And just as justice cannot always be seen to be done (for reasons that the city’s citizens need not know), so too is it necessary that the sentenced be made to suffer her guilt; to feel the wrath of the law.
Black fluttering at the periphery, Iskandor blinked crusty lids in attempt to clear her vision. The heat; the hot wind off the desert. She realised that the smell had been with her for a while now. She struggled to place herself; the pain in her arms and back.
“Fly away. Fly away Iskandor” said the black and fluttering bird at her shoulder, “The world has turned; you are no longer.”
The wire at her wrist bit deep to integrate itself in her biology; chemical reactions of green and metallic tang laced pain to bone beyond bearing.
One eye open blood encrusted torture as more birds flocked to reel around her head in a halo of dread.
Somewhere deep in her; beyond thought, logic, or reason, a force was exerted – a force so miniscule as to be invisible to the body’s tendency toward inertia. She held on to everything; the pain; the horror: the overbearing memory of... for what greater horror lurked beyond this body; what black reckoning would the Source deliver to one who could not belong? What else was there out there that may make sense of all this darkness beneath the thin shell that constituted a citizen’s life?
To die now would be to die in guilt; guilt for crimes that she could not believe were crimes; no recipe for eternal rest.
And so she repeated the black bird's words to herself, over and over until they lost their meaning; over and over until they were no longer words but sounds; sounds she rendered with broken voice barely above the rasp of her breath; over and over until they gave her strength and brute force to lift her battered body from its bondage.
Excerpt from Decaying Orbits - a work in progress.
Black fluttering at the periphery, Iskandor blinked crusty lids in attempt to clear her vision. The heat; the hot wind off the desert. She realised that the smell had been with her for a while now. She struggled to place herself; the pain in her arms and back.
“Fly away. Fly away Iskandor” said the black and fluttering bird at her shoulder, “The world has turned; you are no longer.”
The wire at her wrist bit deep to integrate itself in her biology; chemical reactions of green and metallic tang laced pain to bone beyond bearing.
One eye open blood encrusted torture as more birds flocked to reel around her head in a halo of dread.
Somewhere deep in her; beyond thought, logic, or reason, a force was exerted – a force so miniscule as to be invisible to the body’s tendency toward inertia. She held on to everything; the pain; the horror: the overbearing memory of... for what greater horror lurked beyond this body; what black reckoning would the Source deliver to one who could not belong? What else was there out there that may make sense of all this darkness beneath the thin shell that constituted a citizen’s life?
To die now would be to die in guilt; guilt for crimes that she could not believe were crimes; no recipe for eternal rest.
And so she repeated the black bird's words to herself, over and over until they lost their meaning; over and over until they were no longer words but sounds; sounds she rendered with broken voice barely above the rasp of her breath; over and over until they gave her strength and brute force to lift her battered body from its bondage.
Excerpt from Decaying Orbits - a work in progress.
4 comments:
This sent shivers down my spine, Pisces. The imagery is richly and sublimely stunning, the prose darkly lyrical, captivating and haunting at the same time.
Powerful words indeed.
Thanks Van
yes...as vanilla has already said and more...it's fabulous pi, can't wait for more....she's alive to me..
Seeking sense, mining for meaning, prospecting for poignance, importing importance to feel justification for having to observe at all, much less have opinions about the rightness of any of it — it is our burden or our blessing in a life that can never know what is always free to choose.
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