Rem's short stories ★ Index
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I write only sometimes, and when I do I feel as though I have seen god. I adore it. As a kid, bloody, god-fear-filled stories meant a great deal to me; from any culture, really, I was not picky. The bloodier&terrifying, the better. Writing is magical, storytelling is a science I have not of yet mastered. Come back another day; perhaps you shall find the Next Big Thing In Literature here. Or maybe not. Anyways, as you will notice my stories include a hearty, obvious amount of mythical inspiration within them; I just can't help loving impossible things! Happy reading.
★ A branch of pine, ceded as an argument
There was a day when a man awoke to a sheaf of seven arrows perched on the side of his bed.
Although he searched, no bow was to be found in sight. It was a gift from the Gods. The arrows were adorned with silky patterns, waves of emerald-green and swirls of midnight-blue, each unique and its own unrivalled masterpiece. The man, who shedded his sweat each day on the upkeep of the town's altar, distrustful once left to its own devices, accepted this offer with gratitude. Every day, after work, he daydreamed. Visions of the wonderful being who had carved such perfection from entirely ordinary wood floated just out of reach. The wood did not stain; he kept the sheaf on his back. When he washed himself in a river, bits of the plumage would then fall into the lacquered gates of evening water. Like sleeping fairies they floated in the lights of fireflies.
These arrows were tokens, he mused, given to him for something - his deeds, his love of the Gods, his vocation, or mayhaps a thing unknowable. In a mirror of polished bronze he gazed upon the hilts on his back. If taken into palms and squeezed enough, the wooden bars echoed steady beatings of his own heart into his fingertips, like tiny pulsations of the heart of someone he could not see or understand. Yet the heart was his own, and his face could he see. The arrows were no weapon - their points could not cut; in what loving eye would a being ideate such a toy?
Seven days after the apparition of the sheaf, no bow was there to comment on. The afternoon gloomed with the lurking heat of approaching thunder. Once more, the man brushed into the woodland which housed the creek. He rid himself of clothes, and soon all hassle pertaining to the deific dissolved for his body donned the ripples ruminating at his entrance. The quiver lay untouched atop the mossy shore. From their sleep rose bugs and lillies.
And then, all of their souls felt, for a moment coalescent, the urgent incarnation of an invading presence: there was singing - the reflection of a glassy moon on translucent fabric, like the moon had suddenly become a being, and that being was wading her feet through the summer greenery of the stream.
The gloom paused with bated breath. Clouds bloomed to reveal constellations the man had never seen, and, right then, Artemis and her maids graced the water, which lay, beneath their weight, completely undisturbed, as though no goddess had just teared through its silver muscles to freshen her skin. A crown of mistletoe rested on her head; she was nude. At the scene the man gazed as if it were a painting: its heroine, her scintillating women, the clearing, hushed in their wake, the nighttime critters, the only ones left murmuring a distant tune. A curvebow glistened, as though it had only just been birthed, across Artemis' back, thin and pearly, like a wound of milky blood, throbbing in the draughts.
Artemis turned to face the man: the colour of her eyes was indescribable - every poet had known that such an effort would greatly take away from this magnificent creation of the Cosmos - so intricately drawn. A smile inked a wreath across her cheeks. The man knew then that he was not a man, but something else entirely.
Crickets trilled with urgency as her mouth opened to produce a voice akin to the brass ravaging of duelling blades, sprouts reaching deep inside the elder earth; the cracking of their roots, kaleidescope of sonary.
'Look, a deer has lost his way over to the path.' - ripening of citrus pulps, crystals roaring near the seaside, tinglings of wild magic, roaring in the snow.
It was not the words who created - the deed had already been long done, when the man had found a sheaf of seven arrows lodged carefully beside his bed.
Dawned then a thought to move, so he washed past the golden jugs held by nymphs laughing almost thrice as much as the divinity. Water edged the dirt as his hooves trudged out from the belly of the current. The deer trotted onwards, blissfully - leaving a fretful life forgotten, into a hallway kingdom ruled by Earth and Sky: a reality uncovered under a cacophony of stars.
★ The rash which covered the world
My sister long ago brought home a pearl pendant forged in her workshop, and hung it up on the hook above our fireplace. Its glint in the firelight made me strangely curious; so I reached over to turn it to its silver backside. It was lined with a metallic ridge, a fantastic work of art, and in its reflection of a room somehow stood a dark figure. It seemed to cower in the hallway.
Behind me was as empty as it was silent. Yet from the pendant one could almost hear quivering, asthmatic coughs. At every blink of mine the figure seemed to recede into itself, cascading of sorts into the room. What could have I even have done? I carefully lifted the pendant off of the hook. Its face turned to me, tusks jutting over a violent overbite, the creature roused at my movement. In some unconcievable way, it was affacted by natural law.
I do not know why, yet henceforth wore I the pendant. Sometimes it cried like a child. Other moments it jingled playfully as a bell would. My sister ushered me to give it back; but I counted to five thrice and kept tapping on the dinner table, 'til her noises were than a heartbeat. When I showered and the necklace was clouded by steam, the creature seized its opportunity to shift, each time only by a inch, moving quietly from its corner and further up and down the corridor, in some headless circle.
It is known the creature comes in many forms, but still the proper meaning of the word is missing from the dictionary. My mother says it is a beast, its bones protruding, tongue whispering some many griefs. It feeds beauties to one's greed, or may cough death and vile phlegm both, and yet stays the healthy in a blood-filled sea of plague. She says in this way it is a blood-soaked jewel of man's mistakes. And still all of this is incorrect.
It is a mistake to accord misfortune to other factors. Yet I know that he is something more. I counted seven times the twelve eyelashes atop my palm, my mother says 'licho wie', - the licho only knows, a thing she does not want to tell, nineteen drops ceded to the kitchen sink, I count them fifteen times by twelve, my ears ring the rhythm of the gifts he brings me and so I know he is something gracing, something beautiful.
★ Whisper of the Wolfberry
Outside the commonalities of ‘storing clothing no child will ever wear’, ‘musty’ or 'moldy after many rains', many things still differ between the cellar and attic of my grandmother’s country house. On one hand, the floral tableware lining the walls of the attic gives off the impression that it was was birthed alongside the rotting planks that swallow it whole. The buckets stuffed with hay which are kept in the cellar, however, in which are crammed my great-grandmother’s jewelleries, feel like they were unearthed from a land completely separate. A lost future of a slipped life, escaped, dubious manner of submerging one's uncertain survival.