"But since you're here, the front desk is right there," raising , and pointing her hand at the desk that housed maybe three or four people; receptionists, and nurses. One looked like a janitor.
"Let's go outside so I can breathe," grabbing her husband's hand. It seemed endless, the stars shining bright. She had gone from relaxed, to tense and stressed, to free. Nothing on her mind, she just wanted to go home.
"Let's just walk home, and leave the car until tomorrow."
"That's cool," was all he said. Not a care in the world, either one. No pregnancy. No hospital. No old lady. No people. Just her, and her husband. The ambulance scarred up on the curve, slamming into the handicap pole on the sidewalk. The driver, and passenger jumped out frantically. The patient was in the process of dying. Everything moved quickly around the emergency entrance. The gurney dropped on the bricked driveway; a young girl this time. Neither Harlem or her husband wanted to see the chaos so they didn't. The sliding hospital doors echoing through the night air of the parking lot. Harlem was pregnant.
That had been nine, and half months ago, drops of rain from earlier splashing the top of her head. They had decided to quit the hospital, and began to read any, and every book about pregnancy; normal books, above normal, below normal, borderline weird, abstract, sensual. They had made their best attempt to read them all; to become educated on the subject, all within the first two months. And that's what they did. Thinking to herself, at first being warm and secure, now cold and desolate. Just like the single drop of blood in the most unusual place.
It's not suppose to be there, yet it is. How Harlem appears in the vast covering of the forest. A single drop of woman with life in her belly. By normal standards out of place, yet a single drop. Would she stay? The umbilical cord grew tighter around Isaiah's neck.
No more pain. No more pain. No more pain. No more pain. No more pain. No more pain. No more suffering. No more suffering. No more suffering. No more fears. No more fears. No more fears. No more fears. No more fears. No more fears. No more fears. No more fears. No more weakness. No more weakness. No more weakness. No more weakness. No more weakness. No more pain. No more pain. No more pain. No more pain. No more pain. No more hopelessness. No more hopelessness. No more hopelessness. No more hopelessness. No more hopelessness. No more hopelessness. No more hopelessness. No more cold. No more cold. No more cold. No more cold. No more cold. No more suffering. No more suffering. No more suffering. No more crying. No more crying. No more crying. No more crying. No more crying. No more crying. No more crying. No more crying. No more crying. I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die. I'm gonna die. No more hopelessness. No more hopelessness. No more hopelessness. No more quitting. No more quitting. No more quitting. No more. No more. No more. The blood dripped in melody.
She had concluded that her clothes were ruined, everything except her sandals. They lay next to the pile of muddy stained shorts, socks, and shirt. Vision stood. Her toes curled the soft comforts of dark mud, felling the night cool her face. She dazzled in the beauty of herself reflecting in the light shadows. So smooth in skin, and texture, one would believe at a distance that the two were connected.
"Yuck," she whispered in disgust to herself as the mud slid from under her bra strap, and the back bottom of her behind. She chilled at the thought of dirty mud crawling on top her skin, seeping into her pores.
The mud dripped off the curves of her bottom, the fronts of her knees reemerging into the moisture of the earth, pulling at the back of her underwear. The water had turned from a clear outdoor blue to a swampy brown. Her toes were buried deep in the cushion of mud, and she felt stuck, looking up to see Zulu tussling with the crab bucket. She could make out that the child was finishing whatever it was he had started, and could see that he had grown even more meticulous. Maybe he had actually caught something, her hands running across the chubby fat of her stomach with the discovery of more dirt in the deep of her navel. The sag of the muddy laced bra pulled at the back strap of her back allowing the silk to cut through her skin, the grit and grind in her thoughts, and on her mind. She tugged at the sloppy fit of her underwear. The cold silk slid down her thighs easy, untangling at the knees, and finally resting on the claws of her ankles, mud falling from the drop of underwear that was trapped just under her bottom. She squatted, balancing her fingers against the rough bark of the great oak tree root.
Vanity heard panic in her listen, hearing the touch of the tree root by the chubby fat girl standing almost totally naked. She let out another horrific scream. The scream bounced against the inside of the great oak tree. She did not scream again. But rather continued in high pitch the attack of her voice against the enclosure of her demise.
