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| Frank Hearwynn, image: Ian Kahn |
I don’t enjoy getting personal online, but after being such a good guy in the last post, I’d feel like a hypocrite if I didn’t come right out and tell you… I didn’t go to church last Sunday. I slept in on Easter Sunday, because I had a great date the night before, with the woman whom, I thought, wasn’t speaking to me ever again. I felt inspired to try speaking to “Dana” another time because I was confident and flying over some really great writing I’d done for Rhune—the wolf who also got me out of the house last week, jogging along the bike trail and then watching wolves on Discovery Channel, all to try and imagine really being within Hearwynn’s forest (so weird that I chose my last name for that… makes me shudder or something). All because of one story. Amazing.
Though I caution, before you think I’ve forsaken religion completely, let me also tell you—I wanted to do all these things, only because Palm Sunday was so good.
In the biz, we call that ‘the Catholic guilt.’ Yes, I’ve learned that, even as a single, sort of lonely person, I can do better. However, I can’t deny that fellowship with other loving people last Sunday wasn’t a part of it. Reconciliation in a nutshell, the palm-cross was no quick fix and I’ll probably suffer for neglecting my faith before too long. But Father Mark already gave me a penance: write it down, write it down!
Right now, I’m focused on the positive. I’ve got myself a lady.
People put so much armor on, when waiting for the bus. I put in earbuds and turn up my top five. Dana looks at the people who peek backward and want her, then she dares them. My Dana is screaming behind all of that, for people to just finally give a shit and be genuine. I feel the same way, I nod my head to that when I hear it through the monster-green Skullcandy plastic… Someone should give her that chance, to let it all out and love as hard as she wants. Once upon a time, I only felt worthy enough to write for her, what I had sensed.
Dana likes writing too, I found out, which was a relief. She’s not much of a fantasy fiction person, or even what I think of as an authentic fiction fangirl… well, the Barnes and Nobles term is popular fiction… werewolf stuff and vampires… But that is just another way to elegantly express what really speaks to the primal human animal, that hunter need inside all of us. You’d better bet, that I really want to tell her about this blog someday. I already did hook her in, a little bit, by introducing her to Rhune (well, I rambled on our date). Carnivory just isn’t perfect yet, though. So, let’s finish this up, let’s get it done fast, for lady Dana. One day, if it does come up and she really wants the story, I don’t want to have to tell her No.
Oh, and then the real stuff I meant to give you a literary heads-up about:
One—along with my brave nature walks in this June weather and the more comfy adventures in public television, I picked up a writer’s self-help kind of book from the library. Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel (Writer’s Digest Books, 2001) is really very good so far.
Two—Where in Chapter Eight, he writes, “Two or three major subplots are about all that even the longest quest fantasies can contain… Sympathy is torn in too many directions…” I almost had a heart-attack. I was reading that on Sunday night, you know. It’s divine retribution, I swear. Only God knows that I’ve been collecting ridiculously epic storylines for Rhune and all his friends, eversince I was a kid. All those other lives and their minidramas, they’re like my own friends.
Oh, and third—Dana had originally inspired the Dhamshee character, when I did the deus ex machina rewrite last month. Rhune needed someone or something powerful to come along and reinvent him so that I could jump ahead after so many years of me neglecting him. So, technically, the Dhamshee doesn’t look like Dana but I’m changing it. It’s weird, that when you write online, it’s impossible to take things back… all of you have seen the original, I can’t erase it from your imaginations.
Am I paranoid about the woman herself rejecting me, if I ever let her read it? Should I want to date a woman who might be bothered by my artistic vision which started out, to be blunt, in a whole different color? I have no idea. Have I been inspired by how lovely she was by candlelight and thought to myself, ‘Now, the Dhamshee would have to be warm and rich as that.’ Or, is it this guilt biting back, just in another form? Should I let myself be ruled by shame? Why would I feel ashamed of Dana, or ashamed of myself?
Anyways, Frank Hearwynn is not about to go through another five years of celibacy waiting on the answer.
Anyways, Frank Hearwynn is not about to go through another five years of celibacy waiting on the answer.
One and two and three… hocus and poke us, I’m gonna write the foolishness I want, all for you, Rhune, and, finally, get something for me!
