(Untitled Short 2019)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KodNFsP6r88&fbclid=IwAR0Ahs6YhGd3V7jh3NFQGUo6eiyEAPU97z5KgAsIl_hz4bSs9ckaEFrK71o

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This was a dark place - a lightless place.

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It was the kind of place so black, that light, were it to exist, would be swallowed by the depth - absorbed into the manifold of colorlessness and reconstituted into the abyss. It was a place of no thing - no substance or shape, no texture and no reminiscent echo that might otherwise proceed the presence of sound.

It was a vacuous place - a place where no life could be.

Where daylight and its coinciding photosynthesis - the cyclic reconstitution of energies from which all of life had been made material - where cellular organisms, plants and predators, were mythologized by the absence of all things and forced back into the forgotten library of thought by the overbearing presence and suffocating proximity, of nothing and its intimate nothingness.

It was a place that shouldn’t be - a place inconceivable in its nature and resting in defiance against the impossibility of its existence.

And yet…

Jason somehow found himself walking in it.

Treading along some invisible stair or padding barefoot against some imperceptible causeway.

It was too dark for Jason to see himself - too dark to maintain awareness over the individual footsteps, let alone their toehold on a ground that, in almost all respects, had forgotten to adhere to the law of gravity. He couldn’t tell if he was walking backward or forward, if he was climbing or falling; and, as if to add to the suspension, he couldn’t hear the breath swimming cyclically from in and out of his own lungs. He couldn’t feel his heartbeat behind his ribs, no pulse beside his throat and no pump of life flowing throughout veined tunnels and arteries.

He couldn’t even feel his own skin - not the familiarity of cold against the swelling of hair follicles and no comfort of eyelids as they swept shut against his wetted corneas.

Jason, despite the absence of all the things that he had been so long accustomed, felt oddly at peace. He felt strangely content, and the patiently, calculated footfalls that he extended before him seemed to substantiate his serenity.

In a place where nothing exists, Jason heard himself wonder, being afraid must be as useless as a body.

And he was exactly right.

Despite what would have otherwise been the terrifying nature of this place, the deconstructed horror of being nothing at all was as foreign here as Jason was himself; and despite the intangibility of his being, Jason felt intuitively aware of that fact.

Because nothing existed here, it was not the kind of place where fear belonged.

It was not the place for horror - not the place for joy, or sorrow or pride; and it was definitely not the kind of place to stop moving.

For Jason felt instinctively, that if he were to stop walking, cease with the momentum of his motion, that somehow it would be indicative of something highly uncomfortable.

It wasn’t that he was afraid to stop, as again, fear couldn’t exist here; it was as if he understood that to do so somehow went against the grain - like a backwards shave or a papercut - and that stopping would be as obstinate as consciously placing one’s hand on a heated stove element.

Again, Jason’s instincts were exactly right.

Before long, and seemingly from out of nowhere, he heard something else that appeared to be completely out of place.

It was the sound of rubber tires rolling against icy pavement; and in the distance, despite the absolute certainty that they shouldn’t have existed and despite the inherent absolution of them doing so anyway, was the distant wane of approaching headlights.

It was so dark that they appeared to be orange - as if that, upon approach, they were fighting to remain innocuous within the siphoning pressure of the black.

As the lights grew wider, Jason was able to catch sight of his silhouette and saw that what lay beneath him was the appearance of a deep and supple lake. He saw that his toes enacted slight ripples upon its surface and that they were able, if not barely so, to catch some of the reflection from the oncoming vehicle.

As he noticed this, he heard the obnoxious tire screech of a car braking too quickly over a surface that rarely facilitated the act.

Jason looked up and saw the illuminate interior of what looked like a standard, city bus - with rails and hand straps, graffiti and bad advertisements. He saw immediately that there was no one driving, and as the doors swung open with the motion of a self articulated lever, he saw, also, that there was only one other passenger.

Hesitantly, he stepped aboard - feeling again, that doing so was precisely the kind of thing he was meant to.

He walked slowly, noticing within the almost abrasive light that he was both without shoes and completely naked. For a moment, he was struck by the old, familiar impulse to show some embarrassment - that reddened sense of being caught unawares in a position one probably shouldn’t have been - but it quickly subsided as he stepped, barefoot, across the security of the yellow line.

He took a seat opposite the other passenger, who glanced up as he did so and met with Jason’s eyes.

He was very old. And Jason noticed that he was also bare, save for a heavy, woolen blanket that had been draped about his frame. The skin at his cheeks and beneath his eyes hung loosely and there were subtle blue veins weaving beneath widened pores and liver spots.

