Anew
Day
by
Claude Lalumière
The woman grows aware that she is hearing
voices. She looks at her surroundings. Shafts of moonlight,
straying in between the crooked planks of wood, intrude upon the
darkness. The shack —
little more than a roof over her head
—
has no windows, and the door is a slab of wood covering the
entrance. There's no furniture, not even a bed
—
only a bucket
for peeing and shitting. She knows that the bucket has been
regularly emptied and cleaned by demons, who feed on its
contents.
She is startled by this knowledge and struggles to remember what
else she knows.
But the confinement rattles her concentration. The walls close
in on her with every heartbeat. She's afraid to leave her
confines, but she doesn't know why.
Despite her reservations, she shoves the door aside and steps
out.
The moon, low on the horizon, is nearly full. The colour of the
clear sky
—
a dark blue radiating a subtle aura of amber
—
hints at dawn's slow approach. Uncommonly for the time of day,
there are people everywhere on the streets of Urrago.
Urrago.
She struggles to remember other names.
She notes that her shack rests near the edge of town, near the
mouth of a large boulevard. Just as she begins to wonder at the
absence of demons — usually zipping back and forth at great
speed through the city streets, so fast they are nearly
imperceptible
— she is swept along by the movement of the
crowd, heading out of Urrago, towards the desert.
No-one pays any attention to her, but she overhears snippets of
conversation. She is not so debilitated as
to fail to recognize
the irony of the circumstance. She has regained consciousness on
the early morning of Winter Festival. The day of death.
And then she remembers.
She remembers three boys, from a time before the shack. Her
sons? Their faces vanish too quickly, and then the memory of
them also vanishes completely, as other memories flood her
consciousness.
As she follows the crowd towards Winter Festival, she remembers
everything about life in Urrago: the commerce, the festivals,
the demons, the river, the wildlife, the food ... But not
herself in it, no names,
no more faces.
She stares at the faces around her. None look familiar.
The people of Urrago are all walking to Winter Festival. Death
fascinates everyone. They will see their neighbours die: the
old, the unbearably sick, and any who yearn for the oblivion of
demonfire. And those the demons choose to offer to their god.
The Festival is a long event, starting at sun-up and going well
into the night.
There are no demons in Urrago because they are at the arena,
preparing.
She thinks about the stench of the demons, and she gets a whiff
of her own odour. She doesn't know how long she was holed up in
that shack, but she recalls that the rebirth ritual habitually
lasts a whole season, sometimes even up to three. Not having
washed that whole time, she's as smelly as a demon herself. She
wonders how people can stand being so close to her.
The crowd slows. She looks ahead and sees people entering the
arena, including people coming from other directions, from other
towns
—
from Vodel
and Rypole and Burlee.
And then she stops, frightened. She can't bear the thought of
attending, of having to witness a day
full of death.
She tries to escape the flow of the crowd, but, this close to
the arena, people are packed densely together. She feels the
urge to scream, but the last thing she wants is to draw
attention to herself.
She plants her feet firmly in the sand and resists
the push of
the crowd. Then, when she feels strong enough, she slowly winds
her way out of this mess
of moving bodies.
When the crowd gets thin enough, she orients herself and walks
back, ignoring the stares of those who are no doubt wondering
why she's heading away from the arena.
By the time she makes it back to Urrago, it is fully dawn. She
stops in front of her shack.
Her memories of her time in there are blurry. She concentrates
and tries to remember anything and to hold on to what emerges.
She has vague recollections of waking up, of hugging herself, of
singing to herself, of furtively pulling inside food that was
left outside by the door. She can't be sure. How can
she tell
facts from dreams and delusions?
Then she remembers erecting this shack, preparing to withdraw
from the world; although the structure she remembers building
was not as shoddy as what she now sees.
She had been determined and driven when she built this shack.
