beginnings. [trigger #271]

An excerpt from a bigger, trigger related project. So maybe it won’t make any sense alone.

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After accepting the man’s invitation, if only for a time so he could worry less about his next meal, he soon learned that this group of travelers shared his mysterious compulsion. In light of all the oddity going around lately, himself leaving home without logic or sense to say why, he wasn’t truly surprised to learn that these strangers were subject to that same magnetism. It was a relief more than anything. Perhaps they were all being pulled by some nefarious entity, but at least now he knew he wasn’t mad. Not in this anyway.

Every night since he’d joined them, after a fire had been lit for warmth and supper, a ritual would begin in which travelers would recount the story of when they first felt the pull, and of what led them to start following it. He isn’t sure if it is for his benefit that they tell his story, to welcome him into the fold and normalize something otherwise bizarre and senseless. Or perhaps they do this every night, telling their stories over and over again, reminding each other why they wander, reminding themselves.

Tonight, three people tell their story. Many of those who have spoken so far have stories similar to his, troubled pasts of isolation and failure. The final person to speak tonight is an exception. A woman, her husband watching from the edge of the firelight with her two sons, both already in the early bloom of adulthood.

She looks to him before she begins, “I am Magda,” she says. “I have been walking for two years.”

She then looks to her family. He eyes are full, there is emotion that she is able to keep in check, but that seems ready to burst forth at any moment. He looks away. There is some knowing between this family as they look at one another that he cannot bear to see, an intimacy that makes him feel exposed just to witness.

“When I first felt the pull, when I began waking at night with the urge to get up and run after it, when I could no longer finish a day without constantly losing the thread of a conversation because I was looking off into the distance at I knew not what… still don’t know, the village thought I was mad. At first it was just playful jabs and whispers, suggesting I was growing bored with family life and should take a new lover. Yet, when it only grew more noticeable, the whispers changed in their edge, and words like witch and madwoman started to sharpen people’s tongues.

“I made the mistake of being honest about it, and it frightened people enough that faces that had once reflected kindness were now showing me fear which was growing into outright hostility in some.”

She is silent for a few moments, perhaps remembering the pain being cast out of the community that had been her home.

She looked back to her husband. “I would speak to Petyr about it late at night, worrying out what we would do if I was losing my mind. What would happen to the boys? To him? I didn’t want to be a burden to weigh down my family, or for my sons to live their lives with the shadow of my madness ever trailing behind them.

“Petyr would watch and listen these nights, he has never been quick to speak, has never been one to offer a word of comfort or consolation before he had time to measure the situation. He has always been comfortable sitting in that quiet space that makes most folks’ skin crawl. It makes some people awful sore at him, just sitting there while they want a word of comfort. But when he finally does speak, when his thinking is done and he says his piece, you know it’s something real. Not just something thrown out to calm a situation or ease some tension, but something you can hold onto.

“One night, he listened as I raved and feared, and he looked me in the eyes as I did, and finally he spoke. ‘Magda,’ he says. ‘I don’t know what this is that’s come over you, maybe it’s not something for me to understand, but I know that you aren’t mad. It might be that the only thing to do is to pack up and go, to follow whatever this is that’s pullin’ you and see where it takes us,’ he says.

“And we did. As soon as he said all that the fear just went up out of me. That he was with me, that he was willing to follow this crazy drive neither of us understood and that only I could feel… it was enough. We packed up whatever we could carry, we said goodbye to those that loved us, as they pleaded with us to stop being foolish and wait for whatever this was to pass, and we started off.

“It was only a few weeks before we found the rest of the tribe. A lucky thing with how long some of you wandered alone. It’s not always easy, this walking. In fact it’s rarely easy. Every so often, I ask my boys, all three, if we should settle in somewhere, after two long years without answers or clarity. ‘Has it been too long with nothing to show for it?’ I ask. ‘Should we keep going when I still can’t tell them where the destination is?’ And they always wait, and think for a moment, and then they smile at me and nod. ‘We should keep goin’’ they say. ‘You need to keep lookin’ even if we never find it.’”

She stops. The emotion just below the surface is breaking through, and though she tries a few times to continue she eventually just nods and returns to her family, to hugs and affirmation. Again, he needs to look away.

will and testament. [trigger #270]

I just started a 30-day e-course aimed to help rediscover all that passion and joy I once found in writing, and that still comes and goes but isn’t as consistent as it once was. Part of the challenge for the course is to write every day, which is the point of trigger fiction when I’m here. It makes sense to me to post my writing I do for the course here.

Here is Day One.

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He watches her through the window, as she lugs back a heavy bucket of water far too cumbersome for such a small thing. He always urges her to wait, someone will always be along shortly who can take care of it, but she will never obey. She sees his cracked lips, so painfully dry after another fevered and restless night, and nothing he says will dissuade her.

Even in the midst of the shame he feels, that he cannot care for himself and his small child does more than she should, he will certainly be glad for the water when she gets it to him. His thirst each morning feels more like pain than he’d ever thought could come from mere thirst. Gods, everything hurts these days more than he previously imagined possible. And the physical sort is certainly not the worst of it.

Here she is, caring for him, when he has nothing to leave her when he goes. He’s been a wealthy man most of his life, or as wealthy a man as someone from his class can be. He would never legally be allowed to own property of any sort, but considerations and allowances can always be made if one can find a number of patrons from the higher classes. Finding patrons has never been a problem for him. From an early age, he has been sought out for his storytelling, his lively and well-read conversation, his ability to craft oratory of all kinds, and for those inclined that way, the skills he once had as a lover have been whispered about across multiple cities across the empire. It shames him after all this, that he has nothing to leave his child, but he had never intended on having a child.

When agreeing to contracts with patrons, the varieties of remuneration are endless. He could easily have made arrangements with powerful households to make sure that his offspring was cared for, educated, provided connections and references of the highest order. The trouble is that he never thought he would have any children to provide for. It wasn’t selfishness that leaves him with nothing to bestow upon the moment of his death, but simply shortsightedness. If he could only send some message back into the past, to tell himself that against all his beliefs and assumptions he would in his old age fall in love, and that he should take care to provide for the fruit of that delightfully unexpected eventuality.

Outside the window, a short way across the yard, she has taken a break from her trek back from the well. He regards her as she chats with the man who lives four doors down. As she raises her hand to shield her eyes from the sun, he is struck by how like her mother the gesture is. So many of her movements are her mothers. Not from any study or imitation on her part, that would be impossible since her mother never made it through the beautiful girl’s birth. And yet the her laugh, the way she tucks her hair behind her ear, the frown she makes when deep in thought, all lovely and painful reminders of the love he’d found, too quickly taken from him.

The man she is speaking with laughs heartily at something she’s said. It is a true laugh, not the sort used to humor a child. It isn’t a surprising thing, she has a cleverness and wit far beyond her years. He hopes it will be enough to help her find her way.