten more breaths, then with the flat of my hand pressed one, two, three, upon his chest, then I breathed again for him.  I can't do this.  This is exactly the way my son died.  And then they threw me down here.

The pilot of the ship then stood from his seat.  My mind was wrenched from all detail of the old man and I was frozen at the sight of the pilot.  The man was a living corpse.  His body was a patchwork of sewn together pieces of flesh, none of them quite fitting right. The stomach was huge, enormously fat, while the arms skinny, the fingertips chewed. The face was such a blend of stitching and emotion that I could barely recognize it.  God no.  I killed all of you.

The old man suddenly breathed in a long breath on his own.  Air roared in and out of his lungs.  The ship tilted then, and I fought for balance.  My head swam with distorted perception. This is the same, I knew, the same distortion I experienced my first day, after I fell from the sky.  I grabbed at the floor, but everything was strange.  My sense of time was racing, flying by as though I was again dropping out of the sky.  The past, the present . . . Everything again is the Now.  The patchwork pilot stared at me, is staring, stares at me.  I said—no—can say nothing to him.

The old man sits up.  He walks toward me, warmly pats my shoulder.  “You must tell him where you want to go,” he says, healthy as ever.  I just stare.  “You must speak.  You can do so now.  We are up high enough.  You control him.  Don’t you remember?”

The music, the melody, fills my head, but I don't understand how I ever played it.  The wind from the engines of the ship played it with ease, I recall.  I look into the pilot’s mask of patchwork flesh.  The pupils of his eyes are mirrors.  The sight of myself in his eyes sickens me.

I too am all the things of which he is made, but I am seamless in my deceit.  I say nothing.

At once the body of the patchwork man shimmers and dissolves, and another emerges through melting skin.  Standing in his place is the dead woman from below that I had failed to save.  But now she is alive.  Her face is so familiar to me, but still I cannot recognize her.  I don't understand.  She returns to the pilot's seat.  I see in the view screen that the ship is heading toward the hole in the sky.  Am I being released? 

At the controls of the ship lay hundreds of scrolling screens, instructions and messages for the pilot.  She seems to ignore them.  I can’t help but try to read over her shoulder.  The instructions are just random words, bits of poetry, lines of dialogue.  I had completely forgotten about words, forgotten that I had ever known how to read.  What is this place?  Curiouser and curiouser, I read the lines, not understanding how they can possibly be used to steer such a craft of destruction.  I read how April is the cruelest month, and how infinity can be found in a grain of sand, how myself am hell and I wonder what is this quintessence of dust, the beak in my heart!, then I understand what it is that women want, only to float upon the ocean atop a dear friend’s coffin as all the clocks strike thirteen and then I’m off, second star to the right and straight on ‘til morning.  All these words, words not mine, words that have no meaning to me at all but scroll and scroll as I read on and on.  I remember having read from this grimoire before, when they were supposed to have fueled me somehow to do something, say something, but now I am silent.  Incantations and magic and myth, these words are meant to propel me to begin my own words, my own verse ritual that will release me from this pit of captivity.  But still I am silent.  I have no words of my own.

My heart aches to recite the magic that will not come.  My worried eyes seem to signal the old man.

He only gives me a look of kind wisdom.  Then he reaches down to the floor of the ship with his fragile, papery arms.  He picks up the body of the little girl.  She yawns a squeaky breath, eyes searching.  She sees me and grins.  Sound, I realize, she makes a sound as she yawns again.  The old man hugs the child, and she returns a warm caress, as if they had not seen each other in ages.

Before me, their bodies shimmer and shift. I feel nothing of the previous distortion of time, and watch as the miraculous happens: as the old man and the girl embrace each other, she begins to grow bigger, grow and age, until she is a teenager, then a young woman.  The old man's posture straightens, and then he is a young man.  They both turn to me, holding hands.  The two look so much alike.  Brother and sister. 

The process doesn’t end.  The man grows even younger still, until he is a teenage boy, eyes full of spunk and vigor.  The woman ages until she is mature.  She reaches down to the boy, now a small child, and lifts him into her arms like a mother.  Then he is a baby, and an older woman cradles him.  Then she is two women, one with billowy auburn hair and eyes of hazel, the other with lighter hair and eyes of clearest blue.  They are sisters.

I look at the baby they hold between them, newborn, barely three days old.  He is my son.  Alive.  How it hurts to see him again.  My arms ache to hold him.  I do not understand who these women are who have him now.

“We are not from your past, but from a time to come,” she says.  “And not from this place at all, but we come to remind you who you are. We come to tell you it is time to begin the rites that will release you from this place.”

I do not understand.

“You are here because you choose to be.  Your captor is yourself, your turning away from your world.  We came and we waited and we want to help you understand that the music of hope is often the same song as pain.  But only you can save yourself.  Speak the words of your story and be released.”

I realize then the pilot was not taking us up and out of the hole in the sky.  I need somehow to take over and master the controls of this ship.  I need to recite the words, write them down, anything.  If only I knew who she was, this woman who looks at me pleading.  She will listen if I but speak.  Tell me then what to say!

“You can’t force her,” the women with the baby tell me.  “But that’s all anyone wants to do.”  They are younger now, holding by the hand my son who now seems a boy of about eleven.  All seem to be brother and sisters.  Their oldest brother needed to be here as well and we’d have a perfect portrait, but I know he is in the outer world adventuring to find me. 

I look to the pilot.  She knows the way out of this place, when I do not.  And I didn't save her, am truly more cruel to her than I am kind (more words not mine).  She points above to the ceiling.  I see for the first time pressed faces of people staring down at me, faces of people I do not know flattened like reflections in obsidian glass looking in at me as if reading the book of my life with intolerable scrutiny.  I know then the identity of the pilot, why she looks so familiar.

In another world, another time, she is part of me, the keeper of my secret art, my inspiration, my magic.  I have let the worst parts of me abuse her, the masks of all my desperate selves destroy her, and I am now cut off from any help she can offer.  And by neglecting her, I am forbidden to decipher the controls of this ship, recite the words and begin the ritual of release.

“Sure love this family reunion each time it’s summoned, but you’ve got work to do,” says she who is my muse with the same sneering cynicism I remember from below.  “For once, try and let me help you just a bit before your little demons end up killing me.  For once, I’d like to see you recite your words and get us out of here.  Then I can help you write it all down and this place can be banished forever.”  She walked around to a control panel near her pilot’s chair.  “The flute was a nice surprise this time around.  Perhaps the music can release you where words cannot.”  I see the rare beginnings of a smile, then it was gone.  “But try not to drop the thing again.”  No joy, no wit stained her voice, and I deserve none.  She mumbles something about my not ever remembering anyway, then presses a few buttons.

At once the ceiling shatters. Obsidian faces drop down on me.  I hear their screams as the floor gives way and I fall from the ship.  These observers fall with me, all of you who hear me now, unfolding from your cocoons of liquid glass to become part of my world.  Again.  One sharp edge slashes the side of my head and I’m dizzy and I black out

Remembering nothing

I wake

and we are falling.  Limbs tangle and my head cracks into someone’s skull as we drop out of a hole in the sky.  People scream.  Falling faster.  Someone grabs hold of my arm, scratches me and screams into my face.  His cries are mute against the rushing of the wind in my ears.  But I am helpless to save anyone, and he screams and screams and I am silent.  I can think of nothing but the Eternal Now.  Tumbling and twisting and hard to tell which way is up.  My head is splitting.  I only wait.  Surely we cannot fall forever.  I fear that soon we will wish we could.