She'd salvaged and carted stones, tools, wood, and straw from
wherever she could find them. She built the thing in only two
days. She'd enjoyed the work. It had strained her muscles. It
had made her sweat. Her work completed, she had entered the
shack, pulled the door shut, curled up on the ground with her
knees pressed against her stomach, and fallen asleep.
Yes, she remembers all that. And she thinks,
And I am
—
It confuses her that she doesn't know how to finish that
sentence. She remembers no-one, not even herself. How long did
she hide in here?
Judging from the state of her hair and nails, she estimates that
she spent perhaps two seasons in that shack. She sniffs
—
and
smells herself.
Time for a bath,
she thinks. She walks away from the shack and deeper into the
city, heading towards the Vysang river.
Urrago is quiet, deserted. No people. No demons. There aren't
even any animals around.
She is comforted by the familiarity of Urrago. There is the
tavern. Here is an inn. There is the clown guild. And this big
house is a commune where children and mothers live as one big
family, regardless of kinship. She can visualize all of these
places, their interiors, their moods. But details such as
people's names or specific events she took part in
—
she can't
call up any of that.
When she hears the young boy's anxious shouts, it comes to her
that, for some time now, a woman's screams have been prodding
the edge of her awareness.
In the distance, on the city's periphery, where the boulevard
opens wide into the desert, she sees a woman, wavy hair down to
her waist, running and stumbling on her long dress, her arms
flailing in the air. She can't distinguish the woman's features,
but she can hear her loud screams and imagines the grimace on
her face.
The boy, too young and short-legged to be able to catch up to
the woman despite her stumblings, is yelling repeatedly in a
tearful, frightened voice: "Mother!"
She stands motionless as the woman's flight takes the pair of
them away from the range of her vision. The sound of them
recedes a short time later. They'd come from Winter Festival.
Whose death are they fleeing?
She is surprised to hear herself whisper, "I need..." She
doesn't know what comes after these two simple words, beyond her
obvious need for a bath —
but she yearns for something not
quite so simple. She runs her hands through her hair. Sighing at
the oily tangles, she figures that a bath will have to do for
now.
Finally nearing the Vysang, she admires the intricate structure
of the bridge. She finds the doorway that leads to the baths,
which are housed underneath the bridge. The doorframe is
decorated with carvings depicting the whale dragons that roam
the oceans, interspersed with painted illustrations of the demon
god Yamesh-Lot, he who lurks in the bowels of the world.
The staircase is dim, almost frighteningly so. Groping the
walls, the woman goes down the short flight of stairs.
She reaches the baths. The only light is provided by occasional
openings in the ceiling. The fires that usually keep the air
inside the baths' walls warm regardless of season or weather
have been doused.
It is one of the demons' duties to tend them.
She is startled, though not alarmed, to find that she is not
alone. A gaunt old man sits, naked, on a large rock, his feet
resting in shallow water. He's extremely tall, with long white
hair and whiskers. He looks like a disproportionate and hirsute
skeleton. He acknowledges her presence with a subtle nod.
She takes off her filthy robe and lowers herself into the water.
The extreme cold is a welcome shock. The current filters through
her tangled hair, kneads her limbs, teasingly brushes her vulva.
She delights in reacquainting herself with these simple
sensations. With her teeth, she trims her water-softened nails
and luxuriates in the feeling of relief with which that simple
act fills her. She stays in the water a long time, until she
feels refreshed, cleansed.
She climbs out of the river. She stretches, relearning her
muscles and joints, when the old man speaks. "You're quite young
to feel so blasé about death."
She laughs. "I've just spent a long time dying. I think I've had
enough of it for a while. There'll be other Festivals."
He grunts. They both sit in silence for a while.
She asks him, "Do you know who I am?"
"I know who you were."
She nods. "That's more than I know. I don't even know my name."
"For you, the past is irrelevant. You shouldn't dwell on its
absence. You're not that old yet; enjoy the new future you've
given yourself."
