Natura: Uhuru Genesis

LOU

LOU

5. THE FRIAR

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world is full of more weeping than you can understand

- W.B. Yeats "The stolen child"

A lone town: the row houses lining its street, nothing but ransacked skeletons; the fanned out windmills, their iron bars rotating and creaking, but without life; road signs, twisted and curled downward, like sun-toasted leaves. Uphill, near the cliff, is a dead Pepsi billboard, cracks fissuring in its middle, resembling splashing tears.

Lou knows this dream, and he's been jaywalking here, every dusk, for what feels like a year. It's usually at this time, when the cold bolts of pain start harrowing his insides. This is no ordinary pain. In his eighteen years, he has mourned before; but not like this.

He's woken up a couple of times, but his lids often feel heavy. Awake, time feels like a seamless sequence of black and white, and the people who walk into the room; just faint ghosts in boots and sandals, to him.

The times he's up, he swears he can't feel his face, the coils of his cropped hair, his arms, or legs. His right leg always feels a tad heavier, and he's conscious that it is because of the injury. There's a snug cast around the leg, the color of alabaster, over which his finger keeps idling. But that's no cause for pain, when his eyes fly open.

Or even, when they stay shut. There is always this thing; a slow, cold liquid, which burns hot like a tear, but thick as honey. He's heard that souls bleed, but he's never understood, that it happens in the literal sense. This has to be it; the bleeding of a soul. Because it trickles down, from under his collar bone, to the pit of his stomach. It bleeds, when he wakes, when he sleeps, leaking icily into the worlds of his nightmares.

He can't remember his first nightmare, in this bizarre room, whose air is always hugged with the scent of incense, clove cigarettes, and leather. But he remembers waking up soaked in sweat, his knee a pack of jelly, and the back of his head banging hard against the headboard of the bed upon which he lay. And now, this morning, he finds himself glaring up the doleful Pepsi billboard again; by the cliff.

He knows it's morning because of the faint shimmers at the backs of his eyelids; a sign that watery daylight is pouring over the restless, white lace curtain drawn across the window.

He knows that if he lifts his leg, to jump down the cliff, he would crash awake. But when he tries, he feels a net of static electricity crackle around his knee, to his thigh. So he just turns around, and stalks back, to the nightmare town.

He arrives at a square, which looks like Fair Square, washed of traffic. Empty apartments gape, nested in a toadstool tower, the huge screen on its curtain wall flickering and grainy. At its foot, where yellow lines lead away into another boulevard, behind a flashing Don't Walk sign, stands a girl.

She wears a golden dress, and by the look of her left shoulder, she's a hunchback. Her hair is tasseled, pieces of small paper skimming the street under her feet, even though no wind blows. Lou travels to her. "Basha?" comes out of his mouth, "what are you doing in this town, buttercup?"

"This is not a town, Lou," she says flatly. There is grime on her face, as though she stormed through sludge. But still, there's something different about her, her gravity, her distance.

"What is it then?" Lou wants to inch closer, but his foot feels heavy.

"This is a garden," she flicks her finger, without turning, at the toadstool tower, its screen threaded with flickering gray ropes.