Stuff and More Stuff

I've been experiencing this new thing where if I drink at all, even if I only have a couple and don't go to sleep until 3 am, I wake up between 6 and 8 am, super stoked and full of restless energy. So I've been jumping out of bed and walking down to Spyhouse and emailing and internetting in the morning sunshine. It's kinda nice, but weird, to me. Today I decided to up the ante and go to Bad Waitress and have breakfast with myself and the internet. It's been suprisingly enjoyable!

And now, a story.

River

The house is long, low, and dark, resembling a slightly more menacing Frank Lloyd Wright creation. It sat back, nestled among towering evergreen trees that tinkled delicately in the silence of the sky where it stretched over the wide, slow-moving river. Although cloudless, the water's reflection of the ether was dark, sappharine blue, and fathomless.

I am in care of the mansion compound, though I don't enter often. The occupants are unknown to me. My days are spent with a group of nomadic peoples of indeterminate race, who currently inhabit the edge of the forest near the house. Their homes are simple structures, lean-to's with few comforts, built into a hillside where rainwater has washed away the undergrowth on it's path to the river, revealing the rich black soil characteristic of this region. Although they don't speak to me much, I feel more comfortable around their fire than I do in the shadowy beauty of the empty house. From what I've gathered, these 20 or so people simply felt rejected by the society into which they were born, in a village approximately 20 miles North of our current location. There, only blue eyed first born sons were given privilige, although they had to face considerable rights of passage upon the first full moon of their 13th year.

The nomads were dissenters, who also disagreed with the practice of sacrificing goats during religious celebrations, which were inherent to their tribe's social organization. I suppose I felt an affinity for these outcasts, as I myself had moved away from the urban center I previously resided in, with its crowded freeways and hardscrabble economy.

Around the fire, you could feel the dampness of the soil, the cool air reserved among the broad fronds of the evergreen, and the lick of flame as it cooked venison. The smells of the camp were something that took some time to get accustomed to. The nomads were generally clad in animal hides and fur, which retained a musky scent, derived either from the curing process or from the people themselves. The smell of venison has an almost metallic, pungent odor, perhaps due to the adrenaline which courses through a wild animal's veins at the time it is caught.

I myself recently experienced the phenomenon of our bodies' chemical response to danger. Crossing the bridge from the camp to the estate, one of the ancient cedar planks which created the surface of the structure gave way beneath my foot, sending me on a course for the bottom of the river. The water was apparently as thick as it was dark, and I felt as though I was being sucked down by clear blue molasses. I soon reached the bed of the river, which was covered by smooth gray rocks about the size of my palm. I began to panic as my ability to hold my breath waned, and as I looked to the surface of the deep water, an enormous school of large silver fish swarmed above, as birds in the air, their long, sharp teeth peaking out from the tips of their snouts. I could see the trees which lined the bank, lusciously green and wavering with the current, as well as the sky, like a streak of lightening cutting it's way through the forest above it's companion, the river.

The fascination aroused by the fish and their journey across the sky somehow postponed my need to draw breath, and as they passed downriver, I pushed for the surface of the heavy, coursing water, fanning my arms and momentarily wishing I could co-opt the fins of the strange fish. I reached the surface and found one of the nomads holding a pole out to me, which I used to pull myself to the shore, exhausted. He asked if I saw the school heading downriver, and when I told him I had, he ran back to the camp.

To Be Continued