Plantae
29th June 2006, 05:04 PM
Another story of mine, in the same dense prose style that those that read "Philosophic Pabulum" or "The Maiden (Fish)" will be familiar with. This is for Vulpix.ck's birthday. Happy birthday Carlene!
This is slightly shorter than The Maiden (Fish), though not by much. I find the most trying problem with this one is all of the unexplained plotlines. Maybe I will owe it a few short spin-offs later. I apologize for the length. I might have better posted it in two parts.
[u]Avoid Water
Fatima absolutely, downright had not missed it. The permanent haze that hung over Cairo, a cloud of filth to rival much larger American cities, was an annoyance at best and a health hazard at worst; she prided herself on tolerating these conditions and the stink of overflowing sewage, the system backed up again, hardly phased her. She was used to abominable fragrance; her own paper mill had that eternal, ever-pressing ru'twm, entirely noisome from sulfurous fumes. Her being back in Egypt was, though falsely concealed under the guise of a visit to her hermit-like mother, a business conference. She had communicated with a Cairo official at an accidental meeting some years ago about her little paper mill. And though it was not customary to expect customers from such a distance away, and though she was curious as to why a man she scarcely knew had remembered her, it was an opportunity not to be missed. Negotiations had gone well thus far and Fatima believed they promised, possibly, a demand for imports, and from her own wee company no less.
But the metropolis distracted her. She could remember, once, long ago, when her family had been homeless in these streets; now, perhaps gaining a sense of pride, she'd lost her tempered wariness. Greed might have softened her, yet she was unaware; Fatima's mother, aged now but with a mean streak and a galumphing speed that signified her continuing independence, warned her of such a plight. The two were incomparable. Fatima was a hard-working and rigid loyalist who concealed her Egyptian heritage and embraced the American side of her father, disdained living in anything less than what she could afford with the salary given her, and was all the makings of a "modern" woman. Her mother Sassicza was an obstinate traditionalist, a voodoo queen who attached herself to a myriad of supernatural beliefs, antique Greek philosophers, and lived modestly. She had the tendency to interfere in other's affairs, as well-meaning as she often was, and it was one of the primary reasons Fatima had departed the foul country at adulthood and went to live and go to school in Massachusetts with her relatives. There was no smog in Massachusetts, or if there was, she'd never seen it; it was no real factor, but she liked to convince herself it had been. She lied to herself about many things, repeatedly and fantastically, in elaborate form. Among these excuses, infallible stories and imaginings, was the awful idea that her relationship with her mother was sound and that she need not visit; she imagined her doing so as a glorious gift. The old woman did not appreciate her coming anyway!
It was almost laughable, then, that she had attempted to bar herself under such a visage. The need for concealment would have been not, however, if it was not for her husband highly suspecting her of simply ducking out of sight to have an affair with her foremost compatriot, an Eastern European native named Boris. Despite the trappings of such a boorish name, he was a likeable and attractive man, and therefore threatening to the bald-spot Canadian native of hers. She had assured him she would visit her mother, then, on the condition that she knew he was implying that he wanted some sort of watchful eye upon her. It was as if she had shaken her head the entire trip, enduring it because she knew about his intermittent bouts with paranoia (a mental condition in this case), and for the willingness to put his mind at ease. If she had not so thoroughly convinced herself that everything was going to be absolutely dandy, she would have seen sense and been worried. She had not seen Sassicza in five years, and if she would have been thinking rationally instead of in tidy and volatile buy-sell corkscrews, she might have been more distressed at remembering exactly what her mother's persona resembled (to her a rather voracious, polka-dotted cow). Fatima was quite good at fooling herself. It was how she'd quit smoking those nauseating cigarillos- Boris and her other day-to-day administrators extremely relieved- anyway. So, when she finally brought herself to head towards the hamlet-like place up the Nile to which her mother was attached, her mood could be best described as "hopelessly oblivious."
"Ima." So came a voice, gruff, bursting her reverie. Her soft sienna hair fell over her eyes and she tossed her head back, curls bouncing and her caramel-tan skin glistening with sweat in the humidity of the bus cabin, soon to the city outskirts, and further along to the nursing-like village of her mother's residence. Fatima opened one murky, viridian-irised eye and let out a little sigh in explicit direction of her comrade, Boris, who'd disturbed her. Boris chuckled at her expression and remembering that avian tendency to sleep with one eye open he muttered, "Duck, are we?"
"Shut your trap, warrior." He smiled, shrugged off her sultry manner, and eased himself into a lazy slouch next to her. She had a fondness for name etymology and insisted on telling him the meaning of the name of any person they met. She, admittantly, had guffawed hardest when she first learned what her own name had meant. Fatima, with origins in Arabic, was defined as "daughter of the prophet." Though it had obviously Islamic ties, she could not help but scoff at the connotation that either of her parents might be considered a "prophet."
Her father fit best, but was still a capricious and extremely volatile senior with a penchant for young women and fast vehicles. This was, coincidentally, a rather oil-and-water combination. Underneath he might have been a softly loveable teddy bear with an obstinate impression of life and a sense of dependability, but even years after meeting him, you'd not find much more than a work-ethic-less, arrogant retiree with an utter disregard towards almost everything. He was never predictable and a puerile hypocrite at times; she'd seen him appeal for animal welfare and then go to buy a new leather jacket. Fatima knew that his favorite phrase was practically, "I might be a hypocrite, but my point is still a valid one." And though she acknowledged him as hers, her parent, the atmosphere when they were together was near-constant argument over the most minor details. She had conjectured more than once that her father brought out the worst in her, a desire for debate bordering on madness. In all, he was more of an apocalyptic horseman with humorous tendencies than any blind zealot philanthropist. Though she often sided with his lack of loyalty, she had always wondered if it was truly his personality that had divorced man and wife. The fact was, in any case, that she had outgrown her parents.
She felt a certain, poignant tap upon her shoulder, and realizing it was not the first, turned again to a more straight-postured Boris who intoned, "I think we'll be reaching our stop any minute now. Mind if we act like proper tourists today, eh?"
With a ridiculing expression she queried, "Meaning?" She did not like his twittery grin or the slight twitch of anxiousness over his stocky build, nor the way he stroked his aristocratic, black locks with a demeanor of mild discontent.
"Well, I was thinking we could, you know, shop abo-" It was almost if his pause and her interruption were a simultaneous two-as-one, him just waiting for her to comprehend the implications of what he was saying.
"No! Boris, I loathe knick-knack shops and antiques and half-mothball-eaten clothing and widgets that make me sneeze, and you know it. I refuse, I can't-"
"Well, only for a little bit. You do owe me." Then, when she shot him a questioning but curious look, he said, scathingly and with a sinister manner that bordered on criminal, "I believe you recall last year's Christmas Party." Fatima turned pale and glared obtusely at his childish disposition after the fact; he seemed pleased with himself, and she hated him for it. The truth was, she did not quite recall the Christmas Party, per se, but that was beside the point.
The Christmas Party debacle, or so it came to be called afterwards with a wink, occurred when one Fatima consumed a few too many vodka-mixed drinks. Her memory was addled of the incident, though in a particularly detailed account afterwards, she had, with open ears, heard the words "mancala" and "lesbionic" and "belly-dancing;" the rest was a paint-by-numbers and Boris' role the sincere Samaritan. Among other things, he had been the one who had driven her home and who had mediated a scuffle between her and another woman over god-knows-what. He expelled the little, beady-stone, pink mancala piece she'd nearly choked on, and it was he who had covered for her at work the next day after he had stopped to assure that her hangover and her head cold were bettering since her husband, Algernon, had been absent (though it was actually December 27th, not Christmas). Unfortunately, Boris was, despite all trappings of kindness, a petty man with a certain affinity for favors; he hoarded them, and then when you least expected, sprung them on you in such a bequeathing manner that you felt mandated to fulfill his wishes. This was the case now as, when, after arriving in sweltering heat, her frail body and fragile feminine height were a-quiver. Even with her Egyptian history she was still hot but had entered with her companion a small off-beat charred redwood cabin-store which from the outside seemed to contain any myriad of a plethora of objects of every shape and size and caliber and most importantly, level and manner of dust.
