Strange Flesh by Chipka
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Description
I can name men—some more beautiful than others. I can name women, too. I have friends with exotic and intriguing names: Dül and Xéŕšé, and they are handsome in ways as different as their personalities and histories. With Dül, I’ll never know his flesh in the ways that I want, but I can know it well enough: when we share tea and those strange, dill-flavored cakes, when we touch in hugs and greeting-kisses on the cheek. I know Xéŕšé in the same abstract way.
But you are poles apart from what they are. Your name is something I dare not say too loudly in the presence of my local friends. They are not afraid of you, but their relationship is a complex and muddled thing as far as you are concerned. You are a force in their shared life: you are a bond between them; I know this with absolute certainty, though I can’t begin to fathom the role you take in their lives. Do they whisper of you when they share quiet nights together? Have they had contact with others of your kind? Do they call these others either friend or enemy? I want to know. I need to know. I cannot say why, only that I must.
I am as foreign to you as you are to me. In other ways I am a foreigner to the friends I have discovered in this land. My associates back home cannot understand the pull this places has on me.
“Ükür?” they ask, "Aren't you afraid of terrorists there? Can you drink the water there? What could you possible do there since they don't even speak English?" Maybe it’s the strange combination of letters and the not-so-Western history of your people, your cities, and your metal-contaminated countryside that makes them think to ask such stupid questions. Maybe it is your music, Üküré music that strikes the ear like some lopsided hybrid of Turkish and Bulgarian songs with something profoundly haunted thrown into the mix. I love Ükür for reasons I cannot understand, and I think that in some way, you are those reasons. I know you, as if from a dream…maybe a nightmare: a mythic being who speaks in whispers and odd stridulations. I’ve dreamed of you, and each time you spoke, sounding like an insect.
Now in Ükür, in the city of Ōmüt, I am drawn to you. I’ve seen your cousins imprisoned in glass cases in the National Museum. I’ve heard stories about you and what you can do. I know of your cousins in Agara and their rumored (and unproven) existence in Estonia. But this is all I really know of you. I hear you in dreams, talking like some strange cicada-machine, which is odd since cicadas don’t live in this part of the world. I touch you in my dreams, feeling the corrosion of age beneath my fingers. But I don’t know you…I cannot understand you.
I hope that soon, I may understand why you are so important to me. When I touch the corrosion that mottles your strange, metallic flesh, I hope that I may learn just what sort of a friend you may be, and what role you play in my life, or what role I play in yours.
--Samantha Braden/Unpublished Journal.
***
Yep, it's more from Ükür. I decided to get into Samantha's head again, and try to figure out how her obsession for these machines might feel and so you have this little snippet. The image itself is less exotic in nature...it's a part of a truck engine bathed in vegetable oil for reasons I cannot guess, but there you have it...you find strange things in truck yards in Chicago, and they often become strange things in places like Ükür and Agara and even the Nemaean Interstellar Republic. Ah, but that's the life of an artist for you...you see something and never know where else it may show up.
As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope that you're having a great week!
Comments (26)
Foto-Arte
Pretty cool work!
Roxam
I'm going to be a fat head! yes, that was real cream, not half or recycled plastic, pure cane sugar?--agave---(not at all saccharine)...added to that I really am trying to not quit but cut way way back on cigarettes...yeah, I had to light up! hmmmmmmmmm.....
popeslattz
Great words to ponder and an excellent image to compliment them. Vegetable oil?
wysiwig
Animists believe everything has a soul. If that is true, why not a machine? And if a machine has a soul can it love? Not here on Earth because we civilized ones do not believe in such things. But who's to say what is possible on Ukur? (can't figure out how to put in the umlauts over the letters!) Nice bit of prose makes the reader want to see more. I really like the close-up of the engine, old, worn and rusted but still serviceable. Just like people, most of who, I'm convinced, have souls.
blondeblurr
I've been reading a few of your short stories/narrations now for a while and I have come to the conclusion, that of every 'hero' or 'heroine', or let's just say - some of those different personalities, you write about, all have a touch of YOU in them... (and that is precisely what I would do, if I was a writer!) I do sense your longing and yearning for the other half, missing in your life at present. (maybe not always, but perhaps now and then or a lot?) That someone is floating in this big Interstellar Universe, looking for you, just as you do, looking for the other half, a bit like YIN looking for YANG. (like in Ükür and Agara and even the Nemaean Interstellar Republic) ** But how can you lose yourself in someone else's life, if you haven't even found your own ? BB
geirla
Ah, decaying machinery... Nice snippet.
beachzz
BB's comment is really interesting, made me go back and read what you wrote all over again. I think everything we write has something of ourselves in it, some far more than others. Yin/Yang, male/female, human/alien--we are ALL connected somehow. More great stuff, Chip!!
watapki66
Powerful design in the image, as well as the words!
MrsLubner
Love the tilt and interest created with the composition.
auntietk
If I were Samantha, I would be obsessed with those machines, too. They're like little tesseract machines, and their allure is undeniable! Remember that photo I told you about? I think it might be Samantha ... When I'm more awake I'll have to delve into it a bit. There's definitely a story there.
bmac62
Chip...I've heard bits and pieces about Agara and Ükür, in the city of Ōmüt. But since this is my first reading about it myself, let me beg off a comment 'til the next time I come to Agara...I may know more by then:-) Well written my friend...when is it not?
helanker
An strange little story, but it is both warm, sensitive and beautiful. And I like very much the shot of an old engine :-)
durleybeachbum
Another brilliant ooze, Chip! Nearly every upload of yours sends us off into a parallel place...well not exactly parallel, more offset like a facet of a dodecahedron maybe.
Meisiekind
The nuts and bolts... Most amazing! The color and texture of rust make me long for long forgotten seafaring vessels on the Atlantic Coast where I am heading in just three more sleeps!!!! Wonderful image dear friend! :))
flavia49
marvelous!
MrsRatbag
Riveting as usual Chip; pun intended! You have such a way with stories. I imagine you as a strange wanderer in another century, wending your way from village to village and telling stories for your nightmeal and bed...
ladyraven23452
great work.
thecytron
Awesome metallic texturing!
sandra46
EXCELLENT WORK AND PROSE!!!!!!
Eresther
Fantastic texture and text!
alwaysonmymind
A part of my childhood was spent playing in a friend's parents derelict farm, the sort of courageously well-kept post war decrepitude that seems to have totally vanished today. The place was chock-full of rusty old tools and machinery that caused the air to fill with the smell of hot iron, when warmed by the Summer sun, through the holes in the roof.
kgb224
Outstanding capture and story my friend.
KatesFriend
Some forms of vegetable oil (especially if it is very fine 'grain') can be used as a machining lubricant. It has the benefits of being non-toxic and biodegradable. I used it to polish crystalline silicate slides when I was a grad student long ago. The photo is a brilliant find in that there is quite clearly a thoughtful face contemplating the sky or some other matter requiring the patience of an artifact resting in a scrap yard for many year. The narrative is engrossing as always and transports the reader to Ükür, a place that is at once quite separate from this world but still a part of it. A kin to some forgotten mountain realm like Tannu-Tuva, a small unique principality wedged discretely and nearly forgotten between two rival empires.
Alex_Antonov
Very nice!
myrrhluz
I am always fascinated by the power of names. In our more pragmatic world, the power lies more in the reactions they cause in those who hear them. But it's fun to think that perhaps, they have an intrinsic power that we are unaware of. You say a name, and a window opens into another place and the named one becomes aware of you. A link is forged for good or ill. I love entering Samantha's mind as she tries to understand her own obsession. It is so interesting to hear the thoughts of those who are grappling to understand. For Samantha it is a vague fear that haunts her sleep even as it consumes her thinking. I love the strong inclusion of dreams in her narrative. A favorite line is: "I touch you in my dreams, feeling the corrosion of age beneath my fingers." That sets up a haunting and powerful image. Excellent corroded image. Loved reading your work, as always!
Asmoday
So cool composed and threated colors all over your work are so strong and cool. Excellent caught!