The Edge

ABOUT US
Who Are We?
About TEoP

STORY UNIVERSES
Rick Silva's Four Visitors 
Ivan Ewert's Solstice
Nick Bergeron's Mnemosyne 
Seanan McGuire's Sparrow Hill Road

Guest Quarters
Postcards

CONTACT US
Call for Submissions
Notification List
LiveJournal/Feedback
Contact

NOTE: These stories are
intended for a mature audience.

Giving Thanks
A "Vorare" story
By
Ivan Ewert
Start at the beginning of the Vorare series

In the bare branches of an ancient maple, Gordon sat and watched the sun sink below the horizon. His face was sticky from the tracks of his tears, the too-visible pain of George's betrayal etched upon his face, his ears, and his hands. Willing but none too wise he had given of himself, had given of his own flesh and with the strength of that flesh his partner betrayed him. Hunger was stronger than trust or love ? the hunger that had drawn them together cleaving them apart.

The world was never truly silent, but at dusk, the doe and hare stepped lightly through the leaves, unseen and unheard. The wind alone spread the sound of wild autumn, and even that was tamed here in the thickest part of the wood. When Gordon had first fled into the northern forests, winter-white had covered the ground. Now in the autumn, golds and russets dominated, spilling a brilliant sea of color over the rich loam and soil.

He had not eaten, not for overlong, not of food or flesh, and the famine was telling on him. He was cold, cold as he had never been in that wild winter of bygone days, protected then by the awful truth of his Christmas feast. His shirt was tattered and gone, his pants stiff with filth and dried blood, his skin brittle and all too thin for such bitter weather as this. Without the flesh, he knew he would not heal ? would never fight off the elements.

The sun was nearly gone, and Gordon lifted himself on rangy arms to turn his body toward the east. In the birth of his sin he had hidden his face from the moon, but tonight, he exposed the face of famine and desperation. Hunger had replaced the shame he felt, and for the first time, Gordon felt some kinship with the men who had founded the Farms, who had first brought the dark feasts of flesh into the world and built their philosophy around the horror few men would ever contemplate.

"Please," he whispered to the moon. "For the springs in the wood I give my thanks. For the creek below I give my thanks. For the safety of the trees and the war of my enemies I give great and many thanks. Please, let me see your face."

She did not rise, rather she appeared, was revealed, to the world below not by her actual presence but by the absence of the sunlight. Gordon watched, feeling the chill grow greater and greater in his hands, feet, legs, and chest. He wrapped his hands beneath his armpits and watched.

"I can't bear it alone. They've come and gone, all of them. The year has torn at me, ripped into me, taken a part of me away. I have spent a year in solitude. I have nothing to show for it but the lessons I have learned."

His tears came again, as they had come every night. It was too much to ask of him to keep the world at bay, to remain composed. Not the throbbing, heaving cries of the previous winter, but silent and still, welling up from the deepest part of himself and escaping freely, moving at their leisure through his eyelashes and racing down his cheeks. The world would not see or did not care ? he had nothing left to give but that crystalline liquid of emptiness.

"I don't want to die." Quietly. Peacefully. "Thank you. I don't want to die. Thank you, thank you. But I don't want to die."

The moon laid a filter around the world, sapped the riot of color from autumn's sun, yet gently, ever quietly, moving with the care and compassion of a nurse who knows her patient's time has come. She stole nothing, only arranged it to a different time and tune, and brought the black and silver to blanket the fires of the forest floor.

"I could if I wanted to. I could have in the winter. I could have at the Farm. I could have in the Pen. I could have as we escaped. George could have taken it all. Paul could have beaten the breath from me. The Farmer could have smothered me as I slept.  I could have let any of them take it all or I could have taken it from myself. But I don't want to die."

The tears came through the realization, not because of it. It was a message they carried on their own silver-black trail across the pale sky of Gordon's face, spread into the corners of his mouth and carried the words into his waiting lips.

"Even alone, I don't want to die."

He climbed out of the tree in the moonlight and began to walk, following the silver trail of moonlight. He no longer knew where in the real world he was ? could he still be in the upper Midwest, so far from the hills and valleys of his birth? Or had he slipped through the ephemeral boundaries of nations, as he had planned, wormed his way into the forests of Canada, slipped the network of the Farm and its minions, the hunters and enforcers and trackers and all? He could no longer bring himself to care. He needed flesh, in quantities, or the winter would kill him wherever he rested his head.

The farmhouse lights were entirely off. No cars sat in the gravel driveway, though two old trucks rusted on the broad swath of snow-dusted grass alongside the barn. If anyone was home, they were sleeping. Sleeping peacefully, as the world intended, sleeping after the manner of the recently dead, still in their sheets and quiet in their minds. There would be no screaming, no fighting, and no trouble at all. If anyone was home.