Fatima wheezed first at the fine particles on an old tome of some sort, then as Boris asked, "Isn't this nice?" She coughed violently over the choking but moderate chunks of it gathered on a flask which Boris polished with his shirt. It left a brown rut and she smirked. Boris kept his eyes off the flask, though obviously with intent to buy, but not in want of the shopkeeper to bear down on him and tell him "how good it was." Fatima embarrassedly reminisced on the first time she'd heard the American term "garage sale" (as she meandered about the curio) and had taken the non-idiom route; no other would quite so obsess over little mistakes, but of Fatima's knowledge, what she seemed to keep in her memory best was little tiny incidents of embarrassment. Every time she had stuttered, had a Freudian slip, tripped over a non-existent object, talked behind the back of someone who was, in fact, behind her, and generally made an arse of herself by general accident was a prominent feature in her memoirs. She also had a mind for useless trivia, as demonstrated by her utterly crushing ability to beat Boris and his wife every other Saturday at Trivial Pursuit; they were not fussed by it either, as the usual follow-up was one of two things: Boris saying something the equivalent of "we could play some Pallanguzhi" and her and him exchanging glances, hers frightened and his amused, and their spouses without a wit of what they were conversing about. Alternatively, the other couple might just happen to beat Fatima and her husband at charades after. Algernon always guessed the least-related, most foreign, increasingly eldritch item possible. Several memorable incidents included "stripper" instead of "cocktail waitress," also, "flamingo" instead of "volcano." He was always excruciatingly humiliated trying to explain how he had reached his conclusions afterward, but found it necessary to try to justify how "Elvis" seemed to him to be "a particularly large armoire,” as that was a rather extant hypothesis.
Eventually, she wandered to the back of the store and a rather dejected box of cheap, bargain rings which were somewhat out of place her, perhaps as a ploy to lure innocent little girls to persuade their mothers to buy them one of the pretty hoops. She knew exactly what they were of course, with their bands embossed in a variety of colors and those legends behind them. Black means anxious, amber cool, gray strained, and so forth, with colored boxes next them for comparison; these ninety-seventies fad circlets, these miniature temperature-readers. Whether necklaces, earrings, toe hoops, or in their more common form, they were to swindle and all the same with that glossy-staring stone surface. But as was not uncommon, she felt a need to try one of them on again, unreliable as the reading would be. The product, of course, was a mood ring. She clenched her teeth as- and she cursed any higher being that might exist for making life so ironic- it turned but a shade and was that hue that she was so less than dearly unfamiliar too.
"Green!" She screamed in protest and stomped her foot, not actually so furious by the incident itself but what she considered the much extended piling of incidents such as these in which things had to be just slightly different from her own desires. Boris turned and bore into her, scanned once with a cursory gaze, and casually strode over; even he, so experienced with her qualms, her outbursts, her cynicism, was unaware of the many previous and some of them directly related failures leading up to this moment. "Verdigris! Beryl- jade..."
With a mutter in a luckily only owner and them occupied shop, he questioned, "Ima... Ima, is there something the matter?"
The fact that his expression was not one of definite concern made her somewhat wary, but she spouted anyway, in a grumbling tone and sarcastic inflection, "Oh, nothing." She held up the ring and he let loose a titter before she mumbled, "Nothing to laugh about. You see, these damn mood rings absolutely, positively, eternally turn this wicked shade of spinach for me. Out of every key-" and she held up that small piece of heavy paper in which the translations were printed, "says it means active, basically boring- though I might be reading in- and average. I know these devices are just playthings..."
"It's alright Fatima. You are under a bit of stress with our negotiations, I understand." But he didn't, and he knew it, and she knew it, and at a loss, he suggested, "Let's out to dinner, take our minds off work. Hey, the restaurants about these parts might not be fine dining as our American corner of the world," and he nudged her. She gave a half-smile, and he uttered, "But better then nothing." Ima thought, "better than nothing..." Was it really that? She had always dreamed of her life being more adventurous than the drudgery it had become. She realized then, that this was nothing. It wasn't any greater, and grander, because it was. Her life was second-rate restaurants and little annoyances and husbands with bald spots and estranged parents. And that was all it would ever be, but she derailed her train of thought, said not a word as the world came crashing down, and did her best to avoid her mid-life crisis.
"Yes- yes, let's go out. Oh, please, I need to relax." Her pining was evident, if accidental, and Boris had that impish countenance, so pleased as a cat that’d just brought his mistress a small, dead pigeon with blood on its feathers and a crumpled, dying pitch of song on its beak. He hadn't any idea what a behemoth she had encountered inside her head, nor that she wasn't particularly fond of tragically late avian creatures, nor that her acceptance was no more than a casual pat to his head, that is, metaphorically.
She did, amazingly, find herself liking dinner, and though his humor was dry or entirely awful, and the food sub-par, it was enough to distract her; she skirted around the edge of the deep chasm of breakdown and ended up in a considerably less lonely mood by the end of it. Boris had insisted that she best visit her mother and she'd dallied about and it was there that they went now, but not before she stopped him, an expression of enjoyment pasted on her face. "Ima?" She merely stared. Then he turned, sighed slightly, and laughed a slurred snicker. "Here we go."
It was a commonly known fact that Fatima was, if nothing else, quite fond of having her picture taken. Whereas others shirked from the camera and hid their smiles, fake as can be, she was the one doing cartwheels in the front row. If not for her plain features and somewhat unassuming exoticism, she always declared she would have been a model; that was obviously not real truth, being that she was short too and had not the ambition or the will to stand under authority and be ordered down a catwalk, but it was irrelevant. She fawned over photography and photo booths, especially when she was marginally down in the middle of Egypt next to one scribbled on in rough Arabic and in need of a pick-me-up. She dragged Boris inside, punched the buttons, set the machine off at a whir, coins already inserted, and started posing fanatically; she ignored Boris protesting with a snigger, "My soul's been stolen so many times," and shaking his head hopelessly. She mimicked the robot. She stared as a deer in headlights. She hugged Boris and cried of joy and she swapped some of her clothes with him. She stood on the seat so only the lower half of her business-dressed body was seen. She stood on her hands, or as well as she could in the space given. By the time it was over and the circus reel of pictures was with her, she was well over any feelings of doubt. Boris was mildly distant in that gleeful way he could be and they strode, Fatima with a skip in her step.
"Oughtn't we to stop at your mother's then?" His comment burst her bubble. She lowered her head, sighed in a dejected way, and prepared a rebuttal. Before she could speak, however, he did. "I understand. I would rather not visit the old maid tonight either, and it's late." She could have thanked him for calling her an "old maid." The insult warmed Fatima's heart before he compounded it with the catch, as was his way. "But I want to stop at that shop again. I am going to pick up that flask before we turn in, alright? I would rather not walk this unfamiliar place alone, aye?" She nodded assent and they went.
The place was as ghostly as it had been and the owner, a gnomish-looking male of no modest girth with bifocals and a meanly furrowed face, gray eyes, and white hair, purposefully organized bits and bobs about. As Boris made much business out of carefully assuring himself that he did indeed want to buy the flask and the old man breathed down his neck, waiting for him to do so, the incorrigible Fatima wandered to the mood rings again. She simply pondered for a moment, ignoring Boris' irritated hagglings with the merchant of it all. Then she picked up the ring- knowing she might forfeit her temporary euphoria- and stuck it on her ring finger. She drooped, withered as it began to turn a rough turquoise; however, her dismay became utter shock as in a split second, the ring was blue: dark blue, in fact. It was a bottomless blue, seething with its own malice. She discovered its description, happiness and romance, and found it dramatically failing in accuracy; it was such that she hardly paid it any attention when the much stranger bit of text read: avoid water. Nor did she notice when she was pulled away by Boris, his lack of notice of the ring and her subsequent shoplifting of it. That is, not until she was galumphing down the path with Boris to respective flats, rented for their stay, and realized just what she'd done. She slipped the ring into her pocket, wondering what she'd do, and decided she would return it come morning.
They came to a fork in the road, left for Boris’ room and right for hers, towards the river. He gave a brief, "Good night,” and then walked on. She found though, once she departed that she could not possibly sleep if she tried, and instead walked along the riverbed in the darkness. She knew to be careful for she knows this river, a friend from long ago. Fatima was contemplative, pacing almost. She dipped her toes in the murky water against her better judgment before pulling them out again, minutes later. She felt need to press on, even when it meant crossing amongst slippery rock climes over the river. But she managed. She always did.
As she crossed the bank she found, nestled in the guise of this small oasis and a number of trees, a bend in the river of which she was not familiar. The air was dead, save for wildlife and the slightest narrow breeze that swept about. Pawing through the underbrush, she came upon the end of this finite and micro-tributary and the pond there. And there, in the seclusion, lay a sight out of place. She blinked several times and concluded that though she knew them, had seen them, she had never known them as large as this. Giant lilypads floated like discs of a green sun and the gentle swirl of the current under them. They looked almost as if they would be supportive of a human, but Fatima dared not cross them. Here and there were dotted flowers, a helter skelter pattern of white blooms closed for the dusk. Insects buzzed about, but not in their usual froth; she could not see the lights of the outpost and even Cairo's distant gleam was no longer visible. Had it not been for a cloudless sky, she would have been blind in the swath of twilight. She had seen, before, settings described as picturesque. Though she desired not to apply such a dirty, untruthful adjective to this setting- for picturesque almost constantly meant "never-seen-by-writer-" it was in her right to dub it "bittersweet." For lachrymose waves washed over the sand at the banks of the pond and the reeds their like the melody of a lone flute over cobblestones, echoing against stone and mortar with no reprieve, and it was melancholy. It was underappreciated, abandoned, and wild as it should be; but at the same time forlorn for it.
