2019-10-05 - Mother Oho Bleeds

A tumultuous black welcomes not his eyes, but his senses.

He sees but doesn't see, and as black vistas beat at the surfacing of his eyelids light manifests, and senses return. He feels it, then, the machine; the archaic thing he now rides upon. The locomotive sound of its swaying rail tracks remind him of such, the turn of the wheels hard and groggy on every turn, complaining of their use- complacent after being unused for such long time, now forced to be again; to think again. To think?

A bump on the tracks and his body rose with force into a binding of gravity he hadn't expected to be subjected to, but it turned out then as his eyes snapped open and his body descended back into what his back could only propose to be a lousy bedroll he crashed into that he was, in fact, in a place. The air was thick, here; thick as only a small cabin could make it. One could feel the encroaching chill of the outside, but there was a certain heat to this wagon- and a wagon it was, he noticed as his eyes drifted hazily from the awakening, eyeing a series of crates that surrounded his little corner of the wagon itself. Each was covered in green and brown tarps, strapped and harnessed with thickly-woven ropes not entirely made of nylon or polyester, but reeds; but fibers, and other neolithic, raw materials that gave the compartment a tribal feel. His palms lowered down to his sides, and he let his fingers dig into that thin bedroll, soaked in sweat, but was it his own? How could he know. The rest of the wagon was shielded by a crate at the base of his bedroll, and darkness hadn't taken him thanks to a glimmering lantern subtly lit beside his bed, in the shape of a coffee pot, its little flame threatening to be snuffed out at any second.

It was almost as if in life he had never felt his legs, not truly; almost as if burden hadn't taken shape in his life, until that very moment, when he struggled to even move his toes on the bedroll beneath the trundle of the train's passaging, and flange squeal that seemed to ebb and flow solely to awaken him; to urge him to a rise. Eventually, yes, his knees buckled outwards and he let feet drop and touch the planked wagon floor. He felt it move every other second, subjected to the movement of the train, and as his arms outstretched in search of aid to stand he took to a string from two different crates in each hand and stood.

His body swayed a brief back and forth, and he forced his feet to spread laterally much like in a bus to better handle his gravitational center and not fall to the hard turns and bumps of the train's path. This new angle - this rise from the bed - gave him view of the wagon's rest. At its back, a fine stack of rusty coffins piled up to the ceiling, with one strangely tilted and its bottom held on the edge, which he presumed would end up falling at any given time. Still, it had all been natural until that moment; that singular second where he realized this isn't where he belonged- this wasn't his home, this wasn't the trailer, this was elsewhere. The very notion of achieving clarity and sentience within an episodic dream terrified him, specially knowing what he knew; specially remembering what Marion said. You're a dangerous son of a bitch, Nasir.

"No, please, don't think that of me," he begged in silence, to only but himself, yet that voice seemed to break a balance in the perfectly still silence of the wagon's ecosystem, and down came that coffin he very suspiciously presumed would fall. It spun, turned and crashed its corners atop other coffins, until it found itself on the open center of the wagon, facing up.

It took every ounce of his virtue in the fiber of his being to remain still, for he felt fear seize him. And fear, often so, was a tool of self-preservation, yet a gnawing know reminded him subconsciously that in this land; in this place, its meaning was utterly different. And so bravery, fear be damned, accompanied him then, as his body instinctually hugged the wall to his right and kept him alerted, away, from the coffin that slowly began to stir and move with life. A crack, a bash, and one loud snap, the dingy, rusty lock that kept it closed was split open under unknown force, and slowly an entirely mundane, poorly-dressed, tanned man pushed the lid aside and carefully edged himself out of his own, little personal cabin, however macabre it was.

He wore a red felt hat, covering his ears; his visage was mostly one long, white beard, and the rest of his features were dark and covered entirely in pockmarks that made for one gruesome descend from the baggy below of his eyes down to the rooting of his beard whole. He looked delicate, almost; spindly, fiddlesticks for arms and a collarbone so pronounced one had to wonder where did the sinew come, to actuate this man as he closed the coffin's lid and sat, rather comfortably, atop of it. The rest of his body was an all-encompassing robe, colored beige and tied to the waist by three differently colored sashes that covered him from hip to midriff in three essential colors; violet, red and dark, mustard yellow. Trinkets and baubles hung from it, Nasir noticed; a little horn no bigger than his thumb, a set of rat skulls jingled together with fibrous stringing, and a buckle that buckled into nothing in particular.

