The Wish Belly Part VI
Photo courtesy of Wendy Longo Photography.
A fiction serial by Shane Kimberlin
For a long time I fell - long enough to realize I was falling - and that mess of panic and adrenaline soon curdled into dread.
"Are we going to die?" I said.
"Yes," said the cat, "most probably."
I didn't want this to end. I wanted to see her again. Some people don't believe they have much on earth. and I understand we all have to die, but there was still so much to do. If we died, who would save her? Would she save herself?
I remembered being at a summer barbeque at her sister and brother-in-law’s. It was in their front yard. Our friends’ kids played in the street, and the sun had just reached the best part of the evening, before the purple and orange colors were flooded with red. There were hot dogs roasted on rough-hewn sticks and music, fun and lithe, pushed out of a little wireless speaker. She was there, laughing with her sister while holding the cat, and I remembered wishing all this - and us - could go on, forever and ever.
But here I was, far away from such a memory as one could be, descending without permission into nothing as darkness etched deep upon my face and the cat's claws gripped into my shirt.
"I really don't want to die,” I said.
"Rub my belly,” said the cat.
"What?"
"Try it. Maybe something will happen."
"What?"
"I feel something. Make a wish."
I rubbed the cat's belly. It was warm, and his heart chugged full speed like a little toy train inside his chest.
"I wish…”
Falling.
“...I wouldn't…”
Falling.
“...die."
Boom.
A floor of water hit me. The cat left my axis. I tried to swim but directions like up and down were asleep. I was in endless water with no map or vision. Terror clenched my frame. Nerves got rent out like the twisting of a soaked rag.
A lot of people say right before you die you see your life flashing before your eyes, this unyielding chain of passing and poignant images, but that's not true, at least for me.
Instead, I was back in that summer evening. There were more guests than I remembered. Some folks had never been in this memory before. My parents were still there, but so were their parents, and all our friends’ children still played in the street, but there were new children as well, and they wore archaic clothes. Around the fire stood aunts and uncles from far away states, old classmates from school who I hadn't seen in twenty years but were aged oddly, like those artist sketches of long-missing children. It was everyone I ever met in life.
This summit of memory and fantasy unraveled slowly. First, my old math teacher Mrs. Fildman disappeared. The lady she was conversing with, a certain Ms. Evaughn (former librarian) looked confused before becoming nothing herself. Then, the barista from the coffee shop by work was erased plain. Soon, the scene faded piece by piece and person by person. Slow ghastly exits of both flesh and setting turned rapid. The guy who played Santa at the local mall when I was five dissipated. Her sister vanished. Everyone faded. Soon all that was left was her.
"Don't be afraid," she looked at me across the yard, "don't be afraid."
Then she evaporated from me and that world, piece by piece, like ashes amidst a roaring wind.
Soon the event itself, with its bonfire in a yard in a neighborhood somewhere in the world, began to dismantle. Prefab houses shifted, turning, then completely detached from earth and gravity to float lazily upward, like balloons half-filled with helium. The once fun and poppy music emanating from the speakers slowed down and went lower in key. It was a new form, a lumbering monstrosity.
I looked down and there, in my stomach, was an arrow. I pulled it out with great stress and threw it away.
Panicking, I ran fast but the run was futile. How can one escape an entire world ending? Then, all the last twenty-four hours came back to me: the cat, the kidnapping, three feet under the cherry tree, the hole, the wish belly, and the long fall down.
A scattered truth slowly, then all at once, grabbed my heart. I was dying. The oxygen levels in my body were dropping, and this was brain death. I felt another jab in my side and, looking down, saw yet another arrow in the same wound.
Many homes drifted in the now-purple sky with occupants still inside and screaming. In the distance roamed a hundred-foot-tall giraffe, bleating out epigraphs while destroying newly-built skyscrapers with its hooves. A dog ran down the sidewalk on his hind legs, carrying a checkerboard and small burlap sack. The ground shook and trees ripped upwards like nails to a magnet. Hail came falling from the sky. A giant wave was moving in the far horizon.
I shut my eyes and breathed in, bracing my frame for the only possible exit.
All sound dropped out in a moment.
A voice came booming from above.
“You can tell by the way I walk," murmured the voice, far away and very Eastern European.
I began to grow. Physically. Twelve feet tall in a second.
"I'm a woman's man, no time to talk."
One hundred feet tall. I was gaining height uncontrollably fast. Clouds overtook my head. The entire world was shrinking and with it the chaos. I could barely hear the voice that saved my life.
"Whether you're a brother or whether you're a mother, you're staying alive, staying alive."
The world obliterated and I was back in the dark, coughing up a torrent of water. The cat jumped off my chest. I coughed till it hurt and breathed in air like a junkie. Pain enveloped my right side. My eyes were closed from the force of my heaving, but I could see red and yellow behind the eyelids. I opened them up and in the distance was a small flame. I continued coughing.
After ten minutes, I regained my composure to actually talk. The cave was very cold.