Under Vision's touch, the scream made the root snake into the earth, throwing her mind off balance. It was a feel of nasty skin. The way the skin can tell the brain evil. The scream echoed, catching her in mid action of removing her underwear, clumsiness taking precedent again. Vision let out a slight yelp, sounding like a high pitched mistake with beautiful emotion. Again both feet walking form under her waist. The fall not being as worst as the first, but Vision had on barely any clothes, and the exposed of her bottom landed harshly.
Her underwear lay dangled around one ankle. She laid in a familiar position, naked. The top part of her underwear cutting through her skin from the tight fit of the extra mud trapped in the cups at her breast. She hadn't know what happened, but she was sure she had felt the root of the tree move.
"This is not going to work," she thought to herself, referring to her bottom on top the mud. She was not making a mess. She had made a mess.
Vanity stopped screaming from the inside the tree realizing that her sudden burst of hysteria did nothing, said nothing, captured nothing of the outside world. She was only talking to the tree; her torturer, and coffin.
"Just accept it. Just accept it. Just accept it," is what she was telling herself, listening intently to the conversation the great oak had.
"But I can't accept it. But I can't. I can't accept it," the plea for peace, and escaped thought at the same time going nowhere.
"You can accept it, Vanity," the great oak calling her by her first name. "You can accept it, Vanity. Vanity!" Her name created a brief pause in everything. "You can accept it." The great oak sort of laughed at the sound of its voice.
"Maybe I can. Accept it." For the first time since being trapped, she realized that her skin was darker than the dark that helped keep her further entrapped in the solid seclusion of somewhere inside the great tree. She was black. The depth of her color; a distinct definition, a spark of electric energy, a snap of her fingers, an impression of sound appearing out of the arrangement of space on earth, a standard of spectrum to the farthest end. No, she was not black. She was dark; deep, and dark to the point where she was space, as invisible, transparent, inside the shadows of the great oak tree.
"Just accept it. Just accept it." Vanity seriously listened.
"I can accept it," she stated. "I can accept it."
The tree cut over forcefully her last statement. "You're going to die."
"Nooooooo!" she hollered. "I can't accept it," beginning to cry again.
Vision popped the back of her bra strap, releasing the soft flesh that lay squeezed tight with the little lumps of mud. Both her breast relaxed on the stand of her chest. Placing the muddy bra into the dirty clothes pile, she gave a sigh of relief, the blood finally rushing throughout the bottoms of her breast, exercising through the stomach area, dying off around the waist right above her mid section. She was beautiful, and she was totally naked. The outdoors having increased in heat, and warmth now that she had removed her damp clothes, the purple still shining underneath the muck of everything else. Vision's body rippled through the wave of creation that had been there before her.
In her dancing stance, the world was still. Only Zulu moved through the motion of endlessness in thought, appearing as a thinking man with actions quick.
She breathed, the inhale and exhale of her stomach, the only thing that made her separate from the tree that only moved at the top, but not now. The ground that only moved through the grass, but not now. The water that only moved through the currents, but not now. Vision was standing, her nakedness, her flesh appearing natural with the colors of her surroundings. The sporadic markings of mud darkened the hue of her nature, appearing as deep scars across her body. She stood out amongst the older things that had been there hundreds of thousands of years in existence, standing out amongst the gathering as if she had always been there. As if she had always lived there. Only her clothes seemed not to belong in a place where weakness was complimented with terror, death, and hiding, and peace existed in the weakness. But Vision was not weak. She was extremely strong. Physically, she had grown to give birth to the mental amazement of herself. To not be overwhelmed, and consumed with the understanding of her greatness, and push herself, and to push herself. The strength of who she was.
The physical understanding underneath the flesh of her mind, her hands smoothing over the entirety of her body. Her belly curved perfect into her waist, the top of her chest exactly where the beginnings of her started. The back of her neck smoothed with both hands; standing on one foot, massaging the bottom of her heel. Her movements appeared as a cut from the middle of the earth. A burning fire. A dark that illuminated. Be in love is what she told you. Be in love.
For some reason Zulu could feel someone or something watching him again. It was dark, and he knew it was dark. He could just tell. His attention drew away from the thought of the crab, dropping the small legged creature hard into the bottom of the bucket. He listened first to the direction of the river, and the waterfall before turning his head in the direction of Vision. He focused his ears. It was as if he was hearing hands move across naked flesh.
