Blake Fruits
Two worn and sleepless men sat facing each other at either end of an uninspired metallic table, somber in the attitude of contemplation and profound stupor as they stared at an ancient checkered board lying in front of them. Surveying the wooden square and analyzing their moves, their mistakes, it was apparent to one another that their strategies were both compromised. Fatigue was setting in and external stressors were mounting exponentially. There was little more that could be done, though. So, they played.
Their faces were dirty, smudged with engine grease, and their jumpsuits were ragged and frayed. The atmosphere of the room was dim and ghostlike, and a red wall-light lit up the metallic foyer every few moments glinting off of each table and their eyes. An eery, long drawn melodic sound echoed faintly throughout the hauntingly now bootless gallery of their bubble. It seemed to be the whirling sounds of the atomic structures in that far distant forbidden space, each atom crooning in the subtle embrace of its omnipresent author. The two easily could have felt that this surreal and angelic opera remained only in their minds. Several odd glances between them had been shared ever since it started, confirming along with the help of their central computer that it was, indeed, an exterior phenomena radiating from some unknown source, albeit faint, almost not there, just under a whisper dispersed upon the air.
Hopi sat on his stool leaned back against the wall on his side tugging on his unkempt thick black beard while he contemplated how much thought he needed to put into his next move. Then after a moment delay he reached out over the table—a fresh pink scar running along the edge of his hand from his pinky finger to beyond his wrist was apparent—and he moved a little painted black wooden piece to a square, b5, with a heavy sigh. It was a figure in the form of an ancient kneeling warrior wielding a sword in one hand and a crucifix in the other.
“Your move.” He said in a deep, gruff and detached voice.
Abradm stared intently at the board almost mirroring Hopi’s posture. Thoughts struggled to connect as he worried about his strategy and how painful it was to exhale. With great pain every movement rippled through his faculties and into every muscle and bone in his body. It even seemed to hurt merely sitting still in the stiff and cold atmosphere. He sniffled. His breath was nearly seen and both of their faces were pale underneath circles of darkness.
He took a raspy breath, “You blame me for all that’s happened, Hopi.” Abradm more or less stated matter of factly.
“You know very well my thoughts on the matter.”
“Yes, but we have not spoken of them.”
“We need not to. It is to only waste breath.” Hopi almost whispered.
“Then you needn’t have informed me that it was my turn. I knew it was. You want to speak.” Abradm stated.
He clenched his teeth tight and a grimace came over his face as he glanced at Hopi. Hopi sighed irritated. With exhausted eyes Abradm then looked down on the board filled with characters facing off against each other, each one holding a unique shape, and each one hand carved from real oak infused by some unseen edict with unique traits to maneuver how they would. Abradm shivered and thought for a moment of the ramifications each of his moves had in the larger picture—gazing downward on his faithful subjects—all ready to die at his command—perhaps as a weary god might have looked down on his valiantly struggling soldiers in the midst of some horrific war.
“There is something to be said about speaking,” he let out a somewhat defeated joke as he wrapped a synthesized jacket thick round his chest, a faint quiver rumbled in his voice while below their feet simultaneously a tremor reverberated throughout—some of their pieces seemed to move by themselves as the table vibrated the checkered ground of their own world. Hopi didn’t care for the joke, but they both immediately glanced at each other with worry in their eyes, yet it was nothing new. In fact, the tremors were becoming more common. Abradm fidgeted while Hopi stared grimly into his brother’s eyes for a moment, his forehead glistening in a cold sweat and his brow furrowed.
Ignoring the tremors Hopi spoke suddenly with rapid words in his deep resonate voice, “Shall I move for you, brother. You may give me no other choice.”
Abradm didn’t look up. But No he thought clearly, and Hopi only stared annoyed as if he had heard his brother’s thoughts. He thought for a moment longer, dismayed he then slowly moved a magnificently rearing destrier equipped with its armored Knight onto square e2.
Suddenly and before Hopi could make his anticipated move, Abradm gasped and the game was interrupted. There, hopelessly standing in the room across from where they were sitting was Trearshimeen clad in the same torn and dirty dress she had worn in the abyss. She stood there confused and looking around somewhat frantically and disconcerted.
“Tre!” Abradm said in wide eyed astonishment. Tre is what he had begun to call her.
Quickly he mumbled a few uncertain phrases under his breath and ignoring his aching body stood racing over to her clumsily knocking the stool he had been sitting on to the floor and clanking the table knocking a few of those pieces over while others tipped about. Hopi, with no regard to the strange new girl fixed his eyes on one significant piece of his opponent that in a moment tipped precariously onto the edge of its base which was carved into the fashion of an immaculate royal throne occupied by an old grey bearded king. It wore a cumbersome crown and a robe draped over his royalty’s body. It sat back down upright properly onto its square, and Hopi grunted.
