The Snake Said

            The clouds loomed above.  Lightning cracked and thunder yelled, challenging the devil. The old women walked covered by black attire with dolled-up faces, a contradiction in this sordid fate.  Dim lights betrayed their lingering eyes at dawn, dreams gone and life frail, soon to be forever forgotten as the cracked shells of unimportant, decaying dust.

The ceremonial makeup melted at the rain’s harsh command; these women ruined, now wet “witches” walking to the guideless gallows during their stolen time, raccoon eyes dark and infected with cries for innocence long gone in drowned memory.  They wanted to be pardoned to another life long and pleasant, to a haven hidden from the world and its tricks on the poor.  The arrow of desire was trapped in their minds as they looked forward, most crying for the injustice unheard by their captors’ keen yet selective ears.

They continued anyway.

The women’s burning souls blazed and roared, twisting, and playing on the emotion of their tense, stiff bodies like the spells they’d never uttered in Satan’s church, where they’d never been. There was little escape for the tormented minds save the coming death and also the final pride of a fighting flame, dignity screaming out the cursed words of the faltering reality that demanded review, for peace, for goodness, for justice!

These women wanted to be remembered beyond their time but not for mighty fame.  A slight notion of revenge brought grins to several dun, cracked faces, a disturbing sight for the crowd to wonder about, a hint of worry traveled on the wind.

 The old women were to be carbon copies, never again named with crying black streams of unholy mascara on their faces, like coal instead of glittering diamonds.  They waited their turn in the line, their own funerals in the mountains of mourning where their loved ones might have once grieved.

They were not loved due to delusional distractions of hardship, never unique in tears and fears with the poor children crying at their warm breasts to suckle just a little more.  All the same. Cellulose and loose skin had come for them all along with guilty spider veins slithering around life like Eve’s friend the snake: you are but a mortal. 

A runway train of insincerity crashed through the ignored truth that day.  The truth never boasted for esteem, a casualty of the long and difficult war, always honorable in the conduct, but weak on the world that belongs to the devil himself.  The fiend roamed and delighted in the grey graveyard at the edge of the small town where it was under his control.

The unworthy feats of the minds’ eyes brewed within the narrow scope of the crowd’s ignorance.  They cheered as the blade fell each time. The glamor painted a fierce reality of ruby gems. Those judgmental faces smiled as the women’s heads were positioned on sticks, seeds the group’s egos used to inspire the arrogant thirst of self-righteousness within this foolish crowd.  They would one day fade with the crime where they’d be equally helpless to cheering murderers, even if they had to wait for cancer or winding, ugly veins that spoke in simple words.

You are but mortal. 

           

             

           

             

Dance

Ashley let her thin, pale fingers trace the edges of the small, rough box. The golden design wrapped around the object like a choking necklace, tight with eternity’s embrace and promise, an overly invested mother to favored offspring, perhaps. The woven words had lost their previous meanings to time, dead hands caressing each in faded memories, desires and dreams themselves.

The bold symbols were exquisite beyond the cheap charlatans of imitation, along with all the careless collectors with spitting words akin to noisome monkeys, banal verses from fools with powdered, rose blush and sagging breasts who fell to death into a deep grave of complacency, a slumber that would never be bothered or cared for by the gods of housewives. Their possessions gathered in the trash, not dwelling on the final, flawed manicure or the life without meaning that wasted away blubber to bones under the great green grass.

The box breathed in its own right, alive.

The carvings wanted to hold on, the lovers in a foreign world where awe was damned to the talent-offended masses, and the power given to the obscene and ignoble peasant kings with their ill-appetites of self-indulgence above honor and truth.

The box seemed to know the ways of the world without having to scream the profane. It knew.

Rays from the sun acted as a grim reminder in the pungent, stale air of the attic where Ashley’s mind crawled with these useless analytics and ponderings, idle thoughts with distracting weight. How long could she wait for this power? What would it mean for her? She asked herself.

Mold held fast to the old wood and insulation, and she coughed on its cue. She wanted to move to a newer house but couldn’t afford to. So particles moved in the heavy, hot air and spun around enchantingly, landing on the box with a whisper louder than a drum.

Disturb me, the box seemed to say. She hoped she was worthy of its contents, of its will.

Ashely knew well what rested its crimson, cubed interior, knew and what it would take to use such a strange item in context of her modern world where simple witchcraft meant lunacy, dancing in the woods under a full moon and chanting to the sky gods and the forces of elemental nature.

The box meant nothing to their passing hands, not to the typical witches, a pretty thing but not prized, not an accomplished item for them to use with wishes of acceptance through orgies and cries to the waving forest air, to the creeping tide, to grey hair, to the dead stars with ancient and useless light they looked at for answers. They embraced each other as willing, strong closet lesbians in order to quell the mediocrity of their lives in which they mostly spent in the trashed kitchen with screaming babies and neglectful husbands.

They forgot the truth and tried to cheat a way to escape. If only they would have known about its powerful secret, a something in the void they falsely worshipped, those women.

Many people kept boxes and secrets even more glamorous, though scarcely together as in this case. Ashley’s grandmother often warned her of the power within the dark, redwood chamber, “Don’t let the flames reach you! I see fire.” A vision. As a child, such words struck fear in Ashley, and she obeyed with wilting emotion. The box stayed under the bed like an unwelcome pet from a past life – almost. Now older and perhaps wiser past a juvenile fear of the unknown, temptation won the dual in her mind, and Ashley let her finger move on to the lock seductively, slow and paced. She toyed with the key. She pulled the gatekeeper open with a snap and held her breath. Her eyes closed momentarily.

She could not share the moment.

Her grandmother was dead, taken by the worms to dust and buried under the old woman’s favorite waving tree, a weeping willow that swept the air, reaching for what it could never have, but, at the same time, not ashamed of its roots, a swift song to wish for peace around frail branches. Only the wind pitied it, paying it more attention than necessary. The tree never thanked anyone.

The box hummed, bringing Ashley back to the moment. Her eyes opened. A light glowed within the chamber, shy at first then…

No one could warn or stop her from opening the box minus sheer divinity. The old forms of gods were busy deities with more pressing matters in the flawed world of lame species that had fallen from grace in evolution’s clockwork binge.

She flipped the lid all the way off. Her eyes greedily gazed forward. She took in the reaction.

A flash boasted itself through the hot air to show off its power with flipping sparks of various hues: pink, purple, green and blue. Four rocks cracked and broke out of the blood red box to overdo a first impression. A quick flame leapt into the air then spun down with in the hard rocks not from this world. Within their brilliant shine, the mysteries of the world could be understood, a sort of philosopher’s stone but real, not imaginary and not for prolonging the life of feeble mortals in a decaying world of flesh and sin.

What do I want to know? Ashley thought of a lifetime of questions: why do bees sting? Does a diamond really last forever? Where am I in the universe?

I could ask Google all of these questions, Ashley scolded herself with a hushed cry. What wouldn’t the internet know? Could such a question exist that mankind had not sought with a sloppy tongue, the greatness of the mystery teasing the slow comprehension of weak, sentinel beings beneath it?

The flames, beware of the flames. I see fire. The flames engulf everything.

Ashley picked up the pink rock and held it in her hand. The hot stone sang a note then glowed to show its power, its loud beats pounding forward the alien life. It pulsed with a heart, a living creature. On the ground, the others grew impatiently hot. Ashley picked them up and lined them on the cracked wooden table.

Okay, think of a good question, Ashley told herself faintly. She still hadn’t overcome the original shock and show of the rowdy, all-knowing stones.

“How will time end?” She asked.

“It will only continue to begin.” The stones sang a few notes into the tense air, creating a laughing atmosphere. Were they mocking Ashley?

“Will I find love?”

“Not in death.” What a strange reply Ashley thought. She rubbed her hand against the rocks. They hopped to life and started to cut her, jagged edges piercing her fragile mortal flesh. The blood poured out in a river of pain and surprise.

Ashley jumped to her feet. Her head spun in the clouds of confusion and primal fear. The rocks sizzled and teased underneath her and then grew, a sour odor filled the air. The blood brought them to life, an ancient sacrifice having been performed in a modern haze of miscommunication and damnation. Soon, strange creatures stood before Ashley with thick, rotting and purple skin, no eyes and a slick, protruding stomach that hung forward. Why did her grandmother only say the stones know the universe and that the flames would engulf all?

“That is the answer.”

“Wha-what…” Ashley said.

“We are beings of fire and knowledge. Do you fear the truth, you lowly being?”

Ashley’s mouth sagged.

“Do you think we’d give you the answers so that you could keep destroying the universe with your childish and selfish ways? We’ve kept the box alive in the arms of the fearful, of the delusional, of the vain seeking what should never be asked. Who think they are better and worthier than they are… The other Earthlings that were seeded on faraway worlds have left a path of destruction in the universe. Their disorganized minds disrupted the sanity of the stars. Your current population is no different, wars and nuclear bombs, lies and greed. The blood must be purified for the next creation.” He sounded like an Aztec god.

“What is the fire? The next?” Ashley asked.

“Purity.” And with that, the beings began to burn through the attic’s flimsy wood. An unnatural wind blew in the room, and the resident rats scattered and ran save one. Ashley protested, staggering, her own words drowned out by destruction’s wisdom and the rat’s dirty paw which penetrated her shocked, open mouth. The small creature hurried to freedom with the same quick moves as when his kind had walked with dinosaurs on that buried world of teeth and muscle, size and hunger in dangerous, wild jungles never seen by mankind

I should have danced with the lesbians, came Ashley’s last thought before the passion of heat and fury took her under the piercing flames and laughing gods.

She joined her grandmother in the silence of forever, time she’d never remember.