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This essay was written in answer to the question "what
was your protagonist doing the day before the story started?" In
this story my protagonist, Isabel La Roja, is the daughter of a Spanish
noblewoman in an arranged marriage, captured by pirates.
My name is Isabel. Before the story begins, I wasn't born. But that doesn't mean I was passive. I had a strong hand in the story that follows. For one thing, I was very active in getting my parents together. As I sat in the nether world, the ushers of the unborn taunted us incessantly with statistics about how unlikely our existence was to be. They laughed at me particularly. The cross-cultural union of a noble woman and a common mongrel of a man! Impossible. But I had my ways.
I had to bribe the first conception of my mother heavily, telling him, you're
the same as the previous generation, but I'll be something
new! Something different! The offspring befitting a new continent.
He didn't agree. He said I was a violent little demon that
wanted his chance to walk in the sun.
I was about to negotiate,
but
it was his own father who gave him the motivation not to be
born, with all the abuse he heaped on our mother, and
his
very rigid plans for my brother's life. He was a violent and
intimidating man, and my brother preferred the nether world to the risks of life with such a man as a father. We only get one shot at life under the big blue tent but even that is too much for some. There is something very comforting about the warmth of the nether world, and some choose never to leave for uncertain shores. I respect his choice. Yet in contrast to him, my curiosity borders on obsession. As the sounds and shadows of the material world dimly enter our haze, I long for total clarity. I want to see for myself.
The ushers laugh at me, and tell me cryptic things about my destiny, of blood
and failure, designed, no doubt, to intimidate me, to
make me reconsider. They utter warnings, saying it's a
horrible place, filled with sorrow, frustration and a
shortage of good humor. They attempt to make it sound
like the worst dimension of the universe imaginable, you
would think none of us would dare to enter.
Still so many
of us clamber and scheme to get our ride, and an usher's
main occupation is administering this process. I can't
believe my good fortune. The guilt I feel for my brother
is overshadowed by my desire to see this place, feel
it, touch it, inhale it, drink it, wallow in its palpability. The ushers repeat over and over, like a mantra, that there is no peace in the material world because once you become matter, you are all sensation and passion and digestive tract. There is no contentment because eyes are even more voracious than an empty belly, and the sound of valuable metals clinking is one of the most soothing known to the human ear.
I don't understand why they keep rambling on and on about that. "Politics", "land use," "greed", "capital accumulation", "techno-determinism" and other strange, ancient magical terms spew forth from them. It's so irrelevant to me. They keep urging me to "take a long-term view" of what is about to happen to me, but all I can think of is the endless succession of moments of pure physical sensation, the friction of connecting as matter, with matter.
Connection! Intercourse! The flow! The possibility of squishing my toes in the
mud, and the strange thrill of pulling leaches off my body,
what a sound they must make! As they suck on the blood that
will flow through me, the blood that roars past my ears! It
will be hard to sleep at night with that roaring sound.
And
fruit!
So many unborn fruits here in the netherworld tell me of their
expectations, to ripen and burst in the mouths
of
animals, mingling and congealing with them. I so desire this
explosion. I have made a pact with many to join them
in
the material world.
I am getting closer to conception, and
the
ushers have let me nearer to matter. They
have
taken one of the veils of the netherworld off. I can see,
albeit dimly, through the multiply refracted eyes
of
the
ocean, and I have been watching the man that can make me happen,
unaware now as he sails with louts and privateers.
He looks out at the water for hours, and I try in vain to catch his attention.
At times he looks alert, bent on conquest and violence, calculating
his life's fortune to the pounding of the waves beneath which
I float. At other times, he appears serene, pure, and I feel
that he is actually looking straight at me. I feel very close.
I cry out to him. But then he looks startled and shakes it
off, ignoring me further.
I cannot make myself heard. But
it
doesn't matter. Once I myself am a sizable lump in the world
of matter, I will make myself unequivocally heard by
him:
my voice will be one he must reckon with.
My father is a handsome
man.
Now I must make my mother see this. And she is not in
a
state to appreciate the beauty of men, so cruel have the men
around her been. I am trying to be understanding,
I
am
trying to be patient, but timing is of the essence. I have
only
one instant in which to be conceived, and the ushers are
standing
by to assist me. We are all tense, myself the most.
I am just another drop for the ushers, and they could just as easily let someone
else go. Then I'd never get the chance again. They try to
comfort me, say encouraging things now that the moment is
nearer. They have dropped all the former babble of the dangers.
Although the tall usher tells me to be careful.
He repeats
it
gently. Be careful.
I feel somewhat guilty about how I am
going
to use my mother. Here she is, not prepared
to
love a man or bring a child into this world. In fact, she
has been crying incessantly in the past months,
speaking
of
despair and of returning herself to the nether world! I am
a bit angry at her for being so weak about the
material
world,
letting a few little incidents bring her down, distract her
from the marvels.
I say this to the tall usher,
and
he
simply
says "You cannot understand what you are not yet able to experience." And then he maddeningly repeats "Be careful."
Then, for no reason, I suddenly feel the weight of my ungratefulness, and am sheepish about my obsession with growing in her and then ramming my way out.
Somehow, it doesn't seem the most gracious gesture to the woman who will harbor
me and give me passage to the material world. I look to the
tall usher, and notice he has been studying the passing emotions
of my spirit.
"That's just the beginning." He tells me.
"Of what?" I ask.
"Of the violence of matter."
I am even more determined than ever to be in this world of fornication and deceit.
I steady myself for the drop.
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