Hills Do Not Pray to Flatlands

It was our turn for a different flavor of fate

Photo by Jasper Boer on Unsplash

On the day I learned truly what it means to cling so long to the thought of retribution, my sister Kameta and I sat in an old café that smelled of someone’s stale dreams. It was early yet, and the place was weakly lit. The single smudged window to the outside world blunted the view of the street.

As we sipped a frail tea, we spoke of the people of the flatlands. Kameta told me that instead of hills, their world filled with dull plains, and they hurried through brush fires to get to the final horizon of their existence where they insisted all rewards awaited. They lived, longed even, to leave their carnal realm and become bonedust.

Kameta knew all the flatland history. And my god, I loved her, my beautiful smart sister. Although her compassion at times seemed excessive, she was my strength and our combined wits. But I couldn’t always focus on everything she said. Even though we had ascended into the hills, we still struggled for basics. And when buses rolled past, packed with hungry people and other dirt, I was reminded that her fantastical senses didn’t put a plate on the table.

And their clout, I asked?

They had none, my brother, she said.

Of course. I don’t know why I asked, or why I thought that lesser people should get a break. We didn’t. When we were young, before we left the flatlands, we clobbered our neighbors to beat the mob to the flour sacks when the trucks stopped.

And smokestacks. We never mention them any more.

Still, back then, as siblings should, we learned the streets together, played risky games of theft and deception, and always watched each other’s back. Over time we grew. We got out, we ascended, but didn’t entirely escape. Now it was our turn for a different flavor of fate, one that would land us forever on our feet.

* * *

Kameta tugged my arm and shattered my reverie. Look over there, she said. Her eyes and a single finger pointed to the street.

My knife hand tightened. It was our biological father, who had bartered us for a donkey when we were kids, and then disappeared from our lives. For a while, word came that he was a grand king of gunny sacks and junk, selling his scraps in far corners of the flatlands, but now we could see that the years had carved him with sharp days into the hunched shape of ill fortune.

He didn’t see us, shadowed as were in a café that now smelled of a diseased past that had burst its rot. Even if he had, he wouldn’t have recognized the two young adults who had risen as stunted trees in the flatlands of wind and briar, and climbed on their own into the hills.

Before I go, he had said all those forgotten birthdays ago, allow me to introduce your new keepers. Treat them as voices outside your skin. With that cryptic message, he struck his new donkey with a stick and departed.

Our adopted father spit our names into the dirt. Our real mother coughed her way into a ditch. After days of low moans, someone threw down a tarp. None of it seemed real any longer. None of it.

But this. This moment. The old man in the street. The end of my long wait. This made a dog of my stomach.

Let’s go, I said.

* * *

People of the flatlands are so limited. The flatlands breed strange and outrageous tendrils of thought that enter though the nostrils on a dry wind, and worm their way up behind the eyes where you can see that people truly believe the lies that others toss haphazardly into their ignorance.

Once, in a paroxysm of elucidation that she was prone to, Kameta told me that even though the people of the flatlands swore upon an instinct for survival, the instinct doesn’t actually exist. Simple, she had said. We survive until we don’t.

At the time, I didn’t agree, but now, with our biological father, a man who saw animals as children and children as animals, moving down the street graveled and bent, I realized that my sister was right all along. No instinct for survival ever pushed anyone over the finish line, only a gut full of contempt.

* * *

We left the café and followed. Even at the distance we kept, the smell of liquor and piss from the man who had planted two seeds in the now dirtless field of our real mother, swept strong along the street. He wasn’t the only flatman around, but he was ours.

And somehow, we were still his.

He had a donkey, although surely, after so much time, not the same one he had traded us for. Like the man, the beast was brittle and full of ribs, a sad thing someone had discarded along the road in its extremity.

Remember, said Kameta as we followed. Remember that we once clasped his legs with love.

No time for love, I said. He doesn’t deserve it.

No, she said. You’re wrong, my brother. Instead of hills, they run for outcroppings of rock that thrust themselves into their world with a force they cannot understand, infatuated as they are by far horizons.

What are you talking about?

How they live flat and worship small things.

We are of the hills now, I said. And hills do not pray to flatlands.

Our father, valued long ago, but now flattened and despised, turned with his beast into an alley. But who can say who entered first? A man hollowed of all virtue, all benefit of doubt, is indistinguishable from other low creatures of the flatlands.

He sat in a doorway, his legs bent upward, with a bottle that he held with both hands on his knees.  His beard frayed itself into tattered gray clouds that rained only his drunkenness and spit.

Father, said Kameta.

He took a drink, set the bottle back on an knee. Who are you? he asked.

Nobody answered, and I swear I don’t know how, but a light wind formed a drop of water in my eye before the same breeze snatched it away. Enough. It would be a corruption of all that is worthy to ascend the hills and then, with the trickery of sympathy, absolve a flatman crime so ugly that even to touch it with thought was a hot stove. I wasn’t sure what must be done, but it had to include grievances that ripped the wattles from a false father’s face.

He doesn’t know us, said Kameta.

So? I said. We know him.

A shadow crossed the sky. The worthless man who deserved no name slow swallowed another drink, drooled. His eyes sagged like thirsty weeds.

Kameta bit her lip. Let it go, brother, she said.

What?

He’s done.

Again, so?

No answer. Kameta looked down at the cobblestones.

I stepped closer to the old man, withdrew my knife.

No, brother, said Kameta. She raised her head. Please.

Don’t look at me like that, I said.

Brother, please. Her face sorrowed.

Oh god, my beautiful sister, my one love, my survival. Her eyes… her eyes… held pity for me. Pity and shame.

For me.

Only a coward turns from revenge, but without warning I wondered if this old man, a thin prisoner of our desire, or I should say my desire, a desire of strong against weak, should be left to consume himself with drink and stink, and return alone to the flatlands where his life would be thrown to the brush fires and forgotten, or if we, greater than lesser dirt, must rise as gods and punish the feeble and cruel.

For a moment I stood undecided, my chest thick with doubts.

Kameta turned to me, touched my arm. The old man made peace with another drink, sighed and slipped into a torpor. The bottle clinked on the ground and dripped the last of its liquid life. The shadow in the sky retreated.

I let go my breath, put my knife away. Somehow, in a mystery I may never solve, I could not kill a man already gone. I turned back to Kameta. My eyes seemed both flooded and burned.

And before I could think of what to do next, my head shook itself, whether in disbelief or dishonor, I couldn’t say. A measure of my foundation had washed away. I’d have to find another reason to live.

We stepped from the alley. My heart began to slow, a requiem for my anger, or my courage, or both. Kameta took my hand as we walked away. The morning was yet fresh, and our days far from dust, but still, the distant horizon of our existence drew a few breaths closer.

— — —

Thank you for reading Dynamic Creed, home of one of a kind evocative creative fiction outside the designs of our times. Marketing bits aside, welcome to all new and existing readers. I hope you enjoyed this piece. I’ve been hanging onto it for about six months, and finally decided to let it out. Comments always appreciated.

As you may know because I’ve been repeating it lately, all of my stories are free.

However, if you’d like to consider a paid subscription, know that you’d not only be supporting me and our shared oddified sensibilities, but that I donate 25% of all earnings to animal and veteran causes.

If a paid subscription isn’t something you can do, no problem. I appreciate you all very much, and I’m doing this because I love writing these stories.

Another way you can support me is by sharing this story with others here, or with your friends and family at home. What I’d really like most of all is to connect with more people. Spread the word, friends. The center of gravity is shifting.

Thanks again, and all the best,

Victor David