Γαῖα | Gail Primos (all_mother) wrote in forgotten_past, @ 2010-05-16 00:03:00 |
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Entry tags: | gaia |
And I would have stayed up with you all night
Who: Gaia, closed narrative. Some Ouranos.
What: The San Fernando Valley earthquake of 1971. There's only so much a mother can lose.
Where: See above. >_>
When: ...Yep.
It goes like this.
A moment, a frozen-in-time thing made of spun sugar and heaving backs, that space between am I and yes, wherein the stick is dry and there’s nothing, nothing to be seen before that answer. Then she looks, she looks down and sees, and her smile is wondrous to behold as she falls onto the bed in shock and calls, “Honey, honey- I’m pregnant!”
He doesn’t know what to say but says it anyway, all full of answers and smirks that belie everything and nothing at once. It’s not his, is it- he’s had no children since the red-bleeding day long ago, the day they don’t think about but will never ever forget. There’s a barbed word here and there but he stays, he holds her and helps her as her belly swells, as she grows large with a child of the eternal earth, deep-growing and kicking into every trimester that passes like a season.
It comes around like this.
Four-five-six years go by, years of little games and a pitter-pattering soundtrack to maternal days and nights, tiny feet on a child that he can love because she’s new, and mortal, and won’t grow to betray him like the others. A child that she loves, this bright daughter with no old feuds or conflicting values, this mortal who will grow old and die in the fullness of time. The mother who is Mother looks on her every night and dewy morning with this knowledge, this certainty of seeing her children’s children laid in their graves and feels a yes deep to her core. Because no mother should bury their child, but the age of this one will be perfect and it will be right, and even her very bones will be returned to Mother Ge in the end.
For every end is a beginning, the circling cycle that moves us through the spinning wheels of time. Seasons, minutes, hours, days- passing as shadows and the march of moon and sun through Father Ouranos. This little girl seems to shine of her own volition, a child of earth and stars, as she runs to Mommy at the end of her first day of school with a gap-toothed smile full of uncorrupted love. Hello, she breathes into her daughter’s spun-silk hair, Mommy loves you too. The earth never lies, and her promises to this child are as honest as flowers and falling leaves.
It stops like this.
With the blood pounding time has slowed, her question a thrown rock down an empty hall. What’s wrong and will she-, when the doctor’s every hesitant blink and stalling gesture spans a lifetime. Wasn’t it just yesterday that she came home complaining of a headache and stiff neck, woke up in the middle of the night with spiking fever? They two parents, these gods with no knowledge of disease, thought it just some passing thing, labored on until a disfiguring rash prompted them to seek out a den of healing.
Only to be here, now, to have the final tests done and see this mortal man remove his glasses slowly with a dragging sigh, and it doesn’t take an oracle to see the clouded horizon. The hospital hallway echoes bleak and desolate, every inch a linoleum mausoleum. They wait and watch and listen as the syllables fall with rusty bell-clangs, all there’s nothing we can do and went too long untreated but she can hear nothing, only the beating of her own heart and the knowledge that no, she will never see her little girl drive a car or get married, never see her grow old before laying her in a grave.
It falls apart like this.
Here, now, all knowledge is eclipsed by senses: the dead weight in her arms, fingers combing through brittle hair, the ugly red rash and unseeing eyes beneath her, oh. The ugly, hateful heart monitor screeches, a steady mechanical grating against her ears that almost sounds like a protracted scream of pain or disappointment. Dead, it says, dead and gone you failed how could you devoured by the earth, taken by disease as another one bites the dust both here and in the bowels of putrid Tartarus. Another child, this piece of herself turned to ash and ripped from her arms by hesitation and cruel fate. Because she failed.
She is running, running down the halls of the living mausoleum and out the door, running until she finds some patch of green and good, with trees and carefully sculpted flowers that she can surround herself with and be at home. The park is empty this early in the morning, just the odd jogger and sunrise squirrel, but off in the distance a child is at play. One of her holidays, Litha was just the other day and the candlelight worship still swells in her, surging power that floods her veins with ruddy strength and life. The world is quiet, dimmed to a choked whisper as she falls to the ground and screams.
It moves like this.
The hill is no towering Olympus nor proud Othrys, but her feet are rooted to hard-packed desert earth in the midst of chaos. For miles around there is screaming, screaming and trembling and people running for cover, struggling to keep their balance as the very ground bucks and sways, a horse trying to overthrow its master. Buildings shifting, windows shattering in their frames, bookshelves toppling to crush innocent, scared people- the damage is vast and spreading. With every twist of her hand and shift of her furious gaze it worsens, rippling from her as waves in a pond.
Nothing within her feels pity for the scared and dying, no iota of mercy that bids her to stop. Beneath her feet the very ground is rioting, a vast and furious panorama of destructive wrath. Every tremor seems to reflect in or come from her, her bones and muscles shaking fitfully in their skin as the ground slides impatiently along fault lines. Something in her face is strange and distorted, the pretty features twisted into stone with every tremor that sounds like a scream of inhuman grief. Death, chaos, horror and destruction: from her they come, perfect ripples from the all-destroying all mother. I brought you into this world, she seems to say with humanity in her hand, and I can take you out.
It casts off like this.
He isn't the hand-holding type prone to tenderness and sweet nothings; they have gone many centuries playing their games, sniping back and forth with love bites that feel like tearing beaks. When he looks at her, at his wife and mother who has always returned to him, she has a hardness that speaks only of deep fragmenting, and he instantly sees through to her soft places. It's a tricky thing, picking through screaming people and falling trees, wending through streets that are sliding into each other and crumpling like paper. The raw power rolling off her nearly knocks him back, but she's very close to killing them both so he continues.
When she feels his hand on her shoulder, she retaliates with fury: a swift motion meant to knock him on his back. He knows her too well, though, and soon has her by the wrists. As before (in those older days, those days of newness and pain) his embrace envelops her, wraps around on all sides as he was always meant to, containing her still-shaking arms as the world falls apart around them. She looks at him, all rage and wrath, and his answering gaze is calm (perhaps the slightest edge of understanding, even); calm, unperturbed, the rocks on which the tide of her grief breaks. And like the waves she breaks, her ramrod-straight spine curling into him, tears falling from eyes that have been dry since the Inquisition. He lets her, embrace all-enveloping, and she cries until the tremors stop.
It goes like this.