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Synergy Writing Contest ~ Fiction Entry

Travel Log: The Way, The Waters, and The Little Man

Note: 43 (78) Nothing under heaven is softer or weaker than water, and yet nothing is better for attacking what is hard and strong because of its immutability.

- Lao Tzu

On the trembling road-

toward a bridge of toppled towers slain for their prone and gracious length over the precipitous gorge we traveled. Kupe left an eye on deck for the great serpent and we found his cornea flaccid in the new day, waiting in thirst for our swaddlings of fresh water having seen nothing in the vast darkness. That was all necessary for those of us staring intently on the horizon, for those abandoned to the desperation of the quest. Like Kupe's disgorged pupil, our gaze shared no vision and our tales fed the future leading our imagination toward the clouds. We sailed on with sour foreheads, our limbs weathered to scraps of drift wood, tired sinews in the scouring sunlight.

A small man in a precarious, small craft arrived with molars torn from the most wild beasts and he assured us that our ingenuity and fierceness would sustain or tribe. Still, his skill was rather an impetuous burden of a persnickety eye for sharp, shiny, or intricate little things and we could award him no medals for prophesy. The decorated armament he donned was nothing but the ragged rubbish of a touchy-feely drifter of the large waterways where ships, having capsized upon the reefs, deposited their fleshy infantry to the porcelain knives of a sloshing Erebus.

Stagnant in the doldrums, vapid on the sheen of a placated Leviathan I pictured this dingy, this desiccated codger, and a net full of refuse, the old man's gums mirroring the reef with an almost vibrant parade of decay. What a face to stare upon. This geezer face that sneered as the earth's terrain does, revealing its gapping mouth of serrated teeth, and here we are always looking for the gold fillings. Adventurous dolts all we are--sea worthy sots lost in the winds of our own dreams, and caught in the perils of our fantasies. Nothing else would do.

A clochard sleeps, feet wrapped in news-paper. A crumple caption reads, "Investers Put Stock In Nihilism!" A bar of light falls over the mans forehead as the day begins. He dreams, still.

Walking slowly over the gray tundra up from the play ground having climbed each step with that moist, cold hand rail slipping through the cylinder of my stiff hand, my mom and I looked into the dark clouds as they past before us with a theatrical blackness, revealing the sun coquettishly with slippery quickness. The house soon offered itself like a closet of delicious smells.

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