Abide Abode

ABIDE ABODE

ABIDE ABODE

Episode 1

After All

∆

Words By Noah
Silverman

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ABIDE ABODE

A babies arm
reaches out into empty space.

‘
I always wanted to be born’ whispers out amongst
infinity.

PRELUDE: A dream in the future.

ALEJO

A great glowing orb of fire hangs in the sky illuminating
vast idyllic surroundings, beating light through my sunglasses,
creating a warming Spanish summer that kisses my skin highlighting
the hillside for miles, my farmland, my home. Connected to a
child-‐like focus and a meditative serenity I kick a ball against
a barn wall, it hits, bumps to the floor and back again on repeat
1, 2, 3. It’s a cycle of repetitive action, reaction and
consequence that brings with it a peace, like music to my ears,
that I never could feel as an adult. I’m relaxed and fully focused.
All I have right now is me and this blue ball bouncing, one, two,
three, like a heart beat, I would never will myself to lose this
peace nor let daily trivialization take it away. I long you to try
these things, as you would have a child.

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ABIDE ABODE

One, Two, Three, foot, wall, floor, action, reaction,
consequence. Hills roll down to the left, hills roll up to the
right. There’s something’s odd on the hill... a congregation of
people up in a nearby field. Unusual. Town’s people and farmers
grouped together; as this is a no drinking affair it seems an odd
occurrence for familiar people to be huddled like penguins in an
unfamiliar location about 800ft away from me on farmland. They look
at each other as if deep in conversation without speaking a word.
Twenty or so of them. What are they doing?

I remove my sunglasses for a better look but end up placing
my hand above my forehead casting a shadow to my face to adjust my
vision for a better look. One, Two… The ball!!! The meditative
repetition of the ball has been broken. 1, 2, 3, Foot, Wall, Floor.
No more, 1, 2, 3, just Floor, Floor, Floor. The ball rolls away
starting a journey down hill. I’ve dropped the ball. As always in
life if you look away from the ball, if only for a second, you’ll
turn back to find life making its own way. Making its consequence.
You can’t let go of anything. Nothing is static. Is this my adult
mind thinking? I pull my attention from the ominous gathering as
the ball picks up pace. I teeter after it breaking into a run down
the cobbled stones down towards the lower farms. The ball, watched
and chased is taking up speed with the afforded velocity of the
down ward slope. Knowing my road curves at the bottom I expect to
get it easy, it bumps up the curve

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ABIDE ABODE

inevitably, unexpectedly nestling into the sleeping armpit of
a body.

My neighbour Mr. Cobo lays face down on the grass, his hair
gently swaying in the breeze. This is unnatural, Mr Cobo, is not
the type of gentleman to laze on the floor, he is a gentleman, a
hard worker. I find this natural scene unnatural, but to my young
eyes it seems only curious. Spying a stick I pick it up wanting to
prod my neighbor and wake him. I know he is dead but I don’t seem
to have realized. I hold out the stick and near it to Mr Cobos
face.

‘
ALEJO’

My name! Screamed out. A quake in the voice. echoing from my
house; my house, my name, my brother Osil calling me. I recognize
this type of scream, desperate loss. I turn back to the body. The
stick edging closer to the sleeping, if not dead, turned up
neighbourly cheek of Cobo. Closer,

Closer, Closer.

‘
ALEJO’
comes the pent up call again, shrill and shouted
to the sky, I know these calls too well. An
impulse hits me to run to the house, I feel fearand its inevitable
adrenalin.

I’ve let go of the stick, spun and am running home, up the
garden path and into the darkness of my open front door. A small
light shines at the end of the hallway flickering for a silent
minute. My body obscures the light becoming a silhouette running to
the end of time unable to get there quick enough. The living room
has its own deathly silence, it’s not jubilant, and it’s not a
living room anymore.

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ABIDE ABODE

Osil, my eight year, smarter, taller brother, sits on the
floor staring morbidly at his hands, thick black hair covering his
eyes. Our father
Samile! I fight for
breath, he, like Mr
Cobo lays as if
sleeping on the floor. His breath, his breath is
silent
! H
is eyes,
open and unmoving. Pain wraps around me like a cold blanket, as I
stand stilled behind Osil. Please let me take back what I’ve seen,
emotions rack through me and I realize as an adult I should be
prepared to understand these things but I don’t. Samile is dead,
Papa is dead.

‘
Papa!’ I CRY. Distressed youth leaking from me. ‘They’ves
gone away’ speaks Osil in our native Spanish

tongue.

‘
Where? Where’s he gone?!’ I panic demanding information I do
not want to know.

‘
He won't wake up, gone to the dead place’ flounders Osil
grasping his hands together looking closely atour open eyed
father.

‘
The one with fire or wind?’ I respond relative to a story my
mother once told me. My mother! ‘Where’s mama?’ I cry.