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CARNIVORY
The Dhamshee comes to ones,
Who are the last of those,
Ones
Who used to roam.
Then if you are the last one,
Extinct passion, endangered heart,
She will last for you.
Make another two
To make their love
‘Be fruitful and multiply’
In their home.
And, so when she came to Rune,
Who was the last of ones,
She and He, they got alone—
Hearwynn?
Yeah?
…I’m kind of busy. And, you’re being kind of loud.
And so, for Rhune, I will narrate more quietly.
The Dhamshee was a creature deeply in love with every living thing, infatuated with it to the point of wanting to call forth the fertility, to agitate it and masturbate it until it could not bear the contented silence of having achieved survival any longer. Do more. There's room in this world, why not? Indulge abundance. Only she was sweet enough to tempt endangered monsters to love again. She’d plead even for disease to be left alone to live on and on, in the flesh of beautiful creatures. The Dhamshee could bow their heads with shame. Because she was so needed--not because she saw herself as powerful--the Dhamshee manifested herself on rare moments through the centuries, to coalesce all her best urges into one and expel those in a prolonged instance of creation and in a place that badly needed renewal.
But, as with any good woman, she’d only call it forth, for the worthy.
Don’t you remember? Rhune, over there where we can’t disturb him, is an endangered animal. He is the last wolf walking in the physical, of the Mane Grey Pack that had survived by killing all the other wolves. He scampers alongside of her, ears low, whimpering that this is the truth, that he was a victim of Carnivory, not its wielder, that he is now an alpha by default—whining anything, to finally get his turn. The Dhamshee stops, shoulders squared, as Rhune turns up long muzzle and licks her fingers.
She puts a hand on him. Grabbing hold, forcing the mouth closed. It burns like something loose at the edge of a campfire. Sparks at her fingertips where they touch, then bright emberline singes her hand, her wrist, leaving it sweetened brown. Then, up, over the crook of elbow on its inside, and the swell of unused bicep, a shoulder, a half-mouth. She darkens. She blinks until tears soften bright irises, like leaves wet. This is her, melting as Rhune has asked.
“How funny it is, sly wolf, the way in which the high and the low, the evil and the wise, can all find ways of asking to be redeemed.”
Her heart beat very loud, she opened her mouth to kiss and Rhune feared himself dragged into the pounding of a fast summer storm.
She was a wolf beneath him. Then, they were eagles screaming and spiraling their talons caught together. In the next moment, they floated wrong ends in unsettled silence together as did infatuated mosquitoes. A he-frog squeezing ribs of his lover. Rhune couldn’t let go for days. The Dhamshee became a cricket once, rubbing legs and showing ovipositor erect like a wand. He was left, flitting new wings desperate for that musical, beautiful gaze.
Nothing yet, so the two lovers tried again.
Two horses breathless, galloping one another down. Birds perched on a high branch and stacked like the last two bass eggs uneaten. Lioness having her neck bit while her King ruts her rump raised, beaten. They became two monarchs chasing each other, on every other morn. Then a gazelle limping towards his female, trophied with one chipped off horn. A pair of cobras lay long bodies on one another, twining. No matter how the Dhamshee changed and repositioned her penitent, the lupine noise of Rhune raised through the sex, whining.
I still feel like a nasty, sinful wolf. Give me more.
They left puppies behind, as they journeyed through their hungry feelings.
The first five went wild. Carlon, who liked to crunch bones, his twin sisters Tierla and Senny who were more bipedal, as their mother, but each dragged her feet. Hearwynn witnessed also, a sister named Gargla who was kindly, and another sister Smokhu who was unkindly.
The second brood helped the first use what were becoming hands. There were three brothers in this group with talent for clapping games and hand-dancing. With no wolf-else, they all played together, then grew up and mated together, the eight of them… four to the three, or would the five to the three get with one another? They could have done anything to help themselves, it was at the re-start of time.
A first generation inbred a second, made three more from the original two, and here below, since it’s fastest, I’ll list them for you.
Kentley and Sirlyonj, Cashnazlie and Dru,
begat Iffinbotle, Teerteertrayn, Gasha and Bilu
begat Iffinbotle, Teerteertrayn, Gasha and Bilu
This family liked a favorite burying-rock.
