Astute readers of my output here will have no doubt noticed that I did not post anything yesterday.
That doesn’t mean, however, that I didn’t write anything yesterday. I wrote a short story, in fact, a brand spanking new work of fiction. 1400 words plus, even. I just didn’t post it publicly.
Why not? Damned good question.
A short, accurate, but unhelpfully flippant answer : “Shame.”
I am ashamed of the story for reasons I do not fully comprehend. But then again, there is a lot about this story that does not make sense to me, including what drove me to conceive of such a terrible thing in the first place, many years ago, and why I have been carrying it around in my mind like a knot of frost around my heart for all those years, and why yesterday was the day that I finally let it loose upon the virtual page so that I could finally let it go and be done with it.
{Don’t fret, dear readers, the story in question will be posted at the end of this diary entry, in case you are now curious to know what I am talking about. I just feel that I need to make something like a full confession first, before I subject you to it. }
I don’t remember exactly when I first conceived of such a terrible and potentially soul destroying story. I don’t know what I was thinking about or what kind of mood I was in. I don’t think it came out of some kind of great existential depression or anything. In general, I don’t get those. I am just kinda sad all the time.
I have a vague impression that I was looking at a calendar at the time. I doubt that is relevant, as it’s not like there’s a calendar in the story. It does involve time, as a framing device at least. That might factor in there somewhere. But not very heavily.
What I do remember was that the moment I conceived of it, I regretted it. Just the idea of it froze me cold inside. Even then, I was thinking “What a horrible idea… what is wrong with me?” and, out of pain and shame, I immediately buried it in the deep soil of my mind.
But that’s not how it works for a writer. The ideas are always there, waiting to come out via our pen, and ultimately it is futile to try to keep an idea which moves us so strongly down. It will surface again and again, like a traumatic memory (which is many ways, it is) until we finally give in and process it by writing the damn thing, freeing ourselves of the demon by loosing it into the world.
The ability to perform this kind of surgery on ourselves, digging out our deep scars and giving them life of their own and sending them out into the world to do what they will, is one of the strangest and distasteful of the powers of the writer : making the world our therapist.
I suppose that explains at least some of the shame. But it’s more than that, it’s almost like the classic scenario of Doctor Frankenstein suddenly realizing that he’s created a monster. And of course, in his shame, he wants to hide the monster from the world so that nobody knows what a terrible thing he did.
But that is not how writing works. The process is not complete until that monster is released for all the world to see, come what may.
And it’s not a bad story. If it was merely that it was badly written and not salvageable, I would have no problem simply writing it off (so to speak) as a learning experience, sticking it in the back files, and moving on from there.
But no, it’s quite beautiful in its cold, sad, terrible way. I am not normally a consumer of the tearjerker genre, so I can’t really judge, but for me anyhow, it is a tearjerker beyond compare.
As in, I cried the whole time I was writing it, especially the final part. I say that not as some strange form of emo bragging but just to convey the sort of thing that this weird life of being a writer puts a person through. I have written one other story that an effect on me like this, but it, at least, had a happy ending.
This one does not.
So why write the thing now? I am not entirely sure, but I know what triggered it : Beatrix Potter.
Or rather, Miss Potter, a movie about the life of Beatrix Potter. It’s a sweet little movie, pretty much just a winsome costume romance which incidentally also tells the story of one of the best selling and most beloved children’s authors of all time.
But somehow, all that sunny romance and whimsy and mildly eccentric storytelling (her creations are her “friends” in the movie, and occasionally are animated to show the fact) about a writer and her climb to success despite her family’s opposition melted something inside me and made it so that this story just had to come out.
Well, in fact, it gave me the idea for an arguably worse story, and so I struck a weird sort of inner compromise where I wrote the story that follows here instead. It doesn’t really make sense that this is how it works inside me, but what the hell.
I am, at heart, a pragmatist, and the pragmatist motto is “Whatever works, man. Whatever works. ”
Even after finishing the writing of the story, I was somewhat of a mess, emotionally speaking. But now, I just have a strange hollow feeling inside. Presumably, that’s the space where the story was, and it will slowly fill in over time, just as if I had undergone surgery and had a tumour removed.
And there is a powerful feeling of finality, of something having been burned out forever, never to live again.
It’s all in the words now.
Here they are.
{ Author’s note : I can’t tell you why I wrote this. I can only tell you that I have carried it in my mind and my heart for many, many years. I can’t tell you what is wrong with me that I could think of something like this. I can only tell you that I am glad I got it out of me at last. And I can’t tell you why you should take this into yourself. I can only say that I am sorry. )
Come with me, Gentle Reader, on a journey through time and space, where we will steal through the corridors of history like thieves, slip through the rivers and streams of time like tiny fish, and chase the ripples and eddies of possibility like children.
So put on your best wet weather gear, and join me on this trip through the many wrinkled layers of reality, and see what it is I wish to show you.
Hold tight to my hand, and away we go.
Dawn, deep in the forest primeval. A mother rabbit makes her cautious and alert way out of her burrow, ears and nose twitching. Nature has equipped her with marvelous sensory equipment, a fleetness of foot unrivaled in nature, and a high strung nature that judges it far better to be startled by nothing than to fail to be startled by a hungry predator.
