Caltrops - Cabaret Voltron





	[quote name="Ray, of Light"]I liked this story, a lot. I have nothing to add, but saw lesser efforts receiving replies and took it upon myself to right that wrong. Ray! [quote name="Nirk Firkle"][quote name="veronica"]LIke every other schmuck on the planet, I am currently writing down anecdotes of my life. At the moment, I am focusing on times when I was manic. Here is a short description of one of those times.[/quote] I would always wind up taking people back to my hometown, whether they were only loosely acquainted with me or what passed in that youth for "friends." Any excuse would do, no distance was too great. Once it was a fat girl with black curly hair and a funky car. She introduced me to Luscious Jackson and De La Soul and the possibility that adolescence was only a glorified infancy. I took her back to the old place. She could not ever hope to comprehend the raging unslakeable thirst I had to walk over the same fields and to see once more the firs on the horizon, the sun just to their right, the community gardens and recreational fields, the ponds and the little islands in them, my own old home inhabited by aliens. We got off the train and I started walking as though I had never left, mile after mile, long mile after mile: five from the train stop to my home territory, another four to cover it thoroughly, two to get to a place to sit down, another four back to the train. To me it was nothing, I could have walked fifty miles over that soil and gravel and through the sweet meadow herbs, I could have walked it from dawn to dusk the way I always had, ceaselessly, untiring, regenerated by the mere presence of that particular streamlet, that particular cottonwood, those clusters of fox-grape. It was summer, and hot, and everywhere were biting insects and unfamiliar things to her. The bugs didn't touch me, the heat didn't affect me, the sun didn't even hurt my eyes, but, after the first few miles, <i>she</i> started trailing, and then began to follow me at a distance measureable in hundreds of feet, a surly expression on her face and her ankles swollen. I swung east and felt the wind fill the curve of my body, the hot summer wind, and I leaned into it and felt omnipotent briefly. I was very sick. I had a madness. I was a hunter whose quarry had fled three years earlier when I left and the house was sold, and I was still searching for tracks as though I could follow it to wherever it went. I had brought her with me, she who had never loved in this way and who would surely realize my disease any moment now. She was weak even beside that, she had never intended to stalk with me across the luminous hot plains, she wasn't <i>built</i> for it. I had lured her out here on promises of chocolate shops. But I couldn't stop sucking in the life-giving familiar air, the same air which was to her burnt hours. I wanted to sacrifice her to the land to thank it and then to plead for it to return to me. Instead I called out to her, "Doing alright?" She stumbled over a stone and caught up a bit, red and dirty and fatigued. "I guess we can go back to the train station now." That's what I said to her, but what I meant was, "I offer you to this gravel, to that algae, to these locust trees, to this almighty sky which covers me, I offer you to that which I offended with my faithlessness, I give you and your tired flesh to this black soil, may it grant me respite and nourish me again." We turned east and walked back to the train and she was silent. Two months later there was the end of our association. The next time I went back to the firs the mosquitoes tore at me and I sweated and suffocated in the heat, the meadow had grown over with hard thistles and bladed grasses that cut open my legs. The sun did not shine, though it was summer again, and I saw a vulture of an old schoolmate who ate up precious time with worthless and entropic conversation. I gathered poisonous weeds for a witch back home and left, and left nothing in exchange, and the air was perfectly still. What had I done?[/quote][/quote]