Slowly, the stranger's jaw loosened, and he made a grimaced expression as his dry tongue loosened out, licking away at his strangely cracked, sodden mouth. "Pray tell, young man," he finally spoke, and the realization that he had vocal cords threw a sizzle of electricity down Nasir's spine. He shuddered off the wall, and staggered a step closer spearheaded by a flimsily assertive expression, that anchored itself out of necessity on this old figure, now calling him young. "How did you end up inside this coffin?" that same, elderly man wondered as if he himself hadn't just come out of one but half a minute prior.

How fucking ironic.

"You mean the train-- the wagon, how did I end up inside the wagon?" was all Nasir could feasibly reply, for even though the foreboding signals and messages of the situation alarmed him of a horrible fate, that this was perhaps indeed his end; that this, here, was the ladder up to the shepherd's gates, or Allah's embrace, or some Buddhist bullshit, and his time was up, his curiosity lingered still, and he had to know; he had to reply, no matter the awe.

The question brought a twitch from his fellow traveler's lips, one of grim, almost satirical amusement. His old, boney hand found way up to his face, where he'd anchor on the rightmost end of his mustache, twirling it silently while engaging a look to Nasir's physique, judging him so. So much so it made a warband of shivers run down his spine, until that wavery, shakey voice spoke yet again. "You can call it whatever you'd like, Wali. By all accounts, it should be you inside this coffin, you died as of two days ago. You are no more- have you spoken to your mother about it? Did you leave her a letter; have you told your sisters, your nephews?" regardless of the implications, there was a certain familiarity with the underhanded statement of it all. The way he motioned with stubbornly stiff fingers towards the younger man he shared the cabin with, the certainty in which he spoke; the wisdom exacerbated by his ancient looks, and the modulated tone he chose to convey his message to Nasir; Nasir who felt his heart take wings up to his throat, straining his windpipe visibly.

For the longest of whiles, the wagon was only but the sound of running tracks and the constant, sequenced up and down of its treads coupled with that hard, nasal wheezing from the Arab's throat. "I don't understand," Nasir finally mustered, forging on with a tremulous tone that emanated that loss as much as the very words themselves and their ancient meaning explained.

After yet another long, drawn-out silence, the old figure lifted an arm, its end a hand open as a palm. "There's nothing to understand. Feel, Wali; feel, it is your gift. And your burden."

And what a burden it was.

He could feel every twine; every root, and every leaf cry in the crux of Autumn. His eyes were taken from him, and replaced with the sight of another- a thing incorporeal, and inhuman, yet no less alive than he himself. His perception traveled through visions done in the alien perspective of nature, where he became the ground below the train itself; where he saw as the wind, felt as the earth, and suffered a hundred decays of leaf and plant. He died a hundred times, then; a thousand times, in that brief interlude of existential calamity, and his self - his soul - returned with a fury back to his body, accompanied by an inundating feeling of adrenaline and sense of loss once unknown to him. He grasped at his chest with need, letting each and every finger of the hand distance from one another as much as it could to cover as much pectoral as was possible, to contain his heart; to keep its beating from breaching the skin and slumping gruesomely on the ground, something that felt very possible then. His shoulders hunched, and he caved into a weight that didn't have physical power over him, but something much greater than that.

For a time, his eyes remained anchored to the ground, and yet again his only companion was the heaving of his chest, and the hard, strained wheezing of breath that became increasingly difficult to maintain. He wanted to die, then, he knew; to cease that breathing, and let the black take him. A desire in him to ask, if he could indeed cast it all aside and become a bleep into the unknown came over him, and when his eyes looked up unsteadily to where the figure once was there was nothing left, only the coffins. Only his coffin.

Carefully, Nasir stood from the ground and his knees yet again, finding chance and aid with a palm that caught a copper pipe bound into the wagon's wall, transmitting heat into the room itself. He felt weary and tired- he looked at the locked entrances and concluded it was best to sleep. Dejected, he turned and walked back to his corner of the wagon, into the puzzle of cleverly harnessed crates, to slide into his once uncomfortable, now heavenly soft bedroll and pass away into the dark unfeeling he wanted so much.