Vision smoothed over the backs of her knees, and thighs with the tips of her hands. She felt her toes move in reflex to her touch. They felt alive. She could feel all her toes, each one independent of one another, kneeling squatted. Her bare bottom a few inches from the ground, she grabbed both ankles, bracing herself against the pull of everything around her. She could feel the pull of muscle in the inside of her legs. She could feel her legs. Vision was only fifteen, but fifteen years of not knowing, her thoughts racing back to as far as she could remember. She could touch the world. The moon was brighter, she noticed. The stars shined brighter. The dark seemed darker as her thoughts trailed off. Vision dropped her head into the blind stare of Zulu.
"He sees me naked," frantic, everything that followed an instinctive reflex. Vision moved quickly to any hiding space she could find, the oak tree being the closest shield of curtain from the stare of the blind child.
Her scamper was more of a fast paced tip toe. She was naked, and barefoot, and didn't want to fall. Yet, she didn't want Zulu to see any more of her nakedness than he had already. Yet, she didn't want to wake up anything else that would open their eyes, and see some naked fat girl. Yet, she couldn't move to fast because of the tenderness of the soles of her feet. A split second of thought in dilemma, moving naturally.
At first it was the thick root stumping the toe; too naked to holler out. Then it was the huddle of jagged rocks just on the other side of the root. Then it was the snap of branches followed by the stumble of oak cones resting on the hidden side of the great tree. From the river, and Zulu, in a new pile of wet grass and mud, Vision watched. Her feet firmly planted, she placed both palms onto the waist of the oak tree in a soft hugging position, peeking around the curve of the oak directly into his stare.
"He's still looking," she thought, quickly pulling back around the neck of the oak. She realized she was breathing hard, calming her breath to a slow pace, gripping the waist of the oak tighter with both hands.
Vanity could hear a wrestle noise just on the outside of the oak tree. She listened patiently, not wanting the splash, and drip of blood into the unwanted depths of her mind. The wrestling noise occurred again, this time louder with a stronger base of sound. Vanity heard the palms of the chubby fat girl press loudly against the wood. She could feel the grip from Vision squeeze the tree as if she was the tree herself. The noise appeared to the ears of Vanity as if they were her saviour. Maybe because of the noise she could be free. Maybe the noise would free her, smashing through the solid wood creating small pieces of tree.
"The noise will free me," she thought.
Vision stood nervously behind the waist of the oak. From across the river, she was completely hidden, swallowed whole by its mouth in the belly of the tree. Her feet shifted again through the wet grass, this time holding her hands tight. Only her feet made the slightest noise, but Vanity heard it. The freedom. The thought overlapping thoughts of freedom. Too much for her brain to comprehend after the suffocation of despair. She was going to die.She was dying. She was dead. All tortured thoughts of survival. It was only a matter of time. The thought an extreme in Vanity's situation. Now there was noise. A different type of noise. Not clatter or racket, but melody and harmony.
"Was it freedom?" Vanity asked herself. The pitch of the sound appeared familiar like freedom.
"There it was again," her voice appearing a paranoid stutter than self reassurance. "Is it freedom?" Vanity becoming paranoid with the thought that through all the pain, through all the horror, without the tree's permission, she would be free, pushing against the inside of the bark where the noise appeared to originate. The points of her elbows dug deeper into the grooves of her waist, digging deep into her flesh. From the outside of the great oak, one could hear hear the rubbing of bones together just on the inside. Vanity dragged the backs of her swollen hands in an upward motion against the inside rough of the tree bark. She could feel the swollen flesh tear away.
The track back up the way she had traveled seemed endless to the four legged grizzly bear. She could still hear the loud splash of the waterfall over her shoulders which, at first, had been a pleasant sound to her rapidly increasing hunger, but had now turned into annoyance, and aggravation at the miscalculation of the feasting site. She found herself rushing in hurry, and hunger. She had passed the old trail twice, her paws dragging across the the worn out grass, and dirt, but both entrances to the trail exited deeper into the forest away from the noisy splash, and away from the food. The female no longer cared about the light of the night sky to better her path, the moon quietly in position directly overhead.
The white grizzly stopped to gain sense of where this new path was taking her. It was still early into the night, but it was night. She could work through the night. It was just that eventually when she did go to sleep, it would probably be a couple of days when she decided to wake. The walking path of the grizzly picked up again developing into a slow four step.