She could not even comprehend herself- for in a moment's notice she had taken a dainty gymnast step- for doing what she did. She was, perchance, startled by how fluidly she could move; she thought she'd forgotten it. Fatima was upon the circular leaves, trodding on them, lightly, and without worry of failing. They were platforms to her, floating hereways and thereways, and she felt for some reason she had no reason to fear them collapsing; perhaps it was her frail build, a greens-nursed weight of a meek 49 kilograms. Perhaps it was the chill of the moment, made possible in this dog-in-heat climate by a zephyr blowing northwards, which had her attention. Besides, these were but the shallows; Fatima thought she might be able to stand, even as mousey as she was. Whatever intention she should have had, she knew not, but in a moment's grace she found herself kneeling ever-carefully and plucking up one of the evening-closed buds. It was cumbersome, almost, in its proportions; then, with a bit of deft maneuvering to temper this slippery surface she stood on, she clasped the flower and pried it open as if her smooth hands were a wedge and hammer. She had to convince herself not to stumble as several miffed beetles skittered out and flew into the darkness, her fingers covered in the gooey nectar inside which had trapped them, and she laughing warmly to herself at it.
She had full purpose towards returning to shore. She pivoted and faced it, took one sidelong step onto the next pad, and set her course to resemble that which brought her to the spot she was in. Fatima hadn't realized how far out she was, a marvelous twenty feet at least, though it was not surprising considering the very make of her improvised stepping stones. She began, in a slow chant, to number her steps as she went; counting one, two- three, four... five in Arabic. "Six," she spat in English, seeming vulgar next to her country's tongue, and then a stride again. It was then that her foot struck stem, as if it had surfaced from the water like a tentacle, and before she had time to say "seven," the world went black and damp as she tumbled into the water below. She reasoned immediately, as the first gulp of lukewarm liquid entered her lungs, that underneath there was but stringent light flitting through. In her confusion she might have turned from position and now she was without any clue as to where the bank was. She scrambled and tried to catapult through the lilypads, but she felt a swift retribution as she found a surprisingly thorny surface riddled with bulbous vein tissue. And when she came to understand that she could not pull herself out, Fatima settled herself quickly into an arrow-like stance and kicked her legs and broadened her arms and pushed in whatever direction it was she was facing. If she could just hold her breath, it could not take more than thirty seconds time to endure until she found terra firma. She settled to a pace, tried not to think of the passing time, or the burning in her chest. She latched on with an animalistic grapple her will to live; the water only grew murkier and her eyes redder as the muck stung them.
The same second she beheld those eyes, Fatima knew she was in danger; at first she thought them that of a crocodile, and she screamed with all abandon at her plight. Then, however, a bit of light flashed over the beast's reed-hair and spindly limbs and she saw an even more worrying shape, like the outline of a man. Her only response was to loose a necklace, a shoe, a sock or two, the second, as flotsam and jetsam and to swim harder and as angular as she could from the achromic eyes of her might-be merman aggressor. But no amount of kicking and howling was going to stop its iron grip as it grabbed her, one gangly arm strangling her pallid neck, and with poise jettisoned her from the mere's tenure to its. It held her there and she strained and choked by this an-aqueous adversity. She discerned her predator and knew abhorrence.
Fatima knew him male or androgynous now, his half-naked chest glistening as droplets fell from it and his phragmitic locks which seemed almost too irriguous; they were wheaten in appearance, and his complexion as dark as that of the Ancient Egyptians and as lustrous. He was not handsome in any traditional sense, with a near-bent nose and apical ears and lips the color of aged peat moss. Perhaps it was the avant-garde array of his features or those oddly gaunt arms or even the tint to his skin, like blooming bluebells. His ferocious white teeth were visible, though in a grimace of a half-bared fury. His pupils were absent and the whites of his eyes indistinguishable from their irises. This nymph-like creature was of a scant build, but obviously, even as he eased his grip over Fatima's throat, sinewy beneath that guise.
As he clutched her, he cocked his head awkwardly, smirked at his power over her, before stating in a matter of fact inflection, "Fatima Naser, daughter of Sassicza, you are charged with crimes against the sanctity of our Mother Earth." Her expression was of mild puzzlement and would have been more had it not been for the constrained conditions. "You have practiced a disregard for her gifts, employing her trees for your purposes and without any caution." Fatima grimaced. It was as if he was drawing her blood and memories by needlepoint; but what he leeched was her sin and his words were right. She had encouraged more than selective cutting on more than one occasion. "Your paper mill has polluted her water," and she regretted diverting it to that blasted fish pond, "and you enjoy more luxuries than necessary." She was slightly outraged at the comment; surely she had right to her possessions if she wanted them? "You compound insult by destroying her works, uprooting this flower blossom, and releasing from it the pollinators that are its lifeblood. This is the final symptom of your hubris." She hadn't seen the sign to keep off the pads, but this was not the time for smart ass comments; this was life or death, and her understanding that only made it worse. It was no trial, he did not even allow her the ability or acknowledgement to speak; the evidence, in this case, was lucid. He could see through her eyes with those terrible ocular manifestations of his. She shied from his stare as if it were the sun, or as if she'd been a toddler in the face of a monster. Then she reasoned this was actually the case. The sound of it rolled off his tongue with a certain malevolence, like the creak of a door in the midst of pitch black room, and the face of evil peeking through, "Your punishment shall be threefold." Then he smiled and told her how. Salty woes graced her cheeks as he spoke. Were the scales of justice so skewed? Was her punishment so unfairly harsh? With utter satisfaction, his words made her understand she deserved it; it was simple karma and as fair as the beauty personified. Her lamentation turned to one of self-pity. But no one mourns the wicked.
But her humiliation was not complete; the name, his, blanketed her consciousness as a swarm of locusts. This judge and jury Calidane was tied to his glade. He did an act so vile, thinking himself justified all the while, as he defiled her body. No, not in so easy an up and comings: what he did was far worse. She felt the sting but underneath the water only the fish heard her wails, and even they gave up on her, as did she, as had he. Her body fell away and she felt herself draw into the back of her own mind as if she was a parasite. And then she saw the world through her own eyes: as a spectator. It was at that instant that Calidane began to walk.
=
He had told them all to evacuate on account of dangerous gases. He had told them with her voice, sounding almost alarmed about it, concerned; perhaps she owed him that much credit. And then when they had all gone home, he had done the terrible deed. The explosions that had ripped through the building were heard for miles around and the fires burned long and hot. "These are the consequences," he muttered as she considered that if she ever returned, she would be part of punishable arson (for she owned only a share of the company) and responsible for the lost jobs of hundreds of workers, some who might not be able to put bread on the table after, "but the only path is a rebirth through fire." Her irises had shone with an emerald blaze as they stood in woodland away from it and watched the factory combust.
"Your business made forfeit and all of it destroyed as you decimated the workings of nature. This is equal; the balance will restore nature's hold." The way he looked upon her was as if he was Boris, so irritatingly pleased with himself. He was prideful, she could tell, a dignified creature who'd been forgotten and who had waited patiently for a savory chance to continue its reign. No one believed in myth and neither did they believe in him; that is, she had not. Now she did and she knew she always would if there was an always; but she reflected, sobbing solemnly, that the likeliness of a future for her in any modern sense was infinitesimal.
=
She wished she could avert her eyes, but they were his for the moment, and so she watched the kindling and the smoldering of another building in front of her. Her home that her husband and she had built together stood in ruins greater by the second and all her photographs, her finger-paints, her child's toys. They, her family, had been absent for the entirety of the time and they would return themselves to find a piece of their own lives missing. Two: both her and the lot. She could recollect the timbre of his voice, of Algernon's paranoia- for she knew it now more than ever- and she let its poignant recapture wash over her. She tried with all her might to give retention to her daughter, screeching with mirth and making a loveable nuisance of herself as she ambled about the house with her baby legs and bitty arms outstretched. She memorized both sounds for it was unlikely she would hear them again; all it would take is for law enforcement to make the logical connection and she would have two counts aided by the fact that the blaze had spread to nearby and similarly vacant homes. The worst thought was that this was not her reprieve, her end; there was final reparation that he had yet to act out.
"Your dwelling and the abode of your family eradicated as you did so to the rightful place of numerous flora and fauna in your madness. The equilibrium will set you free from your crimes." It was after this that the lamentation came, drops broad and bulky, as it was divulged how vicious he truly was. He would not be satisfied until all but life had been taken from her and her knowing this meant it would only be a short while before she was resigned to fate. Man and woman were not meant to do battle with such horrors as the medusa or the jabberwocky; they could only be defeated in storybooks. In life they might be destitute and lacking the faith that gave them true substance, but even without that, Calidane was sure to have the last laugh.
