Free A Dirge for the Temporal by Darren Speegle Page A

at more of the jungle surrounding me. I cursed myself, my demons.
      Somehow there was no moment of discovery, no emergency of the heart, and yet neither was it just another patch of jungle. Very little grew in the spot, perhaps because of the shade created by the chestnut and the barn, perhaps because it was otherwise tattooed. The tableau didn’t rematerialize instantly, but waited for nourishment. I wanted to give it that. I had come a long way to give it that. Inexplicably, a discomfort expanded in my groin. When I reached down I realized I was erect. That was certainly not how I wanted to remember. But what had I expected?
      A movement caused me to jerk my hand away from myself. I looked behind me, nothing. It was another occurrence of wind, necromancy, leg erdemain. My errant hand wandered again, only this time it found its way to my pocket. I pulled out the letter, at once a confession, a rite, a statement of charges against me.
  It was the fiftieth time I had read it, and as with the other forty-nine times, I was alarmed by its command of English and, more so, by its poetic nature. She had been a poet, reading to the class as if we were manipulable characters in her dream. It was what had first caused me to take notice of her, just preceding her eyes, her aura, all the rest of her.
      That noise again, like an imp about no good. I sat against the barn and read aloud, in the quietest voice lest I wake the dead.
      “What she does to me just looking at her. Such eyes, such grace, such everything. My father would laugh to see how his experiment has fared thus far. Six weeks at a German school and I’m not only chasing the language, I’m also chasing one of the girls. She has read a poem in class recently, has looked at me with those onyx eyes of hers, and now I find myself following her like an animal.”
      The entire letter was written that way, recounting events from my point of view, and in an unsettlingly accurate way. She must have researched everything about me and my family, strangers in her village, toys.
      “The Rothaus is no destination for a girl. The villagers gossip that it is a home of half-wits and monsters. What business can you have there, Svenja? If only I could persuade you to notice me. Was that the briefest look? Should I hide?”
      It was. God knows, I did.
      “Whose voice is that from behind the barn? ‘Svenja!’ it calls. Can it be the boy named Dirk? Would she spare him a pot to piss in? But then, I’m a stranger and it’s all a mystery to me. For all I know they are lovers and I am wasting my life away with the perceptions that have been imposed upon me by my world.”
      How could a creature like her philosophize? Philosophy from her was like excess venom dripping onto the letter, smearing the ink.
      “My mother loves this field, flowers like flames she says, and here I am walking through it. How would I explain my being here to her? I pass through your vision, Mother, to validate my own. But I know it is baser than that. Even now the sounds I’m hearing give me a raw feeling. Grunts of servility, hints of subtle laughter. I know you, Svenja, I have seen you looking at me over literature and gods. I know you and I don’t know you and I hate you if it is as I suspect it is.”
  Which was where the letter’s author began to lose me, I began to lose myself, pure verse took over.
      “It is as I suspect. There they are, behind the barn, Svenja on the whale-like massiveness of Dirk, forcing out the expulsions as she strokes his swollen penis, taking her own fashion of glee from the enterprise. I will discover the secrets of this, I will blackmail her a thousand times for a taste of what she is doing to him. But I can see there are stranger forces at work. Why would the half-wit want the wine that she pours over him, licking it off his face as she laughs like the first dawn? Why, in the midst of his awful ascent towards cli max, would he laugh with her as she swings