Folding Dust

This is a story prompted by Miranda Kate’s Mid-Week Flash Challenge, although when I reached the end it had become an entirely different story to the one I envisaged at the start. Beautiful @lizcrippinmusic and @rachaelkanute (Twitter links there) also gave inspiration to the tale.

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A love unrequited is not a small thing. It is a bitter monster that gnaws away your entire reality. The woman who constantly haunts my reality has found her own love elsewhere. I constantly picture her kissing a mouth not mine, opening her body to another man’s eyes and fingers, and it hurts. Now is not the time for such visions, but I have no control. They stab into my brain, and my eyes brim with despair.

I blink, lay my hand on the rough bark of the jabuticaba tree, then close my eyes. The tree answers my request, and shows me what it senses through its interconnected siblings. Life teems throughout the jungle, violet sparks and magenta glows spatter the darkness behind my eyelids.

“I sense countless insects,” I say. “Many snakes. A pair of sloth. Beetles rattle everywhere. Howlers … a jaguar … rats. There, a human! Perhaps a thousand paces to the west.”

“Do you think it’s him?” Elodie says, hope lighting her beautiful eyes. I wipe my own dry. I don’t think she has noticed my tears.

“I can’t tell,” I say, “but whoever it is, they are still. A native would be moving towards shelter for the night.” I thank the tree, and we push through the thick undergrowth, moving towards that arc of sky made fire by the lowering sun.

I hold back a thick vine to let her pass, and watch her hips sway around the obstacle. I picture the tattoo that meanders over her skin there. Another man now tastes that delightful trail of ink to her thighs, the soap and salt on her skin, his nostrils wide at the heady scent of her. He now makes her giggle in a bar with a terrible joke, and has his thigh squeezed in reward. I no longer drink the light from her hands, and I despise this other man. Yet here I am helping Elodie to find him. Perhaps that was why she left me. Perhaps I was too accommodating, too eager to please.

We pause again, and I put my hand to a tree root, asking its permission. The tree responds.

“Closer now,” I say. “Perhaps six hundred paces.”

Elodie lays her hand on my shoulder. “How do you do that?” she says.

“The jungle talks to me. It always has, I don’t know why.”

“I didn’t know you could do that. Why did I not know this?”

“You never did know me the way I knew you,” I tell her. “To you I was a passing shower. You are … were my monsoon; I was drenched in you. You filled my entire being.”

“Shit. Look—”

I stand and shake off her hand. The last thing I need is her pity. She sighs, then gives me a smile that briefly lights fireworks in my lonely heart, before that organ shrivels at the realisation that I can no longer brush aside that stray, dark tendril of hair from her forehead. My God, even the mundane things wound me.

We move on through the darkening forest, more slowly now as the light turns umber. I caress the tiny hairs on the surface of a huge leaf the colour of deep ocean. It trembles. Not far now, the jungle tells me.

“Not far now,” I tell Elodie.

“Are you OK?” she says. I do not answer, because I do not fucking know. The answer would be too complicated. Which part of me is she asking about? My conscious thoughts? My dreams? My physical health, feelings, sanity? There are so many seeds of sadness, all grown to different levels: tiny things that, taken individually might cause a slight ripple. Put them together, though, and the crests of their individual waves build to make a bigger tide, something enormous. When Elodie left me I was flattened by a tsunami of despair, a never-ending anguish that even now does not wane. It erodes the shores of me, ripping away the stable structures of my past, present and future. I am free-falling, like dust folding into the hollow cavern that she left inside me.

“Anyway,” she continues, “thank you so much for helping me. No one else would. They all said it was too late, too dangerous. Otherwise I wouldn’t have …” She bit her lip. “I know … I know I treated you unforgivably, and don’t deserve your help, so thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

“We’re here,” I tell her, and stand aside so she can see the man on the ground. He sprawls against moss-dressed rock, his legs hidden by the undergrowth, his hair matted with dark blood, his face streaked with filth. His eyes flicker and open.

“Elodie!” he croaks, and it is immediately obvious that he adores her. Elodie’s face lights up with a joy that I never saw when she was with me. She rushes to kneel by him, and takes him in her arms. More dust smothers my lost soul, thick and dark. Dust to dust.

They are trapped in each other’s eyes, crylaughing. I do not hate this man any longer. Elodie has ensorcelled him as she did me. Now I only hate myself for failing her, for not being enough.

“How?” he coughs. “How did you find me?”

“I wouldn’t have, but for—” She turns to look at me, but I’m already gone. Tree-spores drift across the space where a second ago I stood. The dust folds down again, catching a last dagger of sun as I move silently away, following the path shown to me by the jabuticaba.

My ragged breathing alerts him as I approach. I feel his growl low in my belly, long before my ears register it. Death, cloaked in fur, emerges, brushing the leaves with a luminous absence. This jaguar is black, sovereign of the dark, though I can just make out the rosettes of his coat. His eyes drill through the gloom. I take out my knife.

“You are hungry, brother,” I tell the cat. “Come. Eat.” I slice open the veins in my wrists and toss the knife aside.