=
Calidane seemed especially glad at the last. He waded through the reeds and the water lilies and brought her to the shore where he gently set her down, her first muffled snuffling dejected and ejected into the gloom. He caressed her chin with an elongate finger and heaved up her "pretty face-" it had always been plain to the world but a predator could not help but lust for its prey- and ogled her with those colorless globes. "Your third pain- the labor three- shall be the life you built made chaos." She withered and bent to the wind as the flora did and her tears froze in their course; lethargy overtook her. He had taken a paintbrush to her terrene soul and spattered her world with gray.
The secrets she had held from them all were told. Her mother learned first how deep her hatred of her ran. Boris would know now of her true feelings; her parents learned of that once when she had attempted to poison her grandmother with arsenic. They learned nothing of her motives, as Calidane prevented her from putting to ink those words, those merciful reasons. He did force her to admit how she eventually succeeded and how she had been the one who had set the old farm on fire the same day. Calidane did not permit her the details, those first parts of forgiveness. All her walls she had built since her birth were torn down by one swift stroke and all of the truth was reborn in her inability to stop it. A letter was left, in her hand but in an eerie, disconnected voice that only intensified its prose. Algernon was made aware of her authentic apathy towards him and it read in her own style that she no longer loved him. In this case, she could only write with verity. She told him about the first affair and though she meant to say how she'd ended it, yet it rang pithy. How she'd only now had true love for one and had tossed aside that of her parents, how she had spent lavishly and wanted much, never donating a dime or time to any third world country, her brushes with extortion, and how her cheating the world had made her feel superior. She was not overwhelmed by these and many more sins told to any and all appropriate through letters sent and in some devilish cases words exchanged; she could not be fearful, because she had already known in some deep part of her what an amoral maiden she was. She had the moral insight and the means of expression. Only now she was the daughter and the prophet. She had known all the ideals and how to market them, but she never stood up and showed them the brighter world she could envision. She had never stood up and said, "I have a dream," but had but agreed to slave beneath the foul dreams of others. And for that she had failed the name "Fatima" and so it was forsaken. In the last hours she consoled herself, writing desperately at the bottom of the letter and feeling Calidane cringe at its utter veracity, which only made it mean everything. She wrote it once, twice, more, underlined it twice, three times, and made sure it was scribbled in gargantuan script, "I love my daughter..." Calidane used her hands to tear if off and throw it into the trash can.
=
He left her body with a consummate "umph," loosing her sultry breath and leaving her crumpled on the bank of his slough. She gazed at him; her eyes were bloodshot and drowsy and her demeanor made it seem as if she had aged years in a fortnight. As her mouth flat-lined between a frown and a half-smile, what were once laugh lines curved downwards in a bittersweet hook. Then she brought herself to her knees and set herself in that position. He watched hungrily before announcing that, "You should leave this place. Repent lest another of my kind finds you." Fatima's knees ached as if she had developed arthritis, but when she rose she did so with her poise and dignity intact. And though every fiber of her, her body language and her hesitant manner, suggested her wont need for vengeance... she only inverted her direction and schlepped hence from that lagoon. It is not arduous to conceive Fatima not swiveling to gaze again at what had become her own Amenthes, her underworld. And Calidane, her Ammut, had devoured her soul.
=
The corpse lay there, frigid and forlorn. Death had taken the gender and the name it had once been and dashed them into the water. The near-intangible scent of lilies wafted over the pond and it rippled gently. Only a few flies buzzed about the fresh body. The dirty bath parted at a splash and a slither came, distant than near; the vulture pecking at one of the alabaster, lolling eyeballs squawked in fear and frantically whisked away to permit its superior. There came a muffled dragging noise and the blood about the bullet hole oozed and smeared as it traced scarlet ringlets on the soil. A with a last gnarled hand, mythic tan skin with a faint pigmentation like bluebells, Calidane's body vanished beneath... and the world cried crocodile tears.
=
She was the Mother Teresa, or more appropriately, Mother Terra, of fugitives. She worked with Greenpeace in the Congo and TreePeople in New York. She had even traveled abroad to Italy, getting by with a few scant phrases of their tongue, and dedicating herself to Legambiente. TerraNature had obliged her in New Zealand with a warm sun-soaked hello. She would never forget that she, Fatima no less! - She had seen the oceans fair and the white sand beaches. She watched from afar as her daughter grew, surprised at how easy establishing a "contact" was. When she turned eighteen she decided it was her turn; that the only time she deserved to convince her of any of the truth was now. She had already put pen to paper, and, not so unlike those horrible nights so long ago, written letters. She told the same story so many times over and in so many conflicting tones. It was about her life after those black days: not a word spoke of them. She never threw any of them away in the process; she bundled them all up and she sent them so that they might arrive on her daughter’s birthday. She hoped by now that her letters would go unnoticed and that her crime record had been all but forgotten. It was possible her belief that she had not been, and that they would no less cross countries to seize her, was unfounded and absurd, but better safe than sorry. She could not risk being captured and forfeiting her ability to help all of these organizations, for those that had met her had found her invaluable. On the front of this enormous, careful package was a single sticker that read happily, "Recycle Please!" Fatima recycled everything.
It became the journey she had always wanted and she a valiant, if scarred, hero. Fatima learned skills she never would have pursued in her old life. She scarcely said the words. "Old life!" She taught herself to hack a computer mainframe and to program too and she'd rigged the banked bucks of big businesses to trickle into her account. She stole from them all at once, and in such pilfering amounts that only as she continued to age did they become worthy of their thieving. A corporation that lost a penny a day! Hah: the method of it intrigued her but she kept not a penny for herself. Every last cent was donated to the World Wildlife Fund... or almost every cent. When her bones finally began to fail her, she retired fearfully. It was that fear that kept her alive. The thought that somewhere, somehow, Calidane might live and that he'd find her. It was a paranoid thought so sometimes she reminisced, as unloving of him still, that she had picked it up from Algernon.
She was ever not given any gift of marvelous postage by her daughter: how her eyes would have glowed if she had... like green fire. She had wisdom now; she was a worldly tree, a redwood with its roots marred and its trunk weary. But she was a great sequoia. She knew both in her heart and by factual logic that the little girl of hers would only issue return postage in an impossible never-never-land. She could not sleep soundly and her insomnia would never be cured, but she comforted herself that maybe her daughter was no longer sickened by the love of a murderer. Calidane had done her no favors, or perhaps one by accident; he made it clear to her kin and law enforcement that she had committed avacide.
The settlement where her mother had once lived had begun a slow-trekking merge with Cairo. It would not be far in the future when Cairo and the rural Ammut became one. She saw the millpond again and found herself exchanging money with the land owner who had erected a dinky and plain shanty at the pond's edge. He was a fisherman and he responded graciously to her over-offer; he was unaware she had cursed him with man's gold, dollars and cents. But she called it her last sin and settled and tended an idiosyncratic rock garden, the lilies never far out of sight, but neither the hustle of the city. When she finally found herself only just able to dress herself, she knew it was time. She wrote her final missive, not saying farewell. Instead, it was a short note, and a facile pin number, sent to her grandchildren and their children, with scant mention of wherefore. She would have loved those far-born relatives if she had ever been given chance to, to see her grandchildren and theirs. However, Fatima remained convinced that her intervening in their lives, even less dangerous as it was in her immense age, would only tempt her back to lack of purpose. It would only compound the many illusions her family had of her. She thought maybe she could tell her fable. But she could not have her pain borne by any future generations. All she deserved was to perish from memory. Besides, no one believed in fairy tales anymore: not in this digital age.
She wrote one sentence for herself. It would mean nothing to them but her writing it made it more real. She mutely inscribed the moral of her life: "No one dies by meeting a monster; in fact, all of us die because we never met ours." She muttered, by cracked and wrinkle lips, "Yes... we almost never meet them." Fatima would have beamed, but all she had was gums; she was one hundred and thirty and damn, she looked good for her age, or so she might claim as if she were some spring chicken. And it was that she hobbled not slowly nor quickly, but in an accepting way. She did not carry a cane or a walker. She moved of her own legs, as she had been given them so long ago.
His glade was as he and she had left it. She weaved through the grasses and came to the bank and let her eyes drift, to plumb the depths. She let the spires of the city float away from her line of vision. Fatima stood serenely and searched fruitlessly in the quagmire for those pearl marbles. Finding nothing she let a sigh like the first air had by an antique vanity, dragged from storage and polished to shine again as if it were new. That sigh fixed the termite holes in her. It was somber too, the first frost of autumn upon all the late-blooming petals... all the beauteous petals. She did not bother to draw breath as she took the plunge. She let herself drown.
=
In the morrow, in the grasp of eventide, a pallid yet tan form rose from the water with its ever-sopping hair a-gleam. It pursed its aged peat moss colored lips and tasted the raw, filthy river air. Its gangly limbs flexed as it swam in zigzag- bewildered as it was- to land. All the while its complexion roiled with the embrace of the muddy fluid it was doused in. The water lilies parted, slave dancers in its grand entrance. It clambered onto earth, knelt, and leaned forward to peer at the broth before it. It saw its youthful reflection and put its head in its hands, its suicide thwarted. The monster, Fatima, wept.