“Adeorhe.” Trearshimeen smiled with tender relief as Abradm approached her.
“What are you doing, brother?” Hopi suddenly scolded, still staring at the board contemplating his next move.
Trearshimeen paid no mind to Hopi’s condescending voice and she started to walk toward a dimly lit corridor that exited the room as if being pulled by some unseen etherial force. Abradm paid no mind to Hopi’s irritating tone and followed Trearshimeen, as if being pulled by some etherial force only glancing back at his brother once cautiously as the two made their exit, leaving Hopi to curse under his breath to the now unsecured game board.
Trearshimeen, in a serenely innocent manner only spoke with Abradm in short sentences in-between long pauses while she gently ran her hand over the sleek walls of every corridor she passed through. She methodically strolled through every one light as a ballerina striding upon the rays of sun, yet, there was simultaneously an untouchable darkness in her eyes, impenetrable that through her veins did run. The rising darkness befitted no one, let alone a little girl. The clouds were billowing in.
She wound her way through halls filled with pipes and coils and panels with buttons, and Abradm followed and answered the many questions she started to ask—the occasional tremor reverberated throughout.
“Where are we, Abradm?”
This must be a dream he thought to himself. But he knew where he was, at least, in this dream. Quickly and subtly, before answering the girl, almost as if placing this vivid vision of sorts on pause, with an air of awareness which he, along with those of his kind had been obliged to become acquainted with, he out of trained repetition reached his hand over the top of his own head and slowly grasped the empty space above his dome out of view of his eyes while he looked forward. Before his fingers could pinch together through the empty air a small object suddenly appeared before his hand. He grasped it, bringing it into view and thumbed a keyhole in its side. He clenched his other fist at his left side and in a moment which seemed like magic a small metallic key appeared in it. He then put the key into the key hole and with a sensation of supernal wonder he opened the object. He peered into the tiny aperture which in its smallness miraculously contained a whole universe swirling about with red and purple and blue vivid lights among other things only known to his deepest subconscious self. His visible breath which drifted near to the opening of this portal evaporated as it approached the universe—one reels about in contemplation of what a breath of a god might appear to be to the searchers of some nascent star gazing civilization—and finally with a longing relief he closed the object up again.
After a moment he breathed deeply, composed himself, and, satisfied with what he had seen, the box along with the key vanished into the thin air. His attention, then, quickly turned back to Trearshimeen, whom he was stunned to see gazing at him in a pensive and analyzing manner.
“What was that?” She asked, to Abradm’s utter surprise.
This was no normal dream.
“Tre.” Abradm diverted her second question with an air of unease and returned to her first. “This is Heaven.” he said as he looked about at the innards of a dreary and spiritless vessel.
A unique capacity to attain the vivid presence of mind within a dream heralded through Abradm’s thoughts, and even in this foggy locus, he reached out to note that there was no straining to communicate even in the least as he recalled that He and Trearshimeen had in the dark and hellish cave-prison, and the things that she said were understood in his very tongue with no trouble whatsoever. With a higher condition of awareness than most, and with a strain of curiosity that encompassed he, along with the rest of his kind, he strained within that confined avenue of a dream to focus in on even the subtle motions of the little lips of Trearshimeen as she spoke, to study this oddity, curtailing the vague representations dreams attempt to get away with. He resolved to an awareness that would never have been, and indeed, the motions of her lips matched that of his native tongue—English. His mind raced faster than it had in quite some time. This was, most certainly, a dream of dreams waltzing in enigmatic serenity with his consciousness.
Suddenly Trearshimeen’s hand swept over a new material as they continued on. It was glass or some compound of it. It was cold and it rumbled. The tremors were getting worse, yet, Trearshimeen’s eyes were caught up in the strange fast moving wisps of grey etherial strings zipping through a black void in front of her eyes as she held a hand to its surface.
“That is outside.” Abradm said.
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t suppose you do.” He whispered.
And then, with a whooshing sound a door to their left slid open and the two of them walked through it. Trearshimeen looked around silently for a moment before her eyebrows began to curve upward as she tried to hold back her welling emotions.
“This is Heaven?” Unsure she sputtered quietly as her heavy eyes gazed into the abysmal room.
