A Dirge for the Temporal Read Free

in gold cloth, eyes opening up passages before her. In her wake, the glass of the house beneath which the terrace sprawled seemed to settle back into shape. As her eyes fell on Avian, his knees began to bend.
      “No!” she said. “Not you. Not ever you.”
      “What is this place?” his voice quivered.
      “Your palace. These pitiful creatures surrounding the well still do not comprehend that it is to you, the honor, the harvest is given. Hear me! you worms. Place your hands before you! Place your hands before him !”
      They did…out in front of them like a prayer…and not one among them possessed a thumb.
      “I don’t want it.” Lord God, no.
      “Was that your sentiment when you commanded one side of the mountain to invade the other, stealing the thumbs of every captive taken?”
      He didn’t intend for it to come blurting out. “You are a lunatic, woman!”
      “I remember their faces, my mother and father, when they discovered that I, alone in the whole village, had somehow been spared. I remember their faces when they dropped me down the well. They threw me away, Danny, but because they did, I came to know the fishes that are gods and the fishes gave me these eyes. With these eyes I swam through the mountain. With these eyes I appeared, in a spring, to the village I would come to know as home. With these thumbs , I escaped my origins. Since all of my birth village had been harvested, I could only have come from other realms.”
  He gaped at her. Not because she was a lunatic, not because he was in the claws of some cult, and God knew where on the map, but because he had dreamed it. The recurring nightmare had inspired him, hadn’t it? He had indeed attended a party, and at his own house. She had been there, eyes turning him to dripping butter. “Cocoa from South America,” Vanguard had introduced her.
      Let me see your hand , she’d said. She had led him by his hand into his bedroom.
      No, he mustn’t think of it.
      In his bedroom, she had been a woman to him, a woman who became something more as he caressed her, kissed her delicate, shiny, scaly skin. Her eyes poured into his as his horrified hands, and thumbs pressing into her windpipe, choked her, turned her face to rich colors by the shadows of the strange room out of time and place and reality.
      No, Vanguard, she tried to…she wasn’t human, Vanguard.
      Sober up. We’ll take her to the river, Vanguard said. No one will ever know what has happened.
      Sober up. Two words that had followed him out of his burial grounds. Lamenting the past abuse of alcohol and drugs made it easier to forget what really lay beneath the shoveled earth.
      Or surface of the river. Her spectral jewels transfixing him, burning their image into his tissue, as her dead body drifted away.
      “River? Did you mention the river, Danny?”
      Cocoa’s eyes transfixed him now.
      He found himself falling, falling down the shaft of a well, to his knees.
      “Forgive me, Cocoa.”
      “ Not ever you, I said. Rise. Rise, poet.”
      He rose.
      She turned to the glass, secret glass, her gaze warping its properties as she summoned the whiskered man, Abe.
      “Abe has gathered and Abe has fed the hungry mouths. Now Abe will step aside for the original Gatherer, for whom all of this exists. You know what to do, Danny, yes?”
      He stared.
      “Lay him gently beneath the surface. It is poetry that way.”
      “No.”
  “If I do it, Danny, I fear it won’t be the same.”
      “I won’t do it.”
      “Let me show you how easy…”
      She walked Abe to the edge of the murky stew. “He has given the thumbs of his hands. Now we will give the rest. Job well done, Abe.” And he did not resist as she pushed him over the bank.
      The entire surface of the pool came to life as the mouths converged on him, and in seconds his body and its pieces had disappeared beneath.
      “There is but one thing left then,” she said, turning