Not A Creature Was Stirring

I began by telling him how dissatisfied I was with the idea that life must be a lesser thing than we were capable of imagining it to be. I had the feeling that the same thing happened to nearly everybody I knew and whom I did not know. No sooner was their youth, with the little force and impetus characteristic of youth, done, and they stopped growing. At the very moment that one felt that now was the time to gather oneself together, to use one’s whole strength, to take control, to be an adult, in fact, they seemed content to swap the darling wish of their hearts for innumerable little wishes.

—Katherine Mansfield, from her journal

Come and get these memories.

—Martha and the Vandellas

There was a culvert down there that would take you right back into the mountain. In the spring, or whenever it rained, the thing would rush with run-off water that would fill the little creek and turn it for a time into a roaring, dirty river. During dry spells, however, you could walk ankle-deep in clear water way back into the cool darkness of the culvert, right into the belly of the mountain. A normal-sized man wouldn’t even have to stoop.

When everything started to go to hell and the men came across the fields in their black helmets and set fire to farm houses and barns, the people who lived in the little villages that were spread out across the countryside packed up their most essential possessions and took up residence in the mountain culvert.

Eventually the villagers established an elaborate community in the culvert, and started excavating further into the mountain on all sides. They set up partitions and built elaborate housing warrens for individual families and tribes. At one end the essential flow of water into the culvert was walled off with stones and diverted away from what were now the crowded apartments of refugees.

After a time the culvert community, strained by overpopulation, began to expand further and further, until there were a handful of anonymous villages strung out deep within the mountain. These subterranean hamlets eventually developed their own languages and cultures, and became in time bitter rivals. Malnourishment and an assortment of related dementias led to escalating violence that was every bit the equal of the hostilities that had driven the culvert dwellers underground in the first place. There were constant eruptions of new conflicts, and eventually full-scale war, which was a savage, bloody, and hand-to-hand affair in such close quarters.

They said when they finally went in there with the bulldozers they found the bodies stacked like cordwood, and there wasn’t one soul left breathing.

The darkness is only light

That has not yet reached us….

—Charles Wright, “Tattoos”

I knew if I waited long enough light would eventually come through that hole, and so I waited.

I waited a long time.