Allegories of the Tarot (18 page)

“If you can’t, brother, at least give me some time to get
away, a chance to follow my own path.”

Mkai watched
,
breath stuck in
his chest, as Fsol stared at him. He sighed with relief when Fsol’s shoulders
slumped in defeat and he nodded.

“For you, Mkai, for all that we had together I will
wait.” Fsol said quietly. “I can give you two hours to get clear before I have
to report this to Kalia. That should give you a solid head start.”

“Thank you,” Mkai said and embraced his friend, “The
world thanks you for this chance.”

A tear broke free and slid slowly down Mkai’s scaled
cheek as the dagger he had pulled from behind his belt slid between his friend’s
ribs. Fsol stiffened with a gasp and he clutched at Mkai. He stumbled on knees
suddenly gone weak and Mkai caught him before he could fall. He carefully eased
Fsol back onto the couch, the dagger hilt standing up tall, a slight quiver in
it as the skewered heart tried to keep beating.

“I am sorry, brother. More than you can ever understand.
But this is bigger than you and me, more important than either of us. She cannot
win. It would mean the end to everything. And I couldn’t risk it. Be at peace,
and if there exists anything for us after death, wait for me. I doubt I will be
long.”

Tears fell freely as he watched Fsol’s eyes dim. With a
final rattle, he let go and death claimed him. Mkai arranged him on the couch,
refusing to look at his dagger. With two gentle fingers, he closed Fsol’s lids
and rising, quickly gathered together a couple things. Opening the mantle he
gently took out the small doll.

“You will be avenged.
After so long.”
Mkai kissed the doll softly and placed it back into the mantle and closed it
with a click.

***

Two days later found him standing in the shadows of an
alley. His journey had been uneventful until now and his nerves were stretched
thin waiting. He watched As’hame, the angel he had come for, as he worked
through a gang of human thugs. They had come to prey upon a defenseless woman
and the As’rai showed them why it was such a bad idea. Mkai tried to calm his
beating heart. He prayed he’d be allowed to speak and couldn’t help but chuckle
at the thought of a demon praying. The angel sent the last of the thugs running
and Mkai judged it was time to speak.

“You enjoyed that a little much, don’t you think?”

***

Matthew has been obsessed with reading (and writing)
since he could walk. Coming home on the first day of kindergarten mad because
he couldn't read was just the first sign. It has just steadily got worse and
the fascination with creating worlds with words finally exploded. This spring
will see his first book,
In Heaven's
Shadow
, in print. Edited by the fantastic Annetta Ribken, he is quite
excited to share it with the world.

He lives in the Great White North...no not as far as
Edmonton—in Calgary, Alberta Canada. Born and raised (notice the avoidance of
the phrase grew up...) in a small town the move to the big city was a bit of a
shock. He's traveled around a bit and that has helped broaden his experience.
All of which comes out in his writing.

You can find Matthew here:
authorsnotes.ca

***

DEATH

Transformation

By Timothy Bryant Smith

“Rose?”

Rose stirred in her sleep.

“Rose, sweetie, I need you to wake up.”

She cracked one eye open to see her mother leaning over
her.

“Com’n, Rosie…you have to get up.”

Rose
peeked
her eyes open a
little wider this time. Something wasn’t right. Usually, when her mother woke
her up, the first rays of sunlight were already beaming down on her face,
illuminating the walls of her bedroom in the light of daybreak. It was still dark…and
wasn’t it Saturday? No school today, she remembered, why was Momma waking her
up so early in the morning? She muttered something under her breath and turned
over in her bed in protest.

“Rose.
Now.
Momma needs you to
get up and get dressed right now.”

She didn’t sound angry, but she wasn’t kidding around
either.
Momma's voice sounded weird, too; gravelly and
hoarse…stern but somehow sad.
Rose wasn’t sure if she was in trouble or
not.

“What, Momma?” Rose muttered, “What’s going on?”

A drop of liquid splashed down on Rose’s forehead as her
mother stroked her hair. Rose opened her eyes all the way to see her mother’s
face. Even in the dark, with just the hall light shining through the bedroom
door, Rose saw something was wrong. Her mother’s eyes were puffy, her nose red
and raw, her cheeks flushed, and she was fully dressed in her jeans and
favorite Grateful Dead t-shirt.