They had entered the Parkway. It was darker than the rest of the vessel, and sadly, it reeked of death, even more so than the abyss of where they ate rotting flesh together. Only a faint red light blinked silently reflecting off of thousands of wilting and decaying plants. The music almost unheard at this point suddenly spiked with an intense burst of emotion and began to crescendo. Whole trees that once had stretched hundreds of feet into the vast glass domed structure had fallen over entirely, their roots left bare and their leaves, brown and crunchy were strewn throughout. Over the brick pathways that were once lit by the power of the stars in nearby systems lay wrinkled and shriveled vines while tomatoes rotted on the floors and carrots and lettuce were turning black in planter boxes. The nostalgic nods to a distant world could be seen in the antiquated trash bins and stained wooden benches lining the winding brick walkways—all mementos to a distance realm.
There was a foul scent that permeated the air, and a doom fell over them both as they beheld the work of death amongst the long absent miracle of life. Abradm looked around disheartened, his eyes darting from one end of the massive room to the other while they filled up with tears. His breaths became shallow and his emotions were clear and distinct, something Trearshimeen had never seen of him when they were in the abysm. There was no detachment. His stoicism was nowhere to be seen and he felt all too bluntly the horrors of this wretched predicament rise up in his chest once more, the very predicaments that had taught him to engage in the search for peace in the controlled motions of meditation. This was Abradms home—and it was in its final repose, and, as well, too young to have gone this way. He alone held the burden of its demise, while the others who walked the halls like shadeless specters seemed to carry no added burden, spiting him in an attitude of mockery and disdain. This work lied upon Abradm’s conscience, and his alone.
“No, Tre,” with his eyes, red, stinging and a tingle in his nostrils from the vapors of decaying vegetating, he felt an overwhelming need to clarify something, something that had never before been such a concern, what with the befuddlements of language and its problematic barriers. Tre now, in this capacity somehow, whether literal, or figurative, to Abradm’s mind, knew what the word heaven denoted and the meanings it carried in his own native tongue, “this isn’t where the righteous go after death,” he assured. “This is a damned vessel. One that was christened long ago for the homeless,” He trailed off under his breath as if beginning to recite some memorized verse of long dismissed mythology, “known only to the immortal pneuma collocated against the endless abysm of ungoverned space is the damnation of the gods.” Tre tilted her head toward Abradm with tears streaming from her large blue eyes and left the wilting flowers to themselves. She turned down another hallway, and as a child far too used to the injustices which beset the unfortunate she wandered as a homeless vagabond to and fro in search of something unseen and unknown. Her tears neither condemned her, nor proved her to be weak, but rather they nourished the seeds of her growing cognizance—and compassion, albeit in the trenches of unwritten anguish. Boulders began cracking apart and tumbling wildly down into the valley in rapidly ensuing chaos.
With modulated breaths she continued to walk through another corridor, some specters whooshed by on fleeting whims, whereupon she came to the final room of their trek through Heaven’s arrayed and byzantine halls. Her wandering, albeit, aimless with no apparent rhyme nor reason to where her feet took her, swept her along into, perhaps the most significant room in all of the vessel, and Abradm followed her in anxiously. The same blinking lights eerily silently seemed to condemn a long grated walkway with glass alcoves lining each side. She walked in. Abradm swallowed hard. A woman’s voice in operatic splendor began to sing in long drawn out mystical tones within the cloudy lacuna between the orbits of electrons ‘round their nuclei pervading the space they occupied.
Tre came to the first alcove on her left and looked in. There, in suspended animation was the body of another human being. A slender fair skinned and blond woman stood tall like a goddess clothed with only a simple white garment wrapped around her body. Her chin was strong and her cheeks defined, but her eyes remained closed in perfect stillness. Trearshimeenin wide eyed astonishment, having never seen the likes of such a woman, innocently scrutinized every curve with an attitude of curiosity, and then after a moment she moved on to the next alcove immediately to the woman’s left. It was a man, even taller than the woman, clean shaven with a peaceful face, who didn’t look much unlike Abradm. A little brown haired boy was standing still, frozen like the rest, next to them in yet another alcove frozen in time.
“What is this place, Adeohre?” Trearshimeen said as she, adrift in thought, gazed into the eyes of the little boy opposite her.
“This is the dream-scape. This is where my people sleep, Tre.”
Alcove after alcove went on and on and Tre continued to look at each one of their faces. There must have been hundreds of them lined up one after the other on both sides. Trearshimeen gently swept her hand over every one she passed. They were cold to the touch, and each one showed the sleeping, perfectly still faces of living individuals. Finally, she stopped and took particular notice of one of the sleepers. It was a tall skinny man with brown skin and short black hair. He, just like the rest wore a blank face frozen in space, yet, Tre took a very specific interest in him.
“Who is this?” She squinted through the condensation on the glass.
