Lake - NaNo 3

i

It began like I always thought that it would, but perhaps just a little more pain. It's difficult to imagine what pain lies in wait for you. The mind's funny like that. You know something is going to be arduous, you know something will be traumatic, both physically and mentally, and you think you've fortified yourself. You think you have steeled the will, that you are prepared.

You are not prepared.

I thought I was prepared.

I was, in a way. But the pain. That pain that I sort of knew would be there, that would be running through my nervous system like electric water. I couldn't prepare myself for that.

When I was just a boy – around five or six years old – my father took me down by the streams. This was long ago, way back before they descent. Way back before the ascension. Back when there were streams, when the water actually flowed. Can you imagine that? Can you recall? I can't really, only a little, but it hurts when I do. Same for all of us. But the pain back then. I recall the pain. Why I cannot recall that pain and apply it to a potential future I do not know. The brain is capable of so much, but not that.

The streams were fast flowing and the grilles were yet to be pulled into position, they were empty. This was around two weeks before the years first transition and no fish would be caught for a few weeks yet. They were hanging high above the stream, heavy dark iron things suspended in mid air by chains thicker than my legs. Thicker than one of my fathers legs, and how I marveled at his limbs. I idolised him. I was just a boy. He was strong, powerful and tall. I wanted to be like him when I grew up. I wanted to be him. No one was stronger than my daddy. My father. He was old though, even back then. He was old, gray and broken. Still powerful, that never left him – that strength that he held in his eyes even as his body had relinquished itself unto time.

I wait for time now.

Under the grilles was a concrete walkway held high over the water. I am not entirely sure as to the function of the grilles other than to stem the flow of fish during the second and fourth transitions. There is so much that has been lost. Lost to time.

Time again, that unseen nemesis of us all.

I wish I could remember more.

We had to get to the other side, to move on to the other streams. There was urgency about my father, and I asked frequently as to the whereabouts of my mother but it was a question that remained unanswered.

“Where is she?” I would ask, as he held my hand as we descended the shingles and moss down towards the first stream, the walkway at that time of year only feet above the surging water. The wind was high and the grilles swayed to and fro, the chains creaking as dying beasts. It was cold. I was cold. I did not show it to him. I asked again, and again. At first I thought that he had not heard me, that the wind had greedily snatched the words from my mouth and cast them into the ether. So I spoke louder, until he winced visibly. We were down by the first of the streams then. The biggest one, the grilles almost overhead. Massive, dark and foreboding. The creak was louder. The throes of industrial death. He turned and faced me suddenly, kneeling down and bringing his face close to mine. His steel gray eyes boring holes through my small skull, an organic drill set to the music of a decaying world.

“Do not ask me again.” He whispered. I shouldn't have been able to hear him but I did. I did as he asked.

My father stood suddenly, turning and looking around. Back up the hill from where we had come then over the streams, towards the skyline of ragged buildings cast stark black against the gray sky. The rotten teeth of the city towards that which we were headed.

The sky was as his eyes.

Cold steel.

I remember now, with the benefit of my years, the expression that was etched into my father's heavily creased face. At first I thought that it was concern, for the light was falling in the sky, the diffuse orb of our sun descending slowly towards those rotten teeth, to be devoured until it was darkness. It was close but we still had some hours yet. I wanted in my youth to tell him. To reassure him of the hours surely remaining to us, and I opened my mouth

WHERE IS MY MOTHER

to tell him. To reassure him. He would look to me and smile, to see me as a man, not a boy. I would dispel his concern.

It wasn't concern. I see that now. His face against the back of my eyes. Those same weathered lines matching my own in the reflection of the still waters. I see it in my own face. Fear. One pure and unpolluted emotion rendered from forehead to chin. He was afraid, my father, he was afraid.

He dragged me towards the walkway. I was afraid of the grilles, they hung low and swayed in a wide arc. The iron chains protested loudly, louder than the rushing waters below. Louder than my own heart. Louder than my labored breathing. We had run for some time. I stumbled, my clumsy feet catching on a large piece of slate, my foot going under and it's ragged edge digging into my shin, through the light metal guards around my legs and into the tender part just above my ankle. I went down hard then, my hand slipping from his as I fell. I wasn't quick in my early years, I couldn't bring my arms into position fast enough to protect myself and I landed hard on the broken slate and shards of glass that made up the bank of the stream. The pain went through me, my hands impaled on shattered glass.