“It’s your Pee Paw,” Rose’s mom whispered. “We’re going
to go see your Pee Paw.”

They spent the next few minutes getting Rose out of bed
and into some clothes. Rose’s mom packed her toothbrush, a few changes of
clothes, and even grabbed her favorite comic, “V for Vendetta”, to put into the
book bag she toted every day back and forth to her fourth grade class.

Rose knew it was going to be a long trip if they were
going to see Pee Paw. He lived in Tennessee and it was an “all-day-long trip”
in the van before they got to where he lived. Rose didn’t mind the time it
took, though. She loved to see her grandfather during summer vacations and there
were always plenty of cool things Pee Paw would have planned for her when
they’d visit.

Two summers ago, he’d taken Rose hunting for a week in
the woods with nothing more than what they could carry in their backpacks. He’d
taught her how to read a map with a compass, how to make a campfire with a
flint, and how to boil water from the streams to cook with and to drink. He
also taught her the constellations in the night sky while they ate.

Last summer, they tracked a buck in the woods for nearly
two days before they found him munching peacefully on some wet, green grass in
a small lea. When Rose unslung her rifle to take the shot, her Pee Paw quietly
motioned to her to put her gun away. For the next hour Rose watched, crouched
in a thicket, as her grandfather slowly closed the distance between himself and
the buck—about thirty yards—from upwind, in broad daylight, not making so much
as a sound. And when he’d gotten close enough, he smacked the deer on its butt
with his hand.

The buck, instantly terrified, jumped straight into the
air, kicking wildly about, and bolted away into the woods, never to be seen
again. Pee Paw just laughed and laughed as he walked back to where Rose lay in
the woods with her rifle.

“Why didn’t you shoot it, Pee Paw?” Rose asked him,
astonished by what she’d just seen. “Why’d we track him for so long if we
weren’t gonna shoot it?”

Rose’s grandfather looked sternly, but spoke to her in
his gentle way.

”Listen to me, Rose. Any fool can kill something. It
takes no skill to kill,” Pee Paw’s stern gaze dissolved quickly into the
familiar smile Rose knew and loved. “I never said we’d hunt the deer to kill
it. We hunted the deer to remind it of how much its life means. To remind it to
be vigilant, to be aware; to live, fight, make babies, and survive. Yes, we
could have killed it, but by sparing its life that deer now owes us a debt.” He
then smiled slyly. “And one day, that deer now knows, we might come to
collect.”

***

Rose slept most of the way in the back seat of the van.
When she awoke, she saw the sun low in the sky. She counted the road signs for
Knoxville becoming more frequent, and knew they were getting close. Normally
when they went to see Pee Paw they would cross the big bridge over the
Tennessee River. But this time Rose noticed her father turned a different way
when they reached the city. Eventually, her dad pulled into the parking lot of
a big building with lots of windows.

“Aren’t we going to Pee Paw’s cabin?” Rose asked.

Rose’s mother turned around in her seat, drew a deep
breath, and looked at her daughter. “Pee Paw is inside the hospital, Rosie.
There’s something I need to tell you, ok?”

“What is it, Momma?”

“Pee Paw’s heart has been very sick and last night it
stopped working.”

“Is he gonna be ok?”
 
Are we still going to go camping?” Rose asked.

“I don’t think so, sweetie. Pee Paw’s heart has been
sick for a long time and the doctors told us it was time to say goodbye.
”

"Say goodbye?" Rose repeated back to her, not
fully understanding what her Momma was saying.

Rose’s mom drew in a deep breath. She tried to let it
out slowly before answering, but Rosie saw the stoic face she’d kept plastered
on her face all day start to break down.

“Yes, Rosie,” Momma half-sputtered.
Her lips drew tight, her chin started to wrinkle, and tears streamed down her
face. “He is going to pass very soon. So we have to be strong, ok? We have to
not be scared and tell Pee Paw how much we love him.”

***

As they walked into the hospital, Rose and her dad each
held one of her Momma’s hands. Rose’s mom warned her that Pee Paw wasn’t going
to look very good and there would be a lot of machines and tubes. She said it
would make it hard to see him like he used to be…and it was important to try
not to ask too many questions.

