In Transit

The continuation of the Vocabulary Notebook is now in http://vocabbook.lux-lucis.net/. Please point your bookmarks/links to the new host and get your feed readers accquainted with the feeds.

Oh, and Vocabulary Notebook will have a more exciting change beyond a new host. An explanation is on the new blog.

Moki

The Maoris called it a moki. It’s construction was exceedingly simple: collect bulrushes and bind them in a bundle, the simplest of conveyances. It’s purpose of intimate importance: to carry a single person over a body of water; a lake, a river, a stream. Tears.

Michelle held her plane ticket close to her heart, fist clutching those one-way paper wings. It was her moki, her way out. She would leave on a craft of her own making, built on one sad memory a time. Over oceans it would carry her, past the stream of tears and onto the land of dead empires where her knight stood on his pedestal, armor gleaming in the failing day.

The final call for flight to paradise.

She stood among the throng of passengers, ticket on one hand, earthly posessions in the other. She would board that plane with 400 other souls yes, but it would still be her moki. It would carry only her and her alone.

For my "granma", Michelle "Bunnzy" McClellan.

Ken

Under extreme duress, the mattress springs squealed. Bare feet riding the sine wave. Bodies in up-down motion, in peals of rapture. Urgent collision of man and woman and then a separation. Beddings tugged from corners pool around their feet, covers thrown overboard without a care. Sweat.

Exhausted, Michelle fell face down on the softness of the springs. Her eyes fell on the label, an incongruity in the sea spray blue of the mattress, half exposed hiding like a tease behind the sheets. She pulls away the pink floral print and traces the border of the label. Rigid stitches embossing a hide-and-seek pattern.

She reads the black and white. "Not to be Removed Under Penalty of Law."

“Isn’t it strange”, Michelle remarks wistfully while making snipping motions at the label, “That even on woman and mans lovebed, the government seeks to place impositions?”

“Irunno”, the syllables roll off Marik’s tongue as a singularity. Sweat beads crown his forehead as he stood above Michelle.

“I figure there are things that are beyond our ken and anyway, its more fun to just keep jumping on the bed rather than worry about useless questions”. He leaps up and hits the mattress with his feet on full force.

The springs squeak again.

Redoubt

The sky was golden. A maudlin red tinges the periphery. On the plains below Timothy stood, surveying the charred ruins of his heart. Stone strewn about haphazardly give testament to the total utter destruction.

“You tried to hold it off as best as you could”, the satyr croons, playing at sympathy convincingly.

“It’s all right”, Timothy murmurs with a sad happy smile. “Hopeless romantics could never hope to build a redoubt against it. Glass light and crystal can never weather, nor do books words and music make for unshakable foundations”

Timothy stalked through the wreckage, working his way to the polestar of his heart. He pauses once to pick through shattered glass and stone, exhuming a tome from its grave. Hands cut and bleeding, he opens the book. On its pages, handwritten, a thousand words for love. In all languages, in all forms. To the last page he turns and writes the thousand oneth.

In the center, he finds her.

Malapropos

Joesef stared at his plate of cheese.

“This cheese”, Joesef pontificates with his accented stutter, “is very very holey”

Serenity is distracted, she’s watching the last rites of the robo-pope on the black and white television over the bar. Through the static and snow of the aged television she soldiers on, hanging on to every utterance of the toaster-cardinal.

“Holey, yes”, Joesef continues unperturbed that Serenity isn’t listening to him. He clears his throat, a sonorous sound.

“This cheese”, Joesef declares, “Is so holey it should be the next pope”

His face splits into a wide grin, exposing rotten teeth leaning against golden caps.

Swiveling her neck in an impossibly graceful motion, Serenity faces Joesef.

“Has it ever occurred to you”, says she, “that that was a most malapropos pun”?

With her lips she points out a figure clad in a monk’s orange robes sitting on a barstool. He is weeping, weeping over a beer, chanting a solemn somber ditty for the robo-pope.

Sylph

She sat on the porch, on her throne of weather beaten wood and peeling paint. The boy ran past her again, feet pounding hard on the sun dried concrete below and finding all the hidden cracks and breaks beneath. Furiously he ran, bellowing a war cry of glee as he ran forth, fine butterfly net held aloft.

She wondered what he was chasing. Butterflies had already died off in the fallout winter.

The boy ran past her again, his oversized shirt flapping in the wind and butterfly net trailing behind him. His laces are untied, skittering on the pavement in his wake. You can see it coming. It’s inevitable, a prescience built upon instincts. A kid running around with his laces undone will fall.

The boy trips. He’s halfway to the ground and she gasps. He meets the concrete slab in a rough kiss. Her lips curve into a smile and she watches him, waiting for his six year old wail to fill the air. To her surprise, the only thing he does is pick himself up solemnly.

Pursing her lips, she yells at him from the porch, “You’re crazy you know. There aren’t any more butterflies around here.”

The boy bent over and picked up his net. He shouts back, “I’m not catching butterflies, I’m catching sylphs. I’ve already got a gnome, a salamander an’ a undine”

“You’re even crazier then”. She punctuates her point by tapping on her temple.

