by Shaun Lawton
Something to do with the general monstrosity of Christ were the only words he remembered when he came back to being bar-flanked by the real walls of his real home. His prison-home. And then even those words faded fast, and he was left with himself and the silence only. His skull roared away into the bareness of autumn until only a couple of leaves were windtrapped in that hollow, being HIM, nothing but a vacancy with blank eyes.
And dancing, he rode, relaxing his two forms completely into the wind currents, quietploding in spirals to a frantic gust, and then downdrifting in slow slides, downward in arcs slowly settling...
Until he lay back and dried as he died.
His funeral and casket were the wind, as well. It lifted him up and carried him off and he was buried in it, disintegrating into the air-currents into a final dust of nothing. This dust swirled everywhere, around the entire earth, and was the dust of all deaths, which intermixed in the springtime with the bright spores of living. But that is getting away from the story, which deals specifically with what happened to the man.
Before long the powder of the man, which had been skytrapped and dispersed in buffeting winds for quite some time, settled back to the attractive grip of the lifeland and its myriad elements. This was inevitable, though in some legends it was said an unaccountable few had remained ever-trapped in the sky on endless winds. But the man in this story was no exception and he random-scattered throughout the land. His patch in particular was noteworthy in that it spanned two mountain ranges, but only at their half-a-dozen highest peaks where naught but ice, snow and frozen rock received him. This would have totally shocked him had he foreseen this fate in life; NOTHING to mix with, to become a part of.
That thought is the perfect example to illustrate how mistaken the man was about EVERYTHING. He froze, preserved in the cryogenic winter.
Numb to the shrieking winds and sub-zero time.
At last he was released into crystal cold streamlets and offered up to the god of fire, the Sun. Offered up to the goddess of life, all things Viridian. The relationship between these two god-forces was always the same, always near-eternal. The Sun would beckon the Viridan and at last reach out and embrace. The holy union always produced the same Child, who as an infant was Spring and as a person was Life. Life would grow to manhood in many ways and under many circumstances, but always grew to finally sit and brood.
Brood about how no matter the walls, the doors; the fields and the sea; the hills or even the open sky; no matter these things were they to he, for the land was a prison, the prison his home.
The man's name was Lief. This is his story.
And so Lief, who had died two seasons ago, would never know the chronicle of his continuing fate. He was naught but Oblivion's dust, and oblivion, as you may know, is TOO LATE.
Thus TOO LATE did the faint-tinged ink stains that were Lief flow effortless toward valleys. Thus did he pass across ground, and through sprouts. Thus did particles of him remain in trees and in flowers, as others strained through & onward, rushing to collect into still & loamy ponds, & to nestle within frogs-eggs and to be eaten by amphibians & insects.
And still Lief's odyssey refused to end.
The river-segments of his diluted patch-self ultimately settled into a random assortment of strewn sediment-spots, and even rarely into the always moving currents of digestion. But in the end (pardon me) it all turned out to be the same final outcome: an abstract collection of stains.
Little would Lief have imagined that part of him would end up in shit.
But then, too, a good part of him would be in water. And nearby plants.
And he would stand a chance of even some more fine-processing.
But never, and I mean never, would Lief or any of Lief's parts be introduced to that strange incubation period preceding Birth, and never would his body be born again.
Which brings us to the first mention in this legacy of the soul, and what became of it. What became of it may be asked, but the answer may remain buried in a shroud of needlessness, unnecessary to ask. If not it may achieve at best perfect miscomprehension, which isn't so bad...compared to the possible nightmares of fallacy which imagination generates.
But a soul there remains; it is evident. What of it? A soul was just a part that remembered which colors led where...and then passed through caverns, swimming. A soul passed through the body & never touched it. The Body fell in a slough heap like a shed skin, and disintegrated in the minerals. The Soul flew on through passageways of memory until it passed into the color it wanted.
If it found the right color, it would doubtless find itself in the familiar comfortable complex suit, THE BODY. Most souls finally grew to accustom nakedness, and so flew free in the lost silence. The others still wordlessly demanded clothes no matter what the climate and they, usually disgruntled, put on their suits and looked out through the eyes of flesh into the variable-structure-game of Life. The Sun burned their eye-lids, furrowed their brows. They never could figure out what the fuck was going on.