Osil’s eyes
slowly lift to mine, broken and bare, flitting them over my
shoulder as tears break down his cheeks and meet the made pathways
of their recently cried brothers. Behind me is my mother, beautiful
and sleeping too, slumped in her favorite chair. My childhood is
over. No breath.

She’s gone
away too’ he croaks. ‘Sleeping.’

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I’d not been bothered that people have been dropping like
flies recently, and what an expression, dropping like flies, the
idiom pertaining to the transitory and fragile nature of an
insect’s life. People are dying and falling asleep. Ruber was the
first to go, he fell asleep, heart attack maybe, then Jose, then
Kiti, then Bernado. It hadn't seemed so suspect when it were those
over 70 suddenly giving up their day for the rest of days and
dying, now suddenly the whole town was at it; dropping like flies.
The newspapers had been talking about it for months, spreading with
the speed of gossip and nothing travels faster. Somewhere in
England this had started and somehow it was spreading, a wave of
people turning off. I had cared little then, why should I when it
didn’t affect me, or life on the farm?

‘
But who’s going to read us the stories?I ask Osil. A tragic
silence echoes between these walls after. I try to speak more, but
these are my only words murmuring with pain and
inexperience.

‘
There are no more stories, Alejo’ Osil answers.

‘
But Mama said there are stories everywhere -‐ the world's
made of stories’

‘
It's not the same world anymore.’ Osil pauses ‘We're the
parents now.’ He drops his head and lifts it heavily back up to see
me, gesturing for a hug. We hold each other in the living room that
used to be filled with, well I wouldn’t say laughter but it was
warm. It strikes on me how mama and papa had both asked us to look
after each other last night. How they had told us everything
happens for its reasons. I

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paid little attention then and yet now the look in their eyes
when they had haunts me with a whole new meaning.

‘
We'll make our own stories.’ I straighten. I‘ want to know
why all the people are sleeping Osil?’

‘
I don’t know because they don’t know how to wake up?’ ‘Maybe
is thems that woke up? ‘ I say. Maybe it is them

who have woken up! I hug harder to Osil’s hunched body, my
face next to his. ‘Please don’t leave me Osil, never leave me
without saying goodbye. ‘

‘
There are no goodbyes Osil, only good journeys that’s what
mama said last night.’

We hold each other for a time but after it becomes apparent
that something needs to be done. I see my father, the light removed
from his eyes now and reach my hand out to his face, ‘Good journey’
I say, moving to lower Pa’s eye lids with a half hope he is still
awake and will shout me for disturbing him. Please make this some
horrible mistake. As my hand touches his open eyed face a judder
runs through me. I can’t move, transfixed in a skin bond. I feel a
magnetic connection made to him, like strings moving coldly through
my fingers, I can’t tell whether they are coming from him or from
me. I can not pull away, a link, it’s as if I’m falling into a
heavy cold stream, waves of energy pouring out of me into him as
warm intensity courses back. An electric shock ripples through me;
I go with it. Unable to move, my eyes slam shut.

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ABIDE ABODE

EPISODE ONE.

after all.

Earth from Space with far enough distance will appear only as
a dot against infinity.

.

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Changes of distance alternate your perception of any given
object or idea.

-Triangle Walk Excerpt –

NOAH

Aged 28. Me.
I’m in my trailer out the back of my ma’s house in Peacehaven. I’ve
just had a dream of Alejo, a dream wired from the future, he’s
being born today but in six years, well, his parents die. I share
the dreams of others. I contemplate this and how it came to be that
I gave up on the things I loved by caring about one thing too much.
I lost my constant and when I did screamed so loud I cracked the
sky, ripped a trench across ocean floor, and inside me, a mark
appeared. Noah, the one who eventually sank ships not engineered
one to save two of each species. I’m on that boat alone, the one I
sink.

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My skin, the abode I abide changed forever when I met Anna
Mason on a dark tumultuous night. I’ll tell you how I got to her. I
was drunk, as I had been for a long time. Drunk to keep me
sociable, to keep me open to others. Anna first introduced me to a
book called ‘The Triangle Walk’ and since reading it I’ve been able
to get inside people’s memories, dreams and bodies. Be careful what
you wish for. After meeting Anna I would drink with the sole
purpose of keeping people out of my head, the dreams, the Alejos.
It’s not that I can control the people I inhabit, no, it’s that I
watch through their eyes and know their innermost thoughts.
Drinking helped me from entering other skins, your skins, it
quieted the voices and helped me to escape the reality of what was
happening. I would tell myself these are not my memories, they are
yours, they are hers, they are his! Now I see them as mine, they
are ours, they are us, memories and experiences of the abodes we
abide, bodies collected in one mind. Since I’ve come to see that
there’s no such thing as time. Life may come to us in a linear
fashion but when you’re receiving incongruous worldly memories out
of context it does wonders to eradicate a concept of time. There is
no time any more. Only now, only all of time living concurrently.
When all time exists as one and you see all the atrocities and
virtues of man together in circular patterns and formations; and I
need to break the cycle.