That was stolen by the Serweeyers, who was sire of Oilyash, Eechie, Frontmane, and the first Matthew, because they had a hollowed out bone between them.
It was taken by Mamma Prifu, who begat Illydie and Xanturnish, Craidol, and Bentbad, also in that, now human litter, were the first Sarahs, Brandons and a Vlad. They found a torn off cloth from somewhere, maybe a strangled lace from when their ancient grandsire tore off The Dhamshee’s clothes…
Remember all these, because they’re coming back.
Then thirty notable more among the unnameless began three dynasties that rose and fell all over again while those who made them couldn’t look. These people were sitting in caves or tossing fruit to burst on wretched campfires when Rhune came back to the edge of the story, by its silver pool.
The Dhamshee tugged Rhune’s crooked, littlest finger with her own. She was smiling, catching her breath, as if come inside out of dancing in the rain.
“I have been to Mars and to Venus. I have been to Earth and to Redallin. Would you believe, I’ve been to Wyle? I once sought out creatures on Jariel and Apollus with its three rings. Once, though, I went by Pluto on mistake.”
“I don’t understand…”
“You don’t have to Rhune.” Her cheeks blossomed. So dark, and yet also, so rose. There was a spring garden between her teeth and her pink mouth, on the inside. She would open her mouth and disgorge flowers, but then Rhune would pick them up and wash his face in so many blooming, unfolding petals.
“Look in the water Rhune.” He did, after squinting around at all the other strange two-legged creatures first.
“Well. I am no longer the one who either befriends or offends females. This real beauty, all over me, free of fur.”
She nodded, “This pristine body was beneath your hide, all along. I saw it. And now you have the purest heart and I knew you had it in you, Rhune. You can’t want to die now, can you?”
Rhune scratched stubble along his jaw, laughed at how pathetic, wiry and small that fur was. “I look good. I feel better.” He would not tell her, that felt sharper, meaner.
“Humans love themselves most of all, in this universe.” She whispered against his flat ear, that he had survived.
The sun was trying to come back out. The Dhamshee ran away, giggled, screamed for it, and the Spring rain whistled into a funnel for her, sang out loud and enveloped her, then swept her away from the land of Hearwynn in a prismatic hurricane. Thank goodness for such a really, happy woman.
Deep in the Howling Beyond, Thatan observed the edge of the world filling up with crawling, cooing, laughing human babies. They spilled out of caves, giggling. They fell into their parents’ campfires, played with their sharp things and weren’t hurt. People went chasing eachother at primeval festival, the sun’d flash over the hemisphere a hundred times, and then there’d come more children screaming and carrying on. Humans going to all the places wolves used to like to go, playing their old games.
As for Ammerwind, the dark veil of the Howling Beyond had made him as wide and flat, as empty and all-seeing as real, eternal night. The trick, was to stay where the sun wasn’t looking, and a body could not be accounted for or counted against, so a wolf with the right skill might last forever.
The beta and alpha wolf had watched Hearwynn as a pale screened world in a rapture of events.
“Do you see it, Ammerwind? I only hear.”
Ammerwind replied, “It was the Matriarch, the love-eater and the puppy-drinker, who used to see, old friend. The one who sings so well, is me.”
“You’re better at tasting, honestly, Ammerwind…”
“Then listen to another of mine! Pain is copper and death is sulfur, and life is bitter, and Man must taste like meat. Look who walks unharmed and still green-haired, at the center of them. His pathetic stink still tastes the same, on the wind.”
“Is that Rhune? He has done all of this?”
“I also tasted the fear of the Dhamshee as she labored and brings forth constant abominations. You fell asleep the last three hundred years. Rhune gave her the seeds.”
“For this, he killed our she-wolves. King Theoden said.”
“For this, Rhune killed our he-wolves too, is what I say.”
“For this, Ammerwind, old Rhune certainly dies. Let us plan our revenge.”
The two wolf-souls whorled around a vortex, crackling the night with violet lightning, and all other sorts of amazing ghoulish things, can you imagine the vicious, villainous poetry of it, until Ammerwind stopped with sharp, whimpering pang of regret…
“Amazing leader, not to break the prose at all… but I do believe we’ll need bodies first.”
More next Wednesday...
