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| Wow. I haven't posted here in over two years.
I'm going to keep this blog open. Maybe Madame needs to resurface for a bit. Maybe not. We'll see. In the meantime....
All The Bees Are Dead
All the bees are dead and gone.
Still the heat lingers, a season gone off its tracks.
The ground is brown, brittle crunch.
Nothing grows. Nothing blooms.
We lie silent.
The dusty world waits.
Inevitable
I am lush and overgrown;
You are postage stamp.
I am volume and intensity;
You are background noise.
I am scarlet, sapphire, emerald;
You are beige, beige and more beige.
Our rough edges are measured
In mountains and canyons,
Rivers and deserts.
And if our twain should meet,
We would cancel each other out
Or I would die from lack
Or you would die of excess.
Either way, either way.
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| The hands of Earth are kind and cruel
To every burned and fallen fool
Who curls his broken wings into the night
And longs for flight.
-- Distant Sky
© Bare Bones Music, 1979 | | |
| The sun rose in the morning mist where we stood on the crimson sand. The air was heavy with vibration, a subsonic buzz in the bones. Joss and I stared at each other through the haze, too tired to move, too stunned to speak. He raised a hand slowly and pushed a strand of hair out of his face, an automatic reflex.
In the smoky dim light his eyes seemed luminous, too large for his face. I imagined my own looked the same. I made my way to him, stepping carefully in jerky, barely controlled, hesitant movement. My legs were leaden. I stood in front of him a moment and gazed into those eyes. He seemed lost, helpless. I leaned my forehead against his chest and fought the tears and the sob that threatened to break past the aching lump in my throat.
"I didn't hate them," he whispered. I could barely hear him; my ears were too full of thunder.
"I know." I looked up again, searched his face. I don't know what I was looking for; validation maybe. I knew there were no answers. Maybe it was just to delay the inevitable. Soon I'd have to look elsewhere, and I dreaded it.
The gun dragged at my hand. I still gripped it tightly, fingers clenched in a spasm that wouldn't break, arm hanging limp by my side. I wanted to let go now. It was over, I wanted the terrible blind fear and madness to stop. I wanted everything to disappear. Joss whispered again.
"You know what comes next."
I knew. Both of us knew now. We were sacrificial lambs; if the job didn't get us, the engineers of the carnage would. Neither of us knew how long we had; the last minutes of our lives could be ticking away.
"Can we run?" I asked. Innocent, desperate question.
"We can try." He swallowed, tried to wet his dust filled throat, or push down the nausea.
I turned from him reluctantly, keeping my gaze on the blood-soaked sand. So much blood. Despite the dread, I raised my eyes, in increments, taking in the scene one tiny horrifying piece at a time.
Bodies. Everywhere. Limbs and torsos, mangled, severed, scattered. All of them, blown to bits, almost unrecognizable as human beings. We had done this. We were the giant hand holding the scythe that had swept down on these people and cut them to shreds, coldly, without feeling. The feelings came later, after the shock and numbness seeped away like the blood still oozing into the sand.
Joss had never looked away from any of it.
I turned back to him, noticed the red trickle down his hand, sliding off his fingers drop by drop, a last bloody benediction, perhaps, for all these slaughtered souls.
I touched him gently on the arm and at last he looked at me. Death, rage, betrayal, agonizing sadness pooled in his eyes; an anguished plea for forgiveness.
"They lied to us." A tremor in his voice, rising from the trembling of his body. I couldn't tell if it was outrage or exhaustion. At this point it didn't matter, they were one and the same. "There was no mission."
Eight hours. Eight endless red hazed hours firing first from the rise over the beach, taking the majority in that initial horrific rain of death. They ran, or tried to. The ones who were left, almost all of them wounded, hid themselves however they could and attempted to fight back, knowing it was useless but unable to simply lie down and die. They were poorly armed, not fighters. Through the night we flushed them out and took them, one by one; by sunrise they were all gone.
We thought we were doing the right thing. Picking through the remnants of the bodies, we discovered we were wrong. They may have been guilty of many things, but they hadn't deserved this.
I touched Joss again, said his name. "Joss. We need to try. We have to." In my head I could already hear the hiss and whine of the craft, feel the impact of metal in my flesh. Joss simply stared, turned inward, gone. I grabbed his injured arm and shook it, tried to pull him out again. He barely seemed to feel it. Rage roiled in my gut, spread outward into my body, turning me to ice. I shook him again, yelled at him.
"Joss! Dammit, we have to try! We have to move!" I stepped closer and hissed in his face. "I will not let them do this to us. I'm not going to lie down and let them get away with this. Now MOVE!"
His eyes focused with torturous slowness. He frowned at me, raised his bloody hand as if just now understanding he'd been hit.
"Okay," he said, and I could hear resolution hardening his voice. "Okay."
We ran.
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