Tales From The Stone Lotus by Subodhana Wijeyeratne

Author:Subodhana Wijeyeratne [Wijeyeratne, Subodhana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Writingale Publishing
Published: 2017-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Thelxinoë is there before him the next day, sitting by the poolside, her one leg dangling in the water. She grins when Arman waddles in, goose-pimpled in the cold.

“You have argued with your wife,” she declares.

“What?”

“You have argued with your wife, yes?”

Arman drops himself into the water.

“How do you know that?”

“You are sad.” A shuffle of her bottom and she is in the water with him. “Your work is going well, but your wife, she is not happy. You told me this. And today your shoulders, they are slack. Is that how you say it?”

“Sagging, I suppose. My shoulders are sagging.”

“Yes.” She is closer now, and still grinning. She sniffs theatrically. “And you smell of sadness.”

“I smell of sadness?”

“Oh yes. Why should not feelings also have a smell? You say animals smell fear, is that not so?”

“I’ve heard that. Always wondered why though. Seems like the kind of thing you’d want to keep to yourself, if you were terrified. It seems...evolutionarily counterproductive.”

“Then your fat and my leg, these are evolutionarily good, else they would not exist?”

“No, and besides, we didn’t start off with those.” He pauses. “Unless, that is, you were born without a leg.”

She frowns at that, and for a moment he thinks he has offended her. And then: “I see. But I was not born without my leg. I lost it.”

“Oh.”

She grins.

“You wish to know why but you are being a gentleman. I shall tell you. I lost my leg in battle. Many of my sisters lost more than a leg.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were in the armed forces.”

“Oh no. Not that sort of battle.”

She falls quiet and bobs up and down in the water. At first he thinks perhaps she is overcome by a memory but her eyes are focused and they are focused on him. Suddenly, as if delayed, all the excitement that should have been with him last night, with him and with Demetria, surges up through him, and he is transfixed.

“You may come with me, if you like,” she says slowly. The way she said Arman when they first met. As if each syllable had its own flavor, and each of these flavours existed only in that place and no place else in the universe.

“Come where?”

“Away from here.”

“Connaught?”

“Away, further than that. You know what wonders there are to see.”

“Like...the Grand Canyon?”

A moment passes and she bursts out laughing, and then he does too.

“Yes,” she says, “The Grand Canyon. But it is not so grand, I think. On Mars, there is a valley bigger than a country. Many countries. In the Oort Cloud, there is an old ark. Empty now, but there are ghosts, old ghosts, and they sing.” And now her eyes lose focus. Now she is elsewhere. “And skies full of diamonds, which rain like red stars. And planets assembled from the shattered remnants of others. And out in the void—a void like you’ve never seen—out there, there are things that seek other things that think, and we must help them, because.

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