Troped » Able

Color Crone

Troped — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 23:19:11 +0000

Slowly, in time, he reaches the figure. She does not look up as he comes toward her. Huddled in a tattered and dark red cape, she is grasping a sharpened bone and shoving it into the ground and dragging dirt away. She has removed all the tablet shards and incunabula from a small circle and is digging in the dirt underneath. Able cannot fathom why but he smiles. “Hello,” he says.

“Hmph.”

“You’re digging in the dirt.”

And so she continues.

“Why?”

“Did you know that Jupiter ate one of his children?”

“No.”

“Yes. Levy. Jupiter’s son the shoemaker, Levy. He ate him whole.”

“I know that Jupiter’s father wanted to eat his children,” Able says helpfully.

She stops digging and looks at him with surprise. “You knew that, did you?”

“Yes.”

“Levy. Jupiter swallowed him whole because he could not bare the embarrassment of having such a plain child as a shoemaker when all his other creations were so glorious.”

“Venus,” Able says and nods.

The old woman furrows her brow and concentrates. “Yes. Venus was one of his more beautiful creations. But how do you feel about him eating Levy?”

“That seems sad.”

“Does it? You are a child of Jupiter. You are! For he fathered all things. And he wants all things to be good. So why shouldn’t he devour a son who chooses to waste the gift of his being on something as lowly and mundane as shoemaking?”

“Mundane means simple,” Able answers.

“That’s your answer?”

“I think shoemaking could be lovely. Especially if you made the shoes out of neat things that you could find—colorful things.”

The woman cackles. “Colorful things! My aren’t you something.” She slowly raises herself up off the ground and holds out her hand for summoning and support. “Come with me, my color-adled friend. I will show you something.”

For Just A Moment, Beyond the Radiowaves

Troped — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 10:15:17 +0000

Able locks the door to his tiny room. He sits on the floor, the only other option being the bed, and takes off his shoes, one with a much thicker sole than the other. He rubs his crippled foot tenderly and closes his eyes. What are you dreaming Able? Most of the time he sees the color white. He dreams of swimming in a sea of white like milk—not the gray syrup that they drink but a much brighter color. He cannot see it but he knows it is there. He knows it is there because there are other colors he has seen, colors that no one knows about.

He looks carefully around and listens for a moment. His father has by now sat himself in the chair in the living room and will remain there until dark, contemplating his curses. So Able reaches under his bed and removes a linen pillow case. One by one he removes his brightly colored mistakes. They are orange and green and violet and pink and as he squeezes each one with love they variously spin, bounce or roll about the floor, bumping into the walls of the tiny room.

Holding his knees to his chest he watches the brightly colored mistakes bound about him. He smiles and closes his eyes and tries to dream of swimming in white, nothing but white—and for just a moment he is far beyond the radiowaves.

The View From Able’s Mesa

Troped — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 10:22:45 +0000

The mesa is singular. It dominates the landscape like a termite mound. For miles around it is the only structure aside from a decrepit and bony hand reaching up thirty-five feet from the ground ten miles north. East, also approximately ten miles, sometimes then running against the dun colored and wavy, wavy sunrises, through clouds of dust, shifts the silhouette of the skin traders’ insect caravans, slow, rumbling, and multi-legged. He will sit and watch the shattered land from here until he hears his father calling out for his brother. His father never calls for him. But still, just the same, he will go home.

Gimp

Troped — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 09:05:02 +0000

Able’s father comes in from the fields spiritually depressed but stubbornly content as usual. He is a large, hard man with a square face and a beard like a Josiah. Removing his wide brim hat and coat, he hangs them on a hook by the door and bends down to struggle with his heavy, black boots.

Standing by the furnace, Able had been watching the dull-gray fire passionlessly consume a new ashen log when his father had entered. He quietly starts to slip out of the room.

“Where is that useless gimp brother of yours?”

Able stops for a moment in the crooked door frame before realizing that his father had thought he was speaking to his brother. He hangs his head and shuffles away.

Lost in Memories Behind Closed Eyes

Troped — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 07:00:32 +0000

She lay buried among the dedicated pumps, perhaps in a tattered and gray linen nightgown, though Able is not sure since he can not see her from where he stands. The little accordion towers surrounding her move asynchronously up and down with tiny huffs and sucking sounds. The small back room is a miniature city skyline, almost entirely filled with tubes and pipes and dirty glass huddled in around the park, the valley that must be where her body lay… perhaps on the small, rotting mattress. Only a single window, high up on the rickety wall allows in any light, and only a breakfast-tea-colored light pushes through the twin filters of dirt and fingerprints on the inside and gray restless dust outside.

Able shifts his weight in the doorway and hears the tired floorboards beneath him creak, their mourning disturbingly louder than his own. His is lost in confusion. He holds his hands uselessly at his side. Then clasped behind his back. Then at his side—watching as the pumps rise and fall, his eyes moving from cylinder to cylinder as each one reaches a peak, seems to hold its breath, puffs and slides down. Falling in a stacatto shuddering, the paper lungs huff dust off into the air in snowy spirals where the tired light captures and frames each tiny particle’s Brownian dance, the bludgeoning of a thousand tiny, invisible fists. Able feels each molecule of pollutant travel up his nose and down his dry throat into his crusted lungs. He closes his eyes and takes a moment to miss her. He travels backwards. Lost in memories behind closed eyes now, he looks up from the floor, playing with bits of rock, to see her looking at him with that familiar perplexed look on her face, wondering at the measure of her own oddity in him. But then, as always she smiles and pats him on the head, the sun behind her silhouette then yellow and streaming. Able opens his eyes to the room, filled with colors like mold, mildew, rot, and is not sure why he remembers the sunlight ever being yellow.

Outside dust devils come to rattle the window and pay their respects with obsidian-eyed sorrow. The land is gray and covered with strewn speeches, arguments, stone artifacts chilsed with law and the broken tablets of theorems. Only a few hundred yards away from Able’s father’s pathetic shack is a shallow grave that Able’s brother has dug. Two rotted pieces of lumber, tied with twine, claw their way up from the scrabbly rock.