Tredecko

Still shaky from the bar, I found myself standing on the edge of a cliff. Vertigo spiraled around me—the sensation of falling over and over. My feet buckled themselves into the rock. 

But the most wonderful creature held my hand. She squeezed a different vibration into me. Thrill. That was what she used to transform my vibration. Fear was the threat of falling. Thrill was a craving to fly.

“According to the position of Neptune,” said Rose, the astrologer, “jumping into a river at midnight on the full moon will be particularly effective for treating maladies of the heart.”

That sounded right to me.

“There is one problem,” I said. “I do not know how to jump.”

“I’ll teach you.” She squeezed another drop of thrill onto my organs. It stung me good. She released my hand.

She ran out, right over the ledge. Her whole body flashed in the moment before she fell, pure updraft energy, brighter than the moon that lit the forest. Even as she splashed down below, she was still in the air, a ball of thrill imprinted on the midnight.

I unbuckled my feet from the rock and took off into her energy field. My organs no longer vibrated in fear. I ran with no ground beneath me. I crashed into her light, the apex of her thrill. Time froze. Fizzles and sparks. My body buzzed. My organs beamed. Fully over charged—444 percent power. I felt like I was home again. Home in the golden age, peace before the invention of violence—I was among my sisters and brothers nourishing ourselves in a loop-track of love, growing ever more vigorous with each repeat.

I tumbled down the arc and into the waters. I was white hot from the hammer forge, plunged in midnight liquid. I was the magma of raw earth, emerging from the waters as a creature wiggling and breathing.

“You jump well,” said Rose. The most wonderful of creatures.

“You have strong residue,” I said. “I have not ingested such substance since I escaped on the brothership.”

“That’s an odd choice of words.” The creature smiled in her way, dimples in the moonlight.

I pointed upwards at our ball of thrill spinning above as I fiddled with the organ that controls my buoyancy.

“Do you not see our residue? It is a powerful imprint.” I admired it even more, two creatures spun out of different stars, entwined in the same vibration.

“The water around you glows,” she said. “Why is that?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“My organs absorbed all the energy of your thrill. And now, they are overglowing.”

“I don’t fully understand the words you’re using,” she said. “But I like the way they sound.”

Our vibrations held us together, in the river, in the moonlight. As I looked into this human’s moist, riparian face, I remembered someone else from my life before. But that someone was now just a molecule of water in the galaxy’s rapids, only able to call out by bouncing light off the moon—messages that would take 444 years to say hello.

“I want to show you something you might like,” said the creature from Earth.

We vibed out of the water.

“Follow me,” she said.

I heard a humming just louder than the river. We tottled over the stones to a place where a harmony bounced between the trees. Before we entered the forest, I could already see the trace of what lay beyond. Golden waves sprouted from the darkness, bending like the river itself. I touched one of them with an appendage and my organs tasted nectarine.

Under an oak tree, there stood a choir of human women dressed in leaf-colored gowns. It was not my regular choir from Calvary Bible. They produced high-quality harmonics, but tuned to a different frequency. Their song tasted of melted mysteries rising from an everflowing bubbler, the planet gurgling its good stuff up from the deeps.

The choir linked their hands in a circle. They sang and chanted about things I did not understand.

“What are these things?” I said to my companion.

She blocked my lips with her finger.

Stepping through the forest, we ventured deeper into their harmonics. I became entwined in a ring of song. For a while, my thinking went flat. I returned to a state of peace that I was not aware existed on this planet.

“Hello, dear sister,” said a human in the choir, ringing out to my companion. When they noticed my presence, I became aware that we were not wearing clothing. Humans squeak inside when their sex organs are showing, and so I worried that I might ruin their vibrations. But these humans were unconcerned with our nakedness.

“Who have you brought, tonight?” asked the human.

“He has arrived from a trail that’s unknown to me. But there’s something familiar in the way he smiles.”

The humming stopped. All eyes turned, wheels of curiosity spinning.

The human stared into me. “We are the sacred coven of the fully waxed moon. Do you come in peace?”

I could see their curiosity flickering on suspicious vibrations.

“My people have no word for war,” I said.

Their wheels stopped. Their gazes fixed.

The sister spoke her piece. “We are a circle of divine Feminine Beings, co-embodying our collective energetics into radiant transmissions capable of reweaving the ancient treasures lost under the influence of patriarchal conditioning. The civilization that surrounds us is in a race towards its own obsolescence, trading life’s essence for false feeling, mimetic machines. It is up to we wombyn to manifest a different direction, to tip man’s tiller towards trouble and away from danger. We are the last hope for humanity. Can we trust you?”

I had never heard words that made more sense since fleeing my home world.

“I may look like a man-human to you,” I said to them. “But it is only my harmonics playing with your reality. What vibration will you deploy to do those things you speak of?”

The woman in green gave another woman in green a bowl filled with ears plucked from a rose flower. A third woman poured river water into the bowl.

This one spoke to me. “We will channel our intention into the sacred rose, and release it back into the river where its machinations will work its magic downstream.”

“It is a very good plan,” I said. “Would you allow me to add the missing piece?”

Their vibrations tightened. They did not quite trust me.

“This one is unlike others,” said Rose. “Let him try.”

Their vibes still played out of tune, even as they offered me the bowl. I took it in one hand, and with my toes, I plucked an oak egg off the forest floor. I added the egg to the bowl of flower ears. I grasped the mixture with both hands. I inhaled midnight air into my organs and flooded the bowl with all my overglow—thrill and hope on this planet, and mourning for my fallen home, lit up by moonlight and loved by all the creatures in the river. I sighed, releasing my carbon and nitrogen in the usuaal waay. The bowl grew heavy.

When I opened my eyes, a child-tree, the color of our galaxy, twinkled before us. Its branches sprouted little flower ears and wiggled roots that were the tails of river snakes, poking through the bowl.

“That should do it.” I presented it to the humans. Their vibrations squiggled, but not unpleasantly.

“What is this?” said the woman in green.

“Take it. It will tell you what to do.”

As she did, its starlight fed into the nectarine waves that the sisters cast through the forest with their song. Ring after ring of understanding formed above the circle of humans, traveling upwards into the midnight.

They planted the child-tree in the shallow of the river. And so it began.