The Rivers of April by Chipka
Contains violence
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Description
The Rivers of April
*
He stands, sodden, in a clump of wild rose bushes and vines in some race of weed he cannot identify; in late, late spring, their stems will redden and they will carry the eye-searing flagrance of brilliant, crimson berries. Summoned by some caprice born of ennui and rain, he has crossed the city from as far west as the prefab-concrete tenements of Down-Barrow. The Number-18 tram has brought him here. He has crossed the half of Twelve Arches: the longest (and oldest) bridge span in the city. He has descended old, pitted limestone steps to the weed-forested face of the Molar. There are eleven islands centering the Olóró River; the Molar is the largest of them.
Ghosts live here, they say.
Alchemists come, to gather mud for their golems.
The Molar draws mourners, and the ashes of the city’s dead are scattered from the larger of the island’s two downstream peninsulas, but Bölán stands on the upstream crown of the tooth-shaped spur of land: where ashes of the apocryphal dead are scattered, and where—they say—the golem muds are born.
The air is heavy with blood-warm rain; it smells of mud, diesel fumes, and a warm, cloying exhalation of violets. The sky is the color of pigeons and gun-metal. Fog obscures the up-river stretches and the ancient castle is little more than the whisper of its own silhouette. It is still early in the Ghost-Rain season—one vowel into the month of April—and by the month’s end, the city will darken in corners and crevices with mold; it will gleam in argentine brilliance, with furtive, darting silverfish. Thunder rolls in an easterly direction, no louder than a butcher’s truck over Twelve Arches, and as the sound fades, Bölán unclasps the buckle of his belt and un-tucks his shirt. He kicks his sandals off and undresses as if locked in the indolent throes of a séance-medium’s trance.
Shirt, trousers, and underwear are left hanging amid rose thorns and unopened blossoms, each bud as green caterpillars with jagged streaks of red and pink and indigo to mark where the buds will open. The Molar is known for its indigo roses: remnants of another age. No one remembers it.
Bölán is as small on the island as any human in the city: a blushed-alabaster afterthought, lost in foliage and rain. The city—he has often thought—is a burden on him, but now, naked, it feels as if the weight of existence has been shed like the skin of a snake. The rain, he thinks, will wash it from the clothes left hanging amid rose buds, leaves, and thorns the color of expensive and exotic teak.
The river is swollen, it breaks over the Molar’s rim, drowning the roots of chestnut trees and willows; the oldest of them lean over the river, their trunks straining against gravity. Another of them will fall before the year’s end. They’re always finding dead trees washed ashore in the southern reaches of the city, where the river bends and sends corpses—arboreal and human alike—into the gulag neighborhoods of the Canker.
Did Astóván wonder why she didn’t drift farther south? he wonders, stepping to the rim of the island and into the squelch of cold mud. It invades the spaces between his toes and covers his feet before his steps carry him into river water up to his ankles, his knees, to the thatch of hair centering the intimacy beneath his navel. Feeble currents tug at him, in some half-hearted attempt to carry him downstream. The farther he goes from the island, the more demanding the currents will become.
*
That morning—those years ago—rain had come and the river churned with ripples, transient rapids, and swollen currents fat with darting fish. There been two winters of snow in the last weeks of January, and so the smaller and shallower of the river-centered islands were nothing but the leafless skeletons of trees, emerging—like petrified nightmares—from the churning, muddied waters. By that afternoon, silt-gray waters with billows of black, left a woman’s corpse on the up-river crown of the Molar. Golem-brewers found her: at first they thought she was nothing more than litter in the lost and tattered net of an up-river fisherman. But the flash of red and the smear of saffron was the complication of a bridal veil and tripartite gowns, and so the golem-brewers sent the junior-most among them to the district constable. Only a constable or a constable’s deputy might ever touch a dead Horé bride. That was the only conceit to local law the itinerant Horé allowed: the only diplomacy they recognized, and so with a constable (and three deputies) retrieved, the bride might be fished from the river and given scrupulous rites of disposal.
