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- Story Listed as: Fiction For Adults
- Theme: Fairy Tales & Fantasy
- Subject: Fairy Tale / Folk Tale
- Published: 10/12/2016
The backwoods were said to hold a sun deep in their mist. A great molten sphere among dewy leaves that pulsated with remembrance, and a resonance that ran through the roots and the leaves. In the dark often coyotes would stumble upon it and stare, and they did now know what they saw.
They watched the pulsating cocoon until finally the mothers picked up their cubs and took them away, out of the radiance. But deep in their primal hearts these raw dogs felt that the sun held more than the forest. That their lives could have been best spent knelt before the sun and panting dark and deep for the honey to spill onto their tongues.
They lacked the words with which to speak. They lived their lives and their hunts and their ruts without the words in their minds to think. There was something in the fading sun that they lacked, and they needed.
And they died, and their bones decorated the forest floor, and the great fish beasts of the nearby swamps would crawl up soaked in slime to chew on the stringy meat of coyote bones. Their great lips would stretch past their beaks and suck marrow on the shores.
They were considered monsters, as their breasts heaved in the mud and their eyes rolled back and they rested in packs slicked in dark and black. In the mist they spoke in simple clicks, their tongues crackling with rhyme and their webbed feet digging deep into worms and lifting them up to their faces.
The coyotes did not drink from those swamps. They receded deep into their holes. Great mounds of dirt were filled with holes, the nests of wild dogs, bee hives covered in leaves where light cascaded past the walls of the forest branches. These hives were a network of burrows, great paths carved through dirt and rocks, where star-nosed moles were torn up from their small caves and beaten and eaten by coyotes underground.
The coyote hive led to springs beneath the Earth, offshoots of the sea, traces of water running along rock at the bottommost layers, a feeding trough, a dozen coyotes lined up in the dark and licking up fresh water off the slick, clean stones.
From the sea came the swamps, and the streams, and the life of the coastal forest.
In the sea a moon levitated in the depths, above trenches, among giant squids, a great black moon sat in the center of the sea where the sunlight did not filter through.
This moon was home to a great silver crab who lived inside and fed off its bacteria. A unique luminescent mold, the crab consumed it until it made life inside her and sprayed young silver crabs across the surface of the moon.
Now that mother crab has died, but the undersea moon shines bright with the flesh of her children. They cover its surface and feed upon the mold that regrows as the sea water impregnates the rock of the moon, and the salt seeps into the moon’s womb and fills it with life.
The crabs crawl along the surface and speak a foreign tongue. They whisper to one another, with their little eyes and their tiny pincers.
“Do you know where we are?”
A little crab shakes its head. “We are in outer space. It is a land filled with stars.”
The first crab looks down. “Where have the other stars gone?”
“We cannot see them because we are so small. Our planet is small.”
The first crab nods. “Okay. And the beasts who drift by?”
“They are the old Gods. The things with the great big eyes and all those legs, they watch over us. They do not eat us because they are our guardians. They have swam through space for eternity. They are each a thousand years old. I see them sometimes in my dreams, and I think they respect our light. Our shining bodies give them hope. We feed the souls of the old Gods by composing…a shining star.”
The first crab moves its little pincers anxiously. “B-but I don’t get it, why are we so special if we’re so small?”
A great shelled beast drifted by in the dark waters.
“You missed it! Mommy told me before you were born. She told all of us, about the Gods, and the stars. We don’t leave our planet because there’s an atmosphere, you see! There’s gravity! If we ever left we wouldn’t be able to breathe, and there wouldn’t be any food.
“If you were a little older you’d know!”
The little crab didn’t sleep for two days after that. He became frustrated, and mad.
“It’s not that I’m young. I’m smarter than that doofus…”
He shook his little head.
“I know he’s wrong about all this. There aren’t any other stars out there, I can’t see them! If we’re surrounded by Gods I should be able to see them!
BWAH!”
The little crab one day moved to the lowest point of the moon. Where the water pushed the hardest on his back, and felt nice, like moving through honey. It took him a day to move along the surface of the moon, looking down into the dark, and the deep.
“If there really is gravity here I’ll jump…
I’ll jump and if I can’t make it, so be it!”
The little crab shoved with his feet off the moon, and to his surprise he began to drift around.
“I’ve done it! I’ve done it!”
His silver brethren all stared, and watched, and cried out:
“Look at him! Look at him, he is floating!”
The little crab wiggled his legs and laughed as he drifted away from the moon, sinking in the water, broken from the spell.
He was ecstatic, his eyes seeing dark, and the white moon that became smaller and smaller as he sank and faded into the deep.
And then he began to frown, and wiggled frantically, and felt lost.
He drifted through the sea until his legs pressed against a great rock floor, and he was burning. He winced as his legs were scorched, and he looked down and saw little volcanoes, a million of them all around, a hotbed of coals scorching the water and burning him alive.
He cried out for help but he could barely see the moon.
He screamed until his little lungs burned in his chest and he was melted upon the surface of the bottom of the sea.
And the next time a crab attempted to leave the black moon, one of the old Gods would reach out a tentacle and grasp it, and return it to the moon. But the little crab who had escaped became a legend, and stories were told of his adventures in outer space, and all the stars and all the places he had seen, in the lands forbidden by the Gods.
He was chosen, they thought, and they spoke of him as a hero.
On the misty shores, miles away from the deepest part of the sea, a young coyote was killed by a trapper.
He had a bedroll on his back and scruff on his chin, a man draped in black and scarves and carrying a bayonet. He was from the city, forty-five miles south, a crystalline metropolis made of silver steel and open windows where sunlight filled the skyscrapers.
His two companions carried guns, and he knelt in the leaves and lamented the coyote’s cry. When it died it sounded as a young girl, and it struck the trapper, and he ran his hand along the coyote’s fur.
“Your pelt,” he muttered to himself. “Will feed two young girls.”
The trappers raised their guns at the mother coyote, who bared her teeth and refused to charge.
The black man on his knees skinned the child silently. It would be sold to the Gucci store, to be worn across the chest. It would cost more than a thousand dollars.
They wandered away as the mist came, and they did not press forward into the heart of the forest, or its sun.
Months later, the underground streams began to dry. The coyotes stared in their tunnels at the rocks, and they pawed at them, and there was only a vague wetness. There was not enough to drink. The sea was cruel.
They turned to the swamps, their only source of water. They left their dirt honeycombs and wandered in packs toward the shores, where the fish beasts the size of oxen sat in mud and their tails swung from side to side in the air.
Their mouths opened agape wide enough to swallow a baby coyote whole. The hard beaks shielded the slimy lips. The teeth could pulverize rock. They could not be fought.
The front sat still as the coyotes watched them, and the beasts watched back. They guarded the water and they waited for their meals to advance.
The coyotes surrendered the swamp. They moved toward the city in search of water, where trappers returned week after week to pick them off. Eventually their paws found sandy shores and they slurped saltwater out of desperation and died.
Eventually the fish crawled out of the water and took over the tunnel of dirt networks. They came wet and slicked with mud and one day the underwater spring surged with water and drowned out all the tunnels.
Flooded, the hive turned to a mud pit, and the fish beasts found a new swamp.
Two swamps sat side by side in the misty forests and the coyotes gradually became extinct, dead in the sand.
A happy homeless man skinned forty of their corpses and became rich.
His fortune gave him a beautiful wife, and two young daughters, and a penthouse mansion.
Years later, every silver crab tried at once to jump from the moon. As one luminiferous being, the surveying squids would be unable to capture them all.
The shining surface of the moon rose and like a massive net it drifted through the sea. The squid made no attempt to save them.
Together, hundreds of tiny crabs drifted through the black water like little shining coins.
“WE’RE DOING IT! WE’RE DOING IT!”
Through space they found no stars, only the same melting floor, and the molten coals, and the volcanoes, and they all died and their bones rendered into ash.
The moon was left black, and it faded in with the water as a blackstar.
The squids abandoned it, and it became just a rock afloat in the center of the sea.
Steaming crab legs and melting faces became the river of white that decorated the volcanic floor, if for only a moment, the red lava streamed with white and silver.
The sun persisted in the mist, unrecognized, unblemished.
A gift, it sat and its radiance was unknown to all.
Its molten metal was found at the bottom of the sea, and in the heart of a coyote.
