Semi-Random Reflections

Read time: 3 min.

An excerpt from my work-in-progress novel The Song and the Tempest.

Whisps of blue vapor still coming off Nasrin coalesce behind Jonah, forming Julrane’s outline. The outline places her hands on Jonah’s shoulders. Julrane’s voice whispers, “Time for my part.”

The rain turns into sapphire again. The drops that hit Jonah soak into her clothes and skin. The sapphire draws a cold, pale slime out of her skin and washes off the residue. The drops ring with ancient wails of their own that go quiet as the slime dissolves in the sapphire and turns back to clear water. Weeds spring up on the ground where that water drops.

Sapphire runs into Jonah’s eyes. Through a blue film, Jonah sees tree limbs forming cage bars around her. She sits in the Tree’s canopy, feeling her legs sink into the bark, compressed on all sides and unraveled. Her hair rises to make new tree limbs. Almond blossoms sprout out of her mouth. She feels intense pinches all around her outstretched body. Pieces pop off, but she can still feel through them. She envisions layer upon layer of miniscule spheres with air all around them, nearly bursting as their contests struggle against their thin skins.

She recognizes the Tree’s cave. She also recognizes the Javanese marauders with their swords raised.

One of her tiny bodies gets severed from the others. She feels the squeeze as that external organ bursts, like someone stomping her toe. From that squashed mole grows another body, increasing in weight, pulling more and more energy, till all she can remember being is an unset jelly without a mold. She knows what mold she’ll get. The pressure of that mold’s confines feels like suffocation in a coffin made of dry ice.

Lightning strikes her back. Julrane’s voice screams.

Puppet strings spear her sides and make her dance. The strings pull her into the water and slam her against coral walls. The sensations she feels create images in her mind. Her hands pull her waterwheel plants off her wall. They tear her emerald tablets. She gets swallowed by person after person after person. Her rooms become dust muddying the water. It mingles with her body and chokes her as though she tried to swallow. She would will those chalk particles to reassemble themselves if she were not pulled back into an icy coffin.

Julrane whispers in Jonah’s ear. “Let me see them feel this.”

Jonah’s eyes catch fire. Julrane feels herself become an expanding burning ball. She feels wind constantly flowing into her body the way water used to flow between her gills, drawing nourishment from every gust. She’s a mass of brilliant waves, every single cell of her corporeal form dancing with all the merriment of a drunken minstrel.

The sailors stand before her. She can smell oil burning. Dark orange leashes billowing black smoke flare from her wrists. The leashes weave their way through the sailors’ ears, in one and out the other. She sees the flashes as their brains fry like several little eruptions. The sizzling gives her tingles. She pulls the leashes. The zombies all kneel. She flicks them into the dark of space and lets the leash go.

The sapphire rain in Jonah’s eyes fizzes and pops. Two teardrop-shaped jewels fall from Jonah’s face as her vision clears.

“Thank you,” Julrane says, “but we can do better now.”