One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four. Her back legs moving off beat with her front. One, two, three, four. She could feel the sudden change in direction of the pull of her body away from the mountains in the direction of the waters. She was close, yet she had always been close, just not wanting to cut through the deepest parts of the thicket of bushes, thorns, and trees. She had grown up in the wilderness knowing virtually everything. Where to go. Where to see. What to do. Where to eat, growing bigger through the trials, and tribulations. To take a short cut off a trial that had already been marked for ages, meant trouble. No way around it, just trouble.
The grizzly reared back on her back legs, balancing in the grasp of catching a few berries that really did nothing for her stomach. But the berries were pleasant to the eye, and the stretching always relaxing, slamming her front legs to the ground, placing two deep foot impressions into the ground. She often wondered because of the foot impressions, looking at them curiously, if she was being followed, trailed or tracked by the other animals of the forest. How she saw it, she always left a pretty big mess. Destruction just seemed to come with her size. She had figured she was pretty easy to follow, and find. The most difficult part being her capture. It was one thing to know where something was, and another to have the ability to find it. But what made her so special is that once you found her, how did you capture her to kill her. Of course she wondered about not being able to move. Her clan called it the awakening; when a grizzly, specifically the elder grizzlies oldest in the clan, stopped moving. They might suddenly collapse or they might close their eyes, and never awake. Or they might not wake from hibernation. She had seen it several times when she was a cub, and every time it was important to the entire clan. There was nothing they could do once they closed their eyes never to reopen them.
As a little cub amongst the clan, they would stop instantly from what they were doing, the entire clan, and simply sit; head up, back straight, front legs extended in the spot where they were. And they would just watch the sleeping bear. Watch them never wake up. It took her, and the other cubs only one time to learn the ritual.
The female cub darted through the under bush of the path, bumping into her brothers, finally slamming into the back legs of her mother. They were in an open field. Circular by design, outlined, and trimmed by the younger amber trees that began to grueling walk up into the bottoms. The white grizzly was one female of a litter with two males. And she loved that she was the only different one in color, drawing the most attention., not from her clan or from her family, but from the other animals that also inhabited the forest. The three cubs continued in their play, the two males surrounding the only female. For some reason everything seemed quiet. A peaceful clear similar to looking through the open sky when on the mountaintop or an open field in the valley. The older grizzlies had stopped abruptly in different spots in a circular clearing by the beginning of the amber path. In the middle of the field, in the smile of the circle, in the shadow reflection of the sun, in the thick of the woods, the entire clan lay stopped, sitting on their back legs, front legs extended, head up. Only the three cubs led head first in play, unaware of the new positioning of the clan or the massive black body that lay crawled out in the open field just as the new growth of amber sprouted, and took form.
The female cub was cornered so all she knew to do was to attack. With her tiny teeth snarling, she charged the biggest of her brothers. She would bite him first, only to captured in the middle of her jump by her mother, except this was different. Painfully different. She could feel the pressure of her mother's teeth dig sharply into her white coat of fur, touching the sensitive flesh just underneath the skin. For a brief second through the pain, the female cub could see the look of terror on her brothers' faces followed by the unusual gathering position of the entirety of the clan. Everyone was sitting except her, and her brothers, her mother finally slamming the female into the soft dirt of the ground. It hurt, but the cub made no sound. One by one she watched, having been the first to be punished, as her mother, apparently angry for some reason, snatched each of the other two cubs in the same fashion as she had been done, slamming them into an obedient stance in the dirt. Their mother finally sitting again on her back legs as the rest of the clan of grizzlies. The cubs were at full attention, watching, understanding, trying to discover a reason for their most recent, most violent punishment. Each cub mimicking in stance, and sit their mother.
The female cub eyed over the entire clan. Every grizzly had stopped. There was no movement. And this went on as far as she could see, way back up into the forest. It was then that she noticed that one of the oldest grizzlies of the clan was not sitting, but rather stretched out in the way of the sun. She fixed her eyes on the dark black stained bear. And she watched. And she saw that her brothers also watched; the entire clan was watching this one who was not watching.
And they watched. And they watched. The sun moved, taking the light away with it, but the black grizzly remained motionless. And they watched, and they watched; the entire clan. It wasn't until the movements of the eldest clan bear became noticeable that the entire clan of bears began to walk, their destination being the other side of the mountains where the water was coolest, and just right for the biggest type of fish that ate at the water's surface.
The tiny female cub continuously looked back at the body of the black grizzly. For some reason, he was not coming as each clan member walked on. She looked back for the last time as the trees swallowed up his body. He was not coming. As a young cub, she had learned to sit, and watch as the rest of the clan did, maybe three or four more times having learned the first time. Each time, a grizzly lay stretched out by themselves. And each time the entire clan just watched, eventually moving on to leave the fallen grizzly in its laid position. Once they laid down when everyone else was seated, they never moved again. As a cub, she didn't know. It wasn't until she was older, three years into the clan, and on her own, that she stumbled across a grizzly that lay motionless just under the protection of a tree root.
The female sat, and watched the body of the grizzly. She noticed that unlike the ones of the past, this older grizzly that lay motionless was about her size. But she also noticed something different about the fur, her eyes, and teeth, and paws. Everything about the grizzly seemed to be fading. She was losing her distinctive characteristics; the qualities that made them grizzlies, the qualities that made them beautiful. So she was curious, very curious. And being alone, she not only wanted to watch, but she wanted to see. So as the days passed, she began to develop a path that led to the body of the grizzly from where ever she was in the forest. And she saw how horrifying the beautiful black bear would become; rotted flesh and bones. The stench compared to nothing imaginably close to what she she had experienced in the past. She felt weak every time the smell would fill her nostrils, marking the beginning of the path to the body of the animal. Back, and forth. Back, and forth. She had counted twenty-one days. Twenty-one hot days where the sun burned brightest directly overhead. Twenty-one days of awful smell. Each day worse, the smell stained everything within breeze blowing distance. And the white grizzly watched in amazement. As the twenty-one hot days passed, the black grizzly decayed. wasting away.
First, the black fur color faded to a pale gray, finally vanishing into the flesh of the animal. The female noticed the attraction of worms, and flies to the attack of the wasted body of the dead animal. They appeared in the hundreds, swarming the interior of the skin lining. By the tenth sun day, the black fur had disappeared, and as the worms, and flies harvested, the thick exterior of the skin withered next, and sunk into the ground creating a concave impression in the earth.
The white grizzly had long since inhaled the awful smell that came with the walk on the new path. It had been ten days since she had begun to create a new path to the laid out body of the elder animal. She could tell the fallen grizzly was an elder by the deep inflicted scars that seemed to multiply around the black face as the wrinkles circled into the center. The snout of the deadly beast showed the most notorious markings of victory. The violet, and purple flower patches within touching distance of the dead carcass had withered to a limp. The petals of the patches of flowers sprawled out across the dirt, warning new comers of death. Even the ambers that overshadowed the body seemed to have sunken in the soft of the dirt, all slightly leaning in the direction of the sunset. The affects of time appeared to have taken a worse attack of decay than the previous day. She walked up on the circular death that surrounded the decayed body.
Having been walking in the stench of the animal for about a mile, her nostrils had grown numb to the thick of the head nagging odor. Yet, her eyes were wide open to the shape, and structure of the interior bones that at one time had held the animal's strength together. Slow motion deterioration. She was actually looking at the inside of herself. The peculiarity of how the stale white of the hard skeleton jutted, and jagged through the flesh, flesh appearing to have melted around the solid of the concrete skeleton. She wanted to get a closer look. She wanted to approach the dead beast that seemed to be more ferocious, and terrifying in its stillness. Her front paws moved forward cautiously, pulling her rear tail, and legs. The ground dropped further into itself, hollow underneath the grass, and dirt, giving way under the pressure of the grizzly. She eyed the gaping mouth of the dead female. The grass had completely rotted away. The bone of teeth showing the attachment of the eyes. She wanted to stop watching. She wanted to turn away, so much more beauty to look at beyond the capture of the stare of the dead animal. The sun was blinding in numerous colors just beyond the cliff of the trees, the playful sounds of the highest tree top birds that fed on the outskirts of the new path, echoed unattentive. Looking up to the highest parts of the amber trees, the pink berries that she never got to taste in abundance except if they should happen to fall, reflected the off the rising sun. The berries seldom fell fresh. Most of the fallen berries that she had the pleasure to taste from the ground were either rotten, and dry or green, and not ripe. The pink berries seemed to be too high up to be affected by the smell of the dead animal. But she couldn't turn away, and as she stared at the dead grizzly, the dead grizzly stared back . . . . page continue