This is slightly shorter than The Maiden (Fish), though not by much. I find the most trying problem with this one is all of the unexplained plotlines. Maybe I will owe it a few short spin-offs later. I apologize for the length. I might have better posted it in two parts.
[u]Avoid Water
Fatima absolutely, downright had not missed it. The permanent haze that hung over Cairo, a cloud of filth to rival much larger American cities, was an annoyance at best and a health hazard at worst; she prided herself on tolerating these conditions and the stink of overflowing sewage, the system backed up again, hardly phased her. She was used to abominable fragrance; her own paper mill had that eternal, ever-pressing ru'twm, entirely noisome from sulfurous fumes. Her being back in Egypt was, though falsely concealed under the guise of a visit to her hermit-like mother, a business conference. She had communicated with a Cairo official at an accidental meeting some years ago about her little paper mill. And though it was not customary to expect customers from such a distance away, and though she was curious as to why a man she scarcely knew had remembered her, it was an opportunity not to be missed. Negotiations had gone well thus far and Fatima believed they promised, possibly, a demand for imports, and from her own wee company no less.
But the metropolis distracted her. She could remember, once, long ago, when her family had been homeless in these streets; now, perhaps gaining a sense of pride, she'd lost her tempered wariness. Greed might have softened her, yet she was unaware; Fatima's mother, aged now but with a mean streak and a galumphing speed that signified her continuing independence, warned her of such a plight. The two were incomparable. Fatima was a hard-working and rigid loyalist who concealed her Egyptian heritage and embraced the American side of her father, disdained living in anything less than what she could afford with the salary given her, and was all the makings of a "modern" woman. Her mother Sassicza was an obstinate traditionalist, a voodoo queen who attached herself to a myriad of supernatural beliefs, antique Greek philosophers, and lived modestly. She had the tendency to interfere in other's affairs, as well-meaning as she often was, and it was one of the primary reasons Fatima had departed the foul country at adulthood and went to live and go to school in Massachusetts with her relatives. There was no smog in Massachusetts, or if there was, she'd never seen it; it was no real factor, but she liked to convince herself it had been. She lied to herself about many things, repeatedly and fantastically, in elaborate form. Among these excuses, infallible stories and imaginings, was the awful idea that her relationship with her mother was sound and that she need not visit; she imagined her doing so as a glorious gift. The old woman did not appreciate her coming anyway!
It was almost laughable, then, that she had attempted to bar herself under such a visage. The need for concealment would have been not, however, if it was not for her husband highly suspecting her of simply ducking out of sight to have an affair with her foremost compatriot, an Eastern European native named Boris. Despite the trappings of such a boorish name, he was a likeable and attractive man, and therefore threatening to the bald-spot Canadian native of hers. She had assured him she would visit her mother, then, on the condition that she knew he was implying that he wanted some sort of watchful eye upon her. It was as if she had shaken her head the entire trip, enduring it because she knew about his intermittent bouts with paranoia (a mental condition in this case), and for the willingness to put his mind at ease. If she had not so thoroughly convinced herself that everything was going to be absolutely dandy, she would have seen sense and been worried. She had not seen Sassicza in five years, and if she would have been thinking rationally instead of in tidy and volatile buy-sell corkscrews, she might have been more distressed at remembering exactly what her mother's persona resembled (to her a rather voracious, polka-dotted cow). Fatima was quite good at fooling herself. It was how she'd quit smoking those nauseating cigarillos- Boris and her other day-to-day administrators extremely relieved- anyway. So, when she finally brought herself to head towards the hamlet-like place up the Nile to which her mother was attached, her mood could be best described as "hopelessly oblivious."
"Ima." So came a voice, gruff, bursting her reverie. Her soft sienna hair fell over her eyes and she tossed her head back, curls bouncing and her caramel-tan skin glistening with sweat in the humidity of the bus cabin, soon to the city outskirts, and further along to the nursing-like village of her mother's residence. Fatima opened one murky, viridian-irised eye and let out a little sigh in explicit direction of her comrade, Boris, who'd disturbed her. Boris chuckled at her expression and remembering that avian tendency to sleep with one eye open he muttered, "Duck, are we?"
"Shut your trap, warrior." He smiled, shrugged off her sultry manner, and eased himself into a lazy slouch next to her. She had a fondness for name etymology and insisted on telling him the meaning of the name of any person they met. She, admittantly, had guffawed hardest when she first learned what her own name had meant. Fatima, with origins in Arabic, was defined as "daughter of the prophet." Though it had obviously Islamic ties, she could not help but scoff at the connotation that either of her parents might be considered a "prophet."
Her father fit best, but was still a capricious and extremely volatile senior with a penchant for young women and fast vehicles. This was, coincidentally, a rather oil-and-water combination. Underneath he might have been a softly loveable teddy bear with an obstinate impression of life and a sense of dependability, but even years after meeting him, you'd not find much more than a work-ethic-less, arrogant retiree with an utter disregard towards almost everything. He was never predictable and a puerile hypocrite at times; she'd seen him appeal for animal welfare and then go to buy a new leather jacket. Fatima knew that his favorite phrase was practically, "I might be a hypocrite, but my point is still a valid one." And though she acknowledged him as hers, her parent, the atmosphere when they were together was near-constant argument over the most minor details. She had conjectured more than once that her father brought out the worst in her, a desire for debate bordering on madness. In all, he was more of an apocalyptic horseman with humorous tendencies than any blind zealot philanthropist. Though she often sided with his lack of loyalty, she had always wondered if it was truly his personality that had divorced man and wife. The fact was, in any case, that she had outgrown her parents.
She felt a certain, poignant tap upon her shoulder, and realizing it was not the first, turned again to a more straight-postured Boris who intoned, "I think we'll be reaching our stop any minute now. Mind if we act like proper tourists today, eh?"
With a ridiculing expression she queried, "Meaning?" She did not like his twittery grin or the slight twitch of anxiousness over his stocky build, nor the way he stroked his aristocratic, black locks with a demeanor of mild discontent.
"Well, I was thinking we could, you know, shop abo-" It was almost if his pause and her interruption were a simultaneous two-as-one, him just waiting for her to comprehend the implications of what he was saying.
"No! Boris, I loathe knick-knack shops and antiques and half-mothball-eaten clothing and widgets that make me sneeze, and you know it. I refuse, I can't-"
"Well, only for a little bit. You do owe me." Then, when she shot him a questioning but curious look, he said, scathingly and with a sinister manner that bordered on criminal, "I believe you recall last year's Christmas Party." Fatima turned pale and glared obtusely at his childish disposition after the fact; he seemed pleased with himself, and she hated him for it. The truth was, she did not quite recall the Christmas Party, per se, but that was beside the point.
The Christmas Party debacle, or so it came to be called afterwards with a wink, occurred when one Fatima consumed a few too many vodka-mixed drinks. Her memory was addled of the incident, though in a particularly detailed account afterwards, she had, with open ears, heard the words "mancala" and "lesbionic" and "belly-dancing;" the rest was a paint-by-numbers and Boris' role the sincere Samaritan. Among other things, he had been the one who had driven her home and who had mediated a scuffle between her and another woman over god-knows-what. He expelled the little, beady-stone, pink mancala piece she'd nearly choked on, and it was he who had covered for her at work the next day after he had stopped to assure that her hangover and her head cold were bettering since her husband, Algernon, had been absent (though it was actually December 27th, not Christmas). Unfortunately, Boris was, despite all trappings of kindness, a petty man with a certain affinity for favors; he hoarded them, and then when you least expected, sprung them on you in such a bequeathing manner that you felt mandated to fulfill his wishes. This was the case now as, when, after arriving in sweltering heat, her frail body and fragile feminine height were a-quiver. Even with her Egyptian history she was still hot but had entered with her companion a small off-beat charred redwood cabin-store which from the outside seemed to contain any myriad of a plethora of objects of every shape and size and caliber and most importantly, level and manner of dust.
Fatima wheezed first at the fine particles on an old tome of some sort, then as Boris asked, "Isn't this nice?" She coughed violently over the choking but moderate chunks of it gathered on a flask which Boris polished with his shirt. It left a brown rut and she smirked. Boris kept his eyes off the flask, though obviously with intent to buy, but not in want of the shopkeeper to bear down on him and tell him "how good it was." Fatima embarrassedly reminisced on the first time she'd heard the American term "garage sale" (as she meandered about the curio) and had taken the non-idiom route; no other would quite so obsess over little mistakes, but of Fatima's knowledge, what she seemed to keep in her memory best was little tiny incidents of embarrassment. Every time she had stuttered, had a Freudian slip, tripped over a non-existent object, talked behind the back of someone who was, in fact, behind her, and generally made an arse of herself by general accident was a prominent feature in her memoirs. She also had a mind for useless trivia, as demonstrated by her utterly crushing ability to beat Boris and his wife every other Saturday at Trivial Pursuit; they were not fussed by it either, as the usual follow-up was one of two things: Boris saying something the equivalent of "we could play some Pallanguzhi" and her and him exchanging glances, hers frightened and his amused, and their spouses without a wit of what they were conversing about. Alternatively, the other couple might just happen to beat Fatima and her husband at charades after. Algernon always guessed the least-related, most foreign, increasingly eldritch item possible. Several memorable incidents included "stripper" instead of "cocktail waitress," also, "flamingo" instead of "volcano." He was always excruciatingly humiliated trying to explain how he had reached his conclusions afterward, but found it necessary to try to justify how "Elvis" seemed to him to be "a particularly large armoire,” as that was a rather extant hypothesis.
