CATHEDRAL ASH, 8

She was not tears; she was stillness. He could remember, as one remembers between bouts of fever, with unusual and necessary clarity, how she had pulled him together, fashioned him into the sort of individual he was beginning to suspect he had actually wanted to become all along.
The term in common usage was Governness. It was her role. There was to be no admitting that she was in some way assigned to be Priestess, Harvest-minion, and most importantly, Giver of clean milk. She could easily have been called his Nursemaid. They liked, as all well know, the richness and musicality of archaic idioms. They were tools to assist in the family's pretense that they would not be held captive by the conditions of the present world.

Human aspirations. [Keep reading...]

CATHEDRAL ASH, 1

Questions milling rampant inside of questions. Air opens, broadens, thins and filters itself from presence. A vacuum, there is space. The urge to become, to become whole and endless through vain acts of unbecoming, the dire Primordial Urge of the I Am is deepened, flogged, made still more urgent. This is a place of torment, a limbo for limbo's sake, a purgation. Here, dissidents bed with cynics, an act of daring and of autocratic disdain, all mumbling and chattering in a whisper of the thinning common night. In a torrid chill, on the blue brink of first light, their activities play to dispense with harmony altogether: [Keep reading...]

PREHISTORY

The species is believed to have first been planted by Roman Emperor Hadrian. His many excursions led him to a fervent affinity for the so-called 'Warrior's Respite'. In times of war, the brave were obliged to flee their homes and plunge their lives into all color of peril; then, when each campaign had ended, the warriors were provided with whatever comforts the land and the human will could provide, assuming there was a loving home to which they were able to return.

Perhaps the strangest attribute of this fig-like white fruit is that there seem never to have been more than two hundred vines in existence at any one time. A long life-span and intricate regenerative ability are the ways in which the plant has come to deal with its characteristic scarcity. Science at large has worked at best inattentively to understand this particular species of runner, perhaps from limited access, but we do know that private logs were always kept by its caretakers and that one of Hadrian's original plants is still with us today. [Keep reading...]