Emissaries of the Shuttermouth

Art by Jason Barnett

   In a backwash of nightfall, as the haze of rain drift freezes in a slanted down glide under arc-light, a razor-edged grimace reveals itself in a weakened pulse of strobe flashing to a lower frequency than that of the long dead starry night's final throes of shed light.

   The moon lowers its crescent nail through the skin of dawn, peeling it back to reveal its underside, the fat layer of eventide. In a darkened alleyway rows of serrated teeth close down one after another until they wink out altogether into a shut mouth.

   A stranger hides in obscurity keeping a tightly clamped grin. It advances just before dawn under the cloud cover of an almost new moon. Only the light of this outsider's occasionally leaked smiles reveals the cobbled path before it in splintery, shard-like reflections.

   Its eyes, should they ever provide the opportunity to be closely examined, would reveal blacknesses compacted into an even deeper dark. They are of an extreme pitch; hidden eyes that themselves see vividly without the need of light. The pupils are triggered to blossom by a strange and remote aperture system, and for this reason fill the eyes with a striated obsidian of a most unusual configuration.

   The specimen standing silently in the alleyway is the Shuttermouth, lone leviathan of the night. It has been known by many names throughout humanity's mayfly-like existence: lycanthrope, doppelganger, vampyr, madman. But the Shuttermouth has no name other than those lent him by mankind.

   The Stygian configuration of its glossed pupils lost in impenetrable inkiness form an almost impossible to see triangulation whose three points open into tiny clustered triumvirates budding from the tips. They realize a gaze which leads back from a descending line of an unfolding sentience whose purpose is to visually inform the master entity delivering it.

   This primordial being is even lesser known than the Shuttermouth, and with far fewer names attributed to it, if any. It sleeps in a special kind of dormancy. It could be described, in human terms, as the Buried Thing. It sends its messenger spies throughout time and across various latitudes of the world. These emissaries live, and die, just as men do. Some live longer than others; some continue to elude death.

   The Shuttermouth is one such tenacious deputy of the Buried Thing. It functions as a sort of remote camera device, and occasionally as messenger or courier. Like very few others that have and still exist, its life has spanned at least a couple and maybe well over a few centuries, the actual date of birth impossible to pinpoint. But then virtually every piece, part and bit of information that mankind acquires over its brief career on planet earth amounts to largely a collection of assumptions on its behalf, placed over that empty abyss that has been labeled "the unknown".

   The unbeknownst: that vicinity from which all knowledge takes root. Thus, this tree of knowledge has its roots sunken in oblivion. We homo sapiens cannot be consciously aware of oblivion's real nature, for not only do human memories fade away fast, but oblivion itself by definition may not manifest within the human universe. Man's most common mistake in this matter is thinking oblivion awaits them, when the truth may approach something closer to the opposite.

   Oblivion resides before the past and everything that has already passed. Oblivion remains absent from time and space. Humanity and other life forms have been slowly seeded from it throughout the ages.
 
   What lies beyond for humankind is merely death, patiently awaiting with jaws agape for its  complimentary sustenance: creation itself, swirling down the drain and into the cosmic disposal machine. Oblivion lies beyond death's reach. We have appeared here as Sustenance for the Serpent of Time.


   That is why individual humans are like ants learning how to fly. The stragglers which continue to elude death, those few survivors, camped out along the banks of time, which refuse to give in to the sand trap awaiting at what would normally be the end of their lives, these are the "special ones" which the Undesignated Thing has sent out its delegates for.

   They are the ones the Shuttermouth has most especially been sent to retrieve. The very ones it loves to prey on the most. Individuals such as yourself who love to read and listen to the most arcane memoirs imaginable, such as the one you're reading now. Take heed on the darkened streets before dawn. Best keep moving and watch your backs under the open light of the Sun.

