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From the Periphery of the Abyss
From the Periphery of the Abyss
From the Periphery of the Abyss
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From the Periphery of the Abyss

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This book is a collection of short stories crafted in a way to evoke an emotional response from the reader. These stories use metaphors and elaborate stories to highlight social issues.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateOct 19, 2020
ISBN9781393576198
From the Periphery of the Abyss

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    From the Periphery of the Abyss - Toni-Jovanka Glenn

    Dutty Tuff

    Prologue

    SLOWLY, SHE MADE HER way along the familiar dirt road, but somewhere along her journey she’d forgotten if she’d been headed to the well or to work. Still, she didn’t return home. She hoped that when she arrived at the crossroads, she’d remember her destination. And if not, her legs would surely take her where her mind had planned to go. 

    The road she trod was arid and unfruitful; she tried to remember if it had been that desolate when she'd arrived as a child, or if her arrival had somehow changed the landscape. Had it evolved to reflect the life she was destined to live? She wasn’t sure when the desolation had started, but over the years the barren piece of land had become her kin. She’d grown to loathe it like an annoying brother that reflected the worst parts of herself. But she could remember no siblings, and the road was so unchangeable; she’d grown to love it as well. It was consistently unfruitful. There were no surprises along this road, and that comforted her somehow. 

    She grew weaker with each step; her strides got shorter, and she felt her strength wane. The persistent coughing had stopped, as if her lungs had exhausted themselves and had only energy left to breathe. She knew what came next. It’d happened to the man that had saved her. The coughing had stopped and then his breathing had followed suit. She was fully aware that this felt like the end of her. Maybe that’s why she had forgotten her destination. She’d forgotten her destination; her strength was waning, but still she walked. She didn’t walk as some defiance to death. She hadn’t decided to live and tell death no. People like her didn’t dare tell death no. She hadn’t told life no either. 

    Maybe she felt obligated to die on the barren road. Maybe that felt authentic to her. Maybe she felt there was some beauty in dying where she’d started. Well, where she’d told herself that she’d started. In that moment, as her strength waned, she couldn’t conjure up a single memory before age ten: the first time she'd lain with a man for survival.

    The barren road was the only path to and from the man who’d saved her, so when her mind failed to recall the truth, she'd decided that was where she'd started. She didn’t remember the journey itself, but the dirt road became a part of her existence, to work or to the well. It must’ve been the road that she’d walked to get to him. She knew she must’ve had a life before she’d met him, but she couldn’t remember it. If she couldn’t remember her past, did it have an impact on the life she lived after? If it didn’t have an impact, was it necessary to long for it?

    Her only memory was her life with the man, and her life after him. From the journeys of the life she remembered, she knew her life with him must’ve started on the barren stretch of land. She’d needed an origin story, so she had manufactured a memory... a memory of feeling desperate, hungry, and isolated. A memory of walking for miles until her little legs grew stiff from exhaustion. When she felt her legs begin to collapse beneath her, she came upon the shack. It stood before her as an oasis where her thirst could be quenched and a rest stop where her aching body could find some relief.

    Her constructed memory told her the dilapidated shack appeared to her as a castle that stood watch over the sea. The fabricated memory told her, her first encounter with the ten miles of dried, cracked, red earth left her feeling enervated, even the hollow of a tree would have appealed to her as a place of solace. She craved rest and found more than a hollow: a castle and a knight to shield her from the dangers of the barren land. No plants were visible on her treacherous walk, only fallen trees and weathered tree trunks. Some of the vestiges of vegetation were black with rot; others were stripped to whiteness, but she saw no greenery until she came to the shack.

    It is an intricate process: knitting together a memory of the beginning from the threads of experiences that spawn from that origin. Her experiences told her a feeling of hopelessness overtook her as she approached the end of the earth, but before she sunk into despair, she came upon an old, worn shack that was surrounded by life. A field of verdant newness lay behind it, but the shack itself looked as if it were on the verge of collapse. Her experiences made her aware of the shack’s deteriorated state, but the memory of her origin had the vision of a castle. The tenuous nature of the memory often left her confused. The truth she came to know was in conflict with her quest to discover past motivations. Why would a child seek refuge in an old shack if it had not appeared to her as a buttressed castle in a desolate place?

    The memory also told her the plants around the house provided her peace. She hadn’t completed the memory to include when the man, who’d saved her, initially entered the frame. Had he emerged from the house? Had he been at the back with the only plants she’d seen for miles? Had that been the reason for her trust? It took great care to tend to plants, she knew that. Did she assume his hands were exceptionally delicate because he coaxed life from the unwilling ground?

    The man who’d saved her died when she was 15, and now it was her turn. They both suffered from an illness that came around like seasons of influenza and claimed its victims before returning to dormancy. What ailed her, and the man before her, could not be diagnosed by any doctor – if they’d had opportunity to see a doctor. Despair produces symptoms but doesn’t show up on serological tests. Hopelessness cannot be diagnosed as cancer by a lump or a mass or an unusual rash, but it is its own form of cancer. 

    She walked the road she loathed and loved, teetering between life and death. Unaware that the dreams she didn’t dare have, the hopes she didn’t give a second thought remained trapped below the surface of her skin and festered like something tangible – fermented and rotted within her like a piece of animal carcass that the body hadn’t been able to digest and assimilate for nourishment. She was about to collapse to her death without even knowing that her death would’ve been delayed had she been allowed to live.

