Smoke City by Keith Rosson

Author:Keith Rosson [Rosson, Keith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Meerkat Press, LLC
Published: 2018-01-07T05:00:00+00:00

5

From the journals of Marvin Deitz:

What comes after death?

For me, I mean.

Yup: birth. Right.

The Curse works like this: Memory arrives in lockstep with sentience, with self-awareness. It arrives all at once, boom. A detonation. I’m a newborn handed this sudden bomb-blast of identity, this explosive memory of all previous lives lived all at once. Even as synapses struggle to form, neurons connecting with muscle cells.

I’m not sure specifically when this detonation occurs, this awareness, but I’d say it generally happens before my first birthday. Certainly before I’m crawling. There’s probably, like my deaths, never a specific time—or at least one that I’ve yet to discern.

Let me put it like this: I died as Geoffroy Thérage from a kick from my horse, a graceless and laughable death, and was reborn. So much of that first rebirth is thankfully lost to me. I do remember the physicality of it, brief shutter-clicks of imagery as my memory came back to me: howling until my tiny throat rent itself hoarse, trying to scratch at my own body with those hands that would not, could not, act out my desires—a simple issue of motor control. I lay there roiling inside my own skin.

I had no idea where I was, of course, and sanity was a fleeting thing that first time around—I’m sorry, but how could it not be? Time was elastic, malevolent. They put little swatches of fabric over my hands to protect me from myself. Blurred swatches of color slowly became tapestries that hung against stone walls, as rugs on the floor.

Dark-skinned women cooed over me in no language I had ever heard. I was eventually aware of the sputtering candles clustered around my crib, their falling flames marking the passage of my hours, my days. Sleep came stealthily and often, an interloper I was grateful for.

I would dream of Esme and Riva giggling as they tried to fit my father’s hood around the head of one of the mules until my mother came out and scolded them, a twinkle in her eye. I would awaken smiling at this and for a moment the face hovering over me would brighten—He’s smiling!—until the understanding of my circumstances returned to me and I would begin howling again.

It was not the damnation I’d expected, of course, but the simple memory of the atrocities was enough.

Sometimes, one of the women would set me on the floor, make sounds to encourage me to crawl to her. I felt the smooth purl of the tapestry’s weave beneath my little hands, the baying wolfhounds and knighted men emblazoned across it. I crawled toward her.

Soon I began using the walls and banisters of my crib to pull myself upright: my first shuffling, stumbling steps. It felt like perhaps seconds had passed—that this was simply a nightmare I was locked into.

The woman would laugh and clap as I crawled, until the day I rose on my little stilted legs and, her back momentarily turned, pulled myself to the lip of my crib and spilled myself upon the stone floor of the nursery.

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