He smiled slightly as Jason sat down and motioned with a near skeletal finger beneath the seat.

Jason looked and found an identical blanket - thick and gray, with the fibrous abrasion that markedly defined wool blankets.

Jason wrapped himself and settled into place, glancing through smudged and beaten windows at the vastness of the black. As the bus started again, he felt his weight shift and saw the old man across from him do the same.

He was older than old.

He seemed so ancient, that at any moment his bones might collapse against the sheer weight of loose flesh that clung so desperately to his musculature.

For a long time they simply sat there - looking at each other, with the old man occasionally smiling at a private thought and returning his gaze to the darkness.

Finally, Jason spoke.

“Do you know where we’re going?” He asked quietly.

The old man turned again to look at him and Jason saw that beneath the clouds of cataracts, his eyes may have once been a very bright shade of blue.

“I don’t really,” he rasped gently, giving the impression of that particular kindness that grows over very long periods within the human soul.

“But if I did, I would tell you.”

Jason felt that he liked this man; he appreciated the authenticity of his voice and thought that he could trust him through it.

“How long have you been here?” Jason followed.

“Oh, a very long time I think.” His dimples moved as he spoke and Jason felt a deep compassion at the answer.

“I’ve been waiting for my wife.” He adjusted his blanket and exposed the soft sallow of his chest beneath it. “But I haven’t a watch to know for how long.”

Jason didn’t know what to say - so he didn’t, and they waited together while their weight tipped against the elongated turns of the bus.

“Are we dead?” Jason asked eventually.

“I believe so,” came the response, “but I can’t remember how.”

Jason couldn’t either. In fact, he felt he couldn’t remember anything from before, save for what people called him.

“But you remember your wife?”

“Yes,” he answered softly, “I don’t think I could ever forget her.”

“What was her name?” Jason asked, touched by the sentiment.

“Justine,” he said. “My wife’s name is Justine.” He had a look of incredible longing on his face, but there was also a sense of anticipation that gave solidity to his otherwise delicate features.

“How long were you married?” 

He chuckled, “oh, about as long as I’ve been on this bus, I think.”

Jason laughed as well, “a long time then?”

The man winked and smiled widely, “yes, a long time.”

Jason wasn’t sure how much had passed while they sat like that together, but he felt that to ask something else might ruin the mystique; so instead, he waited with him and let the bus run its course.

Finally, and after a length that Jason couldn’t determine, the man interrupted the silence - doing so in the manner that one does when they give voice to a private thought, muttering almost to oneself and sharing while, as though through a kind of coincidence, within the mutual company of another.

"Sometimes," he started, "sometimes it feels as though we've always been married." The man spoke distantly - with his eyes set upon the worn, rubber treads of the bus' floor and, again, as if the statement had been directed more at the spot than it might've been towards Jason himself.

"Almost as though… we'd been married before we knew each other - before we'd even met."

He laughed. "As if the rings and the vows, and the wedding, and the time, were just things that commemorated something that was always going to happen." He paused. "Something that had already happened, that had always been there, something that existed regardless of what is, or what was - before I could've even imagined it into being." He took a shallow breath, "before it had the chance to've ever been made real."

"Sometimes… " he was almost slurring now, words falling like water between the movements of his mouth "… on rides like this, I think we'd always known each other - that we always knew where the other belonged."

"Like something that could never change; that would always be what it had always, already been; that I always was her husband, as she'd always be my wife."

Of an endless bus-ride - pleromatos - 

With neither a beginning nor an end

He mouthed something, then, to himself - with his eyes locked upon the same treads - yet blurring, ever so slightly, as they do when vacillating between a thousand memories at once. 

He mouthed it, again - the same thing, followed by a phrase. 

Jason couldn't quite make it out, but he was reminded of that air of conviction that emanates when a promise is being made: the kind of promise that transcends contract, that went beyond the qualities of even just an oath, something that was so powerful that to call it a rarity would do disservice to the understatement. 

The man whispered, then - softly, secretly, knowingly - speaking as if he were reading something from a book that had, already, long been written down.

"… aeons, love…"

"… always and for ever."

He mouthed the word again, a last time - passing it as if a breath and releasing it from the chapped textures that separated the man's lips. 

Though unable to make it out before, Jason understood now that the word the man had been repeating formed the name Justine. It was the keystone to his promise - kneaded over in the man's mind like dough, and crystalizing into the bond that held the endlessness of their relationship together:

Justine, Justine, Justine. 

