Warp & Woof: Chapter Five
A sci-fi serial
Note: the latest installment of our study of All The Pretty Horses was published to Re:Write instead of Re:Read; if you’re not subscribed to Re:Write, you probably missed it, and I apologize.
Warp and woof (warp and weft): (from dictionary.com) The essential foundation or base of any structure or organization; from weaving, in which the warp — the threads that run lengthwise — and the woof — the threads that run across — make up the fabric.
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Now let’s read Chapter 5.
Warp & Woof
Chapter Five:
Pодной Mир
(Rodnoy Mir)
Warp
There was nothing left but to wake up.
Warp opened his eyes to an endless heaven. Fields rolled down to the ocean, and a murmuration of birds lifted in great, black ribbons. He looked to the hill’s horizon, and the starlings twisted back again, painting an ever-changing design upon the sky. Laika would have loved it.
Zasha lay in the grass nearby, close enough to hear her breathing.
“Dmitri called,” he said. “Popov wants to run tests.”
Her eyes remained closed. Her expression didn’t change, but she told him to come to her, more a demand than an invitation, frank but friendly. “The doctor worries too much. Lie next to me. I had the most wonderful dream.”
He moved to her but remained upright like a schoolchild, not knowing what to do with his body.
“Beside me,” she said. “Lie down.”
“Dmitri…”
“I’m staying right here until I’ve tested my hypothesis. If you’re going back, you’ll have to do it without me.”
Tired of leaving the ones he loved, Warp settled into the grass and felt her warmth at his shoulder.
“Wait for me to fall asleep, and when I do, when you think I’m dreaming, just lie there with your eyes closed. Don’t think about what’s happening. Just lie still and wait.”
“What am I waiting for?” he asked.
She didn’t answer but put her hand in his. Her breathing settled into a steady pattern, and the sound of it washed over him like the sea. He felt something beneath him, distant and huge. It frightened him, but he fought the urge to run. Zasha had told him to wait for something to come, and that something had come. He relaxed into its presence.
Warp moved in darkness, a flying sensation that left him unsettled and searching for a solid perch. The air stank of grass and dung and his own bovine breath. He pulled back and thought himself sick as his whole body swayed like the sea.
He sat upright, awake and certain he’d vomit, but just as quickly the sickness passed.
Zasha opened her eyes. “Awake already?”
He was about to remind her that the others waited, but she put a finger to his lips, silencing him. “I want to show you this world.”
He laughed softly without the certainty there was anything to find funny. “You just got here. Same as the rest of us.”
With a chuckle, she pushed herself to her knees. Long tufts of grass clung to her like wires connected to an unseen machine until, one by one, they broke free. She jumped to her feet and reached out for him to follow, saying, “The hypothesis remains. Everything else waits until the study’s complete.”
She ran down the hill to the cliffs overlooking the ocean. He stopped a few meters back, but she stepped right to the edge, as if daring gravity to take her over. He inched beside her and looked into a bright and blue abyss. In areas, fingers of the highlands reached out into the sea, while fingers of the sea reached in, as one did here. The receding waters all but revealed the stony bottom, and the oncoming waves rolled high along the sides of the jetty-like cliffs and roared up the face of the natural harbors, ending in a spray that topped the plateau and left the land nearest the edge barren and rocky. At the furthest reaches of the outgoing cliffs and at the islands that fallen cliffs had left behind, where waves couldn’t build to the fullness of height and ferocity, birds roosted in the crevices of dry rock.
“You should come away,” he said. “This isn’t safe.”
“I could dive unharmed into the sea and ride the wave back again, and a hypothesis left untested is nothing more than a daydream.”
He looked at her and then back into the roaring deep. “You’d die.”
“Only if I’m wrong.”
The sea covered them with a brief and torrential rain.
“It’s not scientific to wager your life on your results,” he said.
“That makes my theory untestable, but if the same assumptions predict a different result, with safety for both success or failure, I could test my theory there.”
He pulled her away. “That would be a much better idea.”
“Reach behind you,” she said.
He hesitated a moment, perplexed, and then glanced over his shoulder.
“Don’t look,” she said. “Reach. Hold out your hand behind you and keep it there.”
He didn’t understand but stuck out his hand.
“Tell me what you were dreaming of,” she said.
“Nothing. I couldn’t make sense of any of it.”
“Before that,” she said. “Before the confusion. Before you moved over to be next to me.”
“The Pervoye. You, me, and the doctor, before we came here.”
“But what was it really about? Were you seeing your mom again?”
“No.”
“Who then? Why the Pervoye?”
He understood at last what she was asking him. “Laika. I was there to see Laika.” As he spoke, his hand hovered in empty space, and he felt a wet nose nuzzle into it. With a gasp that nearly choked him, he pulled his hand away and turned, but there was no one there.
“You were so close,” she said.
“Close to what?”
“Try again.”
He didn’t move. A wave roared and painted the air with rainbows.
“You’re serious,” he said.
“Try again.”
He obeyed, and again he felt it, the brush of fur and the wet nose buried into his palm. He dropped to his knees, and Laika looked at him with black, soulful eyes and drew her tongue across his cheek. She tucked her head against his neck, and he wept.
— Thaddeus Thomas
New! Weekly Flash Fiction for Paid Subscribers—these won’t be emailed to you, but you’ll find the link in my regular posts. Here’s a tiny piece of horror: No One to Blame.
I just picture this being animated by Pixar.
Beautiful, absolutely beautiful. The imagery is beyond anything Hollywood can conjure.