Page 261 - TheRedSon_PrintInterior_430pp_5.5x8.5_9-22-2019_v1

deliberate and immutable falseness. I realized the stream
held no relationship to the moon, the night, or even the forest
through which it unfurled. It was an alien.
The darkness refused the stream its enshrouding touch,
creating a thin film of light above the water where the
night was left incomplete. The revenant light was sickly,
holding a coldness that reached beyond the skin, a strain of
radiance that failed to illuminate its surroundings. Instead,
the light seemed only to solidify its immediacy in a way that
removed the fear and wonder of unseen things, all while
not visibly disclosing them. Within moments, I felt utterly
alone, without dream—purposeless. I was as bleached and
bottomless and indistinct as the whited brook. I sat down
beside the water and stared into its infinite, pointless depths.
It was then that I realized what was happening to me—who
was happening to me.
I had encountered the White Gaia, the Queen of the
Deadworld. I had only once before felt her presence as
keenly.
I was but a child roaming the back roads of the world with
my new family. One afternoon, as we lay in the darkness of
hidden places, my mother woke me from sleep and requested
that I walk with her into the nearby city. The place was
horribly new and over-bright, a plastic corpse laid at the feet
of the terrible yellow noon. We walked deep into the urban
thickets of glass and steel. My mother whisked me into a
ruined apartment building, up a flight of rotting stairs, and
into the shabbiest apartment I’d ever seen. Before me, there
was a double-pane window, its lowest pane filled by a sheet
of white-stained glass. Gently, my mother brought me to
kneel before the white aperture, and told me to gaze through
it. As I peered, I could see outlined in the white fog of the
window the undead mother of the world—The White Gaia.
She spilled upwards, thousands of feet, upon the skinless
ragged bones of her bent legs. Her body was corpulent and
heaving, with breasts like rotting moons. Her arms were as
264 | Mark Anzalone