‘Gonna get a pin,
Long and thin,
Scratch a hole in my eye,
Where a mouse can get in.’
Mother felt me slip out third, blood and slick. I was alive so there was no need to re-ingest me. All my proteins were active and my starting sequences started, DNARNADNARNA. I squirmed as unknown instincts became known and my ways became nipple ways. For a time my life was suck and shit. My eyes were firmly shut, no sight but plenty of sensation to be getting on with.
Apart from the obvious Motherfood, I could feel I was not alone. Pressed around me was warmth I didn’t generate, movement I didn’t move but moved me, probably to tears if my eyes had been formed. Alongside, around and with me were the two that came before and the one that came after. We had lived and therefore our efficiency was proved.
As time and milk progressed my eyes finished themselves and began to open, shapes that once had feeling now had form. From the light diffusing through the nest tunnel, I could now give time, which up to now had been invisible and anonymous, it’s rightful names. So from the single eternal were born the twins of day and night. With my eyes open and time tamed then, it was no longer ‘I will’ but ‘I am’.
My brothers and sister had obviously come to the realm of vision with me and we greeted each other warmly with much licking and smelling and rubbing pinkness. This was a good time, a warm time and we rolled and drank and grew. Our hair and fur grew thicker and more luxuriant as the days renewed after the nights. As we grew then our world shrunk around us and we felt kings and queens of our space. Now and again the Motherfood would vanish and at first we’d cry and wail and shiver together in fear. She had created our existence and we thought that when she went then our very life would go with her. We learnt we were wrong, that our life was with us and this made us stronger. Our arrogance was as pure as the white of our coats.
We were left to ourselves more and more often, left to grow as our world palace shrunk to a prison so that we bickered and fought. We learnt to glare with the black of our eyes and snarl with teeth hardened on the soft grasses and hard seed husks brought with the returning Motherfood. We understood individuality on the strength of mistrust. The first claimed power while the fourth claimed preference. Second and myself watched all but each other most. No longer did our proximity promote peace but antagonise aggression.
Each daytime breathed through the tunnel to where? I was king with other kings in our own restriction of domain. I wanted to be both king and subject, to be power and powerless, a looked after leviathan. As night is to day then I will to I am. A unity of two. Each night the Motherfood disappeared into the nest tunnel and each day she returned. To begin with, I considered that each time she left she ceased to exist and each time she returned she was reborn. Reborn to us as we had been born to her, but as I fought and struggled in my world with my ever-larger siblings, it occurred to me that there was life outside my world. A world outside my life. I had no knowledge but I dreamt in faith.
Faith is born itself from insecurity, that’s its Motherfood without which it has no substance, no self. My Motherfood was going, going, gone and all I was left with was self. A neat little contradiction that hadn’t escaped the attention of my nest fellows. In order to prove ourselves we were going to have to prove faith. Prove faith and you destroy it, yet allow it and you destroy the self. Here we were, less than thirty days old and having to deal with ideas before we understood the ideal. In other words, we needed faith.
While my fellow nestlings wrestle-warred for small time bigness, I’d spend hours gazing into the nest tunnel. Preparing myself, head first at the start of this birth canal with no more knowledge of what lay beyond than I had the last time. Being born again, that was the plan. The confrontations between my kin were growing stronger all the time as they themselves grew stronger. Finally a vicious squabble between First and Fourth propelled me, both mentally and physically, down and out. I was Third but now I am First.
Light, light so strong that it had weight rushed me, crushed me and then stood far, far back to laugh and mock. I closed my eyes to escape but it still poured into me. When I opened my eyes, I saw so much that I was blind. I tried turning and twisting to feel the sides of the new world but there was nothing. I had been king of everything I could see, touch or taste but now I had no title in a place I couldn’t name. I had no more meaning to this place than it had for me. Now I knew fear.
I lay very still; not daring to move as the twins of day and night came in turns to visit. Finally, fear was broken by an even stronger force. I could smell the sweetness of the grasses, the starchy aroma of seed husks until hunger drove me through the fence built by fear.
The hugeness of light no longer intimidated me as once it had but the space it filled confused and bemused me. No matter how far I seemed to travel, I could never find the sides. It occurred to me that maybe, possibly, this world didn’t have sides. Born, as I was, from one womb to another, then I expected boundary. I was used to restrictions, it even felt like I needed them. Living in a world without an end, well, that was going to take getting use to. Maybe this world did have its walls and as twice before I’d outgrown a womb-world until I was reborn, then maybe I’d outgrow this one.
- * * * * * * * * * *
The twins have visited so often now that I’ve lost count. Periodically they bring their cousins, the seasons of warmth and cold. Warmth who brings gifts of food and security and cold who brings hunger yet hope. I was used to my visitors now and no longer feared them or my world. My attempts at discovering the parameters of my world had all but stopped. I still made the occasional foray but without any real conviction of discovering an end. The search itself sated me more than the desire for a result.
Infrequently, I’d spot one of the other nestlings, so they’d obviously chosen the path of rebirth as well. I’d try to avoid them as much as possible, although I once met with Second who was always an ally. After my exit then the politics of the nest had changed until a brutal struggle had forced a painful twin expulsion of Second and Fourth.