Gordon circled the house. No dogs barked. No sign of any life at all. In the dim light, he saw tracks, the tracks that spoke of a car leaving, perhaps not so very long ago at all. There were few neighbors, he thought, the dirt road that had led him here from the forest's side showing little sign of use in the monochromatic moonlight. If they had gone, there was nothing to feed him. But there might be food regardless, and there might be clothes, and it might be simpler to enter.

Thinking was the enemy now. Gordon walked to the window alongside the door, balled his fist, and broke the glass with his shirt wrapped around his hand. Shivering from the cold, he watched a thin red trickle along the pale blue cast to his skin, and after sweeping away the shards of glass he crawled into the abandoned kitchen. There was no sound, no sign that he had been heard.

He could wait. They would come home. A shaft of light through a second window revealed a butcher's block on the kitchen counter, blonde wood and dark stains, and on it a wide, serrated knife. They would come home. Gordon took the knife and walked carefully through the remainder of the house, searching for the bedroom.

Clothes. Ill-fitting, made for a bigger man whose frame had not been wasted and whose muscles were accustomed to hard labor, but clothes, clean and warm. Gordon began to weep again as he pulled on long underwear, jeans, and a braided belt to hold them around his waist. A shirt, two shirts, a sweater, and the blessed warmth began to surround him again. Downstairs there was a hunter's coat, a hat ? lined with fur, blessed moon, lined with fur! It tickled the ragged notches of his mauled ears, and set him to smiling in spite of his purpose.

The refrigerator. Bread. Bread! A package of ground beef which he tore at with the serrated knife still in his hands, threw the raw meat in between two slices of bread and moaned in the back of his throat as the blood trickled down his throat, the feel of real food, honest food, raw though it was ?

Ashes. Honest food meant no more than ashes now. It was not enough, it would never be enough. It might sate his stomach but it could never touch his soul the way the flesh would calm his nerves. He threw the sandwich against the wall and turned to the broken window, knife in hand, watching the driveway for the headlights that would announce the farmer's return. Maybe alone. Maybe with a wife. Maybe with a child ?

"Who will not want to die," he croaked through blood-smeared lips. "Together or alone. They will not want to die."

Gordon's tears came again as he ran a finger along the cresting waves of the knife's blade, as he thought of the calm with which Sylvie had met her end. She knew she was destined to be eaten ? knew that she was born and bred to be consumed. "Manifest and manifold in the body and memory of the Farm," she had said, and she had meant it.

He had not killed her, even after all she had done, all the things she stood for. How could he kill, how could he devour, the innocent man who lived in this place? However the world had wronged him ? how could he think of it?

"I don't want to die," Gordon whispered, and his finger hummed gently with the beat set down by the edge of the knife. "I don't want to die."

And you will not, sang the blade. The voice was whisper-thin and blade-bright, cutting through the fog of Gordon's thoughts. He looked down at the silver in the moonlight, remembering the voice of the dead deer in the road, the eyes of the moon in the deep winter sky. You will live in the body and memory of your self.

"Of the Farm," Gordon said aloud. "Giving myself up would let me live in their body and memory."

Of yourself, repeated the voice. Of yourself.

He looked at the line where the glass had cut into his hand. He lifted the hand to his face, seeing the divots and craters where George had drawn strength, felt the stirring of a breeze through the shattered window rustle the fur lining along his ears. George had eaten of him, left him alive ? and had gained that hysterical strength, even as Gordon lived. He had eaten of George, too, and had burned with the inner fire for months in the Pen on scraps and pieces. George had not died.

"It isn't in the death," he whispered. "It isn't in the dying."

No, whispered the knife. It is in the sacrifice, not in the ending. Give of yourself and you shall receive life unending.

"Myself to myself ? and nobody dying." Gordon unlocked the front door of the farmhouse and walked onto the porch. The moon had moved in the sky, and he began to walk toward her once more. The farmer would come home to find a broken window to be repaired, a mess of beef to clean in the kitchen, missing clothes and a single knife. A scene unpleasant to encounter but far, far better than what might have come, and Gordon smiled as his eyes filled with the moon.

"It isn't in the dying. I don't have to die. I don't have to kill. Give and live. Give and live."

In the depths of the wood, Gordon squatted in a grove and turned his face to the east. The sun would rise, and he would live. Patiently and quietly he would wait. Patiently and quietly the knife sat on a tree stump by his side.

"Breaking the fast," he said, and he rolled up his left sleeve as the eastern sky grew pale.

Story and image by Ivan Ewert, Copyright 2006