Again, she nods, knowing that he's right. Or else she would not
have undergone rebirth. She knows that it's never a decision
taken lightly. There's a taboo against divulging a reborn's
past, against compromising their new identity. There's so much
she wants to ask this man. She breathes out, trying to let the
questions seep out of her, trying to let go of the need for
them.
Again, the reborn woman and the old man sit in silence, until he
says, "Do you like 'Medra'?"
"What do you mean?"
He says, "As a name. Medra. I like that name. Someone I loved
very much was called that."
"Was that my name?"
He looks at her when he answers, holding his face steady with a
visible effort. "No."
Inwardly, she chides herself for asking such a question. "It's a
beautiful name," she says, closing
her eyes.
"It's yours now, if you want." He smiles shyly.
She replies, almost too quickly, "Thank you."
He shivers and coughs, looking weak and tired.
Again, a long silence.
Eventually, she asks,"Why aren't you at the
Festival?"
"I'm afraid you've come to the wrong place to escape death.
That's what I'm doing. Dying. I don't like the crowds."
She clears her throat. "Should I leave?"
"You're not a crowd." He smiles. She smiles back. They both
burst out laughing. His laughter changes abruptly into deep,
hoarse coughs. He slips and loses his balance. With difficulty,
he pushes himself back into a sitting position. His eyes are
closed. His breathing is wheezy and erratic.
She stands up, goes to sit next to him, and nuzzles her face
against his chest, not quite crying. He puts a shaking arm
around her shoulder. His chest hair tickles her nose, but she
suppresses the urge to giggle; instead, she hugs him tighter.
Before long, the man wets himself and dies. She disentangles
herself. She takes the corpse in her
arms and holds it.
She sits like that for a long while, shedding no more than a few
tears, until finally her limbs grow numb.
She washes the corpse. And then bathes again, briefly.
Only scant illumination filters in through the ceiling when she
steps out of the water. She doesn't bother dressing; not only is
her robe too filthy, but it represents a period of her life that
is now over. Instead, she wraps it around the corpse.
She carries the dead man in her arms. More than once, she
scrapes her skin against stone as she climbs the unlit staircase
to the outside. The pain makes her feel strong.
It is already dusk. The days are short at this time
of year.
Goosebumps cover the skin of her legs and arms. The briskness of
the air makes her vividly aware of the heat of her own body, and
she relishes that sensation: the warmth of her blood, of her
chest, of her gut, of her cunt, of her hands and feet.
The city is still deserted and will stay so until
Festival's
end. There are now dogs and cats in the streets. She even sees
some rodents scurrying, trying not to attract the attention of
their predators. When she reaches the shack, she steps inside.
She lays the corpse down on the floor, in the corner where she
remembers sleeping. She loosens the robe, so as to look a the
body one last time.
Then, after foraging through a few shops to find matches, she
sets fire to the shack.
The old man escaped the crowds, his flesh consumed not by
demonic flame but by a more private conflagration.
She stands outside, listening to the crackles of the burning
shack, smelling the fire, staring into the flames, letting the
heat caress her naked skin.
Medra thinks,
Soon people will return.
Claude
Lalumière's latest anthology is
Lust for Life: Tales of Sex & Love
(Véhicule Press, 2006), coedited with Elise Moser.
In
2005, his fiction appeared in Tesseracts 9, The Best
of SDO, The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 4, and
SciFiction.
AT notes: I posted an appreciation
here for one of Claude's recent stories, but what I said
there is true about everything I've read of Claude's. I'm no
reviewer, but perhaps I should say here a bit more about
why I like Claude's stories so
much.
I love the way he
subsumes his ego so well that one forgets he exists. He always
has something to say; his empathies are keen, as keen as his
observations. His style also changes to fit the story he is
telling. To this reader who faints at the sight of a dissected
story, that's as far as I Iike to look. I
just know I've loved every story I've read of Claude's, and I've
written to him over the years to make sure I get to read
them all.
Based in Montreal, Claude
Lalumière blogs at
lostpagesfoundpages.blogspot.com.
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