Black Maw: A Short Story for Contentious Times
While the sun slowly faded, while strata of gold and regal purple overlaid each other, and the sandhill cranes abandoned their shallow posts with dripping talons over black waters, a single, white, bloated and fractured body slapped against the steep shoreline where two men stood. Her black hair, draped over her curved ears and smooth forehead, obscured her face as it plunged into the shaking, primordial muck upholding her. Her clothes, white and frail, thin and fragile like a tissue in the water, dangled besides her hair in a twisting water-dance. Churning in the violent spray, which sprung up from horror currents beneath it, was an ink-like haze of darkened blood that wrapped around protruding obsidian obelisks.
The light seemed to ride like royal chariots across the water, with galloping power and rolling wheels which ran through the sweat and tears that leaked down the face of a brown haired man, as he panicked violently before the worried face of his friend. He was like a beaten dog, glaring and snapping at any person, consumed by terror, shaking and barking through the sunken skin of his face. “I swear to god, John, it was an accident. I don’t know what happened. It wasn’t even me - I don’t know. It was - I don’t know,” he said. And he turned his head, and covered his ears, as if to escape the voices of the judgmental ghosts who haunted him.
John, his friend of many years and a deeply sympathetic man, with hands placed on the man’s inward turned shoulders, had listened intently to each of his diamond dripped syllables. His eyes barely blinked as they remained linked to his manic friend’s turning face. “Relax. Relax,” John calmly said, and drew out each word that lived in his breath. As his friend calmed, they harmonized with a single breathing pattern, creating a tempo between their bodies that matched the rhythm of the water. What slight calm they attained by the means of their intentional convergence of sympathies, was complemented by the primal lake and its billowing underbelly.
“They’re coming. They’re coming. John, they’ll already know by now and they’re coming. I promise, I had my reasons,” he said. And he reached down to grab the edge of his sodden, shredded grey shirt and lifted it up. While water dripped down his obliques, rolling over his rugged skin, collected in the fault-line of a single burning and bleeding gash, recently ripped by the ivory talon of a laser blade and lighted by the low, garnet sun. It was a vicious cut, hewn by hidden violence, marked on his bleeding body.
Then, just as the sandhill cranes’ wretched their prehistoric call, the distant chattering of marching bodies rustled the branches of burning trees. And seven black spines that glowed like rolling oil, alive but carved from bismuth, broke the surface of the water. Each body, propelling itself with a sharpened, dark fin, began nipping at the body, stealing small piece after small piece of rotting sinew.
Snap. Crack. Call. The mob of people, writhing together, marching together, breathing together, broke ranks to overwhelm the two solemn men on the edge of the shore. And just as they arrived, as their cranking boots wrecked the gravel before them, the panicking man climbed into the water. He reached into himself, his fingers stretching the open wound, and pulled from his hurling gut, a twisting crown of twigs and flowers, like the crown of Christ but adorned with blooming white-purple velvet and snipped thorns. Just as he put the earth-Christ crown atop her head, they, then screeching like burning leeches, ripped him from the shallows and dragged him across the blade-hair grass as John cried and fought demandingly in protest.
John ferociously, like a hulking primate, pressed against his tortured interlocutors, hurling in reluctance with his formidable body. He was weighted and dangerous, and acted as a deterrent to their seemingly righteous, untethered aggression. He rammed his shoulder into them, brushed his weight across their sternum, and they complied. By the ferocity of his action in defense of his shivering friend, they retreated - backing up from his organic force.
When they began to ease back, while containing their potential electric energy, he squarely gazed at each one of their eyes, catching each atom in the whirling body they constituted collectively. When he did, one by one, they withdrew their gaze from him, refused to make eye contact, and would snap back to their fixation on him and his friend only after he broke their gaze. They moved like a single machine. Turn left. Look right. Stop. Stare. Move. Kill. They all could produce violence - as a unit - but never alone and free from the possession of the collective soul.
John cried, “Stop. This man, innocent or not, has not had the opportunity to explain himself! Not a single one of you was there to witness what happened, you only know the consequence but not the series of causes which lead to the moment you would condemn him for.” He paused briefly, eyes shivering, and eyebrows turned inward in pity and desperation. He shifted from person to person in the crowd, only to be met by robotic automata, unsympathetic to his voice. “How can you know what happened?! How can you judge him?” he pleaded more than asked.
“Were you there to see it?”, they asked in deep unison.
“No.”
Then, together in harmony they preached, “it is only the consequence of the actions that matter - the intent does not. Intent is only the self serving offense of the accused. Nothing more. This man is a murderer. The body is behind him. It is over. Give him to us.” John had not noticed that they had encircled him and his friend, who was cowering on the ground with glazed eyes and a dissociated mind. They stepped uniformly inward.
John cried, then with an energy hardly contained as he bounded through their cage, “you can’t know. You can’t know - not unless you ask! Not unless we can talk it through! What if he made a mistake? What if you make a mistake? It’s possible. It’s possible. You are limited. We are all limited and have to compensate for that by understanding, by a trial - by acting civilized!” They stepped inward, and their skin began to crack.
“Please”, he said with his back to the water. “Please, I know him and he would not do this without reason.”
Finally, Orestes, the poor and shivering man still draped across the grass, spoke quietly to no one, “She was my mother. And in response to her, I acted. She was a jewel to those who saw her face, but a horror to anyone who fell in her shade. I can’t - couldn’t - see how to stop it.” Orestes, son of his devouring mother, curled over and gripped his bleeding abdominal wound. He groaned in splintering agony. Then, the sightless crowd stepped inward, and with arms around each other’s shoulders began to rise and fall together, performing a horrible dance, a chthonic, demonic haka, where their tongues slapped across their canines, and their backs pulsed outwards like the crest of falcons or heads of cobras.
John manically shot down to Orestes and looked him in the eyes, “run.”
Their jaws unhinged from their faces, their eyes went black, and they leapt like animals onto the men. Together their mouths formed a singular, black, gaping maw whose soul purpose was to fracture the casing of incommensurate minds.
They ripped into their bodies, the thin veils that contained their organs and minds and being, and removed them from the plane of memory through their incessant, all consuming death worship. In seconds the screams were muffled, the clothes were torn, the bodies were hewn, the blood licked from the grass, and any evidence of their existence was wiped from God's eye-view.
Until finally, only the torn body, floating on the pulsing surface, remained. The sandhill cranes called, and resting on the bottom of the lake, beneath the swimming predators, was a freshly used, jagged knife.