solvable? Impulsively, he kissed the hem of Lily’s white dress with trembling lips and told her goodbye. Grabbed his multi-purpose coffee sack, kicked off his shoes for the sake of quiet, and went out.
Typhus’ stunted size gave him the advantage of quiet steps, his bare feet hardly yielding a whisper from the moist codgrass blanketing the threshold to the brackish marsh. The sky was clear that night, moonlight barely trickling through tangled branches of towering cypress and black willow trees, not quite tickling stars. A crisp crush of blackberries beneath Typhus’ feet gave him fair warning of nearby Devil’s Walking Sticks- treacherous growths whose soft leathery leaves masked the presence of thorn-studded branches. The phantom moved ahead evenly without shadow or silhouette, his progress betrayed only by complaint of hard, spiny fruit balls crackling dully beneath his feet, freshly fallen from sweet gum trees that sprouted high above the marsh.
Swamp-muffled moonlight distracted rather than illuminated, so much so that Typhus opted to remove light from the equation altogether; eyes shut tight, he walked on. Removing the want of light allowed a deeper appreciation for information of ear and hand. Typhus moved forward, fingers stretched before him, gently brushing rubbery leaves of unknown plant life. His legs and feet brushed and bumped against hard cypress knees, the height of which indicated how high the waters were prone to rise in a given section of swamp, but also giving some indication of how far he was from home. Nearer the house, the cypress knees were no more than six inches at their tallest-here he noted several in excess of three feet. He soon became concerned as to whether he’d be able to navigate his way back in the dark. Soon the sound of footfalls stopped. Typhus stopped, too.
Quiet.
Would have been perfect quiet if not for the low warble of a hundred lonely bullfrogs, hoping for love and getting none. Typhus waited. Still: No sound beyond that of lovelorn reptiles. With private embarrassment, he realized his eyes were still closed. When he opened them, a gentle illumination in the bog brought him a soft shock. It made no sense. It struck Typhus that this was not light as he understood it.
Light-but not light. That is, it wasn’t so much light as it was a lighter shade of dark. Even this might have made sense had it been a variety of gray (as shadows tend to be)-but this shadow had color. Like fire minus the flicker and crackle; just warm, thick color, lightly painting plants, trees, and saw grass.
Orange. Everything orange.
No sign of the phantom, no sound, no telltale silhouette; nothing. The brightest area of swamp appeared twenty yards or so ahead where cypress knees stretched upwards of four feet. The center.
Center of what? Typhus considered turning back. Didn’t.
As he drew close to the light’s apparent source, the ground became muddier and the desire to inch forward amplified. Typhus’s toes wiggled in the slush, his feet sinking in, then pulling out; the quagmire lightly tugging at the soles of his feet like a living thing. He took another step. Another. And again.
Forwards.
In the swamp of Bayou St. John every inch of terrain is packed with unruly life, every grain of soil nourishing something that insists on being, and thus is, and so grows. This is the way of all wetlands. But the place where Typhus currently found himself didn’t follow these basic rules. Typhus was standing in a clearing-a tacit impossibility where life only competes to push forward, mindlessly crowding in on itself in the name of dumb survival. As his brain struggled to accept the strange reality before him, it dawned on him that the odd light tapered and faded from the spot where he now stood. He was standing at its source.
A lone mosquito-fern drifted nearby, its mossy mats and two-lobed leaves bunched up death-still at the surface of the pool.
Here there was nothing-no sound or sensation, not even of frogs. But there was a certain power in this nothing, a power with no evident bearing on human senses. There was no feeling about it, no feeling at all; just a knowing. But this “knowing” did prod a feeling from Typhus’ chest; a feeling of naked, new wonder.
His feet were submerged, toes squishing in mud. He bent down to dip a finger in. Cool, orange water. Licked his finger. No odd flavor, only the rancid muddy taste of any stale bog. He bent down; inspected the water’s smooth surface carefully by eye before realizing that, although he hadn’t waded further, hadn’t moved at all-somehow the water had crept to his knees. Idle thought: “I’m sinking.”
Sinking.
No matter.
The possibility of his body and soul being consumed by this (
In the water. The water. Water.
But from this purest moment, the worst possible thing happened.
(…)
Lily. Removed from his mind. From his heart and his soul.
If she remained somewhere in his heart, he was simply unaware. She was gone from him now, and he didn’t miss her. Her eyes forgotten, impossible white dress forgotten, Raleigh Rye forgotten, mysterious yellow stain forgotten, hand in a loose fist forgotten, promises made and rewards rendered: forgotten, forgotten, forgotten.
The water was a kind of false light-but not light-and, really, not even water. There was something in it. Something living in it.
Streaks of reddish brown and tiny wisps of pink: jetted and swam, soared then dipped, shot then faltered.
The pinkness was familiar to him, the familiarity a calming thing, the color of rebirth, the color of his babies. The babies he’d sent off on their way into the river, for second chances, for the tender mercy of childless mothers. Typhus didn’t know whether to feel joy or dread at the familiarity. He didn’t know whether to feel at all. There was nothing more to feel.
No matter.
As his eyes followed pink motion, a tinny music positioned itself at the back of his mind, the sound of a horn through a ghostly filter; not a physical sound. The water snuck to his waist-but he didn’t care, couldn’t pull his thoughts from the sound in his mind and the image in his eyes.
So beautiful. Haunting. Lovely. Final.
Bliss.
Sinking.
As the water (
Typhus Morningstar was, like his faithful friend the mosquito-fern, now perfectly still. His trusty burlap sack slipped from his fingers.
Typhus waited for the bag to float up to the top. It did not. It was lost. A nominal price for bliss, he thought. Goodbye, old friend.
A stray thought. Unwelcome.
Bliss = loss?
