The Boar
SO....I am swiftly running out of things ready at hand to post, and will soon have to resort to actually writing NEW MATERIEL... yeesh. Freya's Blade is receiving a bit of an overhaul right now. I'm not sure if I should repost the edited first sections or continue from were I left of or what.... but in the mean time, here is a short bit of something I wrote a few years ago, called, "The Boar"
You push tired thighs through grasping waist high foliage, struggling for every rasping breath. Briefly, between burning lung sears, you feel again the dull pull of day-old hunger in your sunken belly. The hunger has been there since you awoke, and will be there when, in desperate exhaustion, you curl up crusted and warm in the mud and sleep again. When next you awaken, squinting in the painfully hot glare of the unfiltered sun, or with eyes gaping into the blank and faceless night blindly flinching to the growls and shrieks of a nearby struggle, the hunger will be there still, deeper, wider, ever yawning further to fill your once invigorated body with vacancy. Hard it is to conceive that you will be weaker and in more suffering than you are now, tearing through razor edged fronds and sticky grasping vines to evade some shadow of hunting baboons glimpsed in the orange silhouettes of this dusk-lit wilderness.
In the last greys of dusk you scrape your way, happily abrasing your shoulders, into your crevice. The entrance, narrow, screened with hinted green foliage, lies behind you and the two walls converge before you.
A pit of ash and broken char sits in the middle, but it is long cold. You failed to feed the hungry flame so many times that it finally left in huffs of choking smoke and refuses to come back.
You squat, leaning your shrunken body and pounding head against the jagged wall. You widen your eyes at nothing: you will not sleep. Your raw and blistered hand gropes blindly along the wall and finds the long heavy stick whose point you’ve painstakingly shaped against the sharp-stone hidden in the old ash-pit. You draw the shaft against your body, feeling the wood-pricks and roughness in your calloused hands.
You stare and stare outward at nothing. You will not sleep. You will not sleep. You will rest your eyes for a moment, then not sleeping will be easier.
The darkness is different in your eyelids, swirled with half-sensed reds and blues. The hollowness in your middle boils outward like a building cloud, its painful black vacuum slowly spreading to fill your chest, your limbs, your head. Only your ears linger a moment above the wave of black vacancy. A padded crunching slowly crescendos through the nearby foliage. In dreamful fancy the sound swells to deafening as your starving gut tightens in anticipation of being ripped out. A grunted snarl bores through your dream.
Your eyes bulge widely, seeing the same swirling darkness. Why did you sleep? The unseen bushes before you grunt again and gurgle and snarl, and all at once, in a symphony of cracks and rustles, they vomit forth a snarling beast. By some trick of starlight its eyes glow fierce in the surrounding nothingness, and in their light you glimpse hints of the bristling mohawk and orbital tusks of the charging boar. The explosive rage with which he yells is sourced from the same pulling, sucking hunger which devours you within. Even as your body falls backwards in terror, the beast within you suddenly rises and offers forth your spear into the shadow of its gnashing maw. The boar’s hot breath billows warm and soft over your retreating hand as its squeal harmonizes strangely with its guttural roar. Its headlong charge slowed, its tusk merely rips across the flesh of your chest, knocking you back before the boar throws itself onto your prone form, crushing you into the mud with its hot leathery stinking mass. It’s bristled weight squirms into your starving belly. Its shriveled neck is writhing on your chest, its hair-studded chin rubbing yours as blood flows freely from his head into your face. Its blood and yours flow together, pooling hot on your chest, flooding warm over your neck and sticking with the mud cold at your back with all the tackiness of faded life. With snarling violence his head turns, the outer edge of one enormous tusk smashing your cheek. As that tusk settles over your face the other’s point pokes, playfully pricking a millimeter into your temple. The darkness erupts into melodies of painful color. The shaft of your spear, hanging over your eyes, creeks as the boar tries with unrelenting force to turn his head, driving his tusk through your brain, but the shaft is lodged in his skull too far, the other end trapped against the wall. You jerk your head away from his slowly invading tusk to find you cannot move. His quaking porcine body is slowly entombing you.
Your left hand, somehow, is free and has been grasping and pushing his prickled hide to no avail. Suddenly desperate for options you remember it and throw it over your head, franticly searching the ground there. Your hand scrambles over the hard-packed mud to the cool ashes and crumbling chunks of char and find there your hidden treasure, a hand-gripable stone with a razor sharp point. With unexpected strength you grip the stone and drive it into the boar’s head. The spear above your face gives a subtle crack and his tusk penetrates deeper into your temple. You raise the stone above his head and, eyes closed tight in fevered pain, with throat-tearing screams stab it down again and again and again into the beast’s head, realizing slowly that it has already died. A swell of power and vigor grips your heart and with grinding teeth you roll with all your body’s muscle and off of you rolls the dead pig. With the sharp-stone grasped feebly yet tenaciously in your right hand you slash at the fat sweating belly of the beast.