"I'm glad you're alive," said the cat.
"What happened?"
"You nearly drowned."
I coughed some more.
"I couldn't, I couldn't find where to go,” I said.
"You almost made it to shore. I jumped back into the water and grabbed you."
"You did?"
"You're surprised at this?”
"You're a cat. Cats don't like water."
"I don't like water, this is true."
"And you're, I mean, no offense, I'm just so much bigger than you."
"I may just be a cat," he replied, “but I am a Ukranian first."
I winced at the jabbing pain that came again.
"You're bleeding," said the cat.
I took off my shirt, and there was a deep cut.
"It must have been from the digging stick," said the cat. "Those rats threw it down the hole before they shut the hatch. It only nicked you."
“The digging stick, really?”
“Yes,” said the cat. “It is over by the water’s edge if you want to break it in half. Minor revenge, no?”
"I'm lucky it didn't kill me."
"You made a wish," shrugged the cat, "and the belly obliged."
It was silent for a few moments. I didn’t know what to say. I was just thankful to still be there.
The small light flickered three hundred feet away or so.
“What is that?” I whispered, immediately realizing whispering was pointless.
“I don’t know,” said the cat. “It was there when I came ashore.”
“Do you think it’s someone? One of them?”
“No. We would already be caught. I would be already gone.”
I got up, slowly, stiffly. Miraculously, there were no broken bones. My muscles, however, were quite bruised, particularly my thighs, where my body first hit the water. Still, I could walk.
We slowly moved towards the fire and saw the flame floating above the ground. Not a wood fire but something else. It was a metal torch, burning dark green wood like I had never seen. The blaze was brilliant. Twenty feet from the torch stood a small round stone structure four feet high with a large metal apparatus planted on top that looked like an ornate gravestone.
“What is that?” I said.
We walked closer. There were two parts. The top was a tent of glass, and below was a metal box with a rectangular hole underneath the size of a small hearth.
“A lantern,” said the cat.
“I’ll be right back.”
I walked fast back to the water’s edge and found the stick. Its faint silhouette was etched in the darkness. I grabbed it and headed back to the lantern. As the light grew so did the stick’s color, and I could see a small patch of blood still on the wood. I was thankful it hadn’t pierced my innards. I shuddered at the thought and made it back to the torch.
“Ah,” said the cat, “there is the cursed object.”
“I don’t believe in curses.”
The cat shrugged, “We will disagree on agreeing on belief in curses.”
I put the digging stick up to the flame and waited. Slowly wood caught fire until a small burning star hung from the top of the stick. I moved to the lantern’s hearth, where a vat of thick oil sat below the wick, and placed the stick inside.
The oil lit up all at once, flooding the cave with light. I shut my eyes for a good minute in pain. When I finally adjusted and gathered the bravery to open them (worried at what I might find), I finally saw where we were.
The cave at its highest was around a hundred feet high. The pool in which I almost died resided silently down a little incline a few hundred feet away. It was very large and disappeared into darkness. On the ceiling above the water was the hole where I assumed we fell but no ladder was seen.
Behind us, the cave height descended down to fifty feet from the floor until the path was stopped by a giant stone wall that reached all the way to the ceiling, completely smooth and made of sandstone. Painted on the wall was a fading mural of a Japanese cherry blossom tree in bloom. Pigment had vanished in places, leaving in its place the rock underneath.
“A cherry tree,” I said.
“Stranger and stranger,” said the cat.
Upon closer inspection, parts of the wall on which the cherry blossom tree had been painted jutted out, giving the image an embossed, three-dimensional look. While faded, it was obvious great care had been given to the portrait’s detail. You could see each pink blossom - distinct in color, size and shape - on each twig of wildly different branches. The tree itself was poised in a stance of action, as if almost caught in mid-breeze. The bark too looked real; the stone carved to give each nook, crack and gnarl its own idiosyncratic character.
About six feet up was a shallow hole, painted dark, with many lines right around its edges. It was, I gathered, a tree hollow, rare for most trees and certainly for a cherry blossom tree. I looked into the hollow. It’d been painted a pure black color, deprived of the skill and panache witnessed in the rest of the painting, and looking rushed and amateurish in comparison. I kept staring, confused at this incongruity.
As I stared, the hollow turned deeper and with each new moment the paint seemingly moved and more detail arose, the contours and edges of the hole hardened and sharpened into more and more like something alive. What was once a swath of black paint now had depth, and deepened into the tree in space. Still I stared, and drew closer to the hollow, almost without control.
I saw within this cavity a vast looming tunnel filled with blue and black spirals. On it went, this dark pool of no reflection.
A white wooden mask with closed eyes appeared in my sight and stared at me. It floated in the middle of the darkness attached to nothing. No expression crossed its face. It had no eyebrows nor ears.
Suddenly, its eyes opened, revealing lifeless black dots. The lines of its mouth curved upward, forming a sly and awful grin.
“Hello,” said the mask.
The Wish Belly series by Shane Kimberlin: