Dali's Egg ~ 6. June

The pond was cold and surprisingly deep beside the worn path where footsteps seldom fell in the chill of autumn nights.
She lay at the bottom looking up at the moon, its full circle distorted and filtered through the gills of eight metres of water; murky and abundant with microscopic life that floated like dust in the blue light. The digital silence allowed nothing to enter her ears; not even the sound of a bubble that rose from her mutilated gut to break the pond’s bright surface; not even white noise.
It was late November but she knew that her name was still June and that Mars had taken something from her; something more than blood. The knife that he’d drawn from the sheath strapped to his ankle and the engorged flesh, already unsheathed, that he’d used to take what he had no right to take without her consent, where more than just weapons; they were objects of change.
She had met Mars in The Stable Inn at the edge of the village. He had possessed a charm that shone in the light of the vodka she’d been drinking since opening time and he’d seduced her magpie mind with its shining and with his returned-from-Eden-to-visit-his-dying-mother-I’m-a-sensitive-and-complicated-soul story. He’d looked in her eyes and seduced her from the inside as if he already held the key to her heart.
“Richard Mars” he’d said, extending his hand after the first minutes of their meeting. She’d laughed in disbelief and shook his hand, an act that switched the points of her future to a track that led from the first touch of his dry palm and the flow of words and alcohol, through a solid chunk of time to the moment at the edge of the trees on Johnson’s field when he’d grabbed her arm and pulled her toward the water’s edge, where with one hand on her mouth he’d whispered the moon’s poetry and unsheathed his weapons; steel and flesh.
She’d bled for a long time after he’d finished his ritual and weighed her body down with rocks and dropped her into the pond, bled the water red, but had been unable to move to see what he’d done to the body she’d always though of as her own.
Once a stray current had brushed her hand over the gashes in her abdomen; unrecognisable to her dead fingertips; frighteningly inhuman. She’d felt no pain after the initial excruciating horror and now that the water had cleared of her blood, she was left cold and numb and unable to do anything except stare at the moon through the blue lens of the pond.
Someone would miss her soon. Surely someone would come looking soon.

The torch had been damaged during the chase and now gave off very little light. John had lost his sense of direction with the undergrowth seeming equally dense on all sides and he’d lost the trail of blood in the deepening darkness. Any sounds that came to his ears did not offer clues to the way back to the village. In fact there were relatively few sounds for what seemed like a fertile forest. At one stage he heard what sounded like gruff angry voices arguing and the crashing of bodies through the forest. He tried to head in that direction but the sounds faded away into the distant silence once more. He wandered aimlessly for what felt like hours, and, teetering on the edge of panic, he heard the faint roaring of the surf off to his right and, figuring he could find his way back to the village from the beach, he turned in that direction. As if on cue, the torch spluttered and flapped as the flame consumed the last of its fuel and plunged him into darkness absolute. He stood for long minutes as his eyes became adjusted to the loss of the torch. Eventually he made out a vague grey light up ahead, a grey light which gradually got lighter as he tripped and crashed toward it, finally busting out onto the beach of a shallow glassy lagoon surrounded by gnarled and twisted mangroves. John’s attention was immediately gripped by the moon; it hung silver and blue about ten feet above the top of the mangroves, looking down on and illuminating a body that dangled by the neck from the tree in the clearing on the other side of the strip of water. Too far to identify the hanged figure, close enough to notice the shiny silver chain that had been used as a noose, John started forward, his first steps into the water sending concentric mercury silver and black rings into the lagoon and splashing against the sound of the rolling surf behind the trees. John waded across the lagoon, waist deep at its center, but stopped about ten metres before Geoff’s naked hanging corpse. Geoff’s expression was relaxed, despite the noose, and his arms formed a vee to modestly cover his genitals. The air seemed to hum with some magnetic force as John noticed that there was what looked like a narrow ribbon of smoke rising from the top of Geoff’s head. His eyes followed the path of silver smoke up to where the moon appeared to be drinking it in with puckered dark lips while one of its dead grey eyes watched him with idle curiosity. John stumbled forward, fell splashing to his knees on the shoreline, and dragging his eyes from the sucking moon, down the silver chain, past Geoff’s pale body, to the dangling feet to which a ragged piece of cardboard had been nailed. Inscribed on the cardboard in cursive letters was the legend:
Guilty of breaking Rule No.1
Straying - Strays are bad for the pack.