    Her body showed signs of exhaustion as it neared the crossroads. Her legs shook, her vision became blurred, and her lips were parched; she counted the breaths she took as if they were precious gems to be collected. Her knees buckled as she realized that she didn’t have any vessels for water; she must have been going to work and not the well. She smiled at this epiphany and fell forward. Her body banged against the hard ground; her demise went unrecorded and unnoticed, like all other sufferings of her life.

    She let her body lie the way it fell, only adjusting her face so her right cheek laid flat against the dry cracked earth, a request for a goodbye kiss from an old friend. The warmth of the earth, scorched by the unforgiving sun, provided her peace as she collected her final gems. The earth warmed her as she grew colder. She closed her eyes, collected her last gem, and there her story came to an end, at the crossroads between work and the well.

    Her Arrival

    EVERYTHING HAS A BEGINNING and an end. Before she knew of her life’s imminent conclusion, she had concocted her creation story. Her life had been forged by and orbited around the dirt road, so it is around the dirt road that she coined her, In the beginning. Though her conscious mind couldn’t recall her arrival and her life before trauma, the memories had been etched into her subconscious.

    HER FACE REFLECTED the activities of her mind; it looked pained and tired as she considered the crossroad before her. Overwhelmed by the choice, she vacillated between the paths. She wouldn’t go back the direction she’d come; as a matter of fact, she’d been trying to forget the road and her past. She wouldn’t go back, so she had two options. One road was a single stretch of land as far as her eyes could see, while the other ran straight and then meandered. She considered the possible evils that awaited her beyond the bend and chose the road that exposed itself before her approach.

    The road she chose was dry, hard, and fractured like a jigsaw puzzle nature had haphazardly put together. The red earth extended far on both sides of the ten feet of land that was the dirt road. There were no true boundaries separating the road from the other areas of the land, but the road was flatter than its surroundings. Boulder and rock-strewn uneven land lay on the outskirts of the dirt road. The rocky terrain was peppered with fallen trees that had given in to decay and trunks that had been reduced to stumps.

    She walked along the middle of the road. Not favoring the left or the right, but paying keen attention to the broken-down wooden structures that were once homes. Sturdier shells that hadn’t completely collapsed, were also visible – more defiant than their wooden counterparts, but abandoned all the same. The empty homes and fallen trees gave the road an eerie feel, but she was determined to stay the course. She lumbered along until sweat drenched her body, and her feet grew heavy; but still she encouraged herself on her journey. She whispered to herself that it couldn’t be much farther. She was unsure what was to be found at or along the road she’d chosen but she told herself It wasn’t much farther.

    Hours passed. The purple shirt and denim shorts, she wore, that were both two sizes too big, clung to her body – glued by the sweat that poured from her pores. The cumbersome black sneakers, that were also two sizes too big, placed an extra strain on the muscles in her legs and caused them to tighten and twitch. When her body felt near collapse she stopped, sat in the middle of the road, and took a rest. She didn’t dare enter one of the abandoned homes. The sun had started to dip lower in the sky and her lengthening shadow gave her a fright as she passed the remnants of shelter and security. The smell of the air wafting from the houses let her know that they didn’t house any living occupants. Houses that were lived in, had a different odor, she thought. She kept her distance, not wanting to tempt any spectre that may have been present.

    She wondered, almost aloud, when the road would end. Then she saw it. Her heart sank and immediately she wished she hadn’t hoped for the road’s termination. She looked ahead at the orange orb dipping slowly below the horizon and realized there was no more road. It ended without announcement. She turned to look back at the road behind her and that’s when she saw it. She’d directed her attention to the road itself, and not its environs, when the abandoned homes had begun to leer at her ominously. She had been so focused on the road that she hadn’t noticed the board shack.

    The shack was a few meters away from the road. It was multi-colored, bedecked with pieces of board that were at different stages of weathering. It had a slight slant, as if it had been pushed forward by winds coming from the horizon. Behind the shack was a field of green, illuminated by the light of the sun that hadn’t yet disappeared. She admired the size of the field. Some of the green plants stretched to the heavens; others were low, hovering a few inches over the red soil. 

    HE’D SEEN HER THROUGH the frame that served as one of the windows to the shack. The shack had a door that faced the road and two smaller wooden frames to its sides – one facing the land and the other facing where the world seemed to end. He would usually watch the sea, but something prompted him to study the nothingness of the road. He’d been staring absentmindedly through the window when the tiny form gripped his attention. Maybe it was fortuitous, or maybe he had been ordained to bear witness to her determination.

    He was cautiously intrigued as she approached. He didn’t get visitors, so her appearance on the road had made him unsteady; but he was also curious about the person who’d made it so far down a road that showed no indication that life lay ahead.

    He’d exited the house with a cup of water because he knew she must’ve been thirsty. When she finally reached directly in front of the house, she remained frozen a few moments. He assumed she’d lost some of whatever gave her the impetus to complete her journey.  He approached her with the water. She hesitated, as if she was considering the pros and cons of dehydration. He held the cup out to her and studied her minutely. The clothes she wore, appeared as if they were in the process of devouring her. He didn’t spend much time with other people, but he was sure that even if he did, he couldn’t have accurately predicted her age. She had a maturity in her face that wasn’t matched by the slight frame of her body. 

    He plied her with questions, but she didn’t respond to any. For a moment he wondered if she was some ghost, a figment

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