It was found only by the dead, and the dead kept it.
The trappers expanded their city.
Cancer(Alexander Blum)
The backwoods were said to hold a sun deep in their mist. A great molten sphere among dewy leaves that pulsated with remembrance, and a resonance that ran through the roots and the leaves. In the dark often coyotes would stumble upon it and stare, and they did now know what they saw.
They watched the pulsating cocoon until finally the mothers picked up their cubs and took them away, out of the radiance. But deep in their primal hearts these raw dogs felt that the sun held more than the forest. That their lives could have been best spent knelt before the sun and panting dark and deep for the honey to spill onto their tongues.
They lacked the words with which to speak. They lived their lives and their hunts and their ruts without the words in their minds to think. There was something in the fading sun that they lacked, and they needed.
And they died, and their bones decorated the forest floor, and the great fish beasts of the nearby swamps would crawl up soaked in slime to chew on the stringy meat of coyote bones. Their great lips would stretch past their beaks and suck marrow on the shores.
They were considered monsters, as their breasts heaved in the mud and their eyes rolled back and they rested in packs slicked in dark and black. In the mist they spoke in simple clicks, their tongues crackling with rhyme and their webbed feet digging deep into worms and lifting them up to their faces.
The coyotes did not drink from those swamps. They receded deep into their holes. Great mounds of dirt were filled with holes, the nests of wild dogs, bee hives covered in leaves where light cascaded past the walls of the forest branches. These hives were a network of burrows, great paths carved through dirt and rocks, where star-nosed moles were torn up from their small caves and beaten and eaten by coyotes underground.
The coyote hive led to springs beneath the Earth, offshoots of the sea, traces of water running along rock at the bottommost layers, a feeding trough, a dozen coyotes lined up in the dark and licking up fresh water off the slick, clean stones.
From the sea came the swamps, and the streams, and the life of the coastal forest.
In the sea a moon levitated in the depths, above trenches, among giant squids, a great black moon sat in the center of the sea where the sunlight did not filter through.
This moon was home to a great silver crab who lived inside and fed off its bacteria. A unique luminescent mold, the crab consumed it until it made life inside her and sprayed young silver crabs across the surface of the moon.
Now that mother crab has died, but the undersea moon shines bright with the flesh of her children. They cover its surface and feed upon the mold that regrows as the sea water impregnates the rock of the moon, and the salt seeps into the moon’s womb and fills it with life.
The crabs crawl along the surface and speak a foreign tongue. They whisper to one another, with their little eyes and their tiny pincers.
“Do you know where we are?”
A little crab shakes its head. “We are in outer space. It is a land filled with stars.”
The first crab looks down. “Where have the other stars gone?”
“We cannot see them because we are so small. Our planet is small.”
The first crab nods. “Okay. And the beasts who drift by?”
“They are the old Gods. The things with the great big eyes and all those legs, they watch over us. They do not eat us because they are our guardians. They have swam through space for eternity. They are each a thousand years old. I see them sometimes in my dreams, and I think they respect our light. Our shining bodies give them hope. We feed the souls of the old Gods by composing…a shining star.”
The first crab moves its little pincers anxiously. “B-but I don’t get it, why are we so special if we’re so small?”
A great shelled beast drifted by in the dark waters.
“You missed it! Mommy told me before you were born. She told all of us, about the Gods, and the stars. We don’t leave our planet because there’s an atmosphere, you see! There’s gravity! If we ever left we wouldn’t be able to breathe, and there wouldn’t be any food.
“If you were a little older you’d know!”
The little crab didn’t sleep for two days after that. He became frustrated, and mad.
“It’s not that I’m young. I’m smarter than that doofus…”
He shook his little head.
“I know he’s wrong about all this. There aren’t any other stars out there, I can’t see them! If we’re surrounded by Gods I should be able to see them!
BWAH!”
The little crab one day moved to the lowest point of the moon. Where the water pushed the hardest on his back, and felt nice, like moving through honey. It took him a day to move along the surface of the moon, looking down into the dark, and the deep.
“If there really is gravity here I’ll jump…
I’ll jump and if I can’t make it, so be it!”
The little crab shoved with his feet off the moon, and to his surprise he began to drift around.
