Once upon an aching autumn, I set out to find the soft and rotten center of the human story. I clawed at the rank mud left by the rising rivers. I gnawed at the charred ash left by the wildfires. I plunged my face deep into the worm-riddled loam, and I swam through miles of blood into the older-than-ancient depths of this holy planet. There, in the salt-and-iron caverns where the underground forest grows from cosmic seeds, I found the bone-faced medicine keeper weaving away at the world tapestry.
Her finger-bones were swift. Her song was soft, and I set my mind to become dead for a time, to let this nightscape have its way with me, to surrender to this primal underworld where fate becomes fate. I leaned in and watched her work, that hollow-bellied hag. I watched her pull the thinnest threads from her black-hole eyes and hold the needle between her stained teeth. I watched her stretch and pluck brittle strands of hair from her bald head to stitch the silver crescent of the Harvest Moon, and I watched her scrape the last of the flesh from her thighs to mold the leather of a most haunting dreamland. The stage was set, and I waited for the epic ending to come.
A sound from the surface shook me then, and I wondered about that vixen called destiny. One stitch took that hag a hundred years, and my patience was thin.
The land from the topside world shuddered, and I narrowed my eyes to better see the weaver-woman’s work. I squinted to see a solution in her web, a hopeful happily-ever-after in her timeless art, but she was still stitching the moon.
I felt the torrent of waves and the heat of flames from above, and the hag kept stitching the moon.
I choked on oil like a lost duckling and was boiled alive like a fish longing for a cooler current, and the hag kept stitching the moon.
The quake reached our underworld nest then, and even those primordial trees were torn from their roots. Even the crystalline bones of the earth shattered. The cave-stars fell, and the hag pulled her strip-of-leather tongue from between her teeth and marked this moment in her grand map of time.
I knew then we had gone but an inch out of a hundred million miles. I knew then the story was just beginning, and I was never meant to see its end.
I was the once in the once upon a time, and humanity had a billion languages to learn before this tale could be told beside any fire.
An underground river broke through then, and I was drowning in the more-than-human sea. I was swallowing a medicine I couldn’t name, and the bone-hag stayed steadfast, hunched over the slow-stitched tapestry of the world even as the waters rose all around her.
I wept, and I wailed. I had not received the answers I sought. There was no armored hero to see in the hag’s work, no sword raised on a stallion or quiet rebel-turned-savior. Cities rose and fell while the hag wove the moon, while I floated in the subterranean sea and wondered what might become of me and my people.
In time, I couldn’t tell where the edges of her tapestry ended and my life began. Try as I might, I couldn’t discern the difference between my waking apocalyptic dreamscape and her well-woven tapestry of the tale’s beginning. Was this my moon or her moon? Where did choice end and the threads of fate begin?
I woke without waking, but I can still feel her fingerbones tugging at the fraying fabric of my soul’s skin. I can still hear her weaver-woman song, and, if I look close, I can still see her silver-hair threading the moon. I can still hear the horses of the wild hunt beating out the prophetic rhythm of the storyteller’s drums, and I can still bow at the fleshless feet of the hag who weaves the world to death and to birth, over and over again. I can still see this story is in its infancy, less than one line stitch-written out of one hundred billion chapters, and I can still hear the only words the bone-hag spoke just before I lost the vision of her:
Good stories are born in the dark.
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Once upon an aching autumn, I set out to find the soft and rotten center of the human story. I clawed at the rank mud left by the rising rivers. I gnawed at the charred ash left by the wildfires. I plunged my face deep into the worm-riddled loam, and I swam through miles of […]
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Once upon an aching autumn, I set out to find the soft and rotten center of the human story. I clawed at the rank mud left by the rising rivers. I gnawed at the charred ash left by the wildfires. I plunged my face deep into the worm-riddled loam, and I swam through miles of […]
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Once upon an aching autumn, I set out to find the soft and rotten center of the human story. I clawed at the rank mud left by the rising rivers. I gnawed at the charred ash left by the wildfires. I plunged my face deep into the worm-riddled loam, and I swam through miles of […]
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Once upon an aching autumn, I set out to find the soft and rotten center of the human story. I clawed at the rank mud left by the rising rivers. I gnawed at the charred ash left by the wildfires. I plunged my face deep into the worm-riddled loam, and I swam through miles of […]
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Once upon an aching autumn, I set out to find the soft and rotten center of the human story. I clawed at the rank mud left by the rising rivers. I gnawed at the charred ash left by the wildfires. I plunged my face deep into the worm-riddled loam, and I swam through miles of […]
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