Natural Complacency:

Grady and Lucy

 

Sitting on the edge of some setting sun, a world drifted very similar to your own. There was, after all, a sensation of it being a little ‘off’, a world akin to the minds of many of your own writers. Had you been there, looking distantly upon the twilight world, you might have thought it…familiar. ‘Yes, that’s it’, you’d think, ‘this place seems familiar’. Like a permanent déjà vu, the world turns waiting to die: No dimensions, no portals, none of that scientific nonsense to dazzle the mind. The world was simply dying. Your writers have seen parts of it, shades of a distant gray, and written worlds generation after generation. Long before King, before Byron saw the skeleton ships’ ribcages frozen, long before any thought of themselves graying in a gray realm, this world breathed its last breaths, wrote its own gods into existence while mortals killed and loved and died. Every world has its myths, this is just another of them. Now, without another flourish, my tenuous reader, exhale now, and breathe some life into this story. It too needs breath to live again…

 

            It rained again. Four solid days of heavy rain fell for no reason other than spite. It was the story of a miserable time for one lone traveler wandering the world. He sat under an arbitrary evergreen amongst hundreds of other trees. It was a part of the path he called, “The Forest.” It was a lil’ joke he laughed at upon first seeing the trees. It wasn’t really funny, but it amused him none the less. Pulling his wide brimmed hat tighter on his head, he watched the water trickled through the tree and slide off the water resistant brim.  His hair underneath was of an uncouth length, longer than he would have liked, but shorter than he thought fit him. Features aside, he would have said he was ‘boring’ looking.

            Currently, he sat under the tree trying to think of line to write. Had it not been raining, he might have been working on the stanza, but as it was, and given his rather short memory for these things, a line was more than enough work. He wouldn’t have called himself a poet, since those things hardly made one a living, but he deviled in the art pretty well. After all, it was far easier to call yourself a poet than a painter these days. Instead, he went from town to town working for the food he could get, and begging the rest. A regular llama, you might say, bringing his idea of piety to the people.

            According to the map he read before the rain, the road would dump him out into a small town called, ‘West Moorland’. (though, it made no mention of east moorland). He wasn’t quite certain that was how it was spelled. It had, after all, been 4 days. The agrarian way had level most large cities these days, but the small towns seemed to prosper. He had been doing it for the past 5 years, since his father died, and it had made all the difference.

            The dog crawled from his left. He looked at it, patting it gently on the back of the head. Looking in the general direction the dog looked, he saw three people walking side by side. Quickly, he laid flat on his belly, tapping the ground three times next to him. The dog laid down at his side. Together, they watched from the ground.

            “You sure she went this way? I haven’t seen shit in two miles,” the middle one yelled over the rain.

            “I’m tellin’ you, Grady, she went dis way.”

            Grady, the tall man in the middle, turned to his smaller companion, laying a think hand violently across his face. “You raisin’ your voice to me, deputy? Remember Tom, you want to join him back there!” he paused for a second, sliding something out of his right sleeve, “These things don’t wear out on flesh and bone” From the glint of the steel, the wanderer was certain it was knife…which meant Tom and his ‘flesh and bone’ were probably lying somewhere down the way.

            The three men were walking away from town, towards the wanderer. Sighing to himself, he knew it meant Town wasn’t going to be a fun place. “Then again,” he thought to himself, “when was it ever?”

            “Aww, shit. Let’s get back to Tom before someone else gets him.” It had become common practice to loot the dead. Material things, after all, did not carry over into the afterlife. As quickly and violently as they had come into his life, they (temporarily) wandered back out.

            He waited several minutes until they were away, and he rubbed the dog’s neck. “Clear,” he told it. They both sat up in relief. “Wet as all hell,” he thought, “but not dead yet.” “You saved me again, Dog.” He rubbed its ear. It was possible they wouldn’t have seen him beneath the tree, but he always appreciated the heads up.

            One thing Grady had said intrigued the wanderer. They were looking for a ‘she’. A woman. Woman had become a prized commodity these days. “Sad,” he thought. Personally he never thought ownership of anyone was anything but vile, but a sexist part of him was reminded, mostly by a motherly inner voice, that woman were to be protected. This made him smile. You could be a down-right, drunken son of a bitch, but as long as you took care of your woman, you got into his mother’s version of heaven. Sad, he thought, most people treated woman like you would a diamond…one that almost everyman in the world would stab you for. To him, some diamonds were best left pieces of coal; less blood was spilt around them.

