Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

After several weeks of waking up with Sylva next to him Tignee finally began to feel comfortable, as if this was where he was supposed to be. The loss of his family had numbed his heart, and attention to the lot of these two revived it again. He continued to hope that if he remained in these woods perhaps his wife and children would show up, or at least someone with news of their fate. When he lay down with Sylva that first night it was in innocence. He feared her youth and respected her purity. He was determined not to touch her. He sat up once that night, startled at a sound. She pressed him back down.

“Don't worry. It's just the panthers that wander by.”

“Panthers?”

“You can't see them. During the day they sleep, and they come through at night.”

He didn't understand why, but the word “panther” and the idea of its invisibility, rattled Tignee. He felt a surge of desire. “Panther” struck some erotic channel, and he grew hard. When she felt his cock poke her thigh Sylva stirred herself and sucked him into a warm pocket in her body. At that point her youth became an irrelevant cipher.

The physicality, if he could call it that, soon became strange and marvelous. Each night, as they lay down, he felt the weight, the warmth, the very pores of her skin against his, at first all very comforting. As he drifted into his own fantasies before sleep, she became increasingly less substantial beside him. In the mornings, when he was awakened each day by the mischief of Tewly, who dropped bits of bark down, to remind them to start a fire for breakfast, he would reach across to touch Sylva and find nothing palpable. But as he brought more of an image of her to mind she would materialize slowly next to him, forming like a galaxy being nudged into shape by dark matter, until he could finally sense her as on their first encounter. He felt that to get to her it was as if he had to push through a cloud of gnats to come up against a tree, or as if her flesh alone was shy and could hide away until it was persuaded into substance. For him it was a source of exhilaration.

So Tignee stayed and as he wandered among the families of shades in the encampment, watched them feed and wash, make music and dance as if they were alive, he began to notice that the irregularity underfoot wasn't caused just by tree roots close to the surface. As he brushed the soil aside with his sandal in places where it was thin he recognized that he was treading on bone. Human bone formed the substrate of this plateau. So many, he marveled, had died to create this elevation of specters. It stretched as far as he could see in every direction. He suspected that the whole plateau, from sea level to where he was standing, rose up as a heap of bones.

“Is there anyone who hasn't died?” he asked, throwing his head back as if the answer might be in the sky.

“Life is the most temporary accident,” Sylva said.

“Have at it,” said her brother, hanging upside down from a limb of his tree.

At night he lay beside the dim essence of Sylva and waited for a deeper darkness, but none ever came. The bone glowed everywhere beneath the duff and debris, and where bone was exposed it cast a spectral radiance. Sometimes Tignee got up and walked about feeling the glow around him, a shine that seemed to make him light, as if he were on the surface of the moon.

As he circulated among the shades of people at rest, and felt the thrill of panthers sliding through the dim shadows, he soon started to realize what he would have to do. This became so happily obvious, he went about with a broad grin for several days before he started to do anything.

“What?” asked Sylva, giggling herself, as Tignee's good mood was infectious.

“You'll see,” he said.

He collected the cleanest, strongest, most flexible bones he could uncover. Sylva watched him in the evening, as he rubbed them together to harden them, and began to scrape them with stone, to whittle them down. She watched him carve the bone into shapes he seemed to know very well.

“This is the spindle to spin the twine,” he showed it to Sylva and to her brother in the tree. “And this is the needle to braid the nets. We make needles in several sizes, according to the gauge of the net, and we measure that with this mesh gauge.”

Sylva and Tewly gathered some bones for themselves, and started to fashion the implements under Tignee's tutelage. As they worked, others arrived from other encampments and fires, to learn how to fashion these tools. Soon there was a good supply, and Tignee knew that the time was right to start to spin the fiber.

This fiber, as he conceived it, was spun of threads shed from a yuccalike plant, that had to be soaked in the urine of the marmot. To collect enough of this urine was no small trick, but when he explained it to the spectral population of this plateau, they wasted no time taking advantage of the fact that marmots have no fear of human ghosts. The other element in his fiber is made from the leaf of the Yonoletenus bush, which grows near the shore as a tree, to a height of forty-three feet or more, but at this altitude manifests as a bush no higher than six feet. You could create a fiber of the mature leaves of this plant by chewing them thoroughly, enduring the bitterness and dryness of palate that results, and extruding the product through the smallest pucker you could form. This product crystallizes into a fiber that when spun together with the fibers of the succulent creates a thread that will never fatigue. Although Tignee knew of it, a little-recognized fact of nature is that the saliva of the ghost is a powerful fortifying agent. When the Yonoletenus fibers are chewed down with ghost spittle, the resulting cord is undefeatable.

Tignee circulated among the shades, teaching them spinning techniques, how to make twine of different thicknesses, and increase the elasticity, until he had substantial amounts of a variety of twines rolled into easily accessible balls. Then he moved further among the ghosts to teach them how to braid nets, to use different needles for different gauges, how to apply the mesh gauges and keep it uniform. After a while he saw that over the whole plateau vast expanses of net covered the encampment of shades and their ghostly progeny in the trees. For Tignee this was a beautiful sight. The nets were tougher than steel, and though the sweet shades that produced them could pass through easily, nothing of substance would ever defeat it. Though he didn't know yet what the use would be for all the netting his instruction had produced, he knew that eventually it would all be necessary.

One evening, as Tignee lay awake in the persistent twilight of the plateau of ghosts he became aware of some noise, a dim and distant clamor in the auditory substrate, barely audible, a metallic clanging and scraping, unlike the clear resonance of the bells that once rang in his village.

When Sylva rose the next day, he asked her if she heard it.

“I hear it all the time,” she said.

“Do you know what it is?”

“I do,” she said, and looked up to Tewly on his branch, spreading her arms as if she wanted to embrace him.

“Then what is it?” Tignee asked.

Sylva pointed in the direction her father had gone, the direction in which all the men had marched off. “Ay, Pancho. Ahime,” she exclaimed, and for only the second time she put on Marti's sandals and rose through the branches to be with her brother, and they gathered the netting around themselves and disguised themselves within it, as if they had been caught.

Tignee rested among the shades on their plateau for one hundred and thirty-six weeks, during which time he learned a great deal, and passed on as much as he could of his own special knowledge. He was gratified to see how quickly they had produced many square miles of net, all of it of great strength. At the beginning of the one hundred and thirty-seventh week he found himself folding a square of fine mesh around some food and a few belongings. He was preparing to leave. It was a surprise to himself because he hadn't expected to leave, nor had he told Sylva and Tewly he would ever go away.