Aposiopesis * 1: from Classical Greek. ἀποσιώπησις, ("becoming silent"): a figure of speech wherein a sentence is deliberately broken off and left unfinished. * —as if something exploded… —as if the world came to an end while no one paid attention… Dreams shattered and fell away, and the first thing Pávöl felt was the sullen weight of an unrequited erection trapped in the hollow of his lap. Dreams, he thought, left sticky paste beneath his eyelids. Ghost-images lingered for an instant. Faded. And were gone. The bus driver, he saw, had pulled onto the side of the road and voices up front wove through the lackluster plot of a common back-roads narrative. Two husky men stirred from their seats and Pávöl watched as they pulled off their jackets, left them in mounds in the laps of their companions—wives, maybe, or girlfriends—and climbed off the bus. A dog, someone said. The men have to clean a dog out of the grille. A child sobbed. Old women crossed themselves in gloomy Orthodox fashion, and Pávöl watched the blunt silhouette of a man, uncapping a flask and raising it in a gesture of reverence for the departed before taking a swallow. The man, Pávöl, saw—by the trembles in his gesture and his slow-wobbling head—was already drunk. Pickled, as another common back-country story went. In that common plot, he was the shambling crust of a farmer, a potato man displaced by EU-standardized farms. By the flask, Pávöl judged, the man was an alcoholic uncle/cousin/nephew on a dusty, dog-riddled road between charitable relatives. He felt movement to his left: a humid weight lifted from the hollow of his shoulder. His companion for this trip—like Pávöl—had fallen asleep; he’d laid his head on Pávöl’s shoulder. He—like Pávöl—arose, muddled, from the cloying, hungry embrace of dreams. “We’ve hit a dog,” Pávöl said to the unasked question. The words—as he spoke them—tasted like English. “Where are we…?” “Not far from Telíčé.” “Where’s that?” Pávöl shrugged. “Nowhere.” He’d known his companion for only one month: an American expatriate from a tall city by a flat lake. Jamison. There was something exotic in his name, something in the way the vowels rolled around Pávöl’s tongue as he spoke the name in greeting and as he whispered it to himself, alone at night. The color of his skin made Pávöl think rye bread, toasted. Negrí. The word was a bitter joke to Jamison who said that the word—or one similar in sound—was a grenade when spoken with English inflection. I’ll be in Pekkúr for as long as I can, Jamison had said, in the barrel-vault chamber of a cellar bar on Vodička Street. He sold English lessons to bankers and to the brats of politicians. You have friends here? Pávöl had asked. Not yet. It had been Pávöl’s idea to visit Zýn: the old monasteries, the pepper fields, and the distillery. It had been Jamison’s idea to make the trip as any local might. Slowly. By bus, and Pávöl couldn’t find it in himself to suggest a faster, smoother journey by train, and so—by bus—they arrived in Zýn, where they stayed for a day, and—by bus—they left, only to cross luckless paths with a back-country dog. “Nature calls,” Jamison said in echo of three men leaving with shared metabolic intent. Pávöl read their shared common posture, and saw the tops of their heads as they passed the passenger-side windows. “She calls me too,” Pávöl said easily. A lie. His bladder was empty—or near enough—but he simply wanted to watch Jamison, while pretending not to. * And they lingered—afterward—in a cloud of smoke and halting conversation with the other relieved men. They were temporary pack-mates: bachelors standing guard over their mutual claim of road-side real-estate. There was some new delay: a problem with the engine. “Too much dog,” the youngest and skinniest of the stranger-men said, shrugging. There was something Roma in the set of his features, in the color of his skin: near to Jamison’s—in contrast to local, alpine pallor—but not nearly as dark and only half as intriguing. His hair was a curly, black mop, tousled by the humid, indolent breeze. He finished his smoke, consulted his watch, and came to some swift, momentous and unspoken decision. Pávöl watched as he nodded to himself and ambled back to the front of the bus. He climbed on board. Moments later, he re-emerged, carrying a backpack clanking with the sound of bottles. “I can’t wait,” he said. “I’m going only as far as Telíčé. I’ll probably be there before your piss dries.” He shuffled his feet, shrugged in casual departing courtesy, and walked away. Just like that. And an hour later, Pávöl followed the same empty road, with Jamison