Suddenly, and as if to punctuate the solemnity of that mantra, that connection, the bus stopped again - braking with an abrupt squeal and lurching, as though the driver had only just then realized that the route had included a stop.

Recognizing the sound, and in anticipating another entrant, Jason again looked outside and was met, as before, with the now all familiar darkness: the vacuous nothing, the enveloping and immaterial void.

He looked at the Old Man, sitting patient and expressionless, and then glanced back into the nothingness of the dark.

Jason felt afraid now - anxiously struck by the thought of having to, once again, be reduced into an element of the incorporeal: to become not yet but an absent part of a yet greater absence, to be enfolded into oblivion.

Jason felt the fear within him begin to animate. It stretched within the inner walls of his rib-cage and extended its paralysis into his limbs. He was afraid to leave the security of the bus, the comfort that was provided by the Old Man, by the sense of constancy and permanence that had been incanted through his love. The dark loomed beyond, almost reaching towards Jason, alienating him - calling an indefinite summons that promised the dissolution of Jason's self, the relinquishment of all that made him who he was, perhaps even forcing the surrender of his name.

Shaking, naked beneath his blanket and wringing the wool about his waist, Jason sat still - fixed upon the door and the pressing, desolate shadow that he only now understood to've narrowly escaped. He saw it clearly, then, plastered against the glass and seeking to reunite the bus' inhabitants with the nihilation that lay beyond. He saw it rattle against the windshield, suctioning against the barrier that loomed between them and plying its enticement along that wall.

And yet, when the doors finally opened, an immediate, flooding light so profound that it seemed the mirror-opposite as to what lay outside, poured from beyond the bus. It engulfed the entrance, dimmed the silhouetted windows and collided with the faded, plastic seats - smothering into the fear that had otherwise embedded itself so tightly against Jason's core and spreading its heat beneath the layers of his blanket. 

It moved like a sudden fog, and was so bright that it was almost blinding.

“I think that’s you,” said the Old Man - returning, now, from wherever it was that he'd been transported prior.

Jason felt put off, “aren’t you coming?” 

“No, I don’t think I am,” was his answer - soft like his countenance and gentle in its delivery.

“I think I’ll wait here a while longer.”

With that, Jason extended his hand, exchanged shakes with the Man in his scratchy blanket, and let his own fall around his feet.

He walked carefully towards the door, with his hand outstretched - covering his eyes from the radiance. He wasn’t sure what to expect, he wasn’t sure why the light was even there, but he felt, again, as if it belonged there, and that he, somehow, was meant to walk into it.

As he stepped into the light, he was finally able to feel his heartbeat; he felt his skin prickle as if newly sunburnt and he gasped abruptly, such as those suddenly hit by cold water.

He then heard, almost at random, the distant call of a newborn baby -

Crying, as they do, when woken as though for the very first time.

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Reviews

[Thomas W Case]

Tremendous writing. I am intrigued.

[Ookpik]

I'll take intrigue over disdain any day - thanks for dropping by.

-Ook

[Davidgeo]

What's up man? It's been a while. How have you been?

[Ookpik]

I'm alright Dave, doing well.

How about yourself?

[Davidgeo]

How are you dealing with the aging process?

[Neville]

This is quite possibly one of the most riveting reads I have ever read in the Cafe .. and I have read a hell of a lot in well over a decade .. Indeed, in a nutshell, bloody brilliant. Neville

[Ookpik]

Thanks kindly Neville, it’s one of a few shorts I’ve done - though I put up poetry often, it’s novels that I eventually want to get proficient with (explains my tendency towards very long reviews). Hehe

Super flattered man, thanks again

[GlendaK]

Wow! Was Jason reincarnated at the end? I don't believe in it but what a great story! Thanks for the review. I don't understand 'points' yet but this would get the most. (:

[Ookpik]

Appreciate it GeeKay,

Yes that was the idea, though I tried my best to avoid the labels that can sometimes reduce a narrative like this into cliché - even the word reincarnation brings about flashes of Tibetan yellow & orange and I think images of robes and crucifixes were what I was trying most to avoid. :)

Appreciate the review, as for the points and 'scoring' them, just me but I tend to find them a bit arbitrary. Most people put their work up here so that other writers might read and respond to them, though I think many of us have our own reasons for being here. :)

I'll keep an eye out for more of your stuff and will try to drop a line every so often.

Thanks for stopping in,

-Ook

[GlendaK]

I write in drips and drabs as it strikes me, lol. Sometimes it's a flash of light but most times it's less than a spark. I like to read and see the spark in others although time is not always on my side. Thanks back. GK

[Thomas W Case]

Fantastic work. It has a real surreal feel to it.

