Four New Messages by Cohen Joshua

Author:Cohen, Joshua [Cohen, Joshua]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781555970581
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2012-08-06T20:00:00+00:00

SENT

I. The Bed

_________________

Beds are made of trees, and coffins are beds with lids. Death is sleep without bottom. Its nature silent and consciousless and densely dark—

Imagine you are walking through a dream. But your dream is not just that, not just open. Your dream isn’t just one big gray open scape of mist you can step into, you can walk anywhere through, stick a hand or arm or leg into and just wiggle anywhere, no.

There are obstructions, even here. This is a dream with obstructions.

And so it is real. So it is real life.

You are walking through the forest but you cannot walk straight, you have to walk where the forest says you can walk, around the trees that tell you Here and There and Here. If straight is your goal you will have to go crooked. If crooked is your goal you will have to aim crookeder. No, better a fairy should tell you, some sort of dryadish creature: “If straight be your goal you must go crooked. If crooked be your path go forth and crook.”

Yes, fairy. Yes, cretin sprite.

I am a woodsman. A forester. No. You are a woodsman. You are a forester. No. Shake the tree. Uproot the roots. He, yes, he is a woodsman, he is a man in the woods. He is thick like wood and brown like wood and nothing about him is green. He has a bark beard. Knots for eyes and knots for ears and a knot for a mouth but while walking he is silent. His wife he has left behind in their hut. From there, noises. Their hut is made of trees, is made of tree, unwindowed. She lies on the ground expecting a child. This would be their first. New leaves, new leaf, a child shaped in lobes with a stem between the legs. She lies there in labor, lies on the earth belabored, olid and fat. She screams and screams and her eyes are angry. (He needs to move quickly.)

Fairies? “You need to move quickly!”

Thou spirits of lilim and such? “Hurry, hurry fast!”

He must build her a bed. He must build her a bed she can give birth in. And it must be built well so that the birth will be well. But he has to do this soon, has to rush.

His ax has a name but no one will know that name. That name is a secret unlike the name of his child that everyone will call him or her, he is expecting a Him. The axname is secret because that is the name he calls when he needs the ax’s power. The ax was smelted especially for his father, with magical powers that his fathers believed in and that he, the child of his father, believes in occasionally. But he also wonders occasionally why an ax should have an axname like a child has a childname but the ax’s name secret, and there is an unease in that wonder that he does not understand fully or want to.

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