            “Town?” he asked the dog, “Or not to town?” The dog, trained to bark at these rhetorical questions, barked. “I guess to town weeze be goin’!”

 

            Three hours later on the same rainy night, he found himself in a diner/bar with a harmonica in one hand and a pen in the other. He wrote his one line down and played a few notes to match each word. He’d scratch out a word, keep the notes, then scratch the note, and rewrite the word. This process went on until someone brought him a cup of steaming liquid.

            “It’s herbal tea,” said a soft feminine voice from above him. “Mr. Snaith learned to make it in the guides as a kid. It tastes sweet, but runs the rails right through ya, if you know what I mean.”

            He blew a note into the harmonica, his tongue blocking while he inhaled. It had been a few days, but the song sounded good. “Great,” he answered her, correcting his spelling of ‘celestial.’

            “You’re a song writer?” she asked him.

            “Nope,” he responded, never looking up. It wasn’t impolite, he thought, to disregarded someone you planned on stealing from. It wasn’t that he wanted to steal the tea. He pay for it, he had something to trade for it.

            “Aren’t you writing a song?” she asked. The diner/bar was empty, especially since it was a Monday night. Something never changed.

            “I am writing a song, but I am not a song writer. I write some poetry and…” he looked up at her face. Her dark hair hung down to her shoulders around her face. Had it been another time, it would been enough to wrecked traffic in any town. It did a number on his train of thought.

He managed to jam the ambiguous word ‘stuff’ as a sentence ender.

            “You’re a poet? Read me one!” she poured more tea and scooted into the booth with him. He was certain that not even the great ones could have read a poem given the proximity to welcomed warmth. “Do you write sonnets?” she asked with an excitement belying her age.

            “…I’ve written a few, but I’m not very good!” he flipped through the black notebook he’d been previously writing and sought something appropriate to read.  “…no sonnets in here.”

            “Read me anything! Something sad?”

            He recalled something written in his youth on seeing a certain sight, that, as he grown older, still made his heart beat a sullen nocturne. “It’s for a young girl I knew.”

 

She said she knew what made the wind blew[1]

And how the world thought it was all there;

She was something short of cold and blue

While her breasts laid on table bare.

I wanted to agree, that the wind blew on

What she would say was god’s last breath,

But I couldn’t help be seemingly down

Even when my lost heart lies in death.

 

I would say that the trees waved in salute

For the celestial hours rotating over top,

But all I saw was the glass all resolute

With the sands solidified in frost;

I’m broken, tree bent over at the roots,

For she looked like the desert storm

Frozen with eyes parting the sea;

But, then again, her hair was born

At the hate’s hating of all revelry,

Arms over chest to beat the lost.

 

What platter, served to me, sings songs

Of the twilight of sunken moon’s dreams:

For the grass and rats bow to prongs

That seizure them at heart’s beams.

 

And she focused those blue ovals

At the thought of compliancy,

But I offered my own rebuttal

And promised incensory.

 

He ended his reading. He hadn’t expected a fanfare, but she only blinked at him. “I told you I’m not a poet. I just write some words, put them in versical form, and hope for the best.”

            “What does it mean?” she asked. “Did she die?”

            “Well,” he said, “simply put, it’s about a girl I once knew who ended up cold and blue. Metaphorically, it’s about the cruel design of nature and fate, killing off all those things one grows attached too, and indignantly pissing on it as it wastes away in a complacency coded at birth. We are designed to prolong an existence not worth living, and mourned after living a life never lived.”

            She had never heard it’s like, the way the stranger broke each thought. She had never heard real poetry, even at its worse, relying on the awful singers and songs she thought were poets. After all, the sun had set on fine poetry long before either had been born.

            Neither said a word. She watched him intently; he took a long hard drink of the white liquid she put before him. He thought he had offended her with his poetry about death (or his comment about ‘pissing’.) She thought it was possible to fall in love with the unknown, given its slightest familiar qualities.

            A dog bugled in outside, starling him. “Shit, I got to go.” He grabbed his back pack, stuffed his notebook into his breast pocket, and jumped from the booth.