They rode in the elevator to the 13th floor. As the
doors slid apart, Rose saw a big desk with nurses and TV monitors. Her nose
wrinkled at the odor of Mr. Clean and band-aids. She saw her Uncle Bishop and
his girlfriend, along with her Aunt Faith, talking to one of the nurses behind
the desk. Rose’s mom and dad hugged everyone and more tears and conversations
followed, conversations Rose didn’t understand. She didn’t care, really. She
just wanted to see her Pee Paw.

A white-haired doctor spoke with the adults as they
walked down the hall to room 13-22, using words like “resuscitate”, and “heroic
measures”. Rose waited patiently with her hand in Momma’s, and remembered not
to ask any questions.

The florescent light tubes in the hall ran the length of
the ceiling in pairs. Rose noticed a couple of bulbs had burnt-out or flickered
on one side or the other. It reminded her of the last night she’d stayed with
Pee Paw the previous summer at his cabin in the woods.

***

She and her grandfather settled into a nightly ritual of
sitting on the porch, Pee Paw with a Pabst Blue Ribbon in one hand, a funny
smelling cigarette in the other. Rose sipped off the cache of Diet Dr. Pepper
Pee Paw procured for her and relentlessly masticated on a piece of venison
jerky he made in his smokehouse out back. They sat in silence for the most part
that last evening, listening to the sounds of the Tennessee summer night. The
pale blue bug zapper occasionally arced off, announcing the introduction of yet
another moth to its sudden and electrified end.

“Why do the moths fly into the light, Pee Paw?”
 
Rose asked. “Don’t they know they’ll die?”

“Because the light calls to them,” her grandfather
answered.

“Aren’t they afraid to die?” Rose said, “Don’t they want
to live?”

“There’s a big difference between being afraid to die
and no longer wanting to live, Rosie. A moth isn’t born a moth, you know. It’s
born a worm.”
 
Pee Paw drew deeply off
his funny smelling cigarette, held his breath for a moment,
then
blew the smoke out into the Tennessee night air before continuing. “It hatches from
an egg attached to a leaf, high in the trees where the light of the sun keeps
it warm, way up in the sky. When the worm hatches, it falls far away from the
light and onto the earth where it lives its life as a sticky, helpless thing.”

“So it has to become a moth to fly back to the light?”
Rose said.

“Yes, but it has a journey to make first before it can
return.”

“I don’t understand," Rose said through a mighty
yawn. Her legs still burned from the trail hike they took earlier that day, but
she loved these talks with Pee Paw.

“After the worm falls from the light, it spends its life
in the cold wet mud looking for food and trying
protect
itself. It has a sad and lonely life. It only knows hunger and helplessness,”
Pee Paw flicked the nub of his rolled cigarette off the end of his porch and
grabbed his beer. “Its life in the mud is hard, full of suffering and danger.
Most worms end up as food for other animals, so worms spend their time digging
deeper and deeper into the mud, into the cold and darkness, hoping to escape
these dangerous things. But the worm can only dig so deep before it grows tired
and weak, so when it is done running from what it fears, it stops and becomes
still.”

“Like it freezes?”

“More like it surrenders, but yeah.”

“What happens?” Rose yawned again. Rose saw her Pee Paw
smiling at her in the dark. She loved hearing his stories, but she was so
tired. The harder she fought to stay awake with him, the sleepier she seemed to
get.

“When the worm finally surrenders to what it fears, and
becomes still in the cold and darkness, it can feel the warmth of the sun
heating it from above. That warmth calls out to the worm and draws it back
towards the warmth and light.”
 

Rose listened to her Pee Paw’s voice as he spoke; steady
and calm—low but with a consistent strangely sad cadence. His eyes searched out
into the darkness of the woods as the words continued to flow from his mouth.
It seemed to Rose as if her Pee Paw was not explaining, but remembering.

“Very few worms make it back to the surface, but those
who make it do so knowing they must strive for the light rather than survive in
the darkness."

“What happens, Pee Paw?” Rose whispered as the sound of
her Pee Paw’s voice lulled her closer to sleep.

“It must climb the great tree from which it fell, Rosie.
The tree that will take it closer to the embrace of the Sun.
When it reaches the top, the worm offers itself to the light.”