Apocalypse of Jude

A distant rumble of thunder grumbles its disquieting portent in Mae’s ears as she steps from her apartment. Her legs take her quickly down the staircase and onto the street where her eye catches the dew-laden shape of Jude’s car ghosting in the eerily thick mist, the sun discernible only as a dim solar disc. As for the mountains, they are covered in the dense shroud. Seeing his car riles her already irritated and nervous state, as if the day itself is wanting to impregnate her. She knocks on his window, her other hand against the glass diminishing the reflection so she can see in.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

She watches Jude’s crumpled figure rise from its huddled position on the back seat. He rubs his eyes. She raps her knuckles again, with insistence.

“Hey answer me.”

Her voice sounds dim to him like it may be coming from the other side of a sepulchre he is in. But he isn’t dead, neither has the day of the great earthquake come to raise him. He opens the back door, tumbles out, stretches as he stands and groans. He rubs his face and tries to smooth his hair.

“I want to talk but you don’t seem to have time and I know you go walking, so I want to talk now.”

“Well, you’ll have to do it walking. You look like you could do with a good load of fresh air. You hung over?”

She asks with disgust.

“No, a little wired still I think.” He says it with reflection.

“I’m sure I’m supposed to be dead, but I’m not.”

His tone is not emotional in any way. Merely matter of fact.

“Come, drink some water.”

Her voice has softened as she proffers him her bottle. He takes and drinks gulping a few, then twists the lid and returns it to her.

“Let’s go.”

She turns without waiting for him and walks on, hearing him stumbling along and catching her. She closes her eyes in fearful tension, clenching back the memory of her devouring him, Dionysus desiring his spirit through her. Then as he pulls alongside her, her eyes are open. Clear. Looking straight ahead. For a while they walk in silence, each gathering the rhythm of the other’s footsteps and breathing. As they move through the earth’s shroud, a funereal mood descends on both of them, their rising body heat meeting the vapid moisture which settles in glistening marbles on their skin and hair.

“It’s going to be hot today.” Hers.

“And crowded and frenetic.” His.

“Did you have a good time with your mother last night?”

She laughs. Not lightly. Not humorously. Very personally.

“A good time isn’t how I’d describe an evening with my mother.”

Her voice hesitates.

“Please understand Jude, what happened that night between us…I don’t know how to say this any easier…It was your spirit I wanted, not the person.”

She looks at him briefly before continuing to look straight ahead of her.

“That whole afternoon, I was like a boat responding gaily on a calm sea to your oar and sail.”

This time she sighs deep.

“My fault was not realising my heart is a boat on a desolate and empty sea. Had the sea been calm, then maybe my heart would have been obedient to your invitation to come into controlling hands. But it wasn’t. That’s why I did you the way I did. Dionysus frenzied me to devour your spirit, and I thought he had devoured it. But like you said, it seems you should be dead, yet somehow you’re still alive. To be quite honest, that kind of unnerves me. I still don’t understand why it had to be you either.”

He is silent, swallowing the thunder her words have released, and feeling the last hope of being able to reconcile himself to her drift from his control. The full bowl of his desolation empties now on him. He stops short. Stops ghosting her. Mae looks at him, comprehending the full horror of her words.

“Say something to me. What part do you play in all this?”

He looks at her anguished face but sees only the meaninglessness of the emotion.

“I came because I wanted to see you reconcile our sex into being more than you devouring me in a frenzy. So I could say once in my life I had loved, sympathised and yielded to another person. That our sex had at least implied the image of God, despite its ungodly manner.”

He is quiet for a moment, looking down, but then looks directly at her.

“You’ll know soon enough why me.”

He raises a half smile, looking into the mist around him.

“It’s so silent when its misty, like it has swallowed up all life.”

He breaks the gaze.

“I’m going to go back to the car. Enough fresh air for one day.”

He turns. He doesn’t look back. Mae enfolds herself in a hug, but doesn’t linger, turning herself to forward movement into a wind that blows fresh as the higher moving sun begins its burning through the mist.

Wasteland Mix: Fragment 110