With desperate and groping hands you tear into the steaming corpse and wriggle free a slick gelatinous mass and force it blindly into your heaving mouth. With sweet relish you savor its slick heat as it slides wonderfully down your sore-patched throat. You moan with delight, desperately clawing at the bleeding belly you tear and stuff and gnaw and swallow until you have gorged yourself and fall to the mud, curling up with wet-mouthed laughter. Maleficent Death had gotten too eager. He’d had you with his terrible hunger, but this demon sent to finish you had fallen to your desperate cunning and served you in death to cheat Death again.
Your sightless eyes close and you know timeless nothing until they open again, squinting and watering in the blinding whiteness of the morning sun.
You stand and breathe and stretch your muscles. Pain lances through your chest and your temple, but a crust-lipped smile cracks across your face as you stare again with tear-eyed love on the mists in the glistening foliage.
You are not dead.
The rotting corpse at your feet is filled with ants.
You are not dead…
You push tired thighs through grasping waist high foliage, struggling for every rasping breath. Briefly, between burning lung sears, you feel again the dull pull of day-old hunger in your sunken belly. The hunger has been there since you awoke, and will be there when, in desperate exhaustion, you curl up crusted and warm in the mud and sleep again. When next you awaken, squinting in the painfully hot glare of the unfiltered sun, or with eyes gaping into the blank and faceless night blindly flinching to the growls and shrieks of a nearby struggle, the hunger will be there still, deeper, wider, ever yawning further to fill your once invigorated body with vacancy. Hard it is to conceive that you will be weaker and in more suffering than you are now, tearing through razor edged fronds and sticky grasping vines to evade some shadow of hunting baboons glimpsed in the orange silhouettes of this dusk-lit wilderness.
In the last greys of dusk you scrape your way, happily abrasing your shoulders, into your crevice. The entrance, narrow, screened with hinted green foliage, lies behind you and the two walls converge before you.
A pit of ash and broken char sits in the middle, but it is long cold. You failed to feed the hungry flame so many times that it finally left in huffs of choking smoke and refuses to come back.
You squat, leaning your shrunken body and pounding head against the jagged wall. You widen your eyes at nothing: you will not sleep. Your raw and blistered hand gropes blindly along the wall and finds the long heavy stick whose point you’ve painstakingly shaped against the sharp-stone hidden in the old ash-pit. You draw the shaft against your body, feeling the wood-pricks and roughness in your calloused hands.
You stare and stare outward at nothing. You will not sleep. You will not sleep. You will rest your eyes for a moment, then not sleeping will be easier.
The darkness is different in your eyelids, swirled with half-sensed reds and blues. The hollowness in your middle boils outward like a building cloud, its painful black vacuum slowly spreading to fill your chest, your limbs, your head. Only your ears linger a moment above the wave of black vacancy. A padded crunching slowly crescendos through the nearby foliage. In dreamful fancy the sound swells to deafening as your starving gut tightens in anticipation of being ripped out. A grunted snarl bores through your dream.
Your eyes bulge widely, seeing the same swirling darkness. Why did you sleep? The unseen bushes before you grunt again and gurgle and snarl, and all at once, in a symphony of cracks and rustles, they vomit forth a snarling beast. By some trick of starlight its eyes glow fierce in the surrounding nothingness, and in their light you glimpse hints of the bristling mohawk and orbital tusks of the charging boar. The explosive rage with which he yells is sourced from the same pulling, sucking hunger which devours you within. Even as your body falls backwards in terror, the beast within you suddenly rises and offers forth your spear into the shadow of its gnashing maw. The boar’s hot breath billows warm and soft over your retreating hand as its squeal harmonizes strangely with its guttural roar. Its headlong charge slowed, its tusk merely rips across the flesh of your chest, knocking you back before the boar throws itself onto your prone form, crushing you into the mud with its hot leathery stinking mass. It’s bristled weight squirms into your starving belly. Its shriveled neck is writhing on your chest, its hair-studded chin rubbing yours as blood flows freely from his head into your face. Its blood and yours flow together, pooling hot on your chest, flooding warm over your neck and sticking with the mud cold at your back with all the tackiness of faded life. With snarling violence his head turns, the outer edge of one enormous tusk smashing your cheek. As that tusk settles over your face the other’s point pokes, playfully pricking a millimeter into your temple. The darkness erupts into melodies of painful color. The shaft of your spear, hanging over your eyes, creeks as the boar tries with unrelenting force to turn his head, driving his tusk through your brain, but the shaft is lodged in his skull too far, the other end trapped against the wall. You jerk your head away from his slowly invading tusk to find you cannot move. His quaking porcine body is slowly entombing you.