Eventually, she wandered to the back of the store and a rather dejected box of cheap, bargain rings which were somewhat out of place her, perhaps as a ploy to lure innocent little girls to persuade their mothers to buy them one of the pretty hoops. She knew exactly what they were of course, with their bands embossed in a variety of colors and those legends behind them. Black means anxious, amber cool, gray strained, and so forth, with colored boxes next them for comparison; these ninety-seventies fad circlets, these miniature temperature-readers. Whether necklaces, earrings, toe hoops, or in their more common form, they were to swindle and all the same with that glossy-staring stone surface. But as was not uncommon, she felt a need to try one of them on again, unreliable as the reading would be. The product, of course, was a mood ring. She clenched her teeth as- and she cursed any higher being that might exist for making life so ironic- it turned but a shade and was that hue that she was so less than dearly unfamiliar too.
"Green!" She screamed in protest and stomped her foot, not actually so furious by the incident itself but what she considered the much extended piling of incidents such as these in which things had to be just slightly different from her own desires. Boris turned and bore into her, scanned once with a cursory gaze, and casually strode over; even he, so experienced with her qualms, her outbursts, her cynicism, was unaware of the many previous and some of them directly related failures leading up to this moment. "Verdigris! Beryl- jade..."
With a mutter in a luckily only owner and them occupied shop, he questioned, "Ima... Ima, is there something the matter?"
The fact that his expression was not one of definite concern made her somewhat wary, but she spouted anyway, in a grumbling tone and sarcastic inflection, "Oh, nothing." She held up the ring and he let loose a titter before she mumbled, "Nothing to laugh about. You see, these damn mood rings absolutely, positively, eternally turn this wicked shade of spinach for me. Out of every key-" and she held up that small piece of heavy paper in which the translations were printed, "says it means active, basically boring- though I might be reading in- and average. I know these devices are just playthings..."
"It's alright Fatima. You are under a bit of stress with our negotiations, I understand." But he didn't, and he knew it, and she knew it, and at a loss, he suggested, "Let's out to dinner, take our minds off work. Hey, the restaurants about these parts might not be fine dining as our American corner of the world," and he nudged her. She gave a half-smile, and he uttered, "But better then nothing." Ima thought, "better than nothing..." Was it really that? She had always dreamed of her life being more adventurous than the drudgery it had become. She realized then, that this was nothing. It wasn't any greater, and grander, because it was. Her life was second-rate restaurants and little annoyances and husbands with bald spots and estranged parents. And that was all it would ever be, but she derailed her train of thought, said not a word as the world came crashing down, and did her best to avoid her mid-life crisis.
"Yes- yes, let's go out. Oh, please, I need to relax." Her pining was evident, if accidental, and Boris had that impish countenance, so pleased as a cat that’d just brought his mistress a small, dead pigeon with blood on its feathers and a crumpled, dying pitch of song on its beak. He hadn't any idea what a behemoth she had encountered inside her head, nor that she wasn't particularly fond of tragically late avian creatures, nor that her acceptance was no more than a casual pat to his head, that is, metaphorically.
She did, amazingly, find herself liking dinner, and though his humor was dry or entirely awful, and the food sub-par, it was enough to distract her; she skirted around the edge of the deep chasm of breakdown and ended up in a considerably less lonely mood by the end of it. Boris had insisted that she best visit her mother and she'd dallied about and it was there that they went now, but not before she stopped him, an expression of enjoyment pasted on her face. "Ima?" She merely stared. Then he turned, sighed slightly, and laughed a slurred snicker. "Here we go."
It was a commonly known fact that Fatima was, if nothing else, quite fond of having her picture taken. Whereas others shirked from the camera and hid their smiles, fake as can be, she was the one doing cartwheels in the front row. If not for her plain features and somewhat unassuming exoticism, she always declared she would have been a model; that was obviously not real truth, being that she was short too and had not the ambition or the will to stand under authority and be ordered down a catwalk, but it was irrelevant. She fawned over photography and photo booths, especially when she was marginally down in the middle of Egypt next to one scribbled on in rough Arabic and in need of a pick-me-up. She dragged Boris inside, punched the buttons, set the machine off at a whir, coins already inserted, and started posing fanatically; she ignored Boris protesting with a snigger, "My soul's been stolen so many times," and shaking his head hopelessly. She mimicked the robot. She stared as a deer in headlights. She hugged Boris and cried of joy and she swapped some of her clothes with him. She stood on the seat so only the lower half of her business-dressed body was seen. She stood on her hands, or as well as she could in the space given. By the time it was over and the circus reel of pictures was with her, she was well over any feelings of doubt. Boris was mildly distant in that gleeful way he could be and they strode, Fatima with a skip in her step.
"Oughtn't we to stop at your mother's then?" His comment burst her bubble. She lowered her head, sighed in a dejected way, and prepared a rebuttal. Before she could speak, however, he did. "I understand. I would rather not visit the old maid tonight either, and it's late." She could have thanked him for calling her an "old maid." The insult warmed Fatima's heart before he compounded it with the catch, as was his way. "But I want to stop at that shop again. I am going to pick up that flask before we turn in, alright? I would rather not walk this unfamiliar place alone, aye?" She nodded assent and they went.
The place was as ghostly as it had been and the owner, a gnomish-looking male of no modest girth with bifocals and a meanly furrowed face, gray eyes, and white hair, purposefully organized bits and bobs about. As Boris made much business out of carefully assuring himself that he did indeed want to buy the flask and the old man breathed down his neck, waiting for him to do so, the incorrigible Fatima wandered to the mood rings again. She simply pondered for a moment, ignoring Boris' irritated hagglings with the merchant of it all. Then she picked up the ring- knowing she might forfeit her temporary euphoria- and stuck it on her ring finger. She drooped, withered as it began to turn a rough turquoise; however, her dismay became utter shock as in a split second, the ring was blue: dark blue, in fact. It was a bottomless blue, seething with its own malice. She discovered its description, happiness and romance, and found it dramatically failing in accuracy; it was such that she hardly paid it any attention when the much stranger bit of text read: avoid water. Nor did she notice when she was pulled away by Boris, his lack of notice of the ring and her subsequent shoplifting of it. That is, not until she was galumphing down the path with Boris to respective flats, rented for their stay, and realized just what she'd done. She slipped the ring into her pocket, wondering what she'd do, and decided she would return it come morning.
They came to a fork in the road, left for Boris’ room and right for hers, towards the river. He gave a brief, "Good night,” and then walked on. She found though, once she departed that she could not possibly sleep if she tried, and instead walked along the riverbed in the darkness. She knew to be careful for she knows this river, a friend from long ago. Fatima was contemplative, pacing almost. She dipped her toes in the murky water against her better judgment before pulling them out again, minutes later. She felt need to press on, even when it meant crossing amongst slippery rock climes over the river. But she managed. She always did.
As she crossed the bank she found, nestled in the guise of this small oasis and a number of trees, a bend in the river of which she was not familiar. The air was dead, save for wildlife and the slightest narrow breeze that swept about. Pawing through the underbrush, she came upon the end of this finite and micro-tributary and the pond there. And there, in the seclusion, lay a sight out of place. She blinked several times and concluded that though she knew them, had seen them, she had never known them as large as this. Giant lilypads floated like discs of a green sun and the gentle swirl of the current under them. They looked almost as if they would be supportive of a human, but Fatima dared not cross them. Here and there were dotted flowers, a helter skelter pattern of white blooms closed for the dusk. Insects buzzed about, but not in their usual froth; she could not see the lights of the outpost and even Cairo's distant gleam was no longer visible. Had it not been for a cloudless sky, she would have been blind in the swath of twilight. She had seen, before, settings described as picturesque. Though she desired not to apply such a dirty, untruthful adjective to this setting- for picturesque almost constantly meant "never-seen-by-writer-" it was in her right to dub it "bittersweet." For lachrymose waves washed over the sand at the banks of the pond and the reeds their like the melody of a lone flute over cobblestones, echoing against stone and mortar with no reprieve, and it was melancholy. It was underappreciated, abandoned, and wild as it should be; but at the same time forlorn for it.