beside him; there was no sign of the bus behind them, no indication that the driver had been able to get it started. Too much dog, the Roma-stranger had said, and Pávöl cringed at the thought. The air smelled of pepper, mud, and asphalt; gnats hovered in clouds over ditches of roadside drainage, where wild water-grasses recalled stretches of some narrow, primordial river. There were crickets in the distance, and the rusty skeleton of an old, forgotten silo. * 2: This device often portrays its users as overcome with passion (fear, anger, excitement) or modesty. * “There’s a train station,” Pávöl said, as they neared the outskirts of Telíčé. They’d walked for little more than an hour. An intermittent breeze cooled whole stretches of their ambling journey, but sweat salted the hollows under Pávöl’s arms. The flanks of his neck felt slick and clammy. He wore sandals, and there was sweat between his toes, made gritty and uncomfortable by road dust and grit like ant-bites. He’d felt the temptation to remove his shirt, but sudden modesty derailed the impulse, and what it might have told Jamison, in light of the manner of Pávöl’s own broken snooze back on the bus. Remnants of the dream had resurfaced, as if summed by the walk itself with no one but Jamison near him; he felt the swell of arousal just south of his navel. Jamison, it seemed, harbored no concerns for sweat. There was no sign of the Roma-stranger who’d departed before them, but Pávöl found no surprise in that. From his manner he was a back-country guy; it was likely that he knew other roads, other shortcuts between the Telíčé and its neighbors. Perhaps he’d cut through one or another of the vast pepper, wheat, or potato fields to take a break from the afternoon heat in one or another half-abandoned farmer’s shack. At any rate, Pávöl found no signs of him, no evidence that he’d been anything more than an occult function of the stalled, dog-damaged bus. “You’ve been to Telíčé before?” Jamison asked. Pávöl shrugged. “I’ve been through. Always on the way to Zýn.” “I like it there,” Jamson said, conjuring all of Zýn in that small declaration. “It’s so old.” “Telíčé is old, too,” Pávöl said, but didn’t continue. And a waft of quiet dread rode the breeze as Pávöl led Jamison across the border of Telíčé. It was a large town, a small city, an irregular ramshackle of Soviet-Era monoliths looming above wooden structures of different historical pedigree. They’d been saved, Pávöl, knew, simply because they’d been useful. After the Collapse, Pekkúr had been the first city to modernize. Preskiýn followed, not long after. But here, time was an indolent thing, and if Pávöl looked carefully, he might have found the granite-carved ghosts of Stalin and Marx and local comrade bullies. They stood, in municipal logic on islands at significant intersections, within important squares, and in the courtyards of houses liberated from local aristocracy. He didn’t look too closely for them, didn’t interrogate the dingy ramshackle sprawl of Soviet-Era tenements looming over shops selling mobile phones, HiFi sound equipment, and computer repair. He could smell horses in the distance: just around one corner or another, or just within a courtyard, its gates drawn firmly closed. There was a stutter in the air: a sudden and complete pause— …as if time had simply stopped… …as if reality tore away from its moorings and dangled in the maw of some gaping void. A breeze was all that moved, tickling a lock of hair across Pávöl’s cheek. He brushed it away, thinking—for only an instant—of insects walking across his face. He glanced to his left and found Jamison stooped in examination something in the street-side gutter. In his shorts, sandals, and white v-neck tee shirt, he might have been any tourist, any curious alien at home in the outside world. “What?” Jamison asked. “Is that?” There was amazement in his voice; there was a mix of revulsion, curiosity, and something slippery, protean, and impossible to define. Pávöl moved beside him and stooped low, toes clawing at the insides of his sandals: road-dust itched between his toes. He recognized the monstrosity moments before he saw it. What he saw was something like a centipede, as long as long as a cat dozing in sunlight. It was a fleshy, pale thing, crushed at one end, as if run over by the narrow tread of a bicycle. Its two-dozen legs rhymed with the legs of crabs in some lightless trench deep beneath the Atlantic, or with the legs of some improbable spider: something with knuckle-joints for knees and feet like daggers. It swarmed with ants, with flies, and with rotund, black beetles