Eleven Sooty Dreams by Manuela Draeger

Author:Manuela Draeger
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Letter
Published: 2020-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Granny Holgolde’s Tale: The Abyss

The rain had stopped a good twenty minutes ago, but the humidity was still dripping onto the leaves of banana trees, giant rhubarbs, monstrous philodendrons, and, when she stopped walking, Marta Ashkarot listened to the nocturnal silence and delighted in its music, at once monotonous and irregular. It was a very hot hour of the night. The forest was drowned in a torrid mist. Clouds floated at a low altitude, exaggerating the sense of heavy dampness and obscuring the starlight. The elephant advanced carefully on the deserted route, an old trail that had been largely swallowed up by the surrounding vegetation, but which also, at key points, had conserved its nature as a path created by professional clearers, and which had remained practically unchanged since the time when humans were the dominant species.

Marta Ashkarot walked slowly. Under more normal atmospheric conditions, she would have noticed residual glimmers even on dark, starless nights, but, this day, the blackness of the sky was joined by the opacity of the fog, and she could see nothing. This did not stop her from tranquilly pushing ahead, however. She didn’t pay too much mind to the mudholes, puddles, and bogs whose presence she would surmise just before sinking up to her knees. When a fallen log barred the path, she would detect the obstacle with her trunk and step over it. Sometimes she would wind up startling a family of tree frogs or a cane toad, and sometimes she would hear a large grass snake hastily slither away so as not to be trampled beneath her feet, but this was far from a common occurrence. The forest was devoid of beasts, not to mention hominids and monkeys, which she never came across anymore. In the semiaquatic world, like everywhere else, life had made itself scarce.

All around her, silence reigned.

Her eyes provided her with no information, and in order to guide herself she had to rely on her senses of smell and hearing. She progressed this way, ears deployed and trunk on alert, as she dexterously pranced about, often slowing to take in the night. She felt dripping sweat, mud, and plant sap all over her body. She didn’t forbid herself from sleeping, from time to time. She would ensconce herself within a thicket, preferably beneath a ceriman or a carambola, so she could chew on the tree’s fruits while she napped. That kept her well rested so she could continue forward on her blind march.

She had traveled a kilometer since her last break, when suddenly she felt a current of air. There was a breeze blowing against her forehead and feet. It produced a very faint whistle and lowered the temperature at least three or four degrees. The air was moving from right to left, and seemed to cross the path. Well, what’s this? she thought. Nothing could explain such a phenomenon. She quickly came to a halt in order to explore the darkness and find out more. She swung her trunk forward and around her flanks, sniffed intensely, and thought.

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