Your left hand, somehow, is free and has been grasping and pushing his prickled hide to no avail. Suddenly desperate for options you remember it and throw it over your head, franticly searching the ground there. Your hand scrambles over the hard-packed mud to the cool ashes and crumbling chunks of char and find there your hidden treasure, a hand-gripable stone with a razor sharp point. With unexpected strength you grip the stone and drive it into the boar’s head. The spear above your face gives a subtle crack and his tusk penetrates deeper into your temple. You raise the stone above his head and, eyes closed tight in fevered pain, with throat-tearing screams stab it down again and again and again into the beast’s head, realizing slowly that it has already died. A swell of power and vigor grips your heart and with grinding teeth you roll with all your body’s muscle and off of you rolls the dead pig. With the sharp-stone grasped feebly yet tenaciously in your right hand you slash at the fat sweating belly of the beast.
With desperate and groping hands you tear into the steaming corpse and wriggle free a slick gelatinous mass and force it blindly into your heaving mouth. With sweet relish you savor its slick heat as it slides wonderfully down your sore-patched throat. You moan with delight, desperately clawing at the bleeding belly you tear and stuff and gnaw and swallow until you have gorged yourself and fall to the mud, curling up with wet-mouthed laughter. Maleficent Death had gotten too eager. He’d had you with his terrible hunger, but this demon sent to finish you had fallen to your desperate cunning and served you in death to cheat Death again.
Your sightless eyes close and you know timeless nothing until they open again, squinting and watering in the blinding whiteness of the morning sun.
You stand and breathe and stretch your muscles. Pain lances through your chest and your temple, but a crust-lipped smile cracks across your face as you stare again with tear-eyed love on the mists in the glistening foliage.
You are not dead.
The rotting corpse at your feet is filled with ants.
You are not dead…
Submitted by MythWind at 10:02 PM
2 Comments:
Jacob,
You are very deft at capturing the nitty-gritty life and death struggle of man and animal. I like how this piece is not specific to a certain time and place - it could be a hunter back in the dark ages, or a modern man lost and hungry in the wilderness. While the descriptions of the actions and emotions are very specific and personal, you maintain a universality - I have definitely never hunted boar, but i could imagine that it was me. You bring your reader inside the story, and even though they've never been boar hunting, they know hunger and they know what it's like to fight for something of vital importance. You have managed to universalize a very specific act. A friend of mine was musing about poetry after she and I had just finished reading
Flannery O'Connor and she said "isn't it funny that poets make up such specific stories to get across universal points?" And she went on to say how the specificity is what makes it close to home, personal, and meaningful. It just wouldn't be effective enough if , instead of writing "The Boar" as is, you came out and said "Mankind is and always will be locked in a struggle for life with the other creatures of this world. Each ironically seeks to preserve it's own life through the death of the other." Somehow the specific story gets the point across alot better. i think it is because the emotions, memory, and imagination -the whole man- get involved, rather than simply the intellect recognizing a truth...yeah.
Um, kinda funny...So, i though you were actually telling it from the boar's point of view at first, because you have that line in the first paragraph that says '...when in desperate exhaustion you curl up crusted and warm IN THE MUD and sleep again'. Then later you started talking about an ash pit and making fires, and boars don't do that, so i finally figured it out. Were other people confused in the beginning or am i just dumb?
Oh yes, i really liked that the main character (reader) is so possessed by hunger that hunger enters into all his thought- and it causes him to personify the ash pit as also hungering, but for fire. A clever device. Good work=)
p.s.-This is a frickin epistle, sorry!
I enjoy the removed nature of this story, Jacob. Normally, your works are set in a very specific time and place that you spend a lot of time developing and expositing, but here we are set completely adrift, even moreso than I would think wise. Yet the device works perfectly, and we are just as much at sea with the narrative as the main character is in the madness of his own hunger.
Really fascinating work being done here, Jake. I honestly think this is the best thing you've put up yet. Experimental, creative, and extremely engaging. I was gripped, to say the least.
Post a Comment
<< Home