Shepardess of Stone, a short story by ryburndl. Date added: 2011-10-16. Times viewed: 431.
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- Intro: Further excerpts from the Notebooks of Juan Beauregaard-Montez
RyburnDL
Further excerpts from the Notebooks of Juan Beauregaard-Montez
Reportedly Jesus D. Montez-Morales is a hetronym for the half-brother of Juan Bearegaard-Montez. There has been no comfirmation that he has a half-brother so all remains supposition. It is also possible that Jesus is actually Juan or Juan is actually Jesus. It is conjectured that the "Shepardess" was/is real and lived/lives somewhere in the Pyrenees in the small town of St. Julia, Andorra.
Note: See previous submissions of Juan's Notebooks for further clarification.
Shepherdess of Stone
Once she knew only stones. Stretched out before her, these stones created symbols that only she could understand. In this place, grey stones, laced with green-black lichens, spoke into her sleep. Spoke the silence of dark oceans. Spoke the mystery of alien suns. She awoke as she is now. And she remembered nothing, nothing but stones.
All that remained were disillusioned stones. They slowly rose and dragged their poisoned selves into the dark waters of the unrelenting tide of convention. Their dignified sadness, the stones' immense sorrows terrified her.
That memory survived was beyond question. I too found my way along the dark shore into the immanent ocean. Quietly, I sent all strength away, yielded to weakness, to infinity.
It was her eyes. Her dark, dangerous eyes; eyes that held luminous stars that only I could see. It was her eyes that removed the sky.
False images were placed in beds of sea oats. These images professed the knowledge of thought, of Hamlet. These images claimed to love a dead Earth.
Her eyes became birds of prey. They soared in deepest auburn obscurity. A red birthed from Mondrian orange and resins of dark pines. Disoriented tears desired faded storms. Left shadows as memories; reflected day break and daydreams.
Tenderness remained that only these separated emotions could explore. Each moment became a wheel of mud. Each distance measured by time, false shadow.
Failed windows never understood weary magpies. Their shadows' disappearance saddened the color Green. Nothing else could ever have been known save the true shadows that formed around her breath and the tin snips that others had placed in her ears.
Most times there were only thoughts of her. Imaged curved knees; their soft undersides. Thoughts lived in the softness of her touch. Invisible all those days, Night ventured out, touched the ends of her magpie hair with warm breath. Gazed at the sweet darkness of sleeping eyes; whispered, "I adore you."
I gathered the dust of many lives into small concentric mounds. I resigned myself to endless grief. Waited patiently for a new ending, then I saw her brown eyes, the delicate curve of her hands as they reached to touch my invisible body.
A simoom wind scattered these piles of dust into the midnight of forever. I awoke to the sadness of another day without her. I emerged from this terrible ebony night carrying the darkness of a drowned man across my eyes.
Eyes that held the memory of stars gathered across her pale forehead. Stars parted her magpie hair with their companions the comets.
Desire had been heaped to overflowing, steeped in abstract numerology and hypocrisy. A murderer's hands that beg to avenge could not find the blood of the guiltless anywhere. From nowhere, shadows shouted.
I longed for a time when questions were not asked. When twin fires had name’s scrolled in the images of the Old People at the base of pillars; a time when smoke curved in the shape of her thighs, swayed as a cat's tail, upward into darkened sky.
The laws of mercy abandoned us, left meaningless numbers scattered and broken across a landscape of an untouchable tomorrow. These numbers formed an invisible, impenetrable convention of stones.
These stones could never be the stones of love.
I became immersed in a blood that stained the marrow of fools, riddle makers and prophets. I am a fool who desired to dance again and again and again. I was too unwise for riddles. I was too blinded for prophecy.
I had seen her as Vermeer had once seen her, sitting in a high-backed chair writing poems of her great love of life. The pure white of the moon lived on her cheek, now dark, hidden.
Wax melted from a candelabrum became tiny, dying crows. Death throes fluttered in the risen smoke.
A moth circled a great, empty hall built in her honor. The moth reflected phosphorescent beetles in a gilded mirror, mocked footsteps that proclaimed utter loneliness.
The impossible loneliness of her absence on a night with no moon, I lost the will to close the solitary, darkened window. My only companion, the moth, disappeared.
I discovered silver coins carved with her image, a pennant that bore the sign of the Phoenix. Angered, I tossed them into the fire of convulsive masquerade; this roaring engine of unknown dance.
All that I could conjure of her delicate image is the hazy, blue softness of her hips as they rose with each intoxicated breath, each slow departure from the world. Could faintly hear the tiny bones she wore as ornaments rattle rhythmically against her nude body.
Her dark, dark eyes, eyes that destroyed forever, floated against a blurred backwash of black and grey-white. Nothing had been spoken. Everything had been said by our demented ancestors.
The woodsman's axe had been polished and put away. The orange brilliance of morning was still very, very far away.
I touched a shadow between two leaves left on a paralyzed cypress as I once touched the moon that guarded her tender breasts. Like then, my fingers come away wet with tears of an aged tree that had endured too many winters alone. These tears shimmered with golden amber and tiny stars.
The intangible bars that were her prison had been spoken into her; spoken into her by the evil of tradition. I used all my sorcerers’ power, transformed her into a swarm of orange butterflies, pleaded for her to fly, fly, and fly! The distance was so short.
Yet, imagined fear caused her to circle the false lights of others, others who wanted her for the pollen of her beautiful wings. These Others who would turn her into dullness, placed giant pins in her soft, blue thighs.
They could not see golden dust that trailed behind her, could not see stars in her dark panther's eyes. They could never know the beauty of her touch as I did. Only love could create Beauty. She became smaller, more distant. Vainly I pleaded, fly, Shepherdess, fly. Fly back to me.
Return as you were the night of that first touch. Return with soft hands. Return with brown eyes. Return with coal-blue, shimmering magpie hair.
Return with that invincible young body of soft stone furrowed by memory and desire. Return, Shepherdess, Return!
It was impossible to live with silence. Since true silence is death. I slept among smoke and stone along the shore of a dark, mysterious ocean in search of who I am. I discovered only voices and conterminous scorpions. I had been quartered and drawn by the dull sword of delusion.
Even love had been forgotten. Mutilated by ancient light of luminous stars that I realized are already dead.
Shepherdess of stone, grant the formula that will heal this wound. Your soft voice could make the world whole. The sweet nectar of your lips would destroy loneliness, bring back the glory of fin' amors.
Come unto the untamed grasses that grow by a lake of mirrors. Come, walk beneath an ancient arbor of wood rose that leads to joy, free of fear and convention. Suckle, once again, petals of strange, wild flowers that grow in mountain meadows that only you can inhabit.
Return, Shepherdess, Return!
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