Two Tides

LL and I were at breakfast, early into the 10am range in the Industrial School’s second floor cafeteria, right on the lip of the skypillar. We laughed and talked over plastic trays, consuming without eating, our pancakes and sausages. We hadn’t aged a day. Business was going smoothly as usual in the calm of late June. Both of us were artists now, taking new paths that had forked together and brought us here. The other two were tugging at the sides. Neither of us paid much attention.

Perhaps I preferred it, but that doesn’t blunt the disappointment of wandering the library in solitude. It was raining hard and driving, the storms fading in and out in irregular intervals, wet grey bursts against the brick walls and brown carpeting as I studied these scrolls. I left some senses of time back there, but made it out eventually, with only a little of someone else’s money wasted.

LL and I drove down the hill, enmired in deep, humorous conversation that neither of us could grasp direct words of. We exhaled a cloud together, an effervescent grey mist that hung still to bathe us, a connection beyond any ability to convey exact wordage. We were on business, of some kind, coming down the hill from the Facility’s long glass and drywall corridors, abstractions in briefcases clicking heels down off-white ramps and beige lobbies. The truck - or it might have been my car - drove itself, with me at the wheel, in routes we both knew well by heart. We disembarked at the White Park, still in joy, holding hands, in spirit, if not physically. Weighing almost nothing in a clear blue sky that opened up right to the heavens, the sun shown onto us before the statue, golden love empowering us before the white concrete, performing to the core of the brutalist curves.

My wife and I had left that morning, in deep conversation to think out the problems of the day as we kept a brisk pace of speech through the tangled web of the interior city. In the lineage of LL, I couldn’t help but see her face as we considered the possibilities and options. Memory and alien artefacts were stacked up as a library, as a labyrinth, a city of nothing but alleys and fire escapes and rooftop bridges. We darted across, holding hands, securing a bond, energies and tensions coiling around our joined wrists. Someone had been impersonating her, some ungodly Matriarch ensnaring and seducing, from some unholy lineage that threw LL so far out in the first place. LL was long gone now, but it was taking everything to resist the wickedness of the Matriarch from influencing our carefully rambling path.

Several weeks ago, a messenger was shot dead. The briefcase was still cuffed to his wrist and that’s what set it off - the diseased hordes couldn’t resist and he fell face first in a downtown puddle, the shots still echoing around the forty story canyon as the crowd retreated back into hell’s darkness.

My wife and I overlooked the strands of winds, twin tidal currents blowing across the endless ocean of dunes. We sipped our coffee, sitting cross legged atop the smooth stone tower, watching the paths blow together, past the same horizon to radically different ends of the beyond. We were about to fly and one was in our direction. It was the one I had chosen when I chose her over the Matriarch, it was one I had been on with her before it all started.

He hung from the ceiling fan, swaying in lazy circles, feet tracing paths of sigils and rituals copied verbatim from whatever sourcebook he had read last. He was going to meet her, she who had been so loyal. Past him, the wind whipped through the open windows of the apartment - free to move with his soul out of the way.

Water and wind cut away the banks of the canyon, rocks smoothed out to make our path as we flew along her wind. Kali danced in a million tiny iterations with each pass, particles torn away to the tune of our mantras. The mother would guide us down time, the great Way carved out of sand and stone.