I will make many in between. This was the moment of departure, her last instruction. I draw the bow back with all my strength, feeling the single gesture brace every muscle of my body, feeling the tension lock in as the grace of the string touches my lips. Pulling that great curve silences the world and even the wind stops, holding its breath against my energy and the release. And for the first and last time the bow is silent, except for small, creaking sighs which echo my taut bones. I raise the bow skywards, perpendicular to the track that runs over the low foothills in an almost vertical scar from our home. It lets itself go, vanishing into the sky with a sound that sensually echoes through me and every other particle of substance and ghost, in or out of sight. I know I will never see that arrow again. It is not to be my guide; I will have to make that one differently.
Geek Syndicate
That first white arrow is still travelling the spirals of air, sensing a defined blood on its ice-cold tip. For a moment I am with it, high above these porous lands, edging the sea, its waves crashing endlessly below. Above the shabby villages and brutal tribes, leaning towards the wilderness and the dark forest which cloaks its meaning. The pain calls me back, still standing before the track, dazed in the garden. The inside of my arm is raw from where the bow string lashed it, removing a layer of skin with the ease of a razor, indifferent and intentional. Stepping forward, I pick up my sack and quiver, steady my looping stance against the bow and walk forward into the wilderness. The land had become depopulated. Too much effort was needed to keep the patched fields active enough to grow clinging tomatoes and dusty, dwarfish melons; it was a country of the old, tending their patches of earth out of habitual purpose, the last days of the clock ticking through daily ritual, the weights almost unwound from their creaking spool. There were no young people to reset it, no one who wanted to wind the well each day and sprinkle the ravenous earth into function. The young had left for the cities and for slave labour abroad. They were underground, digging fossils for other people’s heat. They were in venomous sheds weaving chemical cancer. They were automata in chains of industry which did not need identity, language or families. All their saved money was endlessly counted as escape. Some went back to the fields to help the old and infirm raise the dented bucket and spade, others attempted to return as princes, buying expensive and bland new homes in the crumbling villages of their origin. This would fail, and their children and the land would turn on them and intensify the shuddering fatigue. The scuffed tracks of their efforts were erased under my feet, walking through the few occupied remnants of community. It would take me three days to clear these places, another three or four to cross the low mountains and be further out at the rim of the wilderness. We had lived in this place for eleven years, healing the gashes and fractures of our past, using the sun and dust to staunch the jagged memories. This peninsular of abandonment had given much, and a part of me ached to plan a return, even though I knew it would never be possible. The heat of the day became saturated with weight. The brightness became sullen and pregnant with change. Clouds thickened and coagulated with inner darkness; water was being born, heavy and unstable. This was the breath of the sickly wind called Burascio by the natives of the land. A wind that sucked rather than blew, its hot, inverted breath giving movement but not relief. It toyed with expectation by animating suffocation, tantalising the arid earth with its scent of rain, whilst beneath the reservoirs, caves and cisterns strained their emptiness towards its skies. This was the reason we lived here. Este said the isolation was part of the treatment, but the mend41