with cruel jaws like a plumber’s serrated pliers. “I don’t know,” Pávöl said, “what you call these things in English.” He shrugged and swallowed against the threat of bile in his throat. “You’ve read Kafka?” he asked, because it was the only sensible question at this exact moment. “Yeah,” Jamison said, nodding. “You’ve read his short story. ‘Metamorphosis,’ about Gregor Samsa.” “Yeah.” “This is similar,” Pávöl said. Vermin. It is the only word I know that will make sense to you.” “I don’t get it,” Jamison said. “Gregor Samsa was a man who’d turned into a bug.” “In English,” Pávöl said. “But in German, Kafka used the words ungeheures Ungeziefer. In English, you would say monstrous vermin. It could be any kind of monster: a cockroach, a bed-bug, a traveling salesman. Anything. Here, we have a similar word. It is súkküb. It is not an exact word, but no other words fit. Just like these things. Vermin. It’s hard to explain what they are; they’re worse than bedbugs. Suküb… Succubus. Jamison shivered, and Pávöl felt it. In sympathy, a chill danced across his shoulders and rolled down the length of his spine. “It looks like a centipede with the head of a baby.” And the head, eyeless and centered with a long, curved horn, echoed the head of gaunt infant, mummified. Pávöl stood and measured two careful steps away from the gutter and the dead thing in it. He swallowed through the urge to vomit. He held his breath for a few long seconds, and closed his eyes. He spat, and the feeling of nausea passed. “It’s creepy,” Jamison said, on his feet now, and at Pávöl’s side. “They’re common. More in the back-country than in the cities, but you can find them in Pekkúr, in the bad neighborhoods, and—sometimes—in the parks. They’re pests, but sometimes addicts might keep one or two, or go to an old woman who keeps one, attached to a host that is usually her son or her nephew. It’s illegal and disgusting, but it happens.” “Pests,” Jamison said, as if tasting the word for the first time, as if playing with the very shape of a new idea. He shivered again, shook his head, and in the sway of some strange emotion, he reached for Pávöl’s hand; his fingers found the spaces between Pávöl’s fingers. An inscrutable expression masked his lean, almost elfin features, something smoldered in the shadows of his obsidian-colored gaze. He shook his head and smiled as if in dismissive afterthought to some transient emotion. He held Pávöl’s fingers for a long, long moment, and Pávöl maintained the clasp, feeling a twinge of gleeful intoxication at the contact. He’d said too much, Pávöl realized, as the echo of his words died on his tongue; there was too much to explain: too many details to illuminate. If Jamison asked any questions, he’d owe Jamison those answers, but he was unsure of what reserves of strength might have been required in the presence of those responses. Who are you people? He’d heard that question too many times, and always, always in English—though once in English leavened with Italianate inflection, and once in the guttural snarl of German. What are you, if you live—so casually—with such monstrous things? But—mercifully—Jamison simply shrugged, nodded, and squared his shoulders. “I’m hungry,” he said. “Is there anywhere to eat around here?” “There are places on the main street,” Pávöl said, nodding ahead. They walked away from the thing in the gutter. They walked through late-afternoon shadows and lozenges of window-reflected sunlight. They passed shops, selling the repair of watches, and others offering shoes, hardware, and office supplies. They passed butcher shops and bakeries, and occasional duos of old ladies pulling shopping carts, loaded with empty bottles and plastic bags. They passed the cart of a vendor, selling kváš, and Pávöl ignored his sudden desire for a glass. They found a restaurant: an old Communist-throwback cafeteria. It was the kind of place where you took only what they had on display beneath finger-smudged glass: no need for a menu. Where you ate—standing up—at dingy, Formica counters, worn in spots by elbows and arms. They had Pepsi Cola, as announced by the red, white, and blue sign in the window. Only when they entered the place did Pávöl realize that he and Jamison still held hands. * 3: To mark any incidence of aposiopesis with punctuation, the em dash (—) or an ellipsis (…) may be used. * They’d taken their fill of schnitzel with lumpy, mashed potatoes with a local garnish of stewed plums and off-season mushrooms: preserved remnants from last year. Real food, as Jamison declared, following with an explanation of how things were done over there, with