Abradm was aloof, staring toward the end of the corridor as if anxiously waiting to come upon some mystery, lost in his head—a place that had begun to be less and less secure with every passing moment. His breaths were shallow and his thoughts were ramping upward. He took a deep breath and refocused himself on the little Trearshimeen and her question. He glanced at the man she was fixed upon.
She spoke again “He has the skin of the laborers—the men my father owned.” She said matter-of-factly and with a certain clarity Abradm had not yet heard in her voice. It was different on many levels.
His brow scrunched together in bewilderment. His tensions were immediately replaced with a deepening curiosity as he looked up and down between the two. Certainly, this was no normal dream. What is this? He thought. There was no working memory of Trearshimeen speaking of any such laborers, or owned men, while they were in the cave. Perhaps, he thought, this is a dissafinity effect, that is, an ambiguous representation within a dream or a vision of two or more unrelated things that, for unknown psychoemotional reasons, amalgamate to synthesize trains of thought which could potentially give rise to higher thinking and problem solving skills. Surely there was no waking-world correlation between the two, Tre and the laborers. Nonetheless he made a note of it, to verify. Sub-Cortical analysis/Trearshimeen, his eyes shot back and forth for a few moments and then they stopped completely as he glanced down at this little anomaly that was asking him all these questions. He reached slowly for her while she stared innocently at the brown skinned man and gently lifted up a tuft of her black hair from her shoulder. He pinched the hairs between his forefinger and thumb utilizing every nerve ending to take in and feel each fine fiber as if he were nearly unconvinced of his own senses, the dream mediating every sensation. She was there, undoubtedly in quite an undreamlike fashion, at least in this fathom. Every sense testified to it, but what this meant, he wrestled with. What dream could offer previously unknown information should the laborers be a real world institution of her world? Preempting the contingency he continue to think, Could I have extrapolated upon this information from the sets of data previously known? Need to verify laborers. He made another neurological note and filed it away under Trearshimeen Dream as his mind raced to understand. New Information: Imprint moment he thought, and then catalogued it. He shook the odd instance off and then started to answer her. He hadn’t known all that were aboard Heaven, yet he was aware of this particular man’s name, he held a unique role about the vessel, and one that he found to be quite odd that Trearshimeen should be so drawn to. But before he could answer a loud noise ranged throughout the corridor interrupting their conversation and the mesmerizing opera, and the lights blazed. A siren streaked through the halls and a specter frantically flew through Abradm’s chest.
Abradm, there is a breach in your sector! A voice echoed loudly in his head, and then the vessel shook wildly while an explosion tore through the corridor. Flames roared through the floor and down the entirety of the hallway engulfing the alcoves and both Abradm and Tre in one instant of horrific cataclysm as volcanic ash spewed from the mountain tops. The flames seared Abradm’s lungs as he turned toward Trearshimeen while his flesh began to tear away. She too was engulfed in flames, yet she appeared to be unscortched, nearly, on the contrary, emitting her own flames which whirled around her in a haunting display of profound beauty and glory. And then, seemingly out of spite for the miracle of grace there appeared all around, within the very flames, the cold eight legged machines. They scurried about in indifferent phasms in all directions in an ugly and frightening display one would recall in a dark and hellish nightmare. They blazed in Abradm’s retinas searing a harrowing view of their monstrous and impregnable reality into his deepest mind in the throes of his thrashing death.
Wake up! Wake up! Breathe!
Then suddenly, as his skin vanished and as the blazes began to melt away his flesh, he awoke in a moment of terrific wide eyed terror, spewing volcanic tesourty out of his mouth and nose upon the shores of the rivers flowing from the peaks of Cu-Chellis. His lungs burned and his veins shook with lighting while the shores were rumbling with intense fervor. He was outside of the pit laying soaking wet in his white under-garments. And once he had certainly come back to the living, Trearshimeen, falling on her hands and kneeling on the rocks of the river beside him, threw her little arms around his chest as he sputtered and gasped for air in a deep cold sweat. His eyes filled with microscopic metallic granules.
“Onluari Pulsuz free-dom abid, Adeohre!” She shouted in a concerned little voice.
“Tre.” He sputtered. “Yes. Yes.” in weakness he agreed that they were, indeed, freed from the abysm.
He, with the little strength he could muster reached up and placed his left arm around her as he lay in this new brighter world, sulfur on his taste buds and watching the water that he had seen only a year earlier rippling by his face in pristine clarity—his head bursting in agony and breathing just barely.
The jubilation of reuniting with Trearshimeen, the brave and ingenious spirit who sent messages on the wings of light into the depths of hell, however, was short lived, a dashing phantom of fate wafting upon the air. The mountain was rumbling, boulders were tumbling, and grey clouds were whirling o’rehead. A storm had been brewing, yet, it suddenly and inexplicably began to abate.