Sunday, June 20, 2010

flash fiction--jungleSciFi "The Outpost"

Dim Blue Glow

Something resembling hope enters into Cooper's awareness in the darkness under the huge banyan grove. So, he thinks, time doesn't exist here, or would like him to think so.  The cool moonlight falls with a quiet, as if delivering silence were a nightly chore before the sun could rise. This is exactly how this forest kills, with darkness and quiet, as it sleeps, cycles set in motion in her ancient past, not waiting for, or expecting, anything new to be learned. Trees set back from the sheer cliff offer a rain forest meadow.  High ferns shelter the opening where death will occur because someone or something forgot a duty and now she, this rainforest, the ancient one, will not forget and serve the sentence. Why is water so unstoppable, dripping off the sheer rocks?  These primeval waterfalls may atrophy by their own hand.  Intimate dances of the ancient past have made it through eons with no trouble. Why is it so difficult to teach the humans; to have their feelings come back to life and stir inside them?  Something is still home here. Something knows how to climb the rocks, how to breath air into its lungs, how to put off the moments until logic would perfectly place itself, something like a motherly unseen force, breathings, as if heard a million times before.  Why don't we just keep our softness, allow the moon to bring a familiar glow. The Tigress is in a strange force field today and I fear the outline of her body against the rocks will fill you with uncertainty you won't recognize, will haunted you inside, freeze you.  
     Cooper will give the Tigress a focus more than awake, with slow leanings across her body in the moonlight.  Her eyes will open wide as her sleek body stares and her back stiffens.  Her stare will love wildness. Her vision in the dark would be perfect. The dim blue glow of the moon, or of something, dances on the jungle floor through the canopy. 
     It comes to offer more than mere moonlight.

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