Betraying the cause.

Causality

The relationship of cause and effect

The principle that nothing can happen without being caused

There was blood seeping

Tracing lines along the grains in the wood

And marking out the cracks in the floorboards.

Blood spewing out of his half-open mouth

And his bleeding nose.

His eyes were half-closed.

Half-open.

Staring aimlessly,

Trying to make meaning out of the rust patterns drawn into the bottom of the refrigerator door.

Trying in vain to substantiate life

And place pins, and hold it down,

And dissect its viscera

As he lay, dissected himself,

In a pool of blood.

His blood.

The blood of the cause.

The high-octane fuel that once charged

That turbocharged mind of his

Which identified, improvised, illustrated, illuminated.

No doubt he started it.

His mind was the manifesto,

And here lay, bread and wine,

And a thousand delusions which escaped the confining quotations

And puzzling citations within that psychical text.

Now with the knife staved deep in his chest,

It still was not easy.

Cutting a shredded line through his heart and his left lung.

Blood oozed out.

Filling the chest cavity.

Pulmonary oedema.

His lungs compressed, filling up with blood themselves.

As he choked on the high-octane fuel

That kept spilling though his breath now.

The blood wrote histories on the ground.

Stories he meant to achieve.

Walk in front of them, at the head of the procession.

His chest bared open to bullets

And cannon-fire.

Wrote tales of forgotten beds

And forsaken love.

The story of a cause

And how it made sense of the world to him.

How he tried to make them see it.

All they heard was a mad man's ravings.

All they saw was a path paved to their grave.

The knife plunged into his heart.

Soft and warm; and red with blood.

Leftovers and Left-Behinds. Surviving a Revolution.

The table was rickety as it was, being put together from discarded bottle crates with boards nailed on top. A very certain tremor quivered over its surface when he banged his fists and pushed his chair back. The knife clanged on the ceramic plate, in tune with the distant church bells that centuries ago used to warn the villagers when the malevolent Putana prepared to spew smoke and flame and brimstone; that ominous note of dark skies, grey ash and blood red earth. A few crumbs of bread floated off and rested peacably on the table.

Peace.

The tip of the cigarette burnt bright red as he pulled in a drag.

The ash broke off and floated off with the dry desiccating breeze.

His eyes were fixed on the horizon.

She looked elsewhere, searching for an answer. Searching for a reason despite all the illogicalness that shrouded the age. Her nose twitched at the familiar tinge of cigarette smoke carried over by the wind.

Peace.

She sat at the table, brushing that lock of hair off her face. Her fingers ran through her scalp, entangled themselves in that forest of melancholy.

He was inside. Could hear the cupboards being slammed shut. Rustle of papers shoved down into a bag. The sharp click of the lighter as another cigarette was lit. The faint memory of smoke trails out of the shack again.

She did not feel sad. Just a sense of time catching up. An intense feeling of tiredness; like when you sit down halfway through a marathon you did not have the lung to finish. A knowing recognition that they could not outrun time, especially when one of them was perennially straining back and looking over his shoulder.

Peace.

And the the tale of silent evasion.

Of hiding away from time.

Trying to find

An island of recluse

From fire, and hell,

And brimstone

And the vicious anger,

Hatred, greed,

And that indefatigably alluring

Hold of ideology

And idealism.

The dream of peace.

She remembered. The tantalizingly melodious sound of the stream. Carving secrets on the pebbles and whispering them to the trees. She remembered his fingers tracing lines on the water; the same way they would draw lines down her back. And her neck.

That distant summer afternoon, long before the paradox of peace confronted them with its brutal banality, she remembered him writing their dreams in the water. She remembered how their dreams seemed to take tangible shape in the dexterousness of his fingers. And how they were washed away. Caught in that flux of time.

When he stepped out of the house, he was the very college boy she had fallen in love with in University.

His eyes were evasive;

Shy.

His face half-turned.

The unkempt hair.

That forest of melancholy.

And the overgrown stubble.

He slung his bag high

Over his shoulders.

Closed his eyes

Not to meet hers.

His footsteps downhill

An ill-tuned verse.

A fly with blue wings

And the leftovers.

When she left out her cry of anguish, he was too far to hear. Too far to turn back. Too far to meet her eyes, hold her waist and kiss her neck. Her voice was a strained violin note trying to drown the silence that engulfed her in that forested melancholy.

Gundrop silence.

The wooden stock was gleaned smooth. Smoothened out by the many sweaty arms against which it had leaned while its sight zoned in on its target. It was worn out. But AK's never get too worn out. The wooden stock. The cold steel muzzle. Its weight so delicately balanced by the bulk of the magazine. It felt right.

He could feel blood surging up his temples. Hear it foot-tap to the rhythm of his heart. And he remembered her face. Her delicately arched eyebrows. And her eyes which held that ocean of truth.

He could hear them come. The footsteps crunching in the gravel. The courtyard. The sun blared in through the window with a vicious violence. Sharp shadows. Sharper footfalls. He held the rifle. The magazine clicked into place. It felt right.

He could hear his deep breaths. Feel his chest heaving. And yet so silent. The gravel crunching in the courtyard. And he remembered her face. Her peach skin so soft beneath his fingers. Her cheeks turning cherry pink with his touch.

He clicked off the safety. Leaned out of the window. Arms resting on the rough grainy windowsill. The weight of the gun. The sunlight streaking, turning his eyebrows gold as he trained his eyes down the sight. Pulled trigger. TISSHHK. A puff of smoke. And a body fell limb in the courtyard. Pulled back the safety. Eyes trained again. It felt right.

Sweat trickling down his brow. Legs cramped. He sees the flare as a gunshot is fired. A volley of bullets. The windowsill splinters. The windowpane bursts into sharp bits of sunshine.

Her face... Her lips curled into that half-amused smile.

No more heartbeats. No deep breaths. No sweat down his brow.

Gundrop silence.

The Mutiny of the Mutes

Dunno why it started. Maybe it was bound to happen. All i know was how it did start. And well, that's part of recorded history.
History is very ironic. It only talks about iron and metal slashing through flesh and obliterating bones. And of monuments built by armies fed on iron-rich blood, to be razed down to make more fodder. Man's monumental history of blood, and iron and blood in iron (heamoglobin, as we call it).
Yes, the Mutiny of the Mutes is waiting to happen. History reminds us that it had happened earlier. But then, the Mutes merely learnt to talk, and they weren't Mutes any longer. Became Mutants rather. The Mutant Revolution.
The Mutes talk in the voice of silence. Words cheat their thoughts and feelings. Their war songs have no words and no rhyme. Their thoughts retain their abstract selves of purity. Their weapons do not thunder. Their footsteps don't raise the dead from their sleep, and awaken them with a yawny groan.
The crumbly charred pages of books will litter the streets. Signboards will read themselves out in the language of fire. Rivers of fire will surge out of windows, in a silent symphony of sorts, intoxicated on Molotov cocktails, Dante's Inferno in a vodka bottle. And the soot and the smoke will block out the sun and lead to a cataclysmic episode of global warming, which will then escalate into the worst Ice Age in the history (ah! that had to turn up again..) of the planet. So says Al Gore. And i don't trust him on that.
The Mutiny of the Mutes remains an abstraction. Like their wordless thoughts of purity. it finds life in our silent moments of perpetual violence, when we forget to hear and refuse to talk. Stop... turn back the pages of history... or write a new book. Write of smiles and tears, love and fears. Write why i left those footprints on the beach, to be licked up and washed off by the kinky tongue of an insatiable sea. Nature reflects who we are.
Let us learn to speak.