Shreds of Paper

Written Words:

                                     [u]Kitten[/u]

“It’s a difficult thing to believe in,” Lee says. The wind picks up and blows his hair over his eyes. He shakes his head, runs his fingers through to the back of his skull, the dyed-blue strands following obediently to each side of his face. But the wind picks back up and his hair raises and swirls in every direction in violent cirlces and a break in the breeze allows it to drop harmoniously back in his face. The air inside a canyon is never still; like a vacuum is follows along the rock walls only to come back again. He is cold. He sighs as Krista stares at him through squared spectacles. He only shakes it away. The sight is still magnificent.

“What is?” Krista asks. She stands a foot behind him, as seemed fitting, peering her blue, curious, constantly working and troubled eyes into his. Her long, curly red hair is pulled back into two braided pig tails. Two dimples appear in her rounded cheeks as she pulls her lips together. His face is stoic, his eyes vacant. She brushes along his side and lays her head on his shoulder, sliding an arm round his waist. She scratches her nails into his flesh. He winces but places his arm round her, thumb massaging her neck, four fingers pressed across her throat. She curls herself into it. She is a kitten. Her neck is open to him. They both stare in silence at the sight before them. The slight whistle of the never-ending breeze, the cool, rushing sounds of the river, the onslaught of sensations causing an unconscious reappraisal of …

“Heaven,” he tells her. “It is a difficult thing to believe in.”

She feigns weak laughter that collapses to a dramatic whimper and she presses her face into his chest. She drags her nose up and kisses his collar, wrapping both arms around him. She is warm; he closes his eyes. She pulls skin into her mouth then squeezes gently her teeth. He lets his head drop to the side. He runs a hand over her hair, intricately woven. Shr drags her tongue up and to the very tip of his chin and he turns his head upward, exposing his neck. With a dramatic pause she casts a sly glance at his face and places a kiss on his cleft chin. A brightness causes his eyes to flutter open and thick, white clouds stare at him before a vast, blue sky. She makes her way to his earlobe. He feels his way through her hair to her braids. She bites his ear. A large cloud, with the sun lurking behind, is stained a deep orange. He grasps her braids in a fist and thrusts her head back. She acts confused; he stares in silence, looks past her. Green bunches of trees and bushes sway together far beneath them. His pupils soften and his temples lighten. But his hair is blown in circles over his face again, and Krista’s eyes narrow and she giggles to herself. He looks her stern in the face then drops her braids, resting his eyes back in the distance. She squeals and slaps her palm between his legs, squeezing what she finds there. His gaze falters and becomes intense, but it forces his pupils to relax again. She rubs it a moment; he says nothing. The kitten can play as she wants.

“It’s not hard,” she says, letting go. She turns and walks along the rock. Thet stand in a crevice of the canyon, the sandstone rock bumpy and jagged but still even, creating a ledge that descends a few meters over, down and inwards, deeper into the wall of the rock. Krista traces her finger along this wall as she walks. She shakes her hips at him, her eyes on the ground. He casts his eyes away. Above him is the vast, blue sky, behind is the cold, indifferent rock. Three hundred feet down a river is passing through. “Once you realize that it’s there, you feel stupid for ever not knowing, for ever doubting.”

The words dance from her lips and are swept away and presented to Lee. He turns and follows her lead, watching her ever step. The trail narrows, becomes more jagged the further she goes. She talks as she walks.

“There are times you know what to believe. And then there are times when you just know. Say, it’s been a long day, so you go out walking. And you walk and you walk and you walk. You stare at the stars, the constellations. Those balls of light that are the suns of other galaxies, that are stronger, in fact, than our own sun. At the moon. You listen to the wind. You place your hand upon the breast of nature. You feel it’s heart beating. You feel your heart beating. You know that it’s heart beats through you.” Her voice trails off and she is silent. Lee hears her speaking but is not listening, the words only absorbed in him somewhere. His eyes dart warily up and down, scanning the sharp rocks and glancing every second back to Krista. Her finger still drags lazily along the wall.

“And that’s when you realize that nothing matters. None of it. No goals. No ambitions. Nothing of what your dreams have created inside your head. Because they’re not for it. They’re for us. And when you realize what you can’t do is when you realize what really you can. And that’s when you see the grand light. That’s when you …”

She turns and looks at him curiously. He stops. The wind catches her braids and flings them before her. She scans his face, her eyes hazy like she’s looking through him. Then they snap into focus and look him dead-on. She speaks quietly.

