If Andreas Came With Fresh Supplies

He turned away from the water, his mind again in turmoil. If Andreas came with fresh supplies next week, there would be no need for fish. He needn’t kill, not even those cold-blooded, suspicious, greedy creatures which – he reckoned – had less developed nervous systems than other animals hunted or slaughtered for food. When he’d told Andreas that he had become a vegetarian and explained (half-jokingly, realising how odd it sounded) about the less developed nervous systems, the old man hadn’t quite shaken his head but had shot a look at him as though he were a mental case.
‘You shouldn’t push things too far, Avni,’ he’d said after a second or two. ‘How are you going to survive up there without hunting or fishing?’
  

The Souls of Those You Love

During those first few months he’d told himself that people are their souls and a soul cannot be taken from you. The soul of someone you love is forever with you and grows with you. It is not something fossilised and static but you can actually talk with people who are not physically there and they actually reply and react to situations. They laugh and cry with you and can talk to you reassuringly and even praise you or scold you. Or forgive you. He now knew that this is very true, but there is also pain in remembering and it is not always easy or possible to remember, and even when you can remember, it is not enough and you cannot talk with those who are not actually there with you as if they were there, physically present. It is a recipe for madness. But tonight it wasn’t like that. For he no longer spoke to her or tried to conjure up her presence beside him. He uttered no words, not even in his mind, but just felt her like something softly glowing within himself, something tenderly aglow inside himself.

© Copyright 2004 Allan Riger-Brown

First Glimpse of Blue

It was always a joy to come in, to pass the headland and see the house in the distance. She loved that stretch of coast and she loved the house. Some other places made her feel she was on the fringes of the world and there were places that made her feel she was in the middle of nowhere, and places – like this one – that made her feel she was at the centre of the universe. In great cities she had felt in the middle of nowhere but she reckoned that if she ever went to the North Pole or Tierra del Fuego she would at least feel she was somewhere. Of course whether or not you like a place depends on so many things – what it looks like and its atmosphere and the people and so on – but in her case she believed there was something more besides: some atavistic need or instinct, something to do with her sense of orientation perhaps – her position in relation to the Earth's magnetic field or something of the sort – or perhaps some unconscious memory of the past, of a place once known and loved, and then forgotten. At any rate she liked it where she was now and knew how lucky she was to be there. She had loved the place ever since the first day when, arriving by coach from inland, she had seen the pine forest and suddenly she was in under the trees, and even in the coach it was cooler and the scent of the pines came in through the windows and mingled with the smell of the exhaust fumes. When you got off the coach, it was a ten-minute walk through the pine forest with the sea-breeze blowing in gentle puffs through the trees and then came the first glimpse of deep blue and then you came out onto the beach. Turning to the right you saw the house ahead, about half a mile away and just in the right place, not too close to the water, not too far, not on the centreline of the bay but slightly to one side, on a spot which probably marked the golden section of the arc of the bay.
She loved to walk up to the house, to its weathered timbers painted light blue and white on the outside – and up the five front steps and into the interior, which always smelled faintly of sea and sun and pitch, like an old wooden boat. It sounded like a boat, too, creaking in the wind, its deck-like floor booming underfoot and, like a boat, the house had its foibles and weaknesses in the shape of numerous draughts, leaks in bad weather, and faulty plumbing. But she wouldn't have swapped that place for anywhere else in the world.

Sandstone

For the knowledge of the self-apart-from-God
is an abyss down which the soul can slip
writhing and twisting in all the revolutions
of the unfinished plunge
of self-awareness…
D. H. Lawrence, Only Man

Of all the horror in the universe, some had come his way. It was, in a sense, quite simple – natural, even. Why should he be spared? Yet he didn’t know what chain of events, what actions or mistakes of his had led him to the present situation – to this ghastly and nevertheless perfectly real, inescapable moment in time. Was it only by chance that he had ended up there? He couldn't help feeling there was something more to it – some subtly ironical, implacable force or necessity behind things. The place itself had a familiar air about it, as though he'd seen it or been there long ago – in his childhood or in a forgotten dream. But he couldn't tell what the place was exactly, what it had been originally, before they had put it to this use. A natural canyon? A crater? Some sort of quarry? Perhaps a huge dig, a colossal pit awaiting the foundations of a building? He vaguely remembered having walked (on his way there?) across a vast, sandy plain, and seen scattered heaps of rubble and abandoned-looking construction materials, broken, jagged pieces of masonry and timber, and also what might have been remnants of bones, and somewhere on the steep walls of the pit he'd seen dark openings like caves. Was it, then, some sort of building site? A man-made thing? He couldn't tell. He had no clear recollection of his arrival there, and from his present position he couldn’t see much: in front of him – barely an inch from his eyes – the grainy, terribly real texture of the stone, reddish, made up of thin laminations, interbedded with darker, glassy fragments of rock. If he rolled his eyes upwards, he could see the wall of the pit stretching above him towards the white-hot, dazzling sky; and even without looking, he could sense that same wall dropping down below him into the abyss.

Yes, he’d known this place – the red stone, the white-hot sky, the gigantic pit. He’d been here or somehow seen these surroundings before, possibly a long time ago. And those soldiers who at some point must have escorted him across the sandy plain, and who were now pacing the crest above the pit as they would a rampart, he had known them long ago, too. He knew their closed, hard faces, their eyes shaded by helmets, the evil they radiated from a distance. He recognised the place and knew his guards like someone might recognise the place and the faces and the moment to which he has been ultimately led by fate, step by step, with the logic of his whole life pushing, propelling him forward, and now relentlessly pulling, sucking him down into the void.