Not that pain. That pain was nothing. Yet even then it was an awakening, and prompted an instantaneous advancing of my years. I was a boy still, but in my head I was older, wiser, all from that pain. There is not a single better education than pain. They know this, and they apply this principle. They apply it like master artist would apply a paint to canvas. That is all we are to them.

A canvas.

Only if that artist was to loathe and lust after that canvas equally, perhaps then the metaphor stands. He wishes to craft and destroy in equal measure. To lovingly create upon the material whilst simultaneously denying it what it is and forming something new from the destruction he brings to it.

The pain.

Yes the pain was merely a taste. Had I known it then I would have perhaps been a little more canny in my vocalisation of my hurt. I am embarrassed now, looking back, to how I was in those moments. he turned to see me folded in agony, my hands held to my weak breast, my eyes wet and flowing as the stream flowed behind and below my father. The teeth beyond that still eagerly anticipating the sun. I almost saw the saliva build between the darkened husks.

“Get up.” He urged, his voice still barely above a whisper but – like before – I heard him regardless. The expression was unchanged. Devoid of any sympathy, or empathy. I had to get up. To do as he said.

I got up, I was shivering. I was young still. A tender boy. I didn't understand.

I am not sure yet if I do, but I know more now.

I wish I didn't.

I got up. I reached out for his hand and he took it, prompting my love for him to momentarily eclipse my pain. I idolised him again then. He pulled me to him and kissed me gently on my head, the lightest of touches. He whispered something else then, something that I didn't hear and god damn me the one thing I wish I had heard most of all. I have fantasied, fixated upon those unheard words since. The words that wind still holds for all I know, never to return them to me. Yet those words are all I want now, especially here. Here where I feel like that boy once more.

We were to make our way across the narrow walkway, across the surging stream. There were many beyond this. Many streams, many walkways. The rest were devoid of their grilles. Only this one, the first, still had them. How effective they were my father did not know (I would listen to him and my mother talk at night when I should have slept, their voices comforting) but he was glad at least some streams still had them. They were the most effective means of controlling the fish. Apparently.

The walkway. We were halfway across before I fully realised where we were, momentarily made drunk with the pain in my hands. When it had subsided to become a mere dull ache, clarity gripped me once more and I saw that he had hauled me over more then half of the span. We had traveled fully one and a half grilles from the southern bank and were directly underneath the large central grille which was suspended low above us. A dark moon of rust. It swung low and the wind had picked up further. I was worried then, worry beyond pain, for my father was distracted and he moved quicker than he had before. My hands were slick with blood and I struggled to keep a firm hold of his hand, pulling free on more than one occasion, blindly reaching for him each time I did so. Still his pace did not slow nor did he falter, yet he looked behind more. I didn't understand. I looked to him and I looked up at the low dark moon above and I didn't understand. Perhaps I should have glanced back, but what would I have seen? I can guess now, but back then I was not ready for such a thing. None of us were, and that was the problem.

But then we shouldn't have been there should we?

We shouldn't be here.

The wind threatened to cast me into the water below as easily as it had stolen those words from the mouth of my father moments before, but that was not the worst of it. For the low dark moon above move closer with a suddenness that put a jolt of fear through my body and rooted me to the spot. With an almighty scream of metal, the dark moon began to pull free of it's restraints, aided by the fierce wind. A crack like thunder brought one of the chains away from it's mooring high up in the parallel concrete causeway a kilometer above and whipping furiously towards us.

I don't think I can remember much more from then on. The remains of that day is a stranger to me, as alien as the sound of my own voice would soon become once I had been through aural castration.

But the pain. I remember the pain. Moreso I cannot recall what became of my father. I remember the fall, the water, the near-drowning. I remember washed ashore, the iron through my torso. I remember the recovery and flashes of what was between. Anguish.

But I cannot remember my father.

Had I lost him then or was that after?

I would recall but not yet. I was undergoing a process. I couldn't think clearly.

That pain. I could have applied my memory of that pain with what I knew would befall me if our plan failed. Something that I think each of the eight of us in turn knew would happen. Perhaps we wanted it to fail, sick as we were of resisting the irresistible. At least I could have prepared myself, but no. The memory of pain is all it will be. A forgotten echo of the real thing. Scars that will never heal are all we have to remind us of what we endured. Perhaps, just perhaps if we could remember succinctly that which would bring the strongest of men to his knees. Perhaps our future actions would be altered.

We would still be here though. There was no choice in that. Where else would we go?

There were two descents. I would tell you of both in time. If I would be allowed. But not yet, for here the door opens and they enter. Two of them.

I can hear them ticking, they remind me of the clocks in my father's workshop.

But I still can't remember what became of my father.