She could not even comprehend herself- for in a moment's notice she had taken a dainty gymnast step- for doing what she did. She was, perchance, startled by how fluidly she could move; she thought she'd forgotten it. Fatima was upon the circular leaves, trodding on them, lightly, and without worry of failing. They were platforms to her, floating hereways and thereways, and she felt for some reason she had no reason to fear them collapsing; perhaps it was her frail build, a greens-nursed weight of a meek 49 kilograms. Perhaps it was the chill of the moment, made possible in this dog-in-heat climate by a zephyr blowing northwards, which had her attention. Besides, these were but the shallows; Fatima thought she might be able to stand, even as mousey as she was. Whatever intention she should have had, she knew not, but in a moment's grace she found herself kneeling ever-carefully and plucking up one of the evening-closed buds. It was cumbersome, almost, in its proportions; then, with a bit of deft maneuvering to temper this slippery surface she stood on, she clasped the flower and pried it open as if her smooth hands were a wedge and hammer. She had to convince herself not to stumble as several miffed beetles skittered out and flew into the darkness, her fingers covered in the gooey nectar inside which had trapped them, and she laughing warmly to herself at it.
She had full purpose towards returning to shore. She pivoted and faced it, took one sidelong step onto the next pad, and set her course to resemble that which brought her to the spot she was in. Fatima hadn't realized how far out she was, a marvelous twenty feet at least, though it was not surprising considering the very make of her improvised stepping stones. She began, in a slow chant, to number her steps as she went; counting one, two- three, four... five in Arabic. "Six," she spat in English, seeming vulgar next to her country's tongue, and then a stride again. It was then that her foot struck stem, as if it had surfaced from the water like a tentacle, and before she had time to say "seven," the world went black and damp as she tumbled into the water below. She reasoned immediately, as the first gulp of lukewarm liquid entered her lungs, that underneath there was but stringent light flitting through. In her confusion she might have turned from position and now she was without any clue as to where the bank was. She scrambled and tried to catapult through the lilypads, but she felt a swift retribution as she found a surprisingly thorny surface riddled with bulbous vein tissue. And when she came to understand that she could not pull herself out, Fatima settled herself quickly into an arrow-like stance and kicked her legs and broadened her arms and pushed in whatever direction it was she was facing. If she could just hold her breath, it could not take more than thirty seconds time to endure until she found terra firma. She settled to a pace, tried not to think of the passing time, or the burning in her chest. She latched on with an animalistic grapple her will to live; the water only grew murkier and her eyes redder as the muck stung them.
The same second she beheld those eyes, Fatima knew she was in danger; at first she thought them that of a crocodile, and she screamed with all abandon at her plight. Then, however, a bit of light flashed over the beast's reed-hair and spindly limbs and she saw an even more worrying shape, like the outline of a man. Her only response was to loose a necklace, a shoe, a sock or two, the second, as flotsam and jetsam and to swim harder and as angular as she could from the achromic eyes of her might-be merman aggressor. But no amount of kicking and howling was going to stop its iron grip as it grabbed her, one gangly arm strangling her pallid neck, and with poise jettisoned her from the mere's tenure to its. It held her there and she strained and choked by this an-aqueous adversity. She discerned her predator and knew abhorrence.
Fatima knew him male or androgynous now, his half-naked chest glistening as droplets fell from it and his phragmitic locks which seemed almost too irriguous; they were wheaten in appearance, and his complexion as dark as that of the Ancient Egyptians and as lustrous. He was not handsome in any traditional sense, with a near-bent nose and apical ears and lips the color of aged peat moss. Perhaps it was the avant-garde array of his features or those oddly gaunt arms or even the tint to his skin, like blooming bluebells. His ferocious white teeth were visible, though in a grimace of a half-bared fury. His pupils were absent and the whites of his eyes indistinguishable from their irises. This nymph-like creature was of a scant build, but obviously, even as he eased his grip over Fatima's throat, sinewy beneath that guise.
As he clutched her, he cocked his head awkwardly, smirked at his power over her, before stating in a matter of fact inflection, "Fatima Naser, daughter of Sassicza, you are charged with crimes against the sanctity of our Mother Earth." Her expression was of mild puzzlement and would have been more had it not been for the constrained conditions. "You have practiced a disregard for her gifts, employing her trees for your purposes and without any caution." Fatima grimaced. It was as if he was drawing her blood and memories by needlepoint; but what he leeched was her sin and his words were right. She had encouraged more than selective cutting on more than one occasion. "Your paper mill has polluted her water," and she regretted diverting it to that blasted fish pond, "and you enjoy more luxuries than necessary." She was slightly outraged at the comment; surely she had right to her possessions if she wanted them? "You compound insult by destroying her works, uprooting this flower blossom, and releasing from it the pollinators that are its lifeblood. This is the final symptom of your hubris." She hadn't seen the sign to keep off the pads, but this was not the time for smart ass comments; this was life or death, and her understanding that only made it worse. It was no trial, he did not even allow her the ability or acknowledgement to speak; the evidence, in this case, was lucid. He could see through her eyes with those terrible ocular manifestations of his. She shied from his stare as if it were the sun, or as if she'd been a toddler in the face of a monster. Then she reasoned this was actually the case. The sound of it rolled off his tongue with a certain malevolence, like the creak of a door in the midst of pitch black room, and the face of evil peeking through, "Your punishment shall be threefold." Then he smiled and told her how. Salty woes graced her cheeks as he spoke. Were the scales of justice so skewed? Was her punishment so unfairly harsh? With utter satisfaction, his words made her understand she deserved it; it was simple karma and as fair as the beauty personified. Her lamentation turned to one of self-pity. But no one mourns the wicked.
But her humiliation was not complete; the name, his, blanketed her consciousness as a swarm of locusts. This judge and jury Calidane was tied to his glade. He did an act so vile, thinking himself justified all the while, as he defiled her body. No, not in so easy an up and comings: what he did was far worse. She felt the sting but underneath the water only the fish heard her wails, and even they gave up on her, as did she, as had he. Her body fell away and she felt herself draw into the back of her own mind as if she was a parasite. And then she saw the world through her own eyes: as a spectator. It was at that instant that Calidane began to walk.
=
He had told them all to evacuate on account of dangerous gases. He had told them with her voice, sounding almost alarmed about it, concerned; perhaps she owed him that much credit. And then when they had all gone home, he had done the terrible deed. The explosions that had ripped through the building were heard for miles around and the fires burned long and hot. "These are the consequences," he muttered as she considered that if she ever returned, she would be part of punishable arson (for she owned only a share of the company) and responsible for the lost jobs of hundreds of workers, some who might not be able to put bread on the table after, "but the only path is a rebirth through fire." Her irises had shone with an emerald blaze as they stood in woodland away from it and watched the factory combust.
"Your business made forfeit and all of it destroyed as you decimated the workings of nature. This is equal; the balance will restore nature's hold." The way he looked upon her was as if he was Boris, so irritatingly pleased with himself. He was prideful, she could tell, a dignified creature who'd been forgotten and who had waited patiently for a savory chance to continue its reign. No one believed in myth and neither did they believe in him; that is, she had not. Now she did and she knew she always would if there was an always; but she reflected, sobbing solemnly, that the likeliness of a future for her in any modern sense was infinitesimal.
=
She wished she could avert her eyes, but they were his for the moment, and so she watched the kindling and the smoldering of another building in front of her. Her home that her husband and she had built together stood in ruins greater by the second and all her photographs, her finger-paints, her child's toys. They, her family, had been absent for the entirety of the time and they would return themselves to find a piece of their own lives missing. Two: both her and the lot. She could recollect the timbre of his voice, of Algernon's paranoia- for she knew it now more than ever- and she let its poignant recapture wash over her. She tried with all her might to give retention to her daughter, screeching with mirth and making a loveable nuisance of herself as she ambled about the house with her baby legs and bitty arms outstretched. She memorized both sounds for it was unlikely she would hear them again; all it would take is for law enforcement to make the logical connection and she would have two counts aided by the fact that the blaze had spread to nearby and similarly vacant homes. The worst thought was that this was not her reprieve, her end; there was final reparation that he had yet to act out.
"Your dwelling and the abode of your family eradicated as you did so to the rightful place of numerous flora and fauna in your madness. The equilibrium will set you free from your crimes." It was after this that the lamentation came, drops broad and bulky, as it was divulged how vicious he truly was. He would not be satisfied until all but life had been taken from her and her knowing this meant it would only be a short while before she was resigned to fate. Man and woman were not meant to do battle with such horrors as the medusa or the jabberwocky; they could only be defeated in storybooks. In life they might be destitute and lacking the faith that gave them true substance, but even without that, Calidane was sure to have the last laugh.
=
Calidane seemed especially glad at the last. He waded through the reeds and the water lilies and brought her to the shore where he gently set her down, her first muffled snuffling dejected and ejected into the gloom. He caressed her chin with an elongate finger and heaved up her "pretty face-" it had always been plain to the world but a predator could not help but lust for its prey- and ogled her with those colorless globes. "Your third pain- the labor three- shall be the life you built made chaos." She withered and bent to the wind as the flora did and her tears froze in their course; lethargy overtook her. He had taken a paintbrush to her terrene soul and spattered her world with gray.
