Dance of the Imps
Edwyn Kumar
A gentle beating drum resonated through the woods. The raging
glow of a fire, from a single distant source, fractured the leaves and found
gaps in the trees, struggling to meet me, guiding me forward. The edges of flickering
light shone on the moss cushioned stones and damp earthy floor.
The even paced drumbeat carried with it a lilting laughter
and the flighty jingling of bells and cymbals, cycling and forming a
cacophonous din to an underlying rhythmic harmony before once again collapsing
into entropic dissonance.
I hesitated and imperceptibly turned towards the tree-lined
passage that drew me closer. I paused only for a moment and then moved at an
even pace, the central path disappearing behind me.
The circles drew tighter. How had I already come so close to
the center? Too soon. I couldn’t find a path that would lead me further away
from the light. It has been so long since one had appeared that it felt like a
time faintly remembered. When I was a child the outward paths were plenty. Here
now, in my adulthood, the connecting trails leading inwards were persistent and
common, like bruised veins spilling me towards a puncture wound.
I took the most direct paths at my weakest hours. When the
fatigue of the journey started to wear me down.
My feet felt raw, my breath labored. The blood in my muscles
and veins turned to sap, sticky and slow. The physical ails were the most
obvious to feel and realize. At the height of my turmoil, I would rage at the
forest around me. At my lowest, I would find myself leaning against the unmoving
trunk of a millennia old tree for support as my heart raced and I sobbed dry
tears. It was in those moments when the small shooting paths leading deeper into
the woods rapidly would appear. The sound of The Dance grew livelier with each
day. The fire brighter. The heat from the high flames warm and promising.
The forest was eternal as time and as finite as life itself.
It was layered and dense, and for all its existence had reflected the seasons
of the mind, unconfined by the turning of the earth to dictate its clime. In
the briefness of an hour or a day, the warm embrace of a summer morn could transition
into the freezing depth of the harshest winter.
In the center of it all lived The Dance. Like the forest, The
Dance was everlasting, and I too would find my way to the crashing sounds of
those yet unseen figures who played its discordant tunes.
In the early days, when I found a shorter path, I took it without
hesitation, squandering my time with impatience. It felt like the right choice.
As though the immediacy of that decision would be beneficial in some way for
the future. I foolishly believed that the inevitable destination would somehow
be richer and hold deeper meaning by carving a path straight for it.
For years in my travels, I was seduced by a harmonious and
sensual sound. When I would catch a small hint of its comforting and passionate
melody, I would eagerly search for a clear line through the deep brush, often
cutting and scratching my flesh as I scrambled through the woven brambles and
thorns that guarded the gaps between the trees and ferns, shunning my futile
attempts to reach it. With certainty, I would find my way back to the central
path upon which I had started and intended to travel, perhaps ahead or behind
from where I had departed, torn and ravaged by my impulsiveness to breach the
woods. I felt a presence beside me at times, even in the better days, yet whenever
I looked, there was nothing there, and the feeling left as quickly as it had
arrived.
In those early days, the fire was distant. Impossible to see
directly except sometimes in the reflection of the night sky. I was innocent and
hopeful then. The jingle sometimes wistfully caught my ear, but not enough to
lure me closer. I had outgrown the thirst for attaining the fettered scratches
and scars of my earlier days.
The warmth of the fire was not a friend to me then, but
present circumstances forced a tighter affinity for the finality it offered.
The weather had turned. It started with a gentleness that
belied its intention. A light dusting of snow had settled on the soft earth. Crystalline
drops froze on the summer leaves and the gentle branches around me. It lulled
me into thinking it would pass. Then a biting crispness drove its fingers into
my bones. My teeth chattered and my heart drew cold in the passing weeks, as I
clutched my arms around me, my movement slowing as the once early morning fogs grew
thicker and settled into each day like an unwanted guest. The days wore on.
The light of the sun became a distant memory. The sound of
The Dance rang loudly through the forest, carried by the charged and frozen air.
The crackling of the flames and the promise of its warmth beckoned me. The
shortcuts drew me ever inwards. I longed to be rid of the winter and the
unrelenting fog and even of the forest itself. It had betrayed me. Life had
betrayed me. My vision and the promise of a new day was blocked and forgotten.
All I could feel was the cold.
I knew the fire was an answer that would bring me closer to The
Dance and the creatures that tended to it. I could hear them laughing and
chanting. I could see the tips of their wavering hats silhouetted against the
flames that burned bright in their personal twilight. There was no fog towards
the within, and the clarity of the sky shone down in a star blanketed light.
The path forward and the path inward were the same now. The
thickness of the undergrowth that held me back so many years ago was gone, and
I found nothing to impede me. There was nothing holding me back, aside from the
fog and the cold of the forest path behind me, and the ever-growing warmth of
the grove ahead.
I pushed aside the last of the tightly budded and frostbitten
branches. I saw the imps then.
The glee with which they danced, swimming around the flames,
flitting through the sparks that landed at their feet, but never touching them,
reeked of insanity. Some of the imps held bells that rang with shattering clarity.
Some held triangles and oddly shaped instruments that made perverse sounds that
cracked the air into a thousand pieces, as their brothers gulped the broken shards
of reality like candied glass. There were imps with handheld drums who thumped and
pounded. Others spun and held noisemakers that cracked and reverberated with
crunching and snapping like bones being torn asunder.
In the center of it all, untouched by the flames, she stood.
Serene and kind. Welcoming, without beckoning or impatience. I was drawn to her
translucent and dark skin, reflecting the starlit twilight sky and revealing a
depth as though looking through the glass of a snow-globe that had swallowed the
universe. I followed her contours to a face that comforted me and made me
forget of the imps that danced around her. They were her gate keepers: tragedy,
murder, infection, wrath, illness, all servants and instruments of her . . .
and the imp who, for me, played a delicious harmony.
The one with whom my eye kept darting towards, and now, that
his song was clear and distinct, the one who had been calling to me for so many
weathered days before. It was his tune, the one that had pursued me through the
bitterness of the forest. The one I had hummed in my head and slept with at
night. The one who promised to release my despair.
He spun away from the circle upon my approach, and my body, my
hands, my feet and my mind began to move to his rhythm. I fell in tune and time
with him and lost myself to the reverie and acceptance of his advance. He went
to take my hand. I reached out.
Then I felt the presence again, this time behind me. I
turned abruptly, breaking my step.
She was there.
I could feel her as much as see her, as beautiful up close
as she was when she stood in the center of the flames. I was not afraid. She
took a single step and my dance with the imp was broken. Relaxed and still, I
stood. The grove was silent. A path, somehow unseen to me before, led not
towards, but rather away from the fire, back into the cold and dark forest, that
somehow held a new promise of something different and possible.
I realized then, that my fear had blinded her from me. She
had always been with me.
Waiting, when I was slow. Traveling, when my progress was erratic
and energetic, never interfering or forcing herself to be known. She was with
me since my first breath, and had never left my side since my soul came into being.
The imp realized quickly that I was lost to him, and
returned to his brothers, to the warmth of the fire and to the crashing song
that fueled their dance.
I could no longer see her, but I knew she was there.
Her presence gave me comfort and strength. She was, and is, my
eternal companion.
With her at my side, I stepped back into the forest and
traveled a path away from the grove.
