Archive for the ‘Rudi Dornemann’ Category
Beginnings
Tuesday, February 2nd, 2010
You step through the door…
…and…
…the city blazes silver in the blinding noon.
You stand in the shade of an underpass but can feel the city, warm as glowing coals.
A monorail hushes by overhead, a little breeze in its wake.
The city sleeps by day, gathering energy, and you have nine hours until it wakes…
…or…
…you slide down the gravel bank and catch yourself just above the waterline.
The ice-covered lake booms.
To your left, the mills are sharp-edged shadows in the twilight. Their vast, hushed buzz has all the little hairs on your arms standing on end.
Under a charcoal evening sky, lights glint among the far dark hills and the farther mountains.
Skaters are approaching, a line of them, moving fast across the ice…
….or…
…you stand beneath painted cliffs, dry heat electric on the back of your neck. You turn to face the towers.
Looks like a busy day, with much coming and going between the aeries.
Standing with the petroglyphs, you feel abstract, an outsider looking out over the flow of lives from a distance that’s more than physical.
Out the corner of your eye, however, you see a path. Winding upward, it can take you among the towers, and the towers will bring you to the aeries…
…or…
…you realize you’re sinking into the earth, the heat all over you like a thousand sweaty palms.
You step onto the roots of a tree for better footing, and cheese-like smell rises from the mud.
Is that the splash of dragons, off among the reeds?
A butterfly gnaws on your leg. A flower buzzes in your ear. You wonder if this was the best destination.
But then the serpents begin to sing, and you forget the rest…
…or…
…you stand in the monkey’s palm, looking out over a plain of earthbound constellations. A sea of signs stretches to the horizon.
The flinty wind on your face. A sound of slow-dripping water.
From this low rise, you look out beyond the monkey, trying to make out the other designs. The chalk lines hold the light, glow amid the evening-faded world. You look out beyond the plain’s cairns and rock mounds, farther than its farthest pyramids.
Early stars stare back at you.
A door opens in the rocky hill to your right, a rectangle of butter-yellow light.
A silhouette beckons.
Apparently, you were expected…
Smoke-Written
Thursday, January 21st, 2010
Up the ladder so fast she skinned both knees through her dress. Into the cloud oracle’s room. The anonymous note had been right. The smoketeller lay face down in a puddle of his own vomit. Poisoned. Dead. In the brazier that smoldered beside his clenched left hand, enough incense for a whole day half-gone already. The mold-sweet smell so thick Irene felt it on the roof of her mouth.
She went up through the door slowly. Even breathing would change the pattern of the telling, but she couldn’t save it if she couldn’t see it.
She jostled the body over and knelt on the teller’s stool, crouched to put her eyes at the level where the teller’s would have been. Composed herself, and looked. Left to right. Threads of smoke against the velvet wall paper. A tangle of meaning she couldn’t read but could remember. An owl in each corner, marking divinatory quadrants.
A bare lightbulb hung above fizzed like it was about to go out. Irene leaned forward to put its glare out of her eyes, felt its heat on the top of her head. The light flickered; all the smokesigns seemed to jump and blur. She looked faster. The corner with the plaster owl passed, then the corner with the stuffed owl. Signs layered on signs unfurling intertangled in the air, all mapped in her brain.
Looking. Bronze owl. Looking.
Irene had nearly reached the wooden owl when the man came up through the trapdoor wearing assassin’s blacks and an expression of recognition. “You’re that memory artist. Don’t say you ain’t. Not one of those phrenologicals with their lumpy heads and magnets, you’re the one who’s some kind of broken, half-made witch. You were pointed out to me once, and you’re not the only one who can remember. Yes, ma’am, it’s a pity you’re here, a pity you’ve had so long to see what you shouldn’t. A pity I have to do what’s next.”
Irene didn’t answer, just reached up until her hand was hot. In the next second, in the dark, with broken glass in one hand, the brazier in the other, with the assassin’s location as bright in her mind as if she could still see it, and her swinging arms filling everywhere he could be with sharpness and burning, she wondered if the outcome of this moment were recorded in the air around them.