Tale of the Week 298: Enter the Void - VOTE!
Submission 1
And so we have come here again. How many days will I be locked up this time? How many months? How many years? I guess it’s true what they say. Bad habits break hard. And so, I’m stuck in this cell, once more. I didn’t ask for this you know. I didn’t want any of this. It’s not my fault. Sure, I did do it. But it wasn’t my fault. I swear. It told me to, and I had to obey. The walker, in the plane of my consciousness. It knows everything I do. Everything I see. It lives inside of my head, and I cannot escape it. It tells me things, sometimes. Things of great wonder. Things I wouldn’t know. But it also demands. It demands things, terrible things. I have tried to resist it, I truly have. But I cannot. It always gets its will in the end. Because of this, there is no end. Only an unending stream of petty “errands”. I’m tired of it, I hate it and I want it gone.
I remember years back, back when I tried to live a normal life. School, a job, friends, the lot. I had it all. I thought it was just a voice, a silly voice. I didn’t know it was *it*. Slowly but surely, it drove me away. Away from it all, it reduced me to nothing. No friends. No school. No family. All gone. All shunned me. Just because I obeyed it once. Just once! I thought if I gave it what it would I would be fine. That it’d go away. That I’d be free. But no. Instead, it took me as its own. I am but a vessel, and it’s my captain. No matter how many times they put me in jackets I cannot break out of, no matter how many times they give me pills I don’t want to swallow, I still can’t break free. I now know that if I do, I’d die. I have nothing left. It has taken everything away from me but itself, and if it were to go, I’d drown in unending loneliness. And so, I must obey. I must do what it calls. It has become part of me, it has become me, or I’ve become it. I don’t know.
Sometimes, it’s kind. Sometimes, it helps me. It fills me with strength, tells me not to worry. Soothes me when they do not. My life is pitiful, but with it there I have something. And so, I have grown to embrace it. To love it, to see it as myself. One day it’ll give me salvation.
Submission 2 The Sun cast long shadows across the ruined city, as the spirit walker started a fire and remembered the last of his friends. He had survived another day, but Ari hadn’t made it. He sipped from the grey metal water-bottle that Ari had found in one of the high ruined towers, before the sudden bow-shot that had left Ari coughing up blood and begging for water, and the spirit walker grieving for his fallen friend.
In the shadow of dying plane trees, as his feet scattered fallen brown leaves, the spirit walker imagined what the city had been like before. Old folk told stories of a place of wonder, a proud city of commerce and culture, enriched by trade along its principal river and across the sea. People once flocked to the city in the hope of starting afresh or achieving fame or fortune. Now, instead of offering hope, the city provided a last resort for the desperate.
Where once ships ferried cargo up and down the river, the dry river-bed was a wide sunken path with an occasional trickle of water. A few hulks of abandoned ships provided temporary shelter and shade. Occasionally, inside wrecked ships, the spirit walker found messages left by other travellers who had walked along the bed of the great river – warnings of dangers ahead or advice on where to find a hidden pool or well. Even in these arid and dangerous times, there were people trying to help others.
The next morning, the spirit walker considered his options. He was familiar with loneliness, as he had travelled without company for a long time before he found Ari. Perhaps, if he walked the along the bed of the great river again, he would find a new companion? There was not much use in being an interpreter of dreams, if he could find no-one else to help. He tilted his hat slightly, the way his friend Ari used to do, picked up his pack, and set out along the dry bed of the great river once more.
Submission 3
Our astral plane has been split longways, short ways, always, and all ways. The void's maw yawns with the self-satisfaction befitting existence’s apex predator. Everything that ever was, everything that will never be, swallowed whole. How does one approach the entrance to endless absence?
The walker of the cosmos thus ponders the day that never dawns. Loneliness his sole companion. The spiral of infinity beckons to him. Tempted by the release of forever. Does one enter the void thoroughly exhausted by wonder? Out of a need for nothingness?
Have we been running from the void since the first flickering spark of sentience? Destination unknown. Dreams of destiny forgotten. Is it a love for adventure or an ache for death? Here, now, and sometimes then. Yesterday, tomorrow, and never. Embrace the limitless waves of silence.
The abyss stares not back at you. Why would it? It knows you shan’t resist its allure regardless of any lingering looks thrown askance. The invitation extended, ticket printed, route mapped, all in the blink after the Big Bang. Why create knowing you will one day destroy? How can that which will swallow the universe remain empty?
Are we but playthings of consciousness, for consciousness? Little self-centered vessels of id scurrying about, lost in the mindlessly inconsequential squabbles of greed, lust, and envy? Does one pray the void grants freedom, liberation, peace?
We are overdue a return to the primordial source whence we came.
Submission 4 Grandma Eleanor lived out in Ohio, in deep woods country. For miles it was nothing but trees, a good place to spend summers as a kid. But now when I think about her, or Ohio, I can’t remember those forests anymore. I can’t remember the streams where we pulled fish out with our bare hands, and I can’t remember the trails where we’d go searching all day for Indian arrowheads, wondering what stories they held. All I remember is that upstairs room in her house where I was too afraid to go, where dad had to force me to walk in.
The first thing I noticed, the thing you couldn’t help but notice when you walked onto the porch, that hit you like a wall when you opened the front door, was the smell. It was thick and layered, heavy with the sickly sweet odors of death. I walked into Grandma’s room and had to bite my tongue to keep from gagging from it. But then I saw her, and suddenly the smell didn’t seem so bad. Not half so bad as looking on the shriveled thing that used to be my Nana, seeing its utter loneliness.
When I came in she seemed to see me, or at least to notice something, cause her eyes came all clear. She tried to sit up, failed, and then raised one bony hand toward me. I was so scared I could barely move. What did I want with that hand, with that corpse masquerading as my grandma? She stretched the hand further, me shrinking back all the while, and then a single tear formed at the corner of her eye. The sunlight through the open windows caught it, filling it with brightness, until finally it slipped down her cheek, disappearing into a small wet blotch on her pillow.
“Walker?” she whispered to me. Grandpa Walker had been dead for ten years, but dad always said I looked like him. I guess nana saw it too. “Walker, are you there?”
I took a step closer, fighting the urge to run, to forget the monster in that bed and remember Nana as she truly was, all laughter and lessons. I took a step closer and I took the hand before me. It was so thin and dry, brittle. It was a corpse’s hand, not my nana’s. But the voice was still her.
“Walker, I’m scared.”
I didn’t realize it then, but there were tears in my eyes too. I could see the fear in her, the uncertainty, and I wanted it to go away. I leaned down to my Nana and whispered into her ear the only things I could think to say. I told her what she needed to hear, and with a sigh she left that plane for good. I was crying, but there was a smile on her face, and that smile stayed there till we put the lid on her box and lowered her beneath the old elm beside her Walker.
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