“I’ve done it! I’ve done it!”
His silver brethren all stared, and watched, and cried out:
“Look at him! Look at him, he is floating!”
The little crab wiggled his legs and laughed as he drifted away from the moon, sinking in the water, broken from the spell.
He was ecstatic, his eyes seeing dark, and the white moon that became smaller and smaller as he sank and faded into the deep.
And then he began to frown, and wiggled frantically, and felt lost.
He drifted through the sea until his legs pressed against a great rock floor, and he was burning. He winced as his legs were scorched, and he looked down and saw little volcanoes, a million of them all around, a hotbed of coals scorching the water and burning him alive.
He cried out for help but he could barely see the moon.
He screamed until his little lungs burned in his chest and he was melted upon the surface of the bottom of the sea.
And the next time a crab attempted to leave the black moon, one of the old Gods would reach out a tentacle and grasp it, and return it to the moon. But the little crab who had escaped became a legend, and stories were told of his adventures in outer space, and all the stars and all the places he had seen, in the lands forbidden by the Gods.
He was chosen, they thought, and they spoke of him as a hero.
On the misty shores, miles away from the deepest part of the sea, a young coyote was killed by a trapper.
He had a bedroll on his back and scruff on his chin, a man draped in black and scarves and carrying a bayonet. He was from the city, forty-five miles south, a crystalline metropolis made of silver steel and open windows where sunlight filled the skyscrapers.
His two companions carried guns, and he knelt in the leaves and lamented the coyote’s cry. When it died it sounded as a young girl, and it struck the trapper, and he ran his hand along the coyote’s fur.
“Your pelt,” he muttered to himself. “Will feed two young girls.”
The trappers raised their guns at the mother coyote, who bared her teeth and refused to charge.
The black man on his knees skinned the child silently. It would be sold to the Gucci store, to be worn across the chest. It would cost more than a thousand dollars.
They wandered away as the mist came, and they did not press forward into the heart of the forest, or its sun.
Months later, the underground streams began to dry. The coyotes stared in their tunnels at the rocks, and they pawed at them, and there was only a vague wetness. There was not enough to drink. The sea was cruel.
They turned to the swamps, their only source of water. They left their dirt honeycombs and wandered in packs toward the shores, where the fish beasts the size of oxen sat in mud and their tails swung from side to side in the air.
Their mouths opened agape wide enough to swallow a baby coyote whole. The hard beaks shielded the slimy lips. The teeth could pulverize rock. They could not be fought.
The front sat still as the coyotes watched them, and the beasts watched back. They guarded the water and they waited for their meals to advance.
The coyotes surrendered the swamp. They moved toward the city in search of water, where trappers returned week after week to pick them off. Eventually their paws found sandy shores and they slurped saltwater out of desperation and died.
Eventually the fish crawled out of the water and took over the tunnel of dirt networks. They came wet and slicked with mud and one day the underwater spring surged with water and drowned out all the tunnels.
Flooded, the hive turned to a mud pit, and the fish beasts found a new swamp.
Two swamps sat side by side in the misty forests and the coyotes gradually became extinct, dead in the sand.
A happy homeless man skinned forty of their corpses and became rich.
His fortune gave him a beautiful wife, and two young daughters, and a penthouse mansion.
Years later, every silver crab tried at once to jump from the moon. As one luminiferous being, the surveying squids would be unable to capture them all.
The shining surface of the moon rose and like a massive net it drifted through the sea. The squid made no attempt to save them.
Together, hundreds of tiny crabs drifted through the black water like little shining coins.
“WE’RE DOING IT! WE’RE DOING IT!”
Through space they found no stars, only the same melting floor, and the molten coals, and the volcanoes, and they all died and their bones rendered into ash.
The moon was left black, and it faded in with the water as a blackstar.
The squids abandoned it, and it became just a rock afloat in the center of the sea.
Steaming crab legs and melting faces became the river of white that decorated the volcanic floor, if for only a moment, the red lava streamed with white and silver.
The sun persisted in the mist, unrecognized, unblemished.
A gift, it sat and its radiance was unknown to all.
Its molten metal was found at the bottom of the sea, and in the heart of a coyote.
It was found only by the dead, and the dead kept it.
The trappers expanded their city.
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