The way Second told it, they too felt the force of the new world and lay trembling as time licked at them, tasted them. Fourth was still born though and refused to move or experience. Lay still until his fur, once long and thick, dissolved away and he was re-ingested, devoured by the twins of time and all the cousins. Second moved on, occasionally catching glimpses of First who ran erratically with madness amongst the tall grasses, snarling his proclamations of power to the roof of the world. The Motherfood was around too, more felt than seen.
Not that it matters now, you can no more travel back along your own life than you can in time. Maybe that’s all life is, a defined segment of time and time just a succession of life joined end to end. Very soon after I left the nest I seemed to stop growing, so I guess this is my world. No more births after all. We weren’t alone in our world though, there was another that shared our space. A Man.
A Man, naked and furless and alone. So large that I was sure that his head must touch the sky, a man stood motionless and alone, staring into the distance and the future. He never moved, never once strode out to discover any ends, never once cried out in loneliness and fear, never shook for want of not knowing. A being that stared forward with the confidence of one who understood the past.
As time and cousin progressed then my physical forays diminished, I no longer needed to search for an end when I had my very own being that could see it. Perhaps see further, past this world and into the next. I grew devotional in my belief, in my faith, my hope.
As a good devotee, I began to tend my idol, nibble at the rough grasses that grew and chaffed between his toes. Lick clean his feet that never travelled. The mist of love fell upon me, obscuring all but that thing that I wished to see. Worship at the leg of a being whose own beginnings had no meaning to me.
Second visited me once, laughing and mocking at my devotion, my faith. No longer was he an ally but an infidel whose very disbelief disproved the validation of his own existence. He was but a golem, false creation of the most sinister kind. I immediately declared fatwa and fell upon his neck with sacred incisors cutting deep, deeply into his wanton neck. I rejoiced as the depth red of life splashed across the foot arch of the true being. Laughed as I licked clean those feet of world, as the non-believer was re-ingested into non-being.
I felt clarity now, swam the green-blue sea of the clean and the true with its tides of revelation and redemption. I revelled in the sensorial touch of ecstatic kelp, coated liberally with accession algae. Rejoiced in my own being that was his. He was mine and I his.
No-one else visited, not First nor the Motherfood. We were left to ourselves, my Man and I. For a long time I was content, content in the knowledge known by the Man and dreamt of by myself. What need I of vision when his eyes saw so much further? Why create questions when the answers already existed.
I had peace but I grew tired with each passing cousin. As my belief and devotion grew, it filled the space in the world around me like an ever-thickening fog so that I could not help but become conscious of it. The more I became aware then the winds and breezes of question would flow in to dissipate the fog. Another seemingly endless cycle had come into existence. A flow and ebb of belief and question, both feeding off each other, creating and destroying each other. As day is to night, as ‘I will’ to ‘I am’.
The man stood through all this, beyond such mundane circles, unmoving and aloof, stare fixed firmly ahead to a sight I had only belief in. A belief I had created. Not once had the man looked down to acknowledge my existence, never once reacted to my devotion. The fog grew darker, but a little thinner.
Time passed and my once luxuriant coat began to fade. My teeth dulled and shortened and the cousin of warmth now seemed cold while the cousin of hunger brought less hope. The light that had once blinded me seemed to fade bringing the snarling shadows of fear a little closer until I could hear their growl.
More often I would think back to my second birth and my desire for a third increased. The fog of faith was all but gone and the questions would come rushing through the clear air to laugh in madness. Faith was no longer enough, having this Man exist was no longer enough. I wanted to see what he saw, to know enough that the cycles would no longer include me in their patterns that etched the form of life.
Whether I was reborn again or re-ingested was the desire that now fed me and held me close. Desire was my Motherfood `and Passion the milk I sucked. As once, in the nest world, the Motherfood had fed me milk and I had grown strong, then Passion filled my failing bones and muscles. As once, the Motherfood had shown me the light of a new world then Desire drove me towards to a new light of understanding.
The fog of devotion lightened and lifted and I began to suspect that I could break the cycle, that circle that entrapped me. I could swim ashore from that blue-green sea of faith and stand strong upon the shore.
I began to climb, clinging to the hairs of the shin, struggling over the folds in the knee, up the expanse of skin and thigh. Higher up the Man, where the light was stronger and purer. Up over the hips and belly, chest and shoulder until I clung to the neck of my idol and cast my vision out. I saw nothing but how could I with these eyes born in restriction, born in worlds that contained ends.
Up further over the lips of a mouth that had never spoken a word of truth or lie. Past the nose that had never smelt the odours of my nest or sweat of sibling body, close and comforting as it had once been. Up to the eye that saw all that I couldn’t, all that I wanted to see.
With teeth both sharpened and dull, I sliced that eye, slipped in, blood and slick. I looked through the Man’s eye, where feeling now took on form and saw what he saw. Saw the edge of my world and beyond, saw new worlds. So many that they formed a mist, a fog of their own. On each world stood a man, staring and unmoving. I began to sing.
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