Escape to the Stars

I’ve run from you throughout ages and times uncounted. How you’ve persisted. We’ve found the edge of the world now, and there’s no place more to flee.

His eyes are the unchanged eyes I’ve always known. In whatever form he takes, whatever color they change to, they’re so cold, like touching steel on a winter’s morning, and that telltale glint of sickly yellow that he can never quite get rid of. In his passions, always yellow, and like now, in this uninhabited wasteland, with no one to fool, a blazing, bleeding yellow. His bloody tears fall, unstopped, red life bound in viscous walls of sallow pus. How they sizzle in the snow.

He is like a man now, but hoary, covered with thick, wild, white fur, with long, massive arms that end in bearlike claws. A giant. He will not speak to me. Language for him is only ever a tool to manipulate others. We are long passed talking now.

The winds are howling, and I doubt we’d even hear each other if we tried for one last, hopeless reconciliation. Such things were tried at the beginning of the world, when the song was new and we were wild with the unbearable intensity of existence, had not learned yet how to deal with our own creation, what has become to us both only pain. Oh! to hear that melody again! for things to be made right! but God’s voice has grown so quiet.

We have wandered so far…

Backing up another step, I feel the icy ledge give way and my foot sink down toward the depthless depth below. With the freedom of the hopeless, I take my eye from the pursuer to glance into the waiting chasm. There, the howling madness of the lost twirl in their mindless circuits over a darkness that has never known light.

I feel so small. The earth rumbles, and I know my old friend has taken the advantage I just gave him. I look up to find him running, full tilt, his mouth widening, bigger and bigger, new, curved fangs, sprouting and filling the walls of his emptiness, hooks ready to grasp and devour.

I throw myself into the air. Leaping backwards, I fall toward the great, uncreation as the mouth of hell races toward me. The ledge I was on, all ice, all brittle ice, breaks and shatters under his stomping feet, while I begin, once more, a transformation, a final transformation.  

There’s too much of me to fly if I hold onto what I was, and so I let it fall, like a lizard losing its tail. The feathered form bursts from what was my chest as my old flesh falls away like ashes in the whipping winds.

Below, the pursuer tries to change, mimicking one of those great, flapping lizards that had died out before man learned to write in the very dust he was formed of. Too big, too slow. He’s caught in the flood of the damned, sinking under that great current of forgotten souls, while my wings stretch over the belching heat of hell.

Rising, rising, rising, faster than a dream, an albatross sails into the stars.

And if you enjoyed that story, it and fourteen others can be found in my book: