A Blithering Literates Life

When they finally finished asking each other how many “r’s” were in that ancient curse word, the man had already straightened his back, uttered two more arcane obscenities and tarried off towards the jet pillars of smoke, rising with frightful consistency, in the distance.  A slight, foreboding grimace creased over his visage, though it could have been from the cracking of his back.  In any case, he seemed distraught, but looks can be deceiving.  Especially looks that had long lost their youthful pliability.  So, with a limp, he soldiered on down the road, continuing a journey with no beginnings in memory and no end in sight.

At least he could traverse the planet, where as his tree brethren were forced to travel through time while rooted in space.  “And space was quite the interesting place.”  He chuckled to himself in the common tongue of the land.  Now there were some words the ash trees could understand, but they were still hung up discussing the possible meanings of the mans long passed profanity.  Though they thought with average speed, stopping a sentence that they began was a kin to stopping a freight train: there was just too much momentum in their speech and, as a result, when they thought to speak, they would finish that sentence with all the stubbornness of a freight train.

Scores of humans had taken the path in silence and in talk and the trees had always heeded their jabbering speak and gleaned many meanings out of those diverse languages.  They certainly had the time, most of the trees along this path being of an age that inclined them to ruminate about the good old days, like all introspective fogies fixed in their ways and places in the world.  In the case of the trees the dirt was where they were fixed.  The old man listened to the trees and counted himself lucky for still being able to get around with relatively little trouble.

These are the cyclical ruminations of an old man, trying to make sense of life in the grand perspective of creation.  He was really optimistic at the start of his journey through the ages.  Now he can see the process at work.  His elders have always told him, time and again, of how innocence is lost and wisdom is gained through strife and turmoil.  No matter how young he was at the time, it had already gotten old.  As he walked across the soot dusted path, the man raised his head with a sickening crack, followed immediately by an ancient profanity, that not even the parched and dying trees around him could remember.  While he rubbed his neck the ash laden ash’s questioned each other, in their excruciatingly lengthy tongue of creeks and groans, as to what the argent haired man said.

An absence of something is certainly lighter than a ton of it or even a crumb of it.  It’s in these terms that most people get lost in their understanding.  Absence is usually synonymous with darkness, which is in turn associated with evil and then things tend to get heavy in every sense of the word, so we have to pull our understanding of darkness out of the shadow of evil and give it a different kind of weight.  We have to give it a shadows weight, which is something that weighs heavy on the soul, for all our inadequacies and failings in life pile up within us and drive out that light that is so hard to grasp yet so easily attained.

There is nothing in the void.  Even explaining it seems to contradict it’s very nature.  Nothingness is a concept beyond our understanding.  Not just humanities feeble grasp, but even in all its infinite reaches, not even the universe can conceive of such a thing as the void.  There are no absolutes.  There are only degrees of absence or abundance.  In the blank mind of such a thing as a scarecrow, there is an abundance of absence certainly, but there is still something just beneath the heavy starkness of that vacuum.  Though it is weighty in concept, the darkness does not weigh anything.

He didn’t want to see it.  He couldn’t watch anymore.  It wasn’t just the horror of the sight before him, but the helplessness imposed on him.  Intervention was completely out of his power.  Even if ripped his fabric skinned arms from their moorings and he descended down the hill to face the blaze, all he would do is add fuel to the fire.  He saw this great blaze and knew that it would consume him if he left the summit of his hill.  Ironically, the only thing keeping the blaze from consuming him with the rest of the field was the barren soil that had been long parched in the middle of this fertile land.  Now the rest of the field would become as lifeless as the hill he had called home for all his days guarding the field.  And so, without the luxury of significance within his actions, he did the only thing he could do to quite the burning pain of his impotent voyeurism: he counted himself lucky for the ability to shut out the world and proceeded to do just that.

And then there was light.  It was a terrible light nothing like the soft kiss of the Sun.  It was starved of warmth and hungered for light to call its own.  It devoured the heat and choked away the sparkling clarity that would shine out of the high blue of the sky.  The sky.  The sky was now black and roiling with bulbous shapes and a viscous consumption of the once blue sky ferried over head.  It was a terror unlike any Connor had felt before.  The fibers of his being withered at its ferocity.  He could see it all around him, swimming through the rows and squeezing the color out of his charge, until each stalk collapsed to a fine grey powder on the ground.  He watched with his stunned eyes, sown with care into the rough potato sack skin of face and wished the stitches popped so he didn’t have to look on helplessly as the fire danced through the field and razed his world down to dust.

“Maybe I could ask him next time he comes around,” he said to himself, being bereft of all but corn in his presence.  He turned his head and saw the little holes torn in his threadbare flannel shirt, where Sir had sunk his claws.  He had long since become numb to pain.  Not since the first sun washed days of his memory had felt anything the tepid breeze of fading summer envelope his hanging form.  That was also the week he had ripped his arm out of place in a fit of rage against Sir.  It was fine now.  One day, Connor had just come too and seen his arm reattached to the nail or rather, the nail was reattached to him.  The cuff of the sleeve was even sown up, all be it in a shoddy manner and Connor always wondered who or what had stitched him up while he floated off into the blank depths of unconsciousness.

Connor looked up and, seeing his friend gone, let out a long sigh of exasperation.  He remembered years ago when he was first plagued by Sir and how he had ripped his left sleeve off of the finger sized nail that kept his arm pinned down just so he could take a swipe at the bird.  It was certainly a show for all the other nearby crows and it only helped Connors situation.  Since that day, not even a bird dying of starvation dared to land in Connors field, say for one.  Something kept Sir coming back and Connor wasn’t sure what that something was.  He didn’t have the word for it.  Superiority didn’t quite cover it.  There was something else outside of his pride that kept him coming back to the field and harassing Connor.