Finishing up 2006

Ok, here's the last portion of the NaNoWriMo novel that I wrote:


* * *

Here is a memory.

The falling shells glow through the night sky, and as they move behind the remaining trees, they illuminate a tangled sphere of branches, each making a nest with an illuminated egg in the center, and these eggs hatch on contact with the earth, angry newborns, tearing limbs and opening bodies to the world they are so spiteful of before they have even opened their eyes. And then they are gone and the men are gone together. And then the trees are illuminated again and another generation is illuminated and extinguished.

I wake up again, and I know I should not be thankful, because there will this night and other nights, and still I must raise my hand above the trenches, but I am thankful despite myself.

The moon is outside the sky and the only light seems to be coming from the bodies of the men themselves, and James realizes that even he glows a little. And upon the shining forms of the men he sees dark shapes crawl, big fat corpse-rats. Tails like worms on bodies, they skitter through the trenches, moving over men and earth equally. James rises, he does not know why. He is not afraid to stand, even though he knows the enemy is watching, and his glowing body is probably a good target. Where do the rats go in the daytime, he wonders. Why do they come out at night? What do they want? Is the same as what they find? He sits down again and digs through his things, pulling out a sheet he covers himself in, to hide his glow. He stays low to the ground and follows the rats. They scurry along, and he sees them chewing buttons off clothes, and patches off hats, and grabbing in their teeth rings from fingers. He sees several conspire to carry a man’s rifle away. And they gather up these things, rings glittering in their teeth and buttons bright in their paws, and take them along, and still he follows them, as they along the trench and then out of it, and he follows them, over the lip and into The No Man’s land, and he follows the rats as they go around the barbed wire and the broken trees and continue silently across the ground. He sees two men examining corpses on the field, preparing to drag them back to whichever trench spat them out. But the rats ignore the dead bodies, and James notices what he has never noticed before, that the corpses and pieces of corpses he passes have lost all their buttons and rings and weapons and all fine things, bright things, which must have been explained as looting, and it is looting, he supposes, of a kind. And he follows the rats. And he follows the rats and they continue on into the ground, descending into a tear in the earth at the base of a stump, and he pulls his form into itself, and slips into the hole, and is pitch black now, so he opens a part of the sheet and lets the brightness of his flesh shine out and holds out his fist like he is holding a lantern except that it is the lantern itself. And he notices as he continues down that the brightness around his fist can spread wider and wider until he is in a cavern, and he sees around him great hanging downward things, and as he examines them he realizes they are the trees, splintered above ground and now growing here, upside down, their roots spread through the layer of earth above and probably into sky, while in this cavern the entire forest gently swings like pendulums, regularly and in time, and the shifting of the earth makes a wind that compels their leaves to language. He follows they rats as they go down, and he takes off his sheet because the animals don’t seem to mind and he wants to feel his light. The rats lead him through another narrowness, and then into another cavern, and it is here that they stop, and assemble, and a big rat comes out.

* * *

And that was my last significant creative writing of 2006. Writing a novel is kind of a bitch, it turns out.