Astóván was the deputy everyone called with an abductee-bride washed onto some stretch of municipal riverbank. Astóván, by his own claim, understood why the abducted daughters of fallen mafiosos threw themselves from bridges on their wedding nights, and so it was Astóván who moved her: careful with her veils and the crayfish nestled in the folds of her gowns, in her hair, and in the wilted, sodden mess of the bride’s wreath still affixed with pins and clasps, to her head. It has been Astóván who arranged her on the medic’s stretcher and picked a snail out of her ear, and it had been Astóván who came home that evening, spoke quietly and casually to Mother and Father, and—at some considerable length—to Bölán. And it had been Astóván who drew a bath, settled into the heated water, and slit his wrists (and the hollows behind his knees) with the blue-cold chill of Father’s straight razor.
Bölán had been the one to find him—his older brother—in a bath as profoundly red as any Horé bridal veil.
Bölán had been the one to sit through the cremation, to gather Astóván’s ashes, and to scatter them from the down-river peninsula of the Molar, and though it might have been parent’s honor to receive the brass buttons from the sleeves of Astóván’s uniform, Bölán took them, at Father’s insistence, and threw them into the river, to sink through the billow-clouds of Astóván’s current-borne ashes.
*
And as the riverbed slopes away, as the water deepens, and as the currents grow more insistent, Bölán hears the lisping splash of rain: millions upon millions of water-gems, exploding (like a sustained whisper) on the river-face.
The downpour—already unrelenting—has gained strength. It is stiff and unrelenting now: a lisp, a serpentine hiss—
—a breath, exhaled.
In the rains of April, winter melts and flows into reborn rivers, and this river—among others—is thick with silt, and some of that silt is all that remains of a constable’s deputy, a brother. It is an April river: a strange beast of currents, the remnant-chill of winter, and ghosts that are drab clouds of silt, offal, and strange, furtive memories.
Bölán stands, submerged to just above his waist, with rain-wet hair plastered to his forehead. The river-bottom is muddy and soft, an endless squish enveloping the soles of his feet: things touch him in the depths, fish, perhaps, or mostly-sunken logs, shreds of clothing, and garbage of a species he cares not name. He strains to feel something within the silt-clogged currents of the Olóró, some remnant of his brother, offering answers to the one question no one has dared voice aloud.
Astóván says nothing, however, and there is only the sound of water: the soft, clapping hiss of raindrops on the face of the month’s swollen and turbulent river.
END
*
The challenge for April was, simply enough, April showers…and as might be expected my muse (now that her extended coffee break is over) has decided to whisper strange (dark) things into the cockles of my creative mind. I have no clue where this story came from, other than the fact that it just bubbled up and spread itself across two pages of digital paper. I must admit that I enjoyed writing it, and I hope you’ve enjoyed reading it.
As always, thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting, and I hope you’re all in the midst of a great week.
Comments (9)
helanker
I shall never tire seeing your book covers, Chip. I love this one very much !!!
Faemike55
Great story, Chip
jendellas
Great story as usual, I love the image as always. x
kgb224
Wonderful writing my friend. God bless.
Wolfenshire Online Now!
Fantastic and intricate story. Always a pleasure.
MrsRatbag
This word painting is going to linger in my brain for quite some time; such a richly expansive and oddly teasing play of a storyline! To me it seems like the little teasers that you find at the end of one book to promote the next one, the invitation to come and wallow in a new world of visions. Well done, Chip!
