HE FOUNDLINGS OF NIRVANA
BOOK TWO
AND THE SEA SINGS
BY LOUANN CARROLL
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
Published by Majestic Books
Penn Valley, California
Copyright 2015 by Louann Carroll
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission.
Other books by Louann Carroll
The Gemini Series
Gemini Rising, Book One
The Light and the Flame, Book Two
Book Three—Coming Soon
A Shadow of Time
Shadowlands
Innocent Blood
The Foundling series
Jenny’s Tale
January 20040
New morning tide is in. Pink glass sparkles in growing sunlight. I am up from underground and today the beach is visible, tomorrow probably not, so I count myself lucky.
Praise be to whomever Shim may be.
I stretch, reveling in new light, rejoicing in my time in the sun. For now, I am free. I taste the air with my protective armor and gaze over tarnished oceans and then onto grayish bluffs that have lost their color.
Beauty went out of the world when the laughing stopped. I haven’t heard a soft chuckle or even a braying guffaw for millennia. But then again, I haven’t seen the creatures in white either and that’s a blessing. Perhaps they died out during the most recent change. The time before this when I was content to be who I was, not who once was.
It was better before the remembrances started. One of the first was of a shelter that consisted of stone or maybe cement. The term is foreign to me. Even though I was an adult and refused to take the change from the government, my parents forced the cocktail into me. I am not sure of the words and it bothers me. What is change? I pause, thinking it over. It is all in ones’ mind. Change that is. Part of me believes I have never been human.
Thinking, thinking, thinking leads to ruminating.
I have too much time to think, I think, with a squeak of happiness at a silly rhyme. Rhyming is new, too. Everything is new in this misshapen reality where nothing makes sense. A tear tries to squeeze out of my one eye and I roll my currently working optical apparatus against pink glass to wipe it away.
My world is not the same without laughter. It is full of fear, panic, and terror. Fear when thoughts of the future pop in, panic when the realization hits that I can never go home, and terror when I think of how short a time I can spend in the new morning sun. It is good, the warmth that is.
Praise be to whomever Shim may be.
I hear the ocean as it once was, not as it is now. My ears are not the ears of the human in me, if that is even true thought, I remind myself. Sound moves though gills placed perfectly on what were once my wrists, hands, feet, and ankles. This body that encases my soul, the essential me who I am, is awkward and slow, belying the dancer that is truly me. I embrace ballet and I sing the opera. Now I am more of a Armadillidiidae than anything else. But I give thanks for the armor that encompasses me as it keeps me safe.
Praise be to whomever Shim might be.
Because of this, my heart is sad, so I live in the now. I believe that if I can be in the now, I cannot be afraid. It is impossible if I just live one now at a time. I do not look forward or backward unless I forget my discipline and then fear consumes me in a stark reminder of why I live in the now.
“Begone begone begone!” A Limitless Langoliare struggles across pink glass and I wiggle out of the way. Long tentacles slim enough to poke through my shield dangle from its sides gleaning glass for food. I have no idea where it came from nor where it is to go except to the sea. The creature meanders on.
“Wait, come back!” Suddenly, I want to ask if the Langoliare hears the same song I do. At the thought, sharp teeth sink into my underbelly. The pain, though fleeting, is sharp. I move out of the way.
“Be off with you,” I say out of two apertures located on the side of what is my head. My words are sharper than I intend. A foggy-bottom fisher tries to eat my flesh and I laugh, yes, laugh, alone I laugh. “You’ll find nothing of substance here, little one.”
The foggy-bottom fisher pops out of his glassy home and stares at me in surprise. Its scaly backbone flips from black to white then back again and its bold brown eye, wide with fear, sits alone atop a round mouth that gnaws the fragile scale it stole from my belly. I laugh again and it scurries away to burrow further into Earth. It is the laughter the creature fears not me.
Praise be to whomever Shim may be.
I find humor in the world, but as far as I know, I am the only one. I wonder why humankind let things get as bad as they did. I am not even sure older ones exist anymore. Life is so long, so tortuous it is hard to remember. A crack of lightening crosses the sky and my discipline wanes.
The change came suddenly after my parents betrayed me. I remember bouts of diarrhea with severe stomach pain. A mental fogginess locked the real me away from memory, so when my skin changed it wasn’t a bother. Instead of warm supple flesh, my outer areas became hard and scaly. Shortly after the solar desolation, the scales fell off except for around my lower body and arms. I’ve heard some created beings changed into reptiles, though I’ve never seen one. But then, I’ve never seen a lot of things.
