“Sweetheart, I am just trying to show you why we prosper…it’s ok…you’ll remember this and thank me one day beautiful…stop resisting…you stupid… you useless, lazy bitch…like your… wasted…mother…c’mon, your father is talking to you.. “.
Allie opened her knowing, bloodshot eyes, stood straight up in the dank, and walked toward the water.
(Written by Edward Roads)
Despite the gelid sea and a discharged syringe at the shore, Allie crawled only a bit, looked about the pressing grass with it’s breathing sumptuousness, and began to embrace her unexplainable warmth.
No crawlies, no weird bugs, no this, no that, just a {damn it!! damn it!! I don’t mind being alone, I just don’t want to be insignificant} shocking realization that her clothes were dry, and for the very first time since it happened, remembered her disgusting father.
(Written by Edward Roads)
After a mindful glance side to side, Allie spun around, quickly dropped to meet the sand, and guided her hand along the brittle edge of the wispy grass for a possible prehension of the fanning warm air.
Now able to process something like this {I don’t think the friggin grass has stopped swaying for a bloody second}, she realized the tall grass on the hummock was actually moving independent of the warm air flow; and without so much as another thought, began to crawl within.
(Written by Edward Roads)
Thousands of kilometers away, a solitary woman, clad in isle simplicity, felt, smelled, and harvested the opulent vegetation of her self-sustaining fortress in the deadly North Atlantic; known to all, including those no longer with us, as Brigadoon.
Here, Allie, with reddening nose adrip and crusty right arm in need of medical attention, moved inspectively closer to the carved ‘shill d19’ on the massive table… that’s when she became aware of a warm air current blowing on the back of her legs.
(Written by Edward Roads)
As her stomach grumbled and her ice cold ears heard clarsach-like sounds wafting from the tall grass, Allie’s bloodshot eyes attempted to focus on a jarring kaleidoscope of unrecognizable script, perhaps ancient in form, strewn about the table’s entirety.
The goosebump chill of the night was settling in and her visible breath made it challenging to see, but a muffled bell began to ring somewhere in the distant storage unit of Allie’s mind when she happened upon a single, legible inscribe… ‘Shill d19’.
(Written by Edward Roads)
STAVE II
A moonlit fog confronted the darkness in the quietude of the shoreline, and began an unnaturally steady, almost sinister roll… which appeared to gather itself as it crept inland.
Like a child that was at once afraid of what was under the bed, but also curious, Allie Carraig, with her back to the sea, carefully leaned closer to the mysterious table and opened her eyes.
(Written by Edward Roads)
After she was laid off from the crab cannery and unable to sleep an English wink, Laura, nude and shadowy, made her way to the filthy front window of the second floor flat she rented from a fat, boisterous woman named Viv.
Looking over the broad thicket, and now wrapped in a soiled comforter she would never, ever touch otherwise, Laura contemplated the sketchy path she took to this point; and decided to be better than the grainy, blank stare she gave more than one hundred eighty years ago in London’s first known photograph.
(Written by Edward Roads)
(Photo by Edward Roads)
Allie’s eyes widened as she slid her right hand back and forth over the etches, gouges and grooves strewn atop the large, rectangular form; whose surface, in the partial moonlight, resembled a well detailed map of tributaries.
As she involuntarily walked around the perimeter of the table, her fingertips rode burrs, her eyes fell shut, and she liminally realized the haphazard scrawl was actually a boustrophedon style of deliberate writing.
(Written by Edward Roads)
As she carefully approached the enormous, oaken table, Allie’s vacant acceptance of what was unfolding around her started to bend, like a forgotten aqueduct that began to receive dribs and drabs of fresh water.
She hadn’t an earnest thought, or a simple memory recall, about where she came from or why she was there… only that her name was Allie and someone or something had made her bleed.
(Written by Edward Roads)
Just beyond the table, a perpetual breeze serpentined through the tall, wispy grass, and created a symphonic wave whose syncopated rustle sounded like a gently plucked harp.
As Allie rubbed her right arm and stepped toward the table, she observed the pristine seafront and it’s naturally meandering striations, which seemed to imprint time’s tide in a coastal longform.
(Written by Edward Roads)
She was alone with the wind… no hungry, discombobulated crowds, no assemblage of rickety boats that discharged nameless aspirants, and no indication, save for a single thing, that Dock 19 existed.
Allie, who was standing at the lip of an encroaching tide, dropped the mysterious syringe onto the wet shoreline, and fixated on what appeared to be a hulking table near the top of the berm.
(Written by Edward Roads)
There were moments, brief indeed, perhaps better described as pauses, where unremarkable events that took place during the course of a given day seemed to subliminally disengage; as if the air, in all it’s capacities and nuances, suddenly got quiet.
Those were the thoughts that seeped into Allie Carraig’s unsteady mind when her regard for the bloody syringe abruptly dissevered… and she noticed something absolutely terrifying.
(Written by Edward Roads)
Beneath a starry and birdless sky, on the center crest of this safe and magnificent islet she called Brigadoon, the sole Sovereign, housed in a hooded woolen wrap, serenely sat with legs crossed, palms up and arms fully extended.
Her name was Zenobia.
(Written by Edward Roads)
Should curious souls be brave enough to approach this very small place, said souls would inevitably fall prey to a petulant portion of the Atlantic that callously reduces any craft to an unpredictable skiff of temerity.
Before their imminent demise was at hand, seafarers might glimpse an overwhelming radiance undulating betwixt the formidable spires…the island’s majestic breath.
(Written by Edward Roads)
Tall, jagged walls of ancient rock rose high along the perimeter of an almost beachless shoreline, and protectively cradled the rich topography naturally encased within.
The verdant and lively land, flourishing with succulent fruit trees and lush vegetable gardens, was intricately connected by rudimentary footpaths which cleverly converged at a substantial, circular clearing in the center.
(Written by Edward Roads)
