Shadows Slither Pass

The wails followed, but there was no source anymore. Only a dark whirling cloud of owls. In between the cries, their winging silent, like stillness descending in horror. And amidst a slight brief deadpan, a great voice shrieked, drawing up an insidious dust that blurred the senses as it proclaimed the unbearable inevitable:

You suckled onto all silver ladles,
Deprived every soul as you drained the land,
Not even the might of Aethelesar,
Lashed underneath his flaming rock of rust,
Condemned to ail on hell’s ashes, was just.
Lost bones, half-soot-and-death, all uncluttered,
Valleys shook yet your soul stood, unfeathered.

Might! Damn you!
(it grew lower, menacing, elemental)
Might! Thrash you
Into the void of oblivious peril!

(an owl dove and turned into a many headed feral,
wings part of the sand, one eye floating glanced,
conscious’d terror in the mortal’s wan)
Will you ever see beyond this (offered hand)?

He cannot fathom the hand. It looks exactly like his own, every vein and curved bone; why it appears to be so inviting. He raised his arm in a slow controlled gesture under his nose, inspecting it for delusion.’ How could I have committed all of these atrocities?! And whose voice is this? Why does it speak of retribution, yet embodies such a horrific scene?’ It was all too confusing, he didn’t know why or where he was, and the suffering world around him was wailing, and all he knew was he was for blaming. The outreached hand in front of him mirrored his fears and reeked of surreal deceit. All the evidences were loud and clear, but nothing made any sense. No gut feelings arose, time seemed to march with the clouds, the voice had a distinct coarse authority that made it clomp and hurl dirt with the sand.

What morbid horrors had plunged his most personal thoughts so much, that amassed such unsightly scenes? Running from the mysterious vog all day long, he knew what it had come to be. There was a long red trail that followed from behind the owl and puddled under his own feet. Whatever ideas and images foretold to him in this moorish world should come to dissipate. So he plummeted unmercifully at his bleeding feet and found that not one of his toes were in pain. He toiled in the dust, and quickly, just before the terror had come to slyly fain, he grappled his right foot and pushed it entirely as he could into his mouth. The eye that was erratically ogling swelled. He clutched his jaw, but the foot bore as if a cake, and his teeth gnashed and gushed of blood that tainted his eyes and the whole world a-glazed red, then slowly faded to pink, and faded until nothing was left but omniscient white.

He awoke from the shambles of what could have only been the collective nightmares of the desert. It was a dark room, and he laid there nursing his heart and unraveling the symbols of the beastly vision.

‘It was all just a dream!’ his words echoed unfashionably into the void.

As the summer days approached, so did the delirium; it was work, a lot of work, a lot of equations and numbers being demystified to his general public. But as soon as June came to pass, Mr. Carl Lauie lost most of his students.

For the third year now, he has associated summer with a dread that is most synonymous with things being cut off from grace. His attitude certainly became of one that is fallen. He had come to question whether his deteriorating faith was of survival or ENVY, as he hoped that more of his students would fail their high school maths just so that more would retake the exams again in the summer, so to request his tutoring during the lost months. However, the ones who did, he was upset with; months long private tutoring had gone to waste. It wasn’t about the money, that, he needed pretty hard. No matter how much he saved or learned how to minimize his expenses, life always made sure that he was on the brinks of unpaid bills by August. When students failed, he had always questioned whether it was a product of his own experimental techniques or simply the dumb-wittedness of his students; sitting lazy-eyed, gobbling in his gestures while the simplifications hit their faces flat and shrill.

When he was younger, he had relayed on his imaginative worlds and playful nature to excite his knowledge of numbers. Swirls, shapes, and fascinating numerical patterns saw that the sluggish sweaty summers of Pearlock were of apt fascination. Carl was two mood-ed, and Pearlock was two seasoned. It was only appropriate for the two to dance out-of-sync; whenever summer came around, Carl stumbled hard before the crowds; his schoolmates saw to the beach with a smile brighter than the sun, and back home, his family planned all kinds of beach festivities, even the weekly gatherings were relocated to Uncle Carson’s beach house. Carl never saw the point of driving 2 hours back and forth every Friday to go to the beach when one can be found only 10 minutes round their home. It was these unrequited opinions of what constituted Pearlockian amusements, and his peculiar interests that had fanned him away from social circles during both seasons. For when the cool clouds began to roll in and conciliate petty burning grounds, Carl saw to outdoor adventures that were themed, yet, looked chromatically absurd from the outside.

He had his own worlds and this kept him company for as long as summer lasted. By the end of it, he would go back to school with all sorts of inspired ideas and stories, mostly revolving around the artisans of numbers than the art itself. In sixth grade, Carl wouldn’t stop talking about farm life and stars. There was a solar eclipse just before school was out the previous term, and it had ignited within him an interest in all maths astronomical. Enter Benjamin Banneker. 11 year old Carl was exhilarated about the mathematical foretelling of future eclipses. He noted as many down on a farm themed calendar that he picked out after four hours of driving around half of Pearlock’s stationaries. Banneker was a farmer. “Do you hear the singing?” Carl would ask with wide ears and wider eyes, “The beautiful rhythms of their buzzing!?” Banneker observed cicadas. And so on. In seventh grade music, a stark veinless teacher had failed to convey the colorful maths of sounds. Carl was made to play the triangle for the end term concert. The mathematical consequence was eighth grade Pythagorean cults; Carl would avoid all bean foods in the cafeteria and preach of the horrors that befell those who stepped on cracked surfaces. Carl was weird like that. And each new school season brought with it a weirder Carl, filled with numerous fanaticisms.

This was how he approached everything, whether serious or recreational. His lifestyle was married into this sense of playfulness. Waking up in the morning, getting ready for work, and preparing coffee was all an adventure of its own. It was only ideal to incorporate these diversions in his tutoring methodologies, and his students found the subject to be more interesting this way and went from; “What is the use of maths in the real world?” to “Lauie,” he disliked mister, “Last week I baked the perfect bread by ratio-ing the amount of…”

“Do you mean portioning?” he cut her off as he does everyone.

“Uhh.. portioning how much flour, yeast, and sugar I used based on the golden ratio.”

“Yes, its a delicious ratio,” he cracked a smug smile, “I’d like me some of that next time please, maybe make it a cake.” He had a staggeringly rude appetite for sweets.

Or, “Lauie, every painting I look at now I see numbers popping up in all the shapes and angles.”

“Yes, well crafted aesthetics speak in numerical beauties.” He often enjoyed ‘elevating notions’, is what he called it.

Even the most uninteresting of kids were allured, “Lau,” they lazily called him, “Yesterday mom kept walking back and forth and pausing at multiples of 12 steps, it was like…”

“Is everything okay at home Jamie?”
“I think so, why do you ask?”

“Your mom was pacing at night, don’t you think it was a sign of stress?’

“Don’t think so Lau, she does that often, I think she just likes to put in a few steps before bedtime,” the drowsy-eyed kid said with the most expressionless face.

“I see, and when she was taking her pauses,” Carl was as nosey as he was imaginative, “was it by any chance at the window?”

“Yeah, how’d you know?!”

“Adults do that to take a breather, gives them a sense of the outside.” It wasn’t his place to raise these children emotionally. He liked to extract info but not to phase in a solution, it was a one-sided passionate collection of gossip.