“That’s when you find heaven.”

His lips seal together; his brow comes down. Her face wrinkles, searching his face for something she’s not finding.

“You can’t see?” she says, and her eyes grow wide and grasp everything. “The unimportance of things. The supreme randomness of our lives. The incestuous love we have with this nature. Can’t you see that?”

Lee steps forward. “But what you want us to do …” She looks at him critically for a moment, his weight on one hip, arms dangling to each side, shoulders hunched forward, all the expressions of a young, hard-nosed dog etched across his face. She twists her eyebrows, turns and walks delicately towards the edge. He’s close behind her, staring. They near the open air and nothing but a foot of grounding separates them from the edge. The river in full view, a strong current pulls deep blue water downstream, past bulging rocks and ancient tree remains causing white foams that disappear and reappear further down. The river twinkles with blinding white stars of reflected sunlight off each ripple.

“You know in a billion years, all the water on Earth will boil?” Krista says. Lee sighs and hangs his head, then peers up through the tops of his eyelids.

“No,” he says.

“The average life-span for a species is 4.5 million years. Life on Earth altogether has existed for four billion years. In one billion the water boils. That’s four-fifths. The life-span of living organisms is 80% used up.” She leans a hair further forward, her eyes absorbed in the river below.

“Do you know what would happen if I jumped right now? I’d die. Immediately. Blood would seep from my skin, fuse with the water. Fish would breathe in through their gills. My skin would dissolve, leaving clumps of fatty pink tissue that would form 'round the edges and frogs would poke their eyes through to see. My organs would feed entire colonies of ants. My hair would skim across the top and be carried off by a bird to make a nest for her young. Something could lay it’s eggs in my skull and I’d hatch it’s offsping in my eardum.”

Lee interrupts: “What’s you point?”

She smiles. “That all who enter this river would taste my blood upon their lips.”

Lee wathes a fish break the surface, leaving a circular ripple that stretches into more ripples that float downstream and dissolve. “Couldn’t you be buried in a casket, like everybody else?”

“A mere fancy,” she says. “Making us believe we’re above the soils of the Earth, while six feet under.”

Lee sighs, impatient. “Well what difference does this make? Really? And what would we be then?”

She squirms with delight and jumps backwards, turning and hopping along her chosen path. He makes to grab her but misses and chases behind, stumbling with sneakers the same rocks she glides over heels bare. She yells behind her.

“We’ll just be,” she yells into the wind. “What we were at first and what we always really will be.”

The edge is a meter away; the wall of the rock a meter the other way. She giggles, overjoyed. He rushes behind; his foot is lodged between two rocks and he thrusts it loose from his wedged shoe and chases on. The wind blows hard and pushes them toward the wall and they both duck their heads and hold an arm to it as they run. He’s close behind her and she pants noisily, her eyes aglow and she sees her designated spot and stops and turns. Lee slows, his nostrils flared, and she takes a step back to coax him on but the wind takes her momentum against her and she trips over a rock and stumbles over the rock floor which seems to disapear beneath her and she sees only the far rock then trees then the river and her head falls forward and the wind consumes her belly but Lee rushes forward and grasps her arms and flings her back onto the ledge and into his arms. The clasp tight and fall against the rock.

They breathe hard. They don’t move. She sits stunned and stares before her, at what was almost her death. She almost died. She can hear no thoughts, like a gray slate wiped through her mind and everything is slow motion. Her ears ring and the breeze takes on a menacing quality, cutting against her face and stinging her eyes but she can’t close them.

Lee looks her over, dazed, sees the girl lock her knees to her chest and knows that she was almost gone, forever, that he would’ve had to watch her fall, hundreds of feet, screaming, kicking through the air, to watch her die, and he’d be left alone. He grabs her tight and wraps his arms around her, his head bowed against her ear, holding her against him just as much to feel her warmth as to deny the canyon her life.

He blinks his eyes, calms his breathing and tilts his head back. She still stares. He has to break the silence.

“You were saying?” he jokes.

“I was saying …” she starts immediately, as if waiting for it. She’d replayed the whole thing in her head. Her reasoning for bringing him here. Her reasons for coaxing him, for running from him, for introducing him to this place. Her reasoning was going to get her killed.

“What we were originally. Before all these …” she brings her fingertips to her temples and seems to measure something: “Complications.”