God’s truth.
Praise be, to whomever Shim may be.
With great strength, I rock and roll onto my back exposing my soft underbelly. Warmth heals all things, even stolen scales. It is quite possible I will not be able to roll over again, but the thought doesn’t bother me. I giggle, mimicking a sound I made in my teens. Giggle, a truly wonderful word no one but me understands.
I wiggle into smooth pink glass, making a bed for myself. I can only be murdered, a distinctly human expression, while on my back because the rest of me is hard as stone and just as difficult to move. I love the sun and my tummy is as warm as can be, not cold like in the deep recesses of Earth. It is always cold down there.
These thoughts are new, well, perhaps returned would be a better word. The dreams started several times ago. It is hard to put to words things that have yet to return to me. I have memory of things that happened long before time here began.
The atmospheric upheaval we were warned against caused the sand on Earth, and in my below space, to heat into glass. Over a few millennia, the glass broke down and became the material my fellow creatures and I use to build. It is where I should be. Down in the dark, making tunnels for food, for copulating, for rest. We eat the small things that abide in the particles of glass. Unlike the other others, I remember hamburgers and fries. They are warm, not cold, chewy, and not slimy. They make you feel good.
I giggle, again.
A nomenactler flies by, its skeletal wings beating back hydrogen, struggling to stay aloft as it seeks something to eat in this God forsaken place.
Praise be to whomever Shim may be.
I think of the nomenactler. I remember birds and I want to go home. A hollow forms in the base of where my gut used to be. A yearning propels me to flip over onto my stomach and out of my bed, slipping and sliding across the glassy sand toward the ocean that calls me, tells me it is home, worships one such as
me. This ocean wants me again, as if it has had me before. The lure promises me a better life.
Jenny, it cries.
It makes no sense, for what is a Jenny? I search my rememberances, anxiety building before I stop. One now, I tell myself, gently guiding my thoughts back into a safe place. It is here, in the now, that I can be, certainly not in the earth and not in the sea. Overhead, thick black clouds roll by, but they do not rain. They are sulfuric and nitric acid thanks be to Asia, so this new world of thought informs me.
My thinking sounds like a prayer, thanks be to Asia. It is Asia’s fault Earth is inhospitable. That and the low pH value leading to elevated levels of hydrogen ions poisoning the atmosphere. Oxygen is rare, so above ground life is not as it was. At one time, the entire above ground was uninhabitable. Now, sand is pink glass, the sky is green, and clouds are black. If rain falls, it burns.
A searing agony rips across my belly reminding me I cannot stay in pink glass much longer. Already they, the others like me yet not like me, stare with wariness when I am in the dark and though they cannot read my thoughts as they do others, time changes all things and it won’t be long before they know my secrets. The change in me didn’t happen completely. I know who I am and I am me and tomorrow I may know more.
Thanks be to whomever Shim may be.
When the attacks first began the pain was intense. I remember hitting my head on concrete or asphalt in a place called cities and towns. Time and again the change rolled through me and those that hadn’t changed never tried to help. Instead they slinked away, frightened to touch me, scared to help. They treated me like a leper. Yes, I remember that word, too.
You are not who you think you are…
A wave of anxiety rolls though me as the voice I have come to hate reminds me I am not who I think I am. This voice haunts me, at times ignores me, even hates me if that is possible. I have done nothing to this creature, so why do I feel its fury toward me? I am convinced this voice is real. I allow my eye, the one that still works, to roll across the top of my head seeking the speaker, but as before, there is nothing there, outside that is. And for good reason, as the voice I hear comes from within me.
It is to be neverminded, I decide, and return to the now. My gaze rests on the glitter of breaking waves. They are not too far away and they sing their siren call. I want to answer, I really do. Perhaps in the arms of the waves there is peace. I do so want to go home.
Jenny! The sea screams.
There is some visibility left in the spectrum in which my sight resides, but it won’t be this way for long. The fact that I see color doesn’t happen often, some-thing must have changed since yesteryear. Perhaps refraction is different. I relish the color, the pink, the green, and even the blue though that is the color of death. Death comes with the promise of serenity, I think. And peace.
I have memory as to how it used to be. I played on the beach, the warm brown, yes I said brown, a plain dull word and much against the advice of many an editor relayed with great relish to