NEW FICTION: The Circle, part 4.
He could see the old woman between the buzzing multiple paths of the dark flies that surrounded him. She had moved forward, and was now standing in front of him - close enough to touch. Her lips were still moving, still mumbling, but she now looked up at him - amusement and puzzlement crossing her face in tandem with each other.
He knew what was coming, without fully realising it, so he dropped his jaw, allowing his mouth to open wide, and at the same time mentally opened himself. He needed to flinch, as flies flicked tentatively around his open mouth, but he stood still, as still as he could, with the old woman watching him intently, watching for any sign of opposition, distaste - of that he was certain. If you don't give willingly in this game, you are not in the game.
So he breathed in deeply through his open mouth, pulling in some of the flies that buzzed around him, then clamped his jaw shut, leaving the bulk of them to continue circling him in an angry cloud. He breathed in again, feeling the flies crawling around his mouth, settling on his tongue, creeping along the roof of his mouth, then he swallowed. The caught flies dripped down his throat, and it began.
The buzzing flies around him dissolved, and it was silent. The old woman still stood in front of him, her diminutive frame swaying to her own rhythm, but her mumbling song had stopped, and her eyes watched him sharply before she spoke.
"Your hair has greyed."
He said nothing, but watched her carefully.
She cocked her head. "But then, you sometimes look older than you are, and sometimes younger than you feel. Isn't that right?"
Again, he said nothing.
"You have no real name, but you have been known by many."
For the first time he spoke to her. "Is this it? Riddles?"
"That's more your game, god of... What are you the god of now, of this moment?" She looked around her. "God of the waving trees?" She looked up and squinted. "God of the morning sun?" Then looked down smirking. "Or god of the blistered feet?"
There was nothing to say, and even if there was, he wouldn't say it. She knew as well as him, that gods of the moment were just that, omnipotent deities of fragments - gods of waiting rooms, of walked pavements, of late night parties and silent mornings with coffee, of stopped watches and lost boots. Gods of the slivers of space that existed, and then were gone.
He gave into her and asked the question she silently demanded. "What do you want old woman?"
She shrugged. "Nothing and everything... as always."
It was his turn to smirk. "You old crone. Don't you ever stop?"
She shrugged in turn, but said nothing in reply.
He sighed, looked down at his bloody and blistered feet. "So why am I here?"
"Not my doing. You came of your own accord."
"To meet you? I don't think so."
There was a flinch that crossed her face. "Am I so abhorrent to you?"
He said nothing. Clamping his lips tight.
She smiled faintly. "Once you thought differently. Do you remember?"
"Don't!"
But she was no longer listening. She started to hum a new tune, a new rhythm. Despite himself, the notes made their way softly and insidiously into his senses, wrapping themselves like ivy, around his many memories, around his treasured moments.
"Don't do this!"
But it was too late. The space shifted around him, yet stayed the same. The circle remained, but the trees drifted away, their rumpled trunks replaced by upright stones, thick irregular lumps of granite that hummed along with the old woman's notes - whispering stones.
And she had changed, and he hadn't. She was now the young woman that had been - playful, sensual, wide-eyed and brutal.
"Remember?" She whispered.
And he had to remember. After all, he had been god of that moment.