And she will need all this, because a fox has tracked her to her lair.
The fox has used its superb sense of smell and excellent brain to penetrate all of our mother rabbit’s attempts to throw her off the trail, and is slowly closing in our mother rabbit.
A leap from an overhang above the burrow, and for a moment time stands still. Life hangs in the balance. What happens next is nothing more than the toss of a coin in the vast tapestry of life.
Which way will it land?
Today, the fox wins. Mother rabbit does not detect her approach, and with a deft and brutal snap of slavering jaws, the mother rabbit’s neck is snapped and he throat lain open. Her blood spills onto the ground as the fox rips ravenously into the still living flesh of her prey, ripping hide off of muscle and muscle off of bone in a frenzy. Our mother rabbit spends her last moments of awareness in pure terror, horror, and confusion, unable to even begin to understand what is happening to her before the loss of blood and bodily shocks and trauma render her forever unconscious.
Her transition from living being to oblivion lasts less then ten seconds. The fox devours twitching nose, alert ears, beating heart, brain, guts, legs and paws all. In a short time, nothing is left of mother rabbit except for bones and scraps of fur.
The vixen pauses, panting, looking around her blankly, muzzle dripping the blood of mother rabbit. She spend a few moments recovering from her feast, and then darts off into the forest once more.
But our gaze moves not with her, but to mother rabbit’s burrow, and the baby bunnies left behind.
Having smelled their mother’s blood and heard the brief struggle, the lapine babies were stirred into great agitation and fear. They were too young to do much more than be frightened and huddle together and be very still. And so that is what they did for a good long time.
After a while, they relaxed some, and resumed their explorations of their environment. But without their mother’s milk, babies too young to be weaned do not last long in this world.
Starvation set in almost right away, and the babies became fearful because of their mother’s failure to return, and then frantic with both fear and hunger as she still did not return. In their blind agony, they tried to eat whatever they could find. Their bedding, stones, clumps of dirt, their own shed furs.
All in vain. Because without their mother’s support, they soon grew too weak to do anything but suffer as their young, brief lives ebbed from them.
A week later, there was not a single one left alive.
A brutal tragedy. Mother cut down cruelly in a moment of feral predation. Children left to die a terrible wasting death. Everything within us rails against such senseless brutality.
But wait…. we are children of the clock, the madmen of infinity. We need not dwell on this horror when we can so easily visit the other side of the coin.
What else might have happened?
The moment thaws anew, but this time, mother rabbit’s deep prey species intuition kicks in at the fatal moment, and she darts out of the way of the fox’s leap and disappears into the forest at lightning speed.
The vixen pursues with all her speed, but it is nothing compared to mother rabbit’s, and so the vixen rapidly loses all sight or scent of her, and what’s more, had been led far away from the vulnerable burrow.
Mother rabbit lives another day, and to her, this was nothing but another routine near-death experience for a member of a highly sought after prey species.
She will live to a ripe old age, and her children will grow into strong, healthy adult rabbits as well, with their own burrows, and their own babies.
Today, mother rabbit has won.
The vixen, however, is not doing so well.
That leap was the last, desperate act of a predator on the verge of starvation. A harsh winter had vastly depleted the local stock of prey. She had increasingly found herself spending more and more of her precious energy simply looking for prey, let alone catching it.
And with every failed hunt, she grew weaker, and more frightened, and more confused. She visited her cubs less and less often, because her milk had long ago dried up, and she could not bear to disappoint them again. She would return when she was strong again and could feed them. Surely she would eat soon.
But time dragged on and her muscles grew weaker and her sight grew weaker and she began to slip and fall and blunder into things, and just when she was almost ready to lay down in despair, she had stumbled across the unwary other rabbit.
So when that last desperate leap failed, as did the frantic chase afterwards, her heart broke. She spent the last day of her life blindly wandering the forest with only her sense of smell to guide her, trying to hard to find the scent of food or, at least, the way back to her cubs, so that when she died, she could feed them all once last time.
But that was not to be. Instead, in her blindness, she fell and broke her right front leg, and did not even have the strength to get back up and hobble onwards.
She died where she he lay.
Her three kits lived on a while. Predators have large meals further apart than prey, and their mother had left on long trips before, especially lately.
But eventually, as their hunger grew and grew, the kits grew frightened and panicked. In hunger, their boldness grew, first exploring the limits of their den, then outside it, all the time calling, calling, calling for the mother who would never return for them.
A month later, perhaps one of them might have survived. But they were far too young to hunt on their own, and their clumsy attempts only wasted what little life they had left in them by this point.
But predators they were, and predators always have one final defense.
Blinded by desperate need, they fell upon each other.
The victor lived a little while longer by feeding upon the remains of its two siblings.
But in the end, they all died scared and alone.
Now tell me, Gentle Reader : which side of the coin do we prefer? Which mother lives, and which dies? Whose children thrive and live on, and whose die of starvation and madness?
And think, Dear Reader. Scenes as tragic and as senseless and as brutal as this happens a thousand times a minute throughout the vast and varied world of Mother Nature. Mothers die. Children starve. Chaos rules. Kindness is absent. And nothing ever makes sense.
And it is from this that we know that justice is a human concept.
And that Nature is the cruelest thing of all.
