Random Story :
Wealth Trumps Death Every Time
Author : Patricia Stewart, Staff Writer Senator Reginald Wadsworth lay …
Ambergris
Author: Jeremy Nathan Marks
Where I live there are many stories about what we call, ‘the town on the edge of the abyss. It’s a town on the verge of something mysterious. Most of these stories go something like this:
“That town is a town of women.”
“No, it’s a town of mostly women and some men.”
“That’s the town where no one believes the Earth is round.”
“No, some people believe the Earth’s round. But most people think it’s flat because the town sits next to the edge of outer space.”
“Isn’t the cliff just a drop into a big lake?”
“No, it sits overlooking the cosmos, even if some people think that the abyss is a lake.”
“Did all the men in town fall off the cliff?”
“No, but a few of them were pushed.”
Recently, I’d heard about a man who caught a whale on the cliff. He had dangled some fishing line (and his own legs) into nothingness. He had caught the whale, hoisted it over his shoulder, and lugged it back to town.
When the man paraded down the street with his catch, people ran out shouting, “No one can carry a whale that size! No one can carry a whale of any size!”
“See for yourself,” the man laughed. “Come and touch this real whale, brought up straight from the abyss.”
Many townsfolk were troubled by what they saw. If the man had caught a whale, then it meant their town sat over a lake. And if it did sit over a lake, this meant the world was round. But since the world was flat, the whale was a fake, a mere balloon.
About a week later, the man disappeared. When I learned this, I assumed that someone had pushed him off the cliff. I saw in the newspaper that his disappearance wouldn’t be investigated.
“God smote him,” my neighbor said. “He was mocking the universe.”
I was eager to see the cliff for myself and decided to visit the town. When I arrived, a strong wind was blowing, taking fistfuls of leaves and stray newspapers from the street and tossing them out and into the unknown. Before following the wind and its trash, I fortified myself with a coffee and a pastry.
At the end of the street, there was neither police tape nor sawhorses. I couldn’t find any indication of a crime scene; the area was deserted. Under the circumstances, I felt safer being alone and I sat down, placing my coffee and little paper pastry bag on the ground. Then I army crawled to the cliff edge. My heart was in my throat. I could feel the wind tearing at my back, rippling my clothes, and rifling my soul.
Slowly, I brought the top of my head and forehead over the edge of the world. I listened intently for signs of a lake or even an ocean out there. The day was quiet save for the wind gusts. I tasted dirt in my mouth; it was loose soil, a pile of grains the ants must have turned over thousands of times. I imagined them going up and down the cliff, entering it sidewise like astronauts moving about their ships and stations in the cosmos.
As I brought my eyes over the edge at last, I saw what I can only describe as a sea of churning purple and milky black. It was filled with stringy and strained clouds, the consistency of coffee cream. The clouds, varying in size and thickness, churned themselves into odd shapes. They puckered and bloomed and snapped and winked and I wondered if the clouds contained seeds preparing to sprout. I also wondered whether they were performing some kind of germination dance as they moved across each other.
But I couldn’t watch them for long: I found the abyss vertiginous. It was making me acutely nauseous. I withdrew my head and was sick on the good, solid ground.
Then I heard a sound, something I knew from old cassette tapes. It was a long-lost noise, raised from the depths of childhood. It was a whale song.
I swallowed my bile, caught my breath, and inched my face closer to the edge again. As I peered over the side, I saw dozens of black and white whales, some with barnacles on their bodies, emerge from the clouds. As the clouds boiled and blossomed, I began to think the whales were conducting the abyss.
Several of them blew shafts of a watery spray from their blowholes. I studied each one closely to stave off being sick. I stared at the fine details of their bodies: fins, baleen, those little eyes, that odd smile on their faces. The whales kept rising, some coming very close to the cliff. I couldn’t bring myself to look straight down, to see whether I was suspended in space. I wondered whether I was lying across the handle of a great pan floating across the flame of the universe.
One whale came very close, smelling of brine. Their flipper passed just beyond the top of my head; I waited for it to touch my hair. But it didn’t. I listened to its ascending song, and to those of all the others, for a long time. I felt miraculously at peace inside this chorus. Eventually, I nudged myself back from the abyss.
I lay on the ground for awhile, listening to what had become a physical silence. I believed my ears had gone blind. Then I stood slowly, retrieving coffee and pastry and returning to my car. As I leaned against the driver’s door, sipping my tepid drink and nibbling on a snack, something landed on my hood with a thud.
It was a man’s boot embedded in what looked like ambergris.