Archive for December, 2009
Declaration
Friday, December 11th, 2009
I keep a diary in my head.
I got a letter from my mother today. It’s sans cerif, so it’s either lower-case “l” or capital “I”. I think it is an l. Mom writes every week. Soon I’ll be able to make a whole sentence. Alas, I’m really low on punctuation, and have not a single period, so I can produce nothing declarative. Still, there are many things I want to know, so I think I’ll ask a question.
Today I got a space. Ha ha, that’s what I say when I really got nothing. Always look on the bright side, Dad said. I’m envious. He could afford semicolons! How many can actually use a semicolon? Yet he’ll give me nothing, nothing at all. I have to “make my own way.”
I took a walk in the park. I saw that girl! Yes, the one I’ve mentioned. She is harmonious of form, she walks in grace, and her smile would melt the hardest stone. She sat on a bench by the duck pond, and I walked as slowly as I dared. I was in heaven! To cap off a perfect day, by the path, half-hidden by dead leaves, I found a period. Now all I lack is “I v ou”. I can trade my question mark for at least one of those, I’m sure.
Today: disaster! I got home early, hoping for something from my mother. The box was empty. Upstairs, my apartment door was unlatched. I pushed it open, slipped inside. Nothing in the front room seemed disturbed, but when I got to my bedroom I found the floor awash with papers, clothing, and all the rest of my stuff. The mattress was askew and the letters and punctuation were missing. Nothing else had been taken.
I spent so long saving. If I start anew it will take forever! Even if I don’t get robbed again.
I went back to the park, sat on my favorite bench. (The one by the duck pond.) I sat, staring at nothing. When someone sat beside me I was taken by surprise. It was she, staring at me with her dark eyes and bewitching brows. She held out her hand. On it: a question mark.
I nodded. It didn’t matter that I had no words.
The Tale of the Song
Thursday, December 10th, 2009
I’m taking requests for my January stories. If there’s a person, place, or thing that you’d like to see appear in a Daily Cabal story, please leave a note in the comments. (Be forewarned, though, suggested story elements may be transformed a bit in the writing…)
–Rudi
A swordswoman hiking up a ravine toward the besieged city of M. heard a bird’s song. Not even the whole song, just a string of notes, falling quickly down then rising slowly up. It stuck in her head the whole march, through the silence when they couldn’t even whisper, and she found herself singing it under her breath to the beat of the battle’s parry and lunge. When they’d won and the city was free and the wine was plentiful, she sang it until she was hoarse, and her comrades sang with her.
By the next time they were hired into battle, the song had found words and an air of bravado. A song of attack and a song of victory. Twenty years later, when her war-band had become an army and then an empire, the tune slowed to an anthem, gathering about itself trumpet-glints and timpani-shadows on the morning of her coronation.
In the border-expanding years of the second empress’s reign, it was sung by schoolchildren and marched to in parades that seemed to happen twice a week or more.
When rebellion years sent the fourth empress into hiding, it was sung softly, almost prayer-like, behind drawn curtains late at night.
When the twin empresses eleven and twelve commissioned fleets of exploration, the song was transcribed for hundreds of foreign instruments in a score of unfamiliar scales.
When twenty-third empress abdicated by disappearing into the noonday crowd on the grand plaza, it attained a melancholy grandeur, sung in snatches as a kind of password — until the fifth regent banned it in the course of an anti-royalist purge.
And when, several tens of thousands years later, an explorer from shores more distant than the empire’s furthest borders picked up a music box that had just enough twist left in its springs to play the song (nearly as much of it as the barbarian swordswoman had heard that distant afternoon), it tingled in the explorer’s tentacles and lingered in her peripheral brain’s deeper nodes all the way back up to the comfort of the limit ship. With the rest of her planetside experiences, she loaded it into the memory pool. Next time they slipped through a particle/wave inversion, the ship merged the pool into the wider aether. Then the song quavered to life in trillions of minds on thousands of worlds and, this time, it would not be forgotten.