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NOTE: These stories are
intended for a mature audience.

Catching the Sunlight
A Vorare Story
By
Ivan Ewert
Start at the beginning of the Vorare series

It was hunger which had brought him to this place, and it was hunger which opened his eyes once more. Did it seem as if he was ever sliding into or slipping forth from the darkness, bringing himself to or letting himself drown? No longer.

He was looking down upon the world from a space above it all, the vast darkness punctuated by a thin blanket of tiny lights - lights in the streets, lights in the home, and wandering will-o-wisps that were cryptic and wandering men. He knew each light as a figure and a shape, human somehow and yet more than human, an ambulatory hunger searching to fill its belly and its soul with something more than it possessed.

Some were bright and brittle, thin panes of glass covering a powerful glow which diffused itself along the snowlines. They were hard upon the eyes if one looked too long or too well, bringing forth tears with the sharp thoughts of what would come should the glass be shattered, showing the sharp divide of shadow and light on all that lay before them.

Others were dull and orange, tiny, dying suns kept caged and careful below thick panes of glass, late-night cashiers in fierce and terrible neighborhoods. These were heavy and solemn lights which promised nothing and asked for little in return, a hunger which had been tempered by regret and long experience with the disappointment of their dreams.

Here and there - more common than the world knew - a light blazed forth so strongly that neither glass nor wire seemed to do it justice. These were rushing blazes of sorrow and delight, fires which would sear the flesh and turn to ashes all that it sought to claim and conquer. These were Darwin's lights, the predatory visions of those whose hunger matched that which Gordon had known for a year, though turned toward whatever fears or delights might drive that individual soul forward.

Driven were all souls, driven by their envies and their hungers, their thirsts for more, more, ever and always for more with little or no heed paid to the consequences of all they wished to bring within them. Gordon looked across the world and saw these souls and the strength of their desires, and he blessed both the sacrifice which he had made and the heaviness which now pierced his chest.

He felt it as a fish might feel a hook, with a certain and solid weight despite its deceptive curves and tapering sides. It rested and nestled itself in the place that once had held his hunger, inches below his sternum, inches above his pubic bone, in the lean meat of his lights and muscles. What had been hunger was replaced by something more, and through it came a tension that was similar yet subtly different.

The desire had been drained from his frame, the light was gone. He was no longer a star among the human constellation, but a part of the darkness through which those stars roamed. The hunger had drained from his body through the wounds he had inflicted upon himself, and with those wounds he could once more walk and pass among men.

There would be time for that, he reasoned, as he sat once more among the branches of a tree. Time enough to return to the spinning world of mortality, time enough to seek out those things which still held interest if no true delight for him. He turned his attention from the dancing orbs of light and back to the rough feel of the bark against his back, the breeze which he knew was bitter and chill, the captivating sight of the flesh which now well and truly belonged to himself and himself alone.

His fingers danced along the smooth edges of the wound in his arm, and as if in response the edges fluttered beneath his questing fingers. The wound was red but not raw, moist but never bleeding. He heard it crooning to itself, a tuneless song whose origins he still could not define - whether it came from deep within or some space far beyond, it came to the lips of his self-inflicted wound - his newly found familiar.

When he spoke, Gordon's voice was no longer raw from tears or graveled with disuse. It was the voice he had known with Sylvie, with his studies, with a life left long behind him now; which held conversation and words to be both natural and normal.

"I've thought of something," he said, "what happens if I actually cover you? Will you still know what's happening around us?"

The tuneless song died, and the edges of the wound slid together and apart with a faint sucking sound. "Your eyes are as my own," it replied, "your ears my ears, your senses my senses. Place a shirt upon me, wrap me in a bandage, it matters naught - all I know will still be known."

"But you won't be able to talk to me?"

"Bind a cloth around your own lips, child of man, and speak the words of your own revelations. Bind it loose and you will be heard, bind it tight and know what it is to lose your precious drops of wisdom to the depth of darkness and the void."

Gordon nodded. "All right." He pondered some more, stroking a finger absently atop the upper lip of the wound. "What else is it that you can show me?"

"What have I shown you to now? What has there been to show, here in the trees and the wind which carries the scent of man?"

"The lights," he said absently. "I never knew. I never saw them so strongly, or from such a distance. I'm right, aren't I? They're people I'm watching, from miles away."

"They are the hunger which moves and devours itself," said the wound, "the hosts and the children of flesh and famine."

Gordon stopped stroking the lip. "People."

"If you like."

"I would like to know, and to hear the word."

For a moment the heat returned to his arm, the tight feel of veins turning to tourniquets behind his elbow. The moment passed, and the voice came sweet and smooth. "People," echoed his wound.

"Thank you."

"If you like."

"So what else is it that you can show me?"

The breeze which ruffled Gordon's hair mirrored the writhing edges of the wound. "I can show you many things, host of man, some of little or no interest, some which may hold great and powerful hidden knowledge."

"Then show me all of them."

"Ah, alas, and rack and ruin, but that I cannot do. I would harm you were I to do so, and such is the furthest thing from my intent. I wish your full and complete health and happiness. To show you all things at one single turn would trouble us both."

Gordon paused. He'd been away, in the darkness, and was now feeling his way along what he sensed to be a difficult and dangerous slope in his dealings with the wound. It felt close to him, so close that he was sure his heart and head were as glass before it.

"Show me," he said slowly, "the thing which will serve me best as I return to the mortal world."

"But alas, that would require another child of man to be present, and there are none within sight."

"Then tell me what it is I should expect to see if there were another person here, and if I were to ask you to show me that thing which would serve me best."

The corners of the wound tightened as if smiling. "You would see another person. And if you were to speak," it said quickly, forestalling Gordon's frustration, "and if they were to speak, and if they were to tell you a falsehood, you would feel me - thus."

The edges of the wound spread themselves backward, and for a brief second Gordon felt the electric thrill of cool air against exposed nerves, felt the unpleasant tightness of skin peeling back from itself. Then, as quickly, the edges pulled themselves together once more and began to slide in speech: "So may you tell the liars among you, or those who seek to mislead."

Gordon nodded. "You think I'll be lied to?"

"I think you will go among the mortal world, and I know mortals to be liars all."

"Will that happen every time someone tells a lie?"

"Do you wish it so?"

"No," he said, "you're right about our habits, and I don't want to feel that when some passerby wishes me a good morning without meaning it." He was silent a moment. "By the same token, I don't want to have to ask you every time someone's speaking."

The silence continued as Gordon sank into thought. He was hopeful that the wound might make some suggestion, some easy answer to the issue - but it remained as silent as he, and finally Gordon let out a sigh.

"You can see the lights. Do they give us any warning about what people might be doing, or planning, or thinking?"

"Only the strength of their hunger."

"All right then. The dull lights, those are people without much passion?"

"They are dim and dying, weak and meaningless."

"Then when they lie to me, I don't need to know - unless I ask you specifically. But when anyone with a great hunger lies to me, I want to know right away."

"If you like," repeated the wound, and Gordon found that the phrase had begun to please him.

Story by Ivan Ewert, Copyright 2007
Image by Rory Clark, Stopped Motion Photography, Copyright 2007