The Story of Anaku

"[...] Anaku did not think in the way we think, with words, but rather he thought with images, for words he had not but images are common to all men of all ages and in that way can be said to be a grand equalizer linking past and present and all corners of the earth. That night he sat outside his cave before a flame, the other members of his tribe fanned out about him in a circle. He paid them no mind. In the flickering orange glow he mindlessly dragged the fingers of his left hand through his long, dirty, brown locks, so mangled with grease and dirt and sweat that they parted in clumps and grated so loudly against his hand that soon the noise became a routine scrape against the crackling of the fire. A cicada chirped a song to the starry night, and a warm wind blew and swirled the flame to the contentment of its spectators. Anaku did not notice. He had been staring into the flame for so long that it felt the entire world had been bleached from overexposure. He would do this often, almost every night at fire time — descend upon the ground with both knees to his chest, stare into the light until he felt his eyes grow hot and gelled from lack of blinking, and wait as the night turned white all around him.

Slowly, spreading out from the flame, the white first ate away at the night sky, swallowing stars as it made its quiet march; from there, it trickled to the trees, jumping down the branches and leaves of those grand and swaying black silhouettes until landing, with emphasis, upon the heads of the members of his tribe, erasing their faces, then their torsos, and then their legs with each successive swipe, before finally blotting out the ground and encircling Anaku with that white formless void which he so longed to enter and knew from which all things in this world once certainly came.

Upon this field of vision Anaku would draw his thoughts as though upon a canvas and line by line they would come before him in such vividness that he could scarce differentiate them from real life. He felt this was a special power of his, a ritual only he had cared to develop and, though it often scared him to venture into this unknown world, he nonetheless engaged in this habit with a form of relish and excitement peculiar even to him. That night he sketched before himself a stretch of verdant green grass, lush and eager in that feral adolescent summer. He dropped himself upon it, and dug into this fertile ground with his toes to feel the damp beneath his feet. Streaks of sunlight began to filter in between the leaves of a great and towering forest, and as he began to look left and right he saw on either side of him Tanaku and Elianu.

Both were bent over with their faces aimed directly before them, fingers on their lips, walking on their toes with such great care that an unlearned observer would think they were trying to balance an egg in the navels of their upturned necks. Anaku followed their gaze to see what they saw and did see it: an adult gazelle, in its prime, grazing upon the feast that is a forest floor with other members of its herd. Anaku bent his body like his brethren and felt develop in his clenched right fist a cool and sharpened wooden stick some five feet in length and of great heft in weight.

The three motioned forward upon that dreamed up plain unnoticed.

Upon his head Anaku felt the sun pull from his skin a singular bead of sweat that ran down the ridges of his face and mixed its painful saltiness with his eye. Anaku did not blink, so fixed were his eyes upon that furred body some 30 feet away, so attuned was he to its gentle expanding and deflating with each staggered breath that he even began to match the silent march of his feet to its cadence, so concentrated was he that he even thought a vein in his head would burst, or his breath would altogether stop, in a noble but ultimately foolhardy effort to become even more quiet.

In a brief moment when the gazelle lifted its head and it’s coiled horn caught a glimmer of that hot and imposing sun which beat upon men and gazelle and grass alike with oppressive indifference, Anaku felt within him an instant and great shock that ran through the length of his body. Without even his command, his neurons fired with such great strength in those firm and rippled muscles of his that they clenched and flexed and raised and made his imposing body erect like a giant unfurling fiddlehead, and with the force and explosion of a modern gun Anaku cocked back his spear-holding hand and flung his projectile at the now death-staring gazelle. Within seconds the mere piece of wood sang a whizzing tune of hell in the air and became Azrael, ancient angel of death, and pierced the eye, then skull, then brain, then skull again of that poor gazelle and, emerging out the other side in a gush of blood like a demon rocket propelled by flesh, thudded to the ground, wet and red and glistening. In moments like these, when something unexpected and for some great and others calamitous happens in the forest, all animals are for a moment silent, as though to first pay proper respect to the gravitas of the passing event and then, second, to think of an appropriate reaction.

And so, in such fashion, the forest was truly still until broken, as is always the case, by a random chirping bird or cricket, wholly unaware of its momentary added significance, and from there a loud triumphant cry rose out from the hunter, and a veritable earthquake shook the ground, and the leaves rustled like hundreds upon hundreds of maracas hanging from those stoic trees, as a herd, a hundred strong, fled the forest and mourned the death of a friend they were incapable of ever knowing. As the last one of them pranced off into that unimagined distance, Anaku and his fellow hunters approached the corpse of the gazelle, now on the ground, now wearing a flat red halo of blood pooled around its head, and howled in their pure and feral joy. Anaku knelt down beside the fractured head, placed his thumb into the blackened socket, made it warm and moist with deadened blood, and, rising, dragged this finger first across the width of his forehead, and then the length of his nose, before sucking it clean..."

"The Story of Anaku" is an unfinished, unpublished short story. A full draft version may be acquired by emailing Jonathan at jndavydov@gmail.com