Tree Mirrored In Apples

   I was incepted from nothing but the memory of a fading photograph. This is how an apple falls from a dead tree. It rolls off to the side and miraculously manages to plant a seed in the ground. Inside the mummified husk glistens a droplet of vitality. The cryptobiotic eggshell cracks open. A copy with nothing left to mimic. How am I to know what being my father's son is supposed to be like, when all I have to go with are memories older than thirty-three years? What I do remember of him remains crystal clear in my mind. The way he delayed responding in conversation sometimes for a few minutes. How his eyeballs resembled hard boiled eggs nestled in their sockets behind the thick lenses of his glasses. He was smart enough to graduate with a degree in chemical engineering, and responsible enough to oversee the start of his own business and the construction of a factory, and maintain it for over twenty years. He kept many friends spellbound with his stories of true life adventures, and made long and lasting friendships with a lot of people. The more I think about it, the better I can see how much I really am like my father. The difference seems to be that his many real life exploits were compressed into fewer years, before being telescoped out into the formative times caring for my brother and I for ten summers through our adolescence and teens. Looking back, it's painful to have to admit I was lucky to have had him until I was twenty-one. When our father was killed, my younger brother was just sixteen. His apple dropped directly at the feet of that tree. My brother has a true genius for inventive craftsmanship and artistry. He's already engineered a hidden cache of unspeakable treasures the world can only dream of being so lucky as to get to see. Meanwhile I wandered off into the west after my divorce and never looked back. I discovered a new home out here and started my love life all over again and have been married for ten years with a beautiful woman who's gifted us with a singular and striking child we both cherish. If my father spent four years at a technical college to then apply his degree toward a successful business, I've shot off in a wild direction chasing fantasies with my best friend until ending up stranded in an alien place. Fate intervened to cut him from our lives as well and here I remain cultivating my family and my wounds. For someone who was never able to remain focused on one thing for long when it came to writing and being creative, I did end up sticking with a menial job for six and a half years until it paid off with my being promoted to supervisor. I stuck with that for another five years until getting a twenty percent raise. Six more years from there and here I am, home owner going on three years and proud father to a loving seven year old boy. The life I've developed here two thousand miles from my family on the East Coast is the product of sheer chance and perseverance. There's no way to see how the apple of my eye reflects the qualities of my Dad. He never had the opportunity to keep growing in order to show me that. The only way I suppose I'll ever know what sort of a man he may have become is to keep on examining myself. I may be my own father's mirror, but I'm not a businessman. How strange that I reaped a life come to fruition from happenstance and chance. My brother and I are no longer all that's left of him. My boy continues to grow and reflect those same half remembered and unknown qualities in the grandfather he never knew. If there's comfort in other men whose fathers are still alive for them, and who truly represent them in their own eyes after their own fashion, then I guess I must find comfort in another way. I must find contentment in knowing the seed that I am grew into a peculiar fruit to penetrate new territory unlike anything my forefathers ever managed to accomplish, even if they may have dreamed it. I feel as if I somehow broke the mold when I rolled off into a strange ditch and grew a new twisted branch of our family tree. A disembodied one that more resembles an autonomous piece of driftwood carried along unexpected tributaries to end up in a foreign land underneath the same constellations. So it makes me think if my own son follows suit his life too may end up nothing like my own. Yet I see so much of me in him already, and in a telling way, a lot of my mother, but no trace of my Dad as of yet.

   What shapes the apple of our progeny if not the form of fate? Have I broken free from the spellbound tyranny of a sordid history doomed to be repeated? I followed not a focused vision for myself in the manner that my father shaped his career and set about accomplishing it. Rather, I went where the wind and whimsy took me, daring to pursue odd cues and enticing circumstances. Perhaps the difference between my father and I is that I've never lived for the future. Instead, I've lost myself in the continuous moment. I must be the only one beginning to suspect this may be the reason I've managed to stay young at heart for so many decades. When a man sets his sight on the future to make his home he shapes his own tomb instead. Since I was a young boy I always wanted to live forever, and today I see no reason to stop dreaming that way. I've stretched the present moment into living with my wife and our son in the same exact manner. We're going to be here today forever and that's another reason we are so different from each other. Because we don't repeat one another's history, we live it together, each under our own sign. I have nothing left today to compare myself with my father, lost to me and our family all those many years ago. All I know is that I loved him, and he returned that love to my brother and I for the ten years he had left since his divorce with our mother. That crystal clear decade remains encased in my skull as vivid memories. Like lava pools with lucid reflections of a long gone life. I don't have to remember them any longer because I know those moments still exist in time. If there's one thing I've learned over the past thirty-three years, it's that our entire existence including all the lives of those who came before us and all of those to come belong to the same single present moment. It is an interval without past or future. Unlike snowflakes or stars but along the same lines my son and I are two reflections in an infinite hallway of mirrors. I know this to be true as certainly as my own father has transcribed these lines. It dawns on me as I write this with him inside me that of course I'm not like him, far from it. I became him the moment his corporeal body was removed from this world. I am my father. The grin across my face as I write this ends up being not just his delight within me now, but a real composite of both our smiles. It's taken me this many years to figure that out. Just wait'll I tell my boy about this. Won't he be surprised at the apples in our eyes.