hamburgers and french-fries or meat-nodules, called nuggets that began as some kind of paste, extruded through a hose. He’d forgone the advertised offering of Pepsi Cola, in favor of a local beer. Real food. A real experience. It isn’t pretty, he’d said. And that’s the whole point. The beer—as expected—was perfect: a local brew. It cut the edge from the day’s cloying heat. And now, an hour past dusk, Pávöl listened to the rhythms of metal and the sound of the engine. They’d made it onto the last train to Pekkúr. It was an old and battered thing: another Communist-Era holdover, as blunt and as beautiful as an ancient Soviet Tank. The red star still glared over the entry to each compartment; the hammer and sickle—crossed—still marked the ends of arm-rests, though they were worn by the rubbing of countless fingers. They were more punctuation than ornament: remnants of something everyone wanted to forget. They had a compartment to themselves and sat—shoulder to shoulder—on one seat. They’d closed the compartment door, but left the partition shade open. They’d close it, Pávöl decided, after the attendant came to inspect their tickets, mark them with stamps, and disappear. “Zýn is a gorgeous little town,” Jamison said, as if caressing the shape of a quiet, personal memory. Pávöl nodded. “It’s perfect for weekends. In the later months of summer, we should return, and stay for a whole weekend. We can visit the forests just beyond the edge of town: everyone will be there for the mushrooms. It will be a party. Everyone will be there.” “Mushrooms,” Jamison said, and it sounded as if he’d touched the edges of another unspoken memory. “Fresh ones, and not canned, like the ones you ate today, with your plums.” “They were good,” Jamison said, shrugging. “Fresh ones are better.” It was easy to fall into the pattern of idle talk, easy to simply lose himself in the sound of Jamison’s voice. They spoke—as always—some strange mix of English and local, switching back and forth without conscious effort. Jamison spoke the local language well enough, though it was clear that English was still some easy comfort to his tongue. He shaped his words with a strange, rolling accent, as if he’d learned to speak from Russian teachers. It was cute. “We’ll come back,” Jamison said. “I’d like that.” The attendant came, inspected their tickets, stamped them, and left: he was an old man, crisp in his dark uniform, his cap with its immaculate, polished brim. He wore a stopwatch, suspended from a chain at his belt, and there was something regimental and martial in his appearance, in the meticulous trim of his moustache. There’d been some soft suggestion of clicking heels as he bowed—slightly—in making his departure, and it was in the silence after he’d left, that Pávöl stepped to his feet and closed the shade. He might have extinguished the light, but he left it on; there was some comfort in the dim, amber glow. “It’ll still be early when we return to the city,” Pávöl said. “We should have a drink together. Jamison smiled, as Pávöl settled beside him and slid his feet from within his sandals. “I’d like that,” he said, reaching to the side, and clasping Pávöl’s fingers. “I’d like that a lot,” he said… END …as with my most recent fiction post (before this one) my initial intent had been different. I have photos I want to share; I have examples of digital art (6-layer collages and other things) that should see the light of day…and yet… …and yet… …I’ve been seized by an idea that involves telling stories as filtered through the definitions of various punctuation marks. I’d started the process with “the Apostorphe” and though “Aposiopesis” follows, it is actually something of a prequel to “the Apostrophe” as it looks at a brief period of time before “The Apostrophe.” I rather enjoyed this unexpected return to Agara, especially since a succubus (albeit a dead one) made an appearance. I suspect that there will be other stories, other explorations of punctuation, and I’m happy that I wrote “Aposiopesis.” Okay, it isn’t exactly the punctuation mark itself but rather the purpose and the actual name of the act of using such punctuation. I couldn’t resist the lure of exploring this particular theme, as it reveals all sorts of interesting possibilities in terms of written fiction. Thank you for reading, viewing, and commenting. Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed reading this as much as I’ve enjoyed writing it, and I hope you’re all having a great week. I suspect there will be more punctuation mark stories coming up, as I feel the presence of a hyphen lurking in the shadows.