“Someone’s gotta restore the elements”, he says in a whisper. Gazing into the sky, he only sees the smoke black remnants of the clouds.

Bloviate

Janice lay on the tarpaulin. Red shirt, blue jeans. Chest heaving, she lay surrounded by splashes of colours clashing to assert their primacy. She’s staring into the ceiling, past the fluorescent lighting and at the holder supporting it. The chromed facets mirror the world in a thousand shards. A thousand shards to hold the world, hold her world in its entirety.

She finally relents to the light and closes her eyes. Seeing past truth is painful and a tear sluices down her cheek to alleviate the pain. Shallow breathing as she watches the playback of the week.

She needs release.

She screams. A long, pronounced scream. A scream so wild the crescendo folds back onto itself in a way sonics were never meant to. A scream to punctuate reprieve. A scream to throw grief in relief. A scream articulate and bloviate, an ornate oration of the past week.

A primal scream.

Aborning

This is death aborning. Of course, death is simply a concept, it isn’t birthed from some skeletal womb. It’s not brought into this world howling, bloody and afraid. Nevertheless, here we are as death comes into being, as death is being born. An oxymoron, a dichotomy. Giving life to death.

Kaine slayed Abel. Mans first taste of mortality. Red splashes of blood to celebrate the sowing of the seed that gives rise to death’s birth. War in Sumer and Akkad and death is progressing well. Want to see the ultrasounds? Isn’t it cute how his little hands grasp the scythe?

Black plague heralds death’s birth. Death is kicking against the womb. Humanity cannot cope with death anymore. In the dark ages, a loud silent wailing to signal the anthropomorphization of death.

Shibboleth

Carefully, neatly, with all the weight of his penmanship Domnick wrote: lightness. He lay the page out on the sunburned concrete, minutely aware of the heat that burned away at his fingertips. Tilting his head on one side he makes a diagonal fold at the top with surgical precision, licking his lips in concentration. He repeats the step on the opposite side and folds the page in half. Gingerly, Domnick folds back the wings. In his imagination he hears the tortured cry of paper as he bends it to his will, followed by dazzled awe as it realizes it has wings.

Domnick holds his newly forged origami airplane lightly between two fingertips and stands tiptoe on iron piping, fighting to keep his balance. He raises his wings to the sky waiting for the wind to pick up. Soon enough, it whips his hair to a frenzy and he lets go of the plane, an offering to his gods. Of words. Of wind. Of sweat.

The wind carries his sacrifice far from the fourteenth floor rooftop.

Through the slats Angel watched as the yellow lined paper took flight, off to the heart of the city. She wondered at his private Shibboleth, this act that identifies the rest of the world as outsiders to him.

Amaneusis

Faith moved to brush away wild strands of hair from her eyes. She paused. In the moonlight, their gossamer strands seemed veil like to her. With a quivering smile, she moved her hands up over her face. Palms gently caressing her cheeks, fingers playing over lips as she lifted her hair away, lifting it like a wedding veil.

She sat at the foot of their bed at four in the morning and watched him. She promised him. She promised that she would be the amanuensis, that she would make real the ethereal, that she would codify his dreams.

On her lap, a notebook lay open. With a quill she had taken his diction in slumber. Haphazardly she scrawled across pages, a puerile attempt to steal from him his dream state.

Cloy

Detective Gerneth leaned against the doorframe and watched the forensic examiners. Like scavengers attacking carrion, they descended on the room. Heads bent like vultures they meticulously pick apart every bit of evidence from metaphorical bones. Or in some cases, Gerneth decided, from real physical bones.

He considered the room. Sterile, functional lighting and Spartan furnishings. Clearly, the artist devoted his finances to his medium. Littering the studio were bizarre shapes, metal twisted into forms not unlike those in a painting by Dali. Gerneth could almost feel sick and disoriented just looking at the sculptures.

The room smelled heavily of oxide from the iron the artist wrought his stomach churning masterpieces out of. Gerneth thought this convenient. The sickly foreign smell of iron would cloy his senses, desensitize it to the scent of blood that’s so strangely alike in odour. This was good. Gerneth was starting to worry. He was worried he’d developed a bloodlust, a kinship, feeling of being at home in a particularly gory crime scene.

Magniloquent

Serenity furrowed her eyebrows. Seen through an aura camera she would be glowing an intense green, the kind only seen in alien movies where the entire human cast dies. Or blood in German video games. Green is the aura of concentration.

Deep in thought she scratches her chin as she delves deeper into the tome. She puzzles over the meanings and weighs the preponderance of the theories. With a heavy sigh she closes the book and replaces it on the shelf.

Turning to Joesef she enlightens him in singsong, “His treatise almost engendered me to his dogma yet the wordsmith’s magniloquence diminished the thrust of his argument”

From the shelves the purple face of Barney and his ilk smiled at them. Sam-I-am stared daggers at the back of their heads. Damn intellectuals! How dare they slander the good name of Dr. Seuss!