SWIMMING IN THE GHOST RIVER: VI

by A. A. Attanasio 

Six

Dancing Goat

From out of the Ghost River, you slog. 

Dawn lights up a fairy tale of summer castle clouds and witchcraft darkness in the forest. A black vibration of bats swirls out of the sky’s attic and drops into the trees. You decide not to go there to dry out. 

Oracular mists part where the fog of animal souls had stampeded in the night. You follow a dirt trace among tasseled reeds. It climbs away from the river.  It climbs away from the forest of big trees where night has gone to hide.

Soon, the land opens wide, a broad page of geography scribbled with creeks. Mossy steps ascend to heather slopes. There, you sit and stare down on silver swerves of river.

“You there!” This fluting voice arrives from every direction. “Yes, you! Come here!”

And you are there, at a higher elevation, above the rocky margin of a failed forest. In every direction, flinty mountains fin the horizon. Myriad ice peaks pierce the sky, and their stones chime with light.

You stare squinting across a chasm at a frozen wall of rock ledges. A goat prances on the glare ice with unfathomable rhythms. It leaps through the snow-dusted air. And it lights with supernatural grace on a round boulder balanced atop a pinnacle rock.

“I am the Dancing Goat,” the magical being announces. It capers nimbly on its stone pivot. Fat as a bulging wine-skin, white fur tufty as feathers, churlish eyes cracked agate, it dances with tiny, agile hooves. 

Questions fall away, like the pebbles the dancing hooves flick into the abyss. “You can’t really tell where dreaming ends or reality begins, can you?” 

“Of course!” you realize, feeling reflective as a mirror. You’ve been dreaming since the Ghost Deer fetched you. Maybe far longer than that.

“What is a dream?” the goat inquires. “Mind. And what is mind? Electricity in a brain made of atoms. And atoms? The atoms of your body are excited fragments of geometry.”

In the mind-mirror, you see all of time in one instant. You see that the Dancing Goat is both glad and sad to meet you. Glad because you will figure out how to cross the river without a boat and the Sunstone will ignite soul-fire in all the slain animals. And sad because it sees, however long you may live, your life is already over.

When you move, the mirror shatters. 

So many selves reflected among the shards! In some, you remember this truth. In others, you forget.

Click Below

for Part VII of

Swimming in the Ghost River

by A. A. Attanasio