Give Me That Body (Oneshots)

Leechtin (Beginning) "Soft Sweet Horror"

(Maybe this will be the first chapter of something.)

Egypt - Northern Red Lands - Late Pre-Dynastic Period 

Cut through with moonlight, floating in the water, stuck with pins of starlight. What had happened?

Bleeding in the river. If I had been underwater asleep, how is it that now I might be here, dreaming in the open air? 

Some memory of violence, of being pulled from horseback, and the sound of my horse screaming and dying, of my hair wrapped around a fist and trying to tell him, someone, that I had a purpose in travelling so hard and so far. 

What purpose? 

Black evening, a flood of shapes in the starlight. Night run through with phantoms. I followed the turning of the earth with my eyes, lying still in water. A tributary vein of the Nile, surely. 

If I'd had a purpose, did it matter at all? Whatever meaning in my life, it had gone. When I rose, and lay myself upon the sandy bank, what had I ever been? When I looked into the warm, clear, living water, and saw a face reflected from my youth? But so smooth and so clever, and measuring, and innocent in his eyes? Is it myself?

It was as if the trials of my old age had never happened. Did I think about it that way? Is that why I forgot it all? Or is it that I really woke without any memory of my earlier traumas? 

I walked away from there.

I had been wearing worked silver. Tooled stones. They were gone. Had I been killed for worldly things? A man never truly believes such cataclysms will happen. Life is so large in his mind. 

Had I been following the tributary toward the Delta? I must have. There was not yet the capital. There was no kingdom, but there was a city there, a roil of humanity. What had I been? 

I have found that I am good with a sword. That I know the names of gods and rituals. I found that I knew the right words to say, and how to build fires and divine. In the early days, I dug into the ground with eager fingers, seeking the cool, silty soil beneath. 

I have always liked the weight of a heavy, gilt sword belt. I like the feeling of a weapon in my hands. I like to have my back to the farthest wall, and find the sound of wind conducting sand soothing. 

A mind tries to put away its recollections. There are too many of them and it is too hard. He is alienated from himself, the many selves I have been. But in dreaming, the pressure is relieved from memory. 

I dream of a city buried beneath a city. Men have rebuilt her many times. Men walk above that life that saw me young and hungry. I dream that when walking, I look up in the old city and see men, unknowing of us below. We dead are walking still, hungry but no longer beholden to the passing days. In my dream, I carry stones. Men blindfold me. I speak to them in a voice that I have practiced, telling them stories of their victories and cares. I wear my hair long. I am for them what they wish my people to be, and I hide my body carefully. 

I wake in another era and reach for a lover, Nataniellus, and he is gentle to me, patting my cheeks with his kind hands and saying, "What are you dreaming, now?" 

Killed over worldly things. 

"Talk to me," my beautiful songbird says, far removed from that city of old Ebla, trying to rouse me from thinking on my dream.

"Hush, little bird. Where are we?"

"We are here together. It is today. What does it matter when?" he asks.

But it does matter. Because I am unmoored in time. But because he does not say when, I am everywhere. It is the first day that I loved him. It is the day I left him. It is the day he came back. It is every day. His being here is a clue. For most of my life, he was not there.