Along the lake, forever

The Sernox

In the inert years of my youth, through the many days and weeks that ran precursor to fate’s inflexible terror, I paid little attention to the transition or angle of the sun. The months would move, retreating with Earth’s orbital path, sliding away until my mind, myopic and inept, accepted their return, uncaring as each spoke the burden it had seen. I held no love of the seasons, aware with only absent thought that daylight compressed or expanded, that a sheen of a frost would appear glistening across grass, that a careless moon would impose on a summer’s night. I never looked at the weather, never sought with prescience how the sky deigned to speak to the land. Instead I watched the clouds, saw in them a thousand dancing shapes, ones that, like all the things of my life, morphed and fled and died.

Yet in Finland, as the cocoon of my youth unfurled, I came to witness these shifts. Days shortened, nights encroached. The seasons exhaled their relief as winds couriered news of the next. The world moved, and I noticed where once I had not. I felt where once I was numb.

All because of Emmi.

*

In the evenings we would stroll the lake, taking the route that stalked the water’s edge, the ripples futile in their want of the shore. Emmi would speak of the sun, of its precise moment, how the great disc of fusion—gold and succulent and rife with day’s promise—was birthed into the sky, telling me how she felt the Earth plummet from her feet. Occasionally she would stop, stroking a blade of grass, whispering she knew its dreams; she would move between pines, letting each needle walk along her palm; she would wait, her hand on mine as clouds found their way through a sky unbound. Then, later, as the last lusting rays glanced across her form, refracting the dew that condensed on her lips, she would sign the sun’s demise, calculating its descent, wondering on the stars as they claimed their turn.

“The shortest days call it forth,” she said one evening, the final shades of amber fleeing behind the trees. We were sat on a bench, the chattering of fieldfares—Turdus pilaris, my brain could not but help intrude—departing with the light, leaving us alone on the lake’s western shore.

“The shortest days, the longest dreams,” I said, saying the words out loud, the ones I knew she longed to hear. Just as with the sun, each day she spoke of the creature, the one she yearned to see, the being that could not leave her mind. I turned to her, caught the glint in her eye, the smile that followed, the laughter that lives now only within the twisted folds of my ear.

“Yes,” she said. “Soon,” and at that her hand drifted to mine, as index for index she pulled me away to continue our walk, the ellipse of our steps carrying us once more back to the village by the lake.

If there is alchemy in the distillation of a single moment, it was to be found in those evenings around the lake. With Emmi, all time ceased. There was no sensation of moving, no past or future; there was only the immediacy of the present, the adjacent warmth of her skin. Yet, with each cruel night, I found myself on the outside, located in the after, lamenting and craving and grasping for when it could begin again. My daytime duties—the mockery I made of each task—became a means of singular purpose: to translocate my body alongside the orbit of the Earth, all until my feet, the ones whose soles refused the ground, found as always my way to her door.

“I was waiting,” she would say upon my arrival, the oxygen ripped from my lungs as she turned her smile to mine. Or sometimes she would claim, “Your arrival was heralded by the winds,” her words spoken as her cheek—pale and with the concave depression of a porcelain bowl—became angled to the sky. Once, when a light rain plied its grey tune upon the lake, she was already outside, lying with her back to the ground, her mouth parted and accepting each drop. “I feel the mountains,” she said, her eyes closed, each lid a shield of flesh for the jade hidden beneath. “I taste their history.” And I could believe that she did, that the mineral veins of millennia were elaborated upon her tongue.

I love you, I tried to say. I already loved you.

But these words never came.

Instead it was the creature that came. The monster.

The Sernox.

Substack Image Generator

---

This was Part 4 of The Sernox.

Part 1 > Part 2 > Part 3 > Part 5 > Part 6 > Part 7.

Once again, I … I do not quite know how to write my thoughts on what this is. So I won’t. I’ll just walk away and look at the clouds through the window.

(As always, I adore your comments and thoughts. There’s a button for that, should you so desire.)