Intermittence

We completed the last big push of the war (though we did not then realize it), and six days later I found the standing stones. They awakened me.

I left my company later that evening, found and retraced my path through the woods, and emerged into the clearing. Threads of energy crackled from stone to stone, blue like the moonlight which filtered down through the treetops.

I stepped through the circle’s perimeter, hand grazing one of them fondly. They were more weathered than when I set them.

My centuries here complete, I gained the center, looked up, and went home.

The rhythm of the music was intense, insistent. The crowd had long since ceased to be a collection and was a million-limbed organism, pulsating and throbbing to the bass line.

I’ll never understand how my eyes singled her out of the crowd, or how our gazes somehow locked on each other across that morass. We found each other, though. We moved tentatively, locked onto a common frequency, bounced, twisted, danced, lived, died, were reborn. Always together, always in synchrony.

The night ended, as they all do, with the rising sun. We parted reluctantly. I see her sometimes, fleetingly, like moonbeams.

By all accounts, the train entered the mountain tunnel with twenty-four cars and emerged with twenty-five. The extra, inserted somehow between the twelfth and thirteenth cars, appeared identical to all the others with the exception of its impenetrably-black windows.

Upon arrival at the nearest station, all attempts to enter the car were fruitless. Examination revealed that the doors were not functional: they were sections of the exterior surface molded and painted to look like doors.

The car was separated from the others and moved to a service building where it remained for one night before vanishing without a trace.

The towheaded boy bothered and bullied me for two years, until the grove out in the bottoms ate him.

I tried to forgive his tripping feet and shoving hands, but human forgiveness has limits, and in the end I could allow him to continue no longer. It was the incident with the cat, about which I may have written elsewhere. I don’t recall.

In any case, I tricked him (with a promise of money, I assume) and led him down the creek bed to where the tangled birch roots caught his feet. I incanted the old words, and went home.

“Head down,” the rider told himself.

The wind whipping by was strong enough to cause him to lose control of the cycle if he let his head rise up too much. He kept his eyes fixed on the readouts instead, trusting them for advice far more than the limited field of vision afforded by the tiny windshield. At these speeds, eyes were essentially useless. Of course, so were human reflexes, but those were all he had to work with.

Projectiles rained down, white-hot and trailing streamers of plasma from their descent through the atmosphere.

Survival was paramount. Failure meant extinction.