He’s relieved at hearing her voice but its tone leaves a dull ache inside his chest and he searches across the canyon to the shadows of the far rock. She feels his heartbeat reverberate against her spine and his uneasy breaths. She wraps her arms round his, pulling them tight to her breast. Her head lay on his shoulder.

“Look around you.” She nods forward. “In the midst of all this randomness, and the lack of meaning that surrounds it all, and at the absolute peak of our own lives, we have the chance to do something truly great. No more following orders. Those of nature or of ourselves. No more time. Time doesn’t exist here. Nothing you thought once mattered exists here. You exist. I exist. This air and this breeze exists. It talks to us, caresses our bodies and …” she stretches into him and purrs softly, “carries forth our thoughts. Our dreams. Desires. It makes love to us.” She interlocks her fingers into his.

“And we can make love to it,” she continues. “This view before us, it is the soul of that glorious creature that is nature. It knows what is and what is to be, and all of that regardless of us. Of the meanings we attach to it. Of the images created and projected from inside our heads that we look for out here, but don’t find. So we waste our lives. We chase whispers. And we condemn the soul, our soul. Because in the end it lives. And because in the end we die.”

She takes a deep breath. “Don’t you see what we can do here? It’s beautiful. Can’t you see?”

She shakes softly against him; her jaw shivers. For once she is cold. He exhales through his nose; she feels it warm against he neck. He waits for more, but there is only silence. Finally he speaks.

“But couldn’t they … co-exist?”

She sniffs her nose, blinks hard and swallows. She looks at her feet.

“No,” she says. Her bare toes bend down like she’s trying to grip the air. “One always cancels the other out.”

His eyes dart about. “Then sometimes we win, right? If ‘one’ always cancels the ‘other’ then sometimes we …”

“No,” she says again. “We destroy ourselves in the process.”

His eyes scan the canyon, searching for a way out. “Are there ever any exceptions?”

“No.” She closes her eyes. “Not for me.”

“But …”

“Illusions,” she says, waving her hand. “Delusions now. Now that we know.”

“But,” he says again. His eyes scan frantically the canyon. “Is there any … can’t there …”

He pulls her head close and examines her face. “Don’t you have any …”

He looks from eye to eye, feeling the way within himself for the word. He can’t feel it but somewhere his brain brushes past something similar and latches on and spits it out before it’s gone.

“Hope?” he chokes out at last.

Her eyes haven’t moved, don’t move, don’t twitch, staring deep into him as if to his very depths. They reach in and grip his insides, flow as blood through his body, dig deep, search ever crevice and core. He can’t breathe. The oxygen sucked from his veins. He tries again to remember the word for her, but can’t. Can’t remember the meaning of the word. Their locked forever; he suffocates inside and blinks.

Her eyes collapse to the floor. She is weak, pale, like something inside her has died. She looks him fearfully, trembling, back in the eye; her lips quiver.

“No hope.”

Her blue eyes gloss over; the unborn tears reflect the sky back into her eyes. He watches it twitter. A tear drips and runs down the bridge of her nose. It nudges her cheek and is absorbed in her lips. She turns them inward, face steady, tasting the salt upon her tongue. He gaze stays on his eyes, drops down scans the rest of his face, then she casts her head slowly back in the direction of the sight. She speaks. Her words are cold, dead things, things that come of pure necessity. Yet they contain in them more hope than anything Lee has ever heard.

“Can you see?”

Her face is turned into the vast canyon. He can only see the outline of her nose against her round cheeks, her tight, pouty chin and the slender curve of her neck. Her eyes squeeze shut and eyelashes flutter. She is listening. She can crumble. He can move mountains with his next words. He can kill or be killed. He can give birth, he can raise the dead, he can fall in love, and he can shatter this girl before him. He has played his part well.

But he has been moved. For she has played her part well as well. He can see.

“I can see,” he says.

Her jaw falters and her eyes peak open, bouncing unsteady before her. She doesn’t move. His eyes grow large, drawing in the encompassing air and river and rock, and canyon where they all meet to judge and decide fates. They gather, multiply, loom over him, weigh on his senses and he’s trapped within himself. He feels small. He feels that Krista is small. He feels that all of humanity is small. He doesn’t trust his skin, or his eyes, or his muscles or bone. His breath feels icy inside his lungs. His blood freezes solid and his brain is in shock and he rises up, out of himself, through the air and beyond the canyon and into the sky where he looks down to see the Earth is in motion, the stars are aligned, the animals feed of the greens and the greens allow them to breathe and everything functions just fine but somewhere there are creatures huddled in a canyon shivering in the warm sunlight because they are small and because their dreams, being so large, had led them astray.

