Cold Mathematics ((open!!))
Sept 24, 2012 15:01:29 GMT -5
Post by kneedles on Sept 24, 2012 15:01:29 GMT -5
[Della Conagher|Sixteen|District 5]
I could wile away the hours
Conferrin' with the flowers
Consultin' with the rain
And my head I'd be scratchin'
While my thoughts were busy hatchin'
If I only had a brain
[/i]My mother taught me that, though I can’t remember a single word she ever spoke to me.
There are no stories from the time before, no art, or poetry or songs- at least nothing that I can get my hands on. A long time ago they set the world at the epicentre of a blast and watched it burn; ripping shards into paper, blowing through canvas and blasting bound leather until all that was left were the bones. Some days, when mud pumps out on the oil fields are working at full lilt, drawing up the fluid from the earth like blood from deep below the skin, I feel like I can almost taste the last lingering traces of the world that was. The bone and the bombs and the burning. The soil is the only thing that remains. Everything flows and nothing abides. The only constant is change. If we tried for a thousand years we could never recreate it; the same stories are no longer told, all those paintings and poems are lost, and we can never again sing their lost songs.
It’s still happening now if you stop and really notice it. Shut your eyes for just a second and witness the death of a moment, losing a hold of time, of cells and shifting chaos that you could never recreate- not if you tried for a thousand years. Perhaps that’s why I like explosions so much; the brief instant of chaos before the last traces of a moment is lost from the earth with nothing but the smell of ash and a stain in the dirt to mark it. Perhaps I just like the lights and the noise and the colours. Its five minutes past minute and I’m in the backyard of my daddy’s house. September and I’m already wearing my winter coat and boots, clenching my fingers into fists to try and warm them up. The cicadas screech against the chill from the wide scrub land stretching out to the vast metal drills, rigs and cranes. The skeletons of sleeping giants, pillowed by the dirt, a freckled galaxy of stars their eiderdown. I’ll never be here, never be this same girl, standing under this same sky again.
Della Conagher, the girl who can recite Pi to almost eight hundred places (as if anyone ever cared to listen for that long) can’t remember anything about the woman who raised her. Sometimes I have to wonder, on nights like this one as I watch the breath rise out of my throat, twisting like cigarette smoke up into the air, what the point of being so smart is if I can’t even do that. There’s no way to recall the way her hair felt when curled up in my tiny fist, the smell of her- talc and weeping colostrum I sometimes like to imagine- or the sound of her voice, that soft rumble that was with me even in the womb, low and melodious like mine is. I’d know it anywhere if I could only hear it, I’m sure of it. Sometimes, when I’m feeling mawkish, when daddy is in a wife beater scratching his hairy underarm out on the porch, when there aint no food in the house and the kitchen is covered in grease and a clump of burnt out coals or I’m laid up in bed feeling sorry for myself from monthly bleeding I’ll think of her the most. And I’d swap it all, in that moment; cohomology, invariant theory, modular representation, molecular theory, relativity- swap all of the cold mathematics for the chance of warm arms wrapped right around me and a lady in a floaty dress telling me she loves me.
But even if we tried for a thousand years, we’d never recreate her- just ask my daddy, he knows better than anyone. We are each of us an explosion, a brief instant of chaos before the last traces of a moment is lost from the earth.
This is not the time for sentimentality though, I remind myself, rubbing my hands together and blowing into them. This moment is salt peter, sugar, a toilet paper tube and a little aluminium foil, set out in the backyard and mixed to my own personal recipe. We all have our little vices; I could be smoking on the back steps or sneaking my daddy’s alcohol when he works the night shift- but instead this is mine. I’m thinking of him too, out on the nearest rig, eyes crusting over with sleepy dust as he drinks the coffee I packed for him in a plastic thermostat; eating sandwiches at twelve o’clock in the morning as though it were and sighing for the comfort of home and a warm bed. He’s going to look out in the direction of home and see a spark of light like a star falling in reverse reach right into the sky and touch the buckle of orions belt and know that I’m thinking of him. I’m not like how I imagine my mom; with warm touches, smelling of talc and mother’s milk- these cold mathematics are all that I have. Fired into the sky at night, though, I feel like they speak loudly enough.
So I slide a pair of goggles over my eyes, pull on a pair of thick gloves too large for my hands so they appear elongated and swollen and use a match to light the tip of a longer firelighter. It touches the string of the firework and crackles to life, devouring up cotton until it reaches the base of the toilet roll tube. Standing back, I arch my head up towards the sky and the constellation canis major expecting- with the amount of explosives I’ve packed into this bad boy- to see smoke and light rising upwards. But I’ve messed up, not considered the simple variable of gravity so simple that a four year old could grasp it; if a densely filled object is imbalanced then the chances are it will topple, especially when powered by the force of an explosion.
“Shoot,”I mutter, grabbing onto a bucket of water by my feet as the smoke begins to billow and fill up our yard. Light and noise shoots from the falling toilet roll tube, the first over the fence out into the oil fields, then another ricochets off the white picket fence, singing the grass and bringing with it the ill burnt smell of plants. Luckily the fall puts out the fire and I don’t have to worry about any more, rushing forwards and quickly dowsing the entire thing. I’ll wait til it cools, to clear it, I think, but for the most part I simply write it off as another lesson learnt. No harm. No foul.
That is until I hear, quietly from somewhere out by the house, the crackling. Then I see the lights. It’s a lone tree out in the oil fields, made brittle by the wind so that it catches quickly. It stands alone in the flatlands like a constellation in itself, a burning star just beyond my own backyard. There are carrion birds roosting in the tree and they scream their disapproval, taking off on wings as ink dark as the night, like the shadows cast by the fire. I hear it roar as though it is alive, eating up the bark of the tree as I hope the fence. It’s growing and spreading, determined in its path and here am I, for all my cold mathematics, unsure of what it is I need to do.
All I can do, though, is stand and watch it- the destructive force that chews up the moments and leaves them discarded. Knowing full well we couldn’t recreate them even if we tried. But it doesn’t care, goes where it wants, and it’s impossible not to find the beauty in it.
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