The secrets she had held from them all were told. Her mother learned first how deep her hatred of her ran. Boris would know now of her true feelings; her parents learned of that once when she had attempted to poison her grandmother with arsenic. They learned nothing of her motives, as Calidane prevented her from putting to ink those words, those merciful reasons. He did force her to admit how she eventually succeeded and how she had been the one who had set the old farm on fire the same day. Calidane did not permit her the details, those first parts of forgiveness. All her walls she had built since her birth were torn down by one swift stroke and all of the truth was reborn in her inability to stop it. A letter was left, in her hand but in an eerie, disconnected voice that only intensified its prose. Algernon was made aware of her authentic apathy towards him and it read in her own style that she no longer loved him. In this case, she could only write with verity. She told him about the first affair and though she meant to say how she'd ended it, yet it rang pithy. How she'd only now had true love for one and had tossed aside that of her parents, how she had spent lavishly and wanted much, never donating a dime or time to any third world country, her brushes with extortion, and how her cheating the world had made her feel superior. She was not overwhelmed by these and many more sins told to any and all appropriate through letters sent and in some devilish cases words exchanged; she could not be fearful, because she had already known in some deep part of her what an amoral maiden she was. She had the moral insight and the means of expression. Only now she was the daughter and the prophet. She had known all the ideals and how to market them, but she never stood up and showed them the brighter world she could envision. She had never stood up and said, "I have a dream," but had but agreed to slave beneath the foul dreams of others. And for that she had failed the name "Fatima" and so it was forsaken. In the last hours she consoled herself, writing desperately at the bottom of the letter and feeling Calidane cringe at its utter veracity, which only made it mean everything. She wrote it once, twice, more, underlined it twice, three times, and made sure it was scribbled in gargantuan script, "I love my daughter..." Calidane used her hands to tear if off and throw it into the trash can.
=
He left her body with a consummate "umph," loosing her sultry breath and leaving her crumpled on the bank of his slough. She gazed at him; her eyes were bloodshot and drowsy and her demeanor made it seem as if she had aged years in a fortnight. As her mouth flat-lined between a frown and a half-smile, what were once laugh lines curved downwards in a bittersweet hook. Then she brought herself to her knees and set herself in that position. He watched hungrily before announcing that, "You should leave this place. Repent lest another of my kind finds you." Fatima's knees ached as if she had developed arthritis, but when she rose she did so with her poise and dignity intact. And though every fiber of her, her body language and her hesitant manner, suggested her wont need for vengeance... she only inverted her direction and schlepped hence from that lagoon. It is not arduous to conceive Fatima not swiveling to gaze again at what had become her own Amenthes, her underworld. And Calidane, her Ammut, had devoured her soul.
=
The corpse lay there, frigid and forlorn. Death had taken the gender and the name it had once been and dashed them into the water. The near-intangible scent of lilies wafted over the pond and it rippled gently. Only a few flies buzzed about the fresh body. The dirty bath parted at a splash and a slither came, distant than near; the vulture pecking at one of the alabaster, lolling eyeballs squawked in fear and frantically whisked away to permit its superior. There came a muffled dragging noise and the blood about the bullet hole oozed and smeared as it traced scarlet ringlets on the soil. A with a last gnarled hand, mythic tan skin with a faint pigmentation like bluebells, Calidane's body vanished beneath... and the world cried crocodile tears.
=
She was the Mother Teresa, or more appropriately, Mother Terra, of fugitives. She worked with Greenpeace in the Congo and TreePeople in New York. She had even traveled abroad to Italy, getting by with a few scant phrases of their tongue, and dedicating herself to Legambiente. TerraNature had obliged her in New Zealand with a warm sun-soaked hello. She would never forget that she, Fatima no less! - She had seen the oceans fair and the white sand beaches. She watched from afar as her daughter grew, surprised at how easy establishing a "contact" was. When she turned eighteen she decided it was her turn; that the only time she deserved to convince her of any of the truth was now. She had already put pen to paper, and, not so unlike those horrible nights so long ago, written letters. She told the same story so many times over and in so many conflicting tones. It was about her life after those black days: not a word spoke of them. She never threw any of them away in the process; she bundled them all up and she sent them so that they might arrive on her daughter’s birthday. She hoped by now that her letters would go unnoticed and that her crime record had been all but forgotten. It was possible her belief that she had not been, and that they would no less cross countries to seize her, was unfounded and absurd, but better safe than sorry. She could not risk being captured and forfeiting her ability to help all of these organizations, for those that had met her had found her invaluable. On the front of this enormous, careful package was a single sticker that read happily, "Recycle Please!" Fatima recycled everything.
It became the journey she had always wanted and she a valiant, if scarred, hero. Fatima learned skills she never would have pursued in her old life. She scarcely said the words. "Old life!" She taught herself to hack a computer mainframe and to program too and she'd rigged the banked bucks of big businesses to trickle into her account. She stole from them all at once, and in such pilfering amounts that only as she continued to age did they become worthy of their thieving. A corporation that lost a penny a day! Hah: the method of it intrigued her but she kept not a penny for herself. Every last cent was donated to the World Wildlife Fund... or almost every cent. When her bones finally began to fail her, she retired fearfully. It was that fear that kept her alive. The thought that somewhere, somehow, Calidane might live and that he'd find her. It was a paranoid thought so sometimes she reminisced, as unloving of him still, that she had picked it up from Algernon.
She was ever not given any gift of marvelous postage by her daughter: how her eyes would have glowed if she had... like green fire. She had wisdom now; she was a worldly tree, a redwood with its roots marred and its trunk weary. But she was a great sequoia. She knew both in her heart and by factual logic that the little girl of hers would only issue return postage in an impossible never-never-land. She could not sleep soundly and her insomnia would never be cured, but she comforted herself that maybe her daughter was no longer sickened by the love of a murderer. Calidane had done her no favors, or perhaps one by accident; he made it clear to her kin and law enforcement that she had committed avacide.
The settlement where her mother had once lived had begun a slow-trekking merge with Cairo. It would not be far in the future when Cairo and the rural Ammut became one. She saw the millpond again and found herself exchanging money with the land owner who had erected a dinky and plain shanty at the pond's edge. He was a fisherman and he responded graciously to her over-offer; he was unaware she had cursed him with man's gold, dollars and cents. But she called it her last sin and settled and tended an idiosyncratic rock garden, the lilies never far out of sight, but neither the hustle of the city. When she finally found herself only just able to dress herself, she knew it was time. She wrote her final missive, not saying farewell. Instead, it was a short note, and a facile pin number, sent to her grandchildren and their children, with scant mention of wherefore. She would have loved those far-born relatives if she had ever been given chance to, to see her grandchildren and theirs. However, Fatima remained convinced that her intervening in their lives, even less dangerous as it was in her immense age, would only tempt her back to lack of purpose. It would only compound the many illusions her family had of her. She thought maybe she could tell her fable. But she could not have her pain borne by any future generations. All she deserved was to perish from memory. Besides, no one believed in fairy tales anymore: not in this digital age.
She wrote one sentence for herself. It would mean nothing to them but her writing it made it more real. She mutely inscribed the moral of her life: "No one dies by meeting a monster; in fact, all of us die because we never met ours." She muttered, by cracked and wrinkle lips, "Yes... we almost never meet them." Fatima would have beamed, but all she had was gums; she was one hundred and thirty and damn, she looked good for her age, or so she might claim as if she were some spring chicken. And it was that she hobbled not slowly nor quickly, but in an accepting way. She did not carry a cane or a walker. She moved of her own legs, as she had been given them so long ago.
His glade was as he and she had left it. She weaved through the grasses and came to the bank and let her eyes drift, to plumb the depths. She let the spires of the city float away from her line of vision. Fatima stood serenely and searched fruitlessly in the quagmire for those pearl marbles. Finding nothing she let a sigh like the first air had by an antique vanity, dragged from storage and polished to shine again as if it were new. That sigh fixed the termite holes in her. It was somber too, the first frost of autumn upon all the late-blooming petals... all the beauteous petals. She did not bother to draw breath as she took the plunge. She let herself drown.
=
In the morrow, in the grasp of eventide, a pallid yet tan form rose from the water with its ever-sopping hair a-gleam. It pursed its aged peat moss colored lips and tasted the raw, filthy river air. Its gangly limbs flexed as it swam in zigzag- bewildered as it was- to land. All the while its complexion roiled with the embrace of the muddy fluid it was doused in. The water lilies parted, slave dancers in its grand entrance. It clambered onto earth, knelt, and leaned forward to peer at the broth before it. It saw its youthful reflection and put its head in its hands, its suicide thwarted. The monster, Fatima, wept.