“I see everything.”

It was but a whisper but Krista turns and clutches his neck to hers. Tears stroll down her cheeks. His eyes haven’t moved. They’re placed in the far distance, far enough that his brain can’t reach. His body is numb. Krista whispers into his ear.

“Is it beautiful?”

The words and meaning formulate in his head but he knows not what she’s speaking of. She clutches him tighter, her teeth chattering.

“Say yes,” she tells him.

He feels her hearts beat through her temple, hears the million ideas running rampant through her.

“Yes?” he says. He meets his temple to hers.

“Yes,” she says, digging her nails into his back.

His eyes stumble in the distance, waiting for her brain to slow down, for the million ideas to converge to one, so she can rest, but they don’t, and he knows that they never will. He sees that they can now make amends for what their brains have done.

“Yes,” he tells her. “It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

He reaches one dazed arm to her back. She reaches and runs her hand through his hair. He does the same. His fingers feel their way through to her braids and he tugs gently but lets them slide through, intricately woven. And then she pulls him away from her and plants her lips to his. She pushes, presses hard against him. He does the same and they’re locked still, eyes closed, feeling the breath of the other against their cheek. She releases and hangs her head before his face. His nose is large before her; he can only see through to the tops of her eyelids. She pants.

“Do you wanna do it?”

He bends and looks for her eye which stumbles meekly about his face and avoids eye contact. He grabs her cheeks in his palms and thrusts her lips back to his and they breathe hard and feel eachothers bodies. They tear eachothers shirts off. Something tells him this must be done quickly, as somewhere his brain is thinking thoughts of why she’d refuse to look him in the eye. They lift themselves awkwardly, refusing to part lips, unbuckling buckles and stripping legs from their pants. They stand stomachs touching and slowly strip their underwear. She smiles and he smiles and he lifts her by the waist and places himself into her. Neither says a word.

Before them, the jagged rock descends down and in. Along the canyon wall rocks spurt out and other ledges are formed, but where they stand is a straight shot to the bottom, where the river runs through. And on each side of the river are grassy embankments and beyond these are trees and bushes and birds.

Krista throws her head back, exhilarated. Both their heads turn to the skies where most the clouds are stringing like silk across the sky and the sun is just peaking out into the day. Dawn turns to high noon. Their faces glisten with sweat. They grind deeper, watching the clouds dissemble, crossing their eyes. Krista’s head lolls in a circle and she breathes into his ear.

“You ready?” she says.

He nods; their rhythm slows.

Lining the parallel cliffs, cut short and shaped by the river, the canyon walls stretch their arms into the blue sky, creating a haven. Birds chirp, an owl hoots, fish swim, a deer nestles in the brush. Lizards crawl the jagged walls.

He carries her stepping backward to the wall of the canyon where she leans forward, her breasts pressing his face, and pushes hard against the wall and he runs forward and kicks the rock at ledges end and sails them through the air. The sacrifice of both brain and body to the eternal soul. They fall, drift, sway through the air, flapping themselves against the other. The blue sky swirls with red rock and green trees then rock again and everything spirals together, blurring their vision. But they don’t look, instead feel eachother; they pull, scrape, dig their nails, thrust hard, squeeze and rotate and feel the wind swarming their skin as they descend farther and Lee’s face is drawn tight because he feels a tingling that’s about to erupt and Krista yells into his ear hope wasn’t the word. His tongue is caught in the back of his throat and he looks at her puzzled and she yells louder hope wasn’t the meaning either. He pumps again and mouths what? but she pulls him deep and he explodes and she releases and their bodies clenched together she howls, their eyes stoned like mad wolves, paralyzed and rotating and clutching tight she moans and bites his neck and whispers heaven. Her outstretched tongue goes inside his ear: you wanted to know if I knew for sure if there’s a heaven or not. His cheeks waver and dyed-blue strands swarm before his eyes but he looks for her face and yells well? but she arches her back and spreads her arms, relaxing her body, and the colors swirl faster now, only the sky is further and the river closer and the red rock is closing round and he’s hunched tight against her limp body and he looks for her face through his blowing hair and makes out a very distant, very thin red smile creep upon her lips and he studies it a moment, perplexed, and they crash into the river.