The Desert of Aune: Flash Fiction
As if a sleeping sickness had struck the village, everything sat silent
As if a sleeping sickness had struck the village, everything sat silent. Shriveled and contorted bodies slept in the shade of the houses, moving only occasionally, the way the earth moves, the way that when no one is around, a soft breeze will scatter a bit of dirt down a hill. In the summer, when the famine had just begun, Dionne had told the young orphan Jordan of the legend of The Father Of The Land, who controlled the ebb and flow of life in the country, and who would not let his people suffer for long. One night Jordan took his rations (a paste of dried fruit and bark) and left the village in order to find The Father and directly appeal to him to end the famine.
It was said that The Father lived in a tower hidden in the hills of the desert of Aune, the exact location known only to a sect of monks that lived in the mountains at the edge of the desert. As it happened, the monks accepted the children of starving families who could no longer care for them, feeding the children what they could and teaching the children how to meditate so that they could allay the pain of their hunger. When Jordan arrived at the monastery the monks welcomed him, thinking he was one of these children, but when they learned of his true purpose they tried to convince him to stay and search no further. None of them would tell him the way to The Father, and thus Jordan spent a handful of idle days at the monastery, regaining his strength, looking for answers, watching the other children in meditation, their bony bodies as unmoving as bare, stunted trees in winter. Despite his best efforts, Jordan could discover nothing about The Father and heard only reiterations of the rumors that came from the coast, rumors of foreign ships laden with food, chartered by the rich, whose servants were buried to their ankles in the shallows of plenty that poured out around them as they loaded grain and fruits and vegetables from the ships onto the trains that gathered at the harbor — stark black beasts shrouded in fog — which then rumbled away to palaces deep in the country…
There was a monk named Allard, pale, tall, skinny, who could see that Jordan was getting impatient, and would likely soon leave on his own, would wander and probably die in the wilderness, and one day Allard bent his mouth down to Jordan’s ear and told him where to find The Father, adding what he knew to be the truth of the matter — but the boy wanted to see for himself.
The Father’s tower, a conical structure whose tip seemed to rest as high in the sky as the sun, stood alone in the silver water of a shallow lake, so shallow that it did not submerge even the toes of Jordan’s bare feet as he stepped into it, and instead gave the illusion that he was walking on its surface. When Jordan reached the massive base of the tower, he walked around it in search of an entrance, but could find none; standing at the foot of the tower he craned his neck to see its top, but it was so tall that he could not. He put his hands against the dark gray surface, cool to the touch; his small fingers slipped easily into the cracks between the stone, and he pulled himself upward toward the sterile blue sky. In the course of his climb he rested often, hanging only by the fingers he had wedged between the rocks, clinging to the tower as pathetic as a bug, and the wind, caressing his exhausted body, tempted him to let go. When he reached the top of the tower he found a window there, and looking down through it he saw lying on a stone altar in the center of the bare room not a god but an old man, near dead, as barren as the land itself. Though Jordan could see that it was hopeless, he still crawled down into the room and tried to wake the old man, to speak to him, but the man’s only response was to mumble unintelligibly. Jordan crumpled to the floor beside the altar and began to wail.
Once again in the palm of the desert, Jordan’s hunger became so acute that he tried to feed on the moonlight, opened his mouth to it and swirled it with his tongue, swallowed, fell to sleep. Even in the dream he had then, hunger still gnawed his body; the shallows of plenty gathered around his ankles, and when his bony hand reached for them they sank away.
