Day One!

I have just spent a wonderful few hours writing with my friends. I present to you now the result, the first 1669 words of my NaNo! If it is hard to read in the blog I suggest copying it to word and double-spacing it.

Thanks for reading!

Enjoy!


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No, not this one. He’s too torn up: you can see the coils of his intestines, now raveled and gracefully unspooled over the ground, tangled in the dirt and the debris of the abused earth. Keep looking. No, just follow me. Follow my voice. It’s all you have now, isn’t it? Well, let’s focus on finding a vessel for now.
Ah, this looks promising. Epidermis mostly intact, innards within, good, good… We can fix this one with just a little knitting. Here. Pick an orifice. Through the mouth – all right, follow me. Dodge the scrape of the enamel teeth, don’t be disgusted by the pink dry mass of the tongue; these will soon be our allies, from the curled fingers to the curling arteries, bones and skin, blood and water, our chariot. Up, then, squeeze through these narrow canals and channels, until here it is… That grey mound, intricate fists pressed together that command fists intricately, all ridges and valleys, the piercing spearhead of evolution. Sink into it, spreading your form wider and wider, less solid, let it soak you in like a sponge…
And here we are. Inside. At the controls. Whatever that spark of life once was that animated this frame, we must now furiously pump the bellows that it abandoned, let our labor give this corpse that which once came to it so easily. Try it. Reach beyond yourself, into yourself –
Whoa!
Feel that? The way the wind moves through the air, predatory currents that chase dust and looming thermals that lift it up, a whole invisible environment communicated to us through the semaphore of our shifting sheen of hair. And the hair! Feel it, feel it pushing through the skin – our skin! – pushing and growing and feeling that world. The world which carries to our tongue molecules of- our tongue! That lifeless thing, now sparked afire with the sensations of taste – dirt and blood, and the flavors carried by the windborne riders.
And all this, lying here, simply lying here! Dig a bit deeper and-
Movement! What is movement but purpose, the result of a decision made for some goal, the goal of movement, one glorious action where the purpose behind it and the action itself are the one and the same! Feel that purpose as the digits spread, in the articulation of the elbows, pushing away the ground. Oh my. Feel the purpose in the balance maintained by the minute shifting of all the muscles, the harmony and the glory of this simple, continual, constant act. Staying upright contains such a will, such a will! Oh, what desire rages inside the body always – the heart, the lungs, the kidneys, to pump, inflate, filter urine! The urge to urinate! And now! That warm, wet stimulation of the nerves as the stain spreads, the acrid odor – and, what’s this? Some new sensation, bubbling up from within. Shame, yes, and relief and shame again. Our habitation itself shudders with feeling. And behind all this, attaching significance to everything, underlying everything, memory lies.
Yes, this is where we must go next. This is the most difficult part, that which most eludes our control. Here, you guide the body, avoid tripping on the corpses and craters, make your way home, step by step.
Oh. Swirling around me, pressing against me, memories big and small, organized not by time but by urgency, beating against me, things that live only as they live, that rely on their constant observation. I don’t know what will help us. Here is what cries the loudest.

Well, they have picked the men, and I am one. An unusual case everyone calls it, most unusual. But desertion is a crime, and even Walters cannot save this one. That I have been chosen for this task is repugnant to me, a perversion. I stand here, now, the familiar weight in my hands, the rifles distributed amongst us, and the man tied to a post. His crimes are read. Insubordinance, cowardice, desertion. The punishment for which is death by firing squad. Thankfully, I don’t know him. I don’t think any of us do, which I am grateful for and yet seems a great injustice. I have heard that they load one of the rifles with a blank in these circumstances, and I desperately wish it is in my own. To imagine – to come to this war for your country, with the blood of the enemy in mind, and forced to shoot one of your own – no matter the crime! I look at this man and can only see a man. Think of him eating, fighting, making love. I see his bound hands and feel that I am bound. But now the call comes and I lift my arms while his remain locked, exercise my will while his remains restrained. There are six of us, yet I hear only five blasts – for a moment I am horrified that I am the one who shirked, and then when I see the smoke ribboning out of my rifle, and the slumped body beyond, I am horrified to realize I am not. I throw my rifle down and walk away quickly, contemplating only the recoil of the shot, the precise noise that sounded from the gun. I could have had the blank. I did. The rifle was weaker in my arms, softer than usual. No, I saw the holes. I couldn’t have done it. But I did. Except that I didn’t. I can feel the lines being drawn in my mind – trenches like the ones I live in and fight for, the constant battle that is my life, recreated in my mind with one life in the center. Except that instead of being my own this life is that of another, one whose existence I barley brushed, but whose nonbeing I helped define. The battle rages on.

Adjacent to this scene, personal information, emotions, colors. We are in a man named Peter Wallace. Against this memory Peter has cast this one.

The sun is high in a clear blue sky, an unbitter electric bulb. These French names all run together, but I know that we are near the front. Children play in a fountain like a square of the sky, throwing things into the air that gleam as they crest their apex, and send glittering constellations of drops into the air as they land, amid the laughing and the beauty of these children, in long clothes with long hair, tied back or free. These arcs multiply, narrow parabolas that begin in a child’s hand and end in the shine of the water, and I see that they are throwing limes. Oval fruits, yellow and green, pinched ends so beautiful in the clear light and water. And beyond them I see limes in the streets, stacked into piles against the houses, rolling along, pushed by dogs’ noses and playful feet. And then through the town, behind it, I see the trees, orchards of orchards, row after row of lime trees, with the wind in their leaves. And then I hear the thunder of the guns, German artillery out of sight, their blasts a gentle rumble of the earth, echoed as weakened stems give way and the citrus falls, some split and send their warm scent through the air, and others just nestle in the grass, until the children run through and laugh in glee and pick up the fruit from the earth, or let it fall into their hands, or just stand under the trees with their arms held out as if feeling the rain. The guns rumble and shake the trees and the fruits fall softly. And above, the sun throws its brightness over everything, turning the children’s hair into halos and the limes into emeralds, and it is so beautiful I choke and run into that field, and feel the shapes of the fallen limes beneath my feet and smell my steps as each footfall breaks them open, and standing there in the steam of life rising from the ground I feel the power of the guns through the earth and the weight of the fruit falling on my shoulders.

That memory is braced against the other, a weight and a counterweight, like scaffolding holding a mine shaft open, so Peter can move on through. He may have to crouch, and he may have to be wary of falling rocks, but he can move underneath the weight of that space, supported. I know where home is, and I know what dangers to avoid. Steer the feet that way, step around the rows of wire. Home is a trench, a scratch in the earth. We are lucky it is dark or we would have been felled by now. Crouch, get low. I don’t want our body, so new, to be so quickly broken. There it is, there is home, that gash. Come on, speed up, hop inside.
And now a new sense is stimulated, almost to the point of excess – the bones of the inner ear vibrate, translate, sound! The mind – our incredible host - can not only understand the vibrations as they are but hold them against an enormous catalogue of such experiences, telling us eventually that this we are hearing is the roar of a rifle.
This information is reinforced by the nerves in our shoulder, transmuting to us such a sensation! Commands to the region lock up, instructions never reach their destination – the arm twitches at our side. What is it about the pressure of a finger against the flesh that can transform a caress into cut, that turns simple feeling into spectacular pain? And it is this pain – spectacular to be sure – that pulses through our shoulder, and it is the combination of sound and feeling that inform the body it has been shot. The strong smell of new blood in our nostrils, and sudden velocity of gravity grips our legs as they give way and we tumble into the trench and into the man that shot us.


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Good night!