Travel Log of a Raven
Day 27 - My Eyes are Different
- Details
- Written by Michelle McCollyer
I awoke. Vomit clung like icicles from my chin; it was some insulation from the cold. I wore only my chest wrap. My pants abandoned me long ago. My hand clutched a piece of cloth I did not recognize. On it I had scribbled illegible words, just sounds really, and a crude drawing of my foot on a goat with spikes on the big toenail. I laid two cart lengths from the trail, beneath a steep rock face. I must have been kicked by a goat to get there. My mouth felt as dry as a creek bank in late summer. I ate the snow off the side of the mountain. My stomach gurgled weakly in its emptiness, as if I hadn’t eaten for days. My insides felt hallowed and torn out of me as they did the morning I awoke with my mother’s lifeless arms wrapped around my body.
I managed to climb up to the trail. It took me half the day. Somebody stacked my things neatly in a pile, everything but my breaches, of course. I counted my scrolls several times; I kept forgetting which number I was on.
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I am not wise, but shifted.
The moss speaks the tongue of those who lurk in the dark. I see through the eyes of the hawk and the trout she just caught, and the dried, wind-blown dandelion that lured the fish to the water’s edge. I am a he and a she, a queen and a farmer digging his cow manure into the fields. I want to lay down into a muddy hole and rake my fingers through the grime and stuff my fingernails with grit. Gasping inward, I remember to breathe. I’ll return from this entourage with the senses.
A glimmering puddle draws me to its surface. In it, I see a darkened reflection of myself.
My skin creases on my face, burning a patterned of hardened tortoise scales that peel and flutter with the wind. My eyes are different. One pupil grows larger than the other. Their whites are yellow or orange, I cannot tell in the fading light. Every sound I hear mutters against an omnipotent crashing noise that sounds sometimes like waves in the ocean and sometimes like the world ripping in two. My limbs sing a low toned “ah”, not like the sounds of a reverent Solstice symphony, but more like the gurgle the comes from the sigh of a drunk just before he passes out.
My knee crusts with dried blood. Is that where I got the blood smudges on the back of my hands?
My ink is gone. Only my blood remains on the splayed stub of a feather I call a quill.
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And so I tell you, with my own blood. I never knew what that mischievous goat-god of the mountains had destined for me.
I hiked all day looking for that moss. I found the Face of the Mountain, that spirit-man with onyx eyes that I encountered during my first moss experience. (Oh, I tore that out…) He lay beneath a frosty enclave, still bald and naked, nearly white as the snow itself. His fire’s embers went out long ago. I thought him dead. His eyelids crumbled around his responseless eyes that stared emptily at the snowbank above him. Ice drooled into the creases of his mouth. I pulled at his blanket.
His eyes smacked me in a silent scream. Crouching, I fell. My hand landed on something prickly. A scoul puckered his lips together, opening into a whistle like a screeching morning bird. I could have laughed aloud, but my palm sizzled. I examined my hand. Spikes of moss protruded from my palm as if they had always grown there. I’d cut my hand on that bloomin’ moss…
The Tarraleesovian boy’s words ran through me, “To eat the moss is to cross a mountain at its brittle peak; a foot on crumbled ground with all sides down.” I had skipped the eating; that bloomin’ moss pulsed straight into my blood!
Mossy fractals sprung from my hand like embers of pinewood shooting from a fire. My hand appeared dissolved and leaping alive, as if it were composed of thousands of flies. Shaking my arm in front of me, the flies leapt about, each taking a different route to my hand’s next stable place. Fascinating. I waved my arm slowly through the air, watching the flies chase my hand. At some point, I noticed them creeping up my arm. Alarmed, I shook my arm vigorously, but they only continued moving upwards, crawling past my elbow. It wouldn’t be long now!
I dug out my bag. A wall of the moss stood in the enclave before me. Using my fly-hand callously as if it were a knife, I scraped off all the moss I could into my bag. Barely filling half the pouch, I shoved the bag under my belt just as the flies began tickling my armpits. Flying through the breeze floppily as a big-pawed puppy, my papers rattling and crunching with every thudding step, I dashed down the mountain pass. As my boots clumped heavier with more force, the hills bled like ink on a wet paper, their blues and reds washing down the slopes. About me, the shades of white and green faded into a shadow of black. It is the last thing I remember before I awoke this morning.
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I passed that Tarraleesovian boy again. It has been five days since I first passed him. FIVE DAYS!?! He was not friendly this time.
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I heard the stream before I saw it. It trickled several cart-lengths below me. My tongue lapped playfully around the edges of my cracked lips as I grew closer. My belly swelled with the excitement to have something inside it. As my lips drew closer to the gurgling pool, a rainbow turd floated beneath my nose. Time dislodged. Had I just pooped?
My laughter didn’t startle the bald, naked man watching me from upstream. He appeared so white, he blended into the vein of the ice-rock he squated from. On his shaded ledge, I could faintly see his tea-stained teeth, large black eyes and crescent butt crack desecrating that cool, glittering stream before me. My burning stomach lurched. My fingers throbbed in swollen thirst. He’s spoiling my water! My blistering lips spilled out a blizzard of words so cross I’d find myself in the stocks to write them here.
But then I remembered. He’s The Face of the Mountain. And I’ve found him at last.