            “Go? But…” she watched him rush away. “What’s your name?” He was out the back door before he could answer. She picked up the pot, walked it slowly back to the machine, and sat heavily on the chair. It was type of sitting she had not done in sometime, a type that spoke far too much of unrequited interest. She felt the soft treading night would never end.

            Things in the world never really slowed, they only appeared slowed. They happened, as it would seem, when they were suppose to happen, never sooner, never later.

Grady, the tall man from the path, walked into the diner/bar and sat down across from her. She did not notice him at first, annoying the envious man. Grady reached over and plucked her hand violently. “Wake up, hunny child, and get your old man some tea.” Grady was neither her lover or her father, and a feminist part of her resented his claim of her. Though, he was a prick to everyone. “Come on baby, my tea.”

“It’s comin, Grady. Hold your damn horses.” She poured him a cup of tea.

“Where’s your sister, Luc?”

“You find Tom, you’ll find my sister. My name is Ms. Dane. My sister calls me Luc, asshole.” She sat back down. This type of sitting was utter resentment.

“Tom’s dead. Where’s your sister, Luc?”

Lucy stood up slowly. “Tom’s dead?”

“Your sister stuck him with a knife, right under here,” he poked his index finger under her right breast. She slapped his hand away, not too hard. No one hit Grady, after all. No one that lived afterwards. “Yep, I got his body down at the station. Your sister is going to be beside him when I find her”

Lucy looked into his horrible, pig eyes. At one time, Grady had been a young, greedy man. He grew into a malignant virus killing anyone he came into contact with. “Meg loved Tom.”

“Yeah, well, Tom loved that bitch too. He loved her until she gut him. I want her, Luc. I want her now. You’re her big sister. She won’t run too far from your skirts.” The time was coming. She could see it in his eyes. It always came about 15 minutes into their talking. “Old man Snaith in the back?”

“Yes,” she lied.

“Good, I like when he hears you cry.” It was a diabolic comment. Worst part about it, Grady was no demon. He didn’t have the muster to be originally cruel. He only played the part of a real bad man. He was a big fish that thought himself a shark, and enjoyed biting littler fish. It was only a matter of time before that little fish either bled to death or tried to bite back. So far, they’d all bled to death.

It began with a slap across the face. Two months ago, he knocked out her right canine with a close roundhouse. This time, his broad hand left pain from her chin/nose clear to her ear. She stumbled backwards onto the ground, sprawling in a nightmarish reality. She wasn’t certain which way was up. Her senses spun. Some deep, primordial side of her told her pass out. Then, in a ringing moment of what any narrator would call an ‘epiphany’, a great intellectual side urged action. It was no moment speaking to her gender, her nationality, or even the greater meaning of life; it was only a moment when an animal was whipped into either submission or rancor. For Lucy, this was a moment of rancor.

After what happen next, we may rhetorically ask ourself whether it was will or chance which set her feet upon her path? Perhaps, we could say fate slid that cooking knife into her hands. Perhaps it was chance that gave an edge to her heated fury. Let us be empirical. When Grady sought to mount his beaten steed, he found a quirky warmth under his chin. So quick did Lucy strike, that Grady had but a moment to feebly grasp his sated throat. Sharp and quick, it severed clean through the jugular, the carotid artery, trachea, esophagus, and any other poor biological thing which found itself in the way of poignant vengeance. It was not a death worthy of such a cruel monster, but it was a death non-the-less. Even the narrator does not know what ramped, vagrant thoughts shot through his cooling conscious, but he fell silently to the floor. In short, Grady fell to the floor a worthless man in life and death.

Lucy did not shake, as we could imagine she might. Nor did she look at the bloody knife as she threw it unconsciously aside. Instead, she washed her hands, as she might have washed away fish scales or pig’s blood. She adjusted her dress; she smoothed the wrinkles gently from her apron. Then, with a cool cup of herbal tea, she waited for Grady’s goons. They’d be there soon enough. She expected, in what might have been her only moment of clairvoyance, that one day one of them would come here with too much Grady in his blood. Either way, that was days off and she didn’t plan on living her life a waitress in a town complacent to their foolish lusts in natural life.

 

On a small road a small ways away, a wanderer and his dog meandered a darkened world’s graying paths. If you asked me, I’d say he felt a lil’ lighter in step. Completely coincidental, I’m sure, but lighter anyway.