The Yahara Journal 2020 edition

FIGS AND WASPS Holly Brissette

The world moves like the hands of a clock, rotating slightly in a darkened room, abandoned. Of course it wasn’t always like this, and that is to say the world was not an empty vessel of lava stretching under its crust. No the world was busy and bustling, but the world in its room was still forgotten and avoided.

Long ago, when the world was the center of the universe and the center of gods’ attention, there was a man. A man I call him, when he was more than such. A beast, perhaps, the essence of life. Yes once something painfully human and achingly not. Doomed by his own kin to live, to love, to suffer, to live, then die, over and over again.

The man who was not, who is not a man in the moment I speak of. His body shook and ached, his fingers danced shakily reaching needily for a bottle or two that lay abandoned after a sort of abuse. His fingers brushed the bottle before the comprehension that the cold smooth surface was just the medicine he had been looking for. His hand came alight and wrapped around the bottle bringing it to his lips, only to revel in the bitterness not of tongue but the taste most foul of the disappointment of finding his bottle emptier than him. Aeris, for that was his name, carelessly let the bottle drop onto the wood floors beneath him and his bed where it slipped just underneath, glittering in the light of the fire like the eyes of a cat waiting for feet to appear in view.

Aeris found himself completely purposeless, he was alone, helpless, and most importantly alone. An uncomfortable awareness to be surrounded by nothing but yourself, its own underneath in the world above. And above him he couldn’t help but see something, two somethings, in the rafters glittering like rubies. Aeris almost cared enough to investigate it further, but he needed a drink, he needed it like oil needs water.

He strapped on his boots and shuffled outside, pausing at the door. His hair stood on end, and before he could stop himself he turned and glanced into his empty abode. The warm fire flickered welcomingly, and the inside of the hutch seemed much less foreboding than the moist, foggy and cold air outside. Before Aeris blinked he found something amiss. A sense of foreboding wrapped over his shoulders like a thin cape fighting to stay against the wind. Then his door slammed shut and he let the thought close with it, he didn’t want to remind himself of the 9