[Ookpik]

'preciate it Thomas

[Jacky Boy]

This story is beautifully abstract and experimental. The kind of stuff I often read in school and think, "Well someone's getting an A+."

The first section with Jason learns the rules of the dream-like world through instinct set the tone really well. Though, if I were to be exceptionally nit-picky, it went on a little longer on certain aspects of description, particularly the presence of fear. While the character was clearly intended to have very little to think of their predicament due to their situational lack of personality, that didn't particularly attract me to the character. I ended up fixating on his name, ascribing historical contexts like 'Jason of the Argonauts' but was unsure how to place that context in relation to the story.

As for praise, I find myself coming back to two lines in particular.

"waited together while their weight tipped against the elongated turns of the bus." was a wonderfully poetic description playing on the homophones of Wait and Weight. Not to mention the physical sensation is so distinct, and a great use of the sense of balance, which I so rarely see utilized in descriptive language.

The second: '"The Man winked and smiled widely, "yes, a long time.” | Jason wasn’t sure how much had passed while they sat like that together,"' was a great example of the contemporary style and your efforts to maintain clean, well-edited work. You saved the use, and by proxy, overuse of the word 'Time' by letting it lend into the ladder sentence. Elegant prose indeed!

Thanks for the read,

Jack

[Ookpik]

Yeah, it is a bit wordy at times and that's definitely a fair critique - something I've been told before and need to keep more in mind (when making art, I was told never to scribble - and yet I scribble all the time). :)

As to the first passage you picked, that is what I consider to be the Argo sequence - Jason and the Man being Argonauts in the afterlife, riding transit in a way that's analogous to sea-travel and inadvertently headed towards the Golden Fleece.

It's pretty loose, and I really only had it mind to justify the name, but it was there and it was clever of you to catch it.

As for the praise, man, it's appreciated - I don't know if A's translate into publishable work, but part of me is still banking on the idea that they might. I was never one to place much importance on grades back when I got C+s (all of highschool) and since then, out of habit, I try not to attach much significance to them.

It is what it is, really, and they are what they are.

Appreciate your reading though, and I'd be more than happy to look over anything else you may have. I missed class this morning, but I'm tempted to try and use this site as a platform to put some kind of club together - still thinking on it.

Anyways, thanks again and I'll probably catch you Weds.

-Ook

[Kaylor Mason]

This is very, very good. I liked how the vivid feelings of emotion were balanced with the physical, the absence of fear, the old man who was confident in his hope. I will admit I didn't think of this as rebirth, but rather crossing into the afterlife (from what I can tell, Jason made it to Heaven.) And the old man patiently waiting for his wife--rings true in a lot of strong marriages.

[Ookpik]

Ah I appreciate that a lot - this review and your last were very kind, and it's not often I get the chance to hear how it's been received. I'm glad to hear you felt engaged with it (often an indicator of close readers) as it brought me quite some joy to write. The ending, too, is open to interpretation and I'm very pleased to hear yours.

Thank you again for your time, and consideration

-Ook

[nostal]

Very compelling piece with some lovely descriptions and a sense for carefully picked out details that add so much layering to the dialogue in particular. I read it and interpreted it as an allegory for rebirth as well.

[Ookpik]

Apologies for responding so late, but thank you so much for taking the time to read - I've always felt it's the detail that can make or break a story, and I appreciate that you enjoyed it as such in this one

-Ook

[John the Baptist]

This offering seems to have some of the elements of the near death experience, but I think another source may have inspired it. The Tibetan Book of the Dead speaks of "bardos," or phases of existence. Jason is now in the bardo between lives. The baby's cries mentioned at the end may signify his birth into a new incarnation. The bus may represent the ongoing nature of existence, and the "Old Man" may stand for its benevolence, even in the dark state of apparent nothingness. The fact that the two words are capitalized is significant. On the other hand, I could be way off base on the whole things. Whatever, the piece is well written, keeping our attention all the way through.

[Ookpik]

I absolutely enjoy reading your interpretation (in many ways it's the more practical reading of the allegory) - in light of that, I would say that you could read it as either, a metaphor for phases of existence, for life and the course of it (befit with nothingness, age, mentor-ship, love and childbirth) - or in turn, as the phase in 'after-life', and as representative of all the same.

Both are correct, and it was written with pliability in mind - for the sake of mystique though, I think it's best I don't elaborate more than that (the idealist in me is still holding out for an interview).

Very thoughtful review John, I'm quite pleased you took the time to read.

Thank you,

Ook