anahata.c
Well! As an old friend used to say, "whooaaaaa, Nellie!" (Nellie must be one done-in lady by now.) "April Showers" brought-out this? I should give up writing and become a brick layer. The actual saying was a famous jazz pianist's words, when he heard Art Tatum play (Art Tatum was one of the greatest jazz pianists): "Whenever I hear this guy play, I wanna give up playing the piano and take up driving a truck." As I'd make a lousy truck driver, I'll have to settle for brick-layer, because at least my creations might wind up in one of your tales. This is sensual and brilliant. We're taken, immediately, into a swirling, very intimate journey into snapshots of this old and memory-laden city. We see the River, we see the mixes of beautiful nature with the soot-laden and fume-filled leftovers of grimy city life---a life we don't actually "see," but see remnants of, reminders of. As usual, you pack your opening paragraphs with bouquets of descriptives: "The air is heavy with blood-warm rain; it smells of mud, diesel fumes, and a warm, cloying exhalation of violets." That easeful way you put beautiful nature next to grimy city streets, how they swirl together. (That nature is "warm and cloying" an "exhalation"---sweet breath---right alongside the dingy smells of a Dickens-like 19th C London, or the corpse-filled riverfront of Varanasi (Banares) which I know of from my Indian friends ((who've been trying to get me to go there for 20 years now)), or the endless industrial parks of Chicago at night. These worlds mingle easefully in your prose. You know cities very, very well.) Or "the sky is the color of pigeons and gun-metal." Well, I'll wind up quoting for the next 6 paragraphs, so I'll spare you the re-reading...just know that I walk very slowly through these paragraphs, as your prose open up like flowers, one at a time, opening up for us as we pass them. And there's the way you describe Bölán's descent into the river, or you describe him as "as small on the island as any human in the city: a blushed-alabaster afterthought, lost in foliage and rain." Amazing how you always completely wipe out our self-importance with these descriptives which place us in a much more cosmic context. Or "the thatch of hair centering the intimacy beneath his navel". Beautiful and evocative. There's a whole journey in these specifics, which is why I'm so slow reading your tales. There are handfuls of journeys before we get to the so-called "action"... Then, enter Astóván. (Btw: Reproducing your diacriticals takes time, lol. I finally realized I could copy-and-paste these names: Before, I used to struggle to find each diacritical, one by one, not wanting to rip them away and leave your character---or town---de-nuded, watered down, whatever.) There's often a revelation in your shorter tales: Here, it's not only the mesmerizing, devastating imagery of dead brides, etc, but that Astóván winds up being Bölán's brother. Wherein Bölán's journey unfolds---in part---to make him custodian of Astóván's final rituals. And I say "in part" because who knows what else Bölán's thinking or doing. (Or what other of his tales are lurking behind this one...And more descriptives: "as profoundly red as any Horé bridal veil" or "to sink through the billow-clouds of Astóván’s current-borne ashes". I'd not have thought about those ashes until you wrote that. And having seen human ashes sink into a lake or river, you've described it perfectly. There are other descriptives, I'm just mentioning a few. This starts, as a number of your tales do, with a journey into 'snapshots', deep and sensual and so often intimating whole stories beyond the tale. And it climaxes in a startling meeting-of-souls, living or dead (here Bölán and his dead brother). And then it quietly ebbs into exquisite afterglows and memory. Here, Bölán is seeking a sign or answer from his brother's passing---a passing that remains unexplained but feels totally fulfilled. (A difficult thing to achieve in writing, but which you achieve constantly.) And finally, the lingering experience of April rain,"the soft, clapping hiss of raindrops on the face of the month’s swollen and turbulent river". You even put in "the month's" before the river. Beautiful prose. You say this just bubbled up...Well, it feels like it was full-formed inside of you, packed with ambiguities and multiple worlds. The moment was right, so it came out. It's intense, deep, exotic...and it transforms death and even horror into strange, intimate beauty. And when we leave it, we feel we were in another life which suddenly recedes back to its world, and we're left with its afterglows. Brilliant, Chip. I'm sorry I don't read lots of these in a session, but I've been here over an hour, so you at least that I've given it time. And btw, I agree with Helle that your book covers are terrific! The lower world in that image is as huge as the higher world above---there's a whole world down there by the River. "Molar" can mean the tooth, having its root in "millstone," something that grinds things into a common denominator, into the dust we all come from. It can also mean "mass" (as in "molar mass"), which works equally well. But maybe it has an Eastern European element that I don't know of. Or maybe it just came full-flush from your unconscious, with mysteries intact. And (also), there was a famous legend of the "Golem of Prague," which you may know a lot better than I. But it was filled with images of the old Jewish ghetto, and I heard about it from my grandparents and some old eastern european teachers. It has its roots in many stories of animated matter, and it plays a big "under-role" in this story, but it never becomes the main story: It's just part of the very rich soil on which this story is built. A wonderfully tantalizing way to use it, and then leave it behind...even though the corpses and ashes of all these passed lives seem linked up with the whole idea of a golem...A beautiful haunting work once more, Chip. Your inner vision seems to have endless "peeks inside," and you take one of those peeks, and another tale emerges. Prodigious and beautiful writing.
mermaid
I just love what you havbe done in the picture and your narrative even more :) complexs yet guiding me in a world I love to explore and feel and you make it easy to follow you along with wonder
auntietk
your title: "The rivers of April" reminded me of the song entitled: "The waters of March." I found it marvelous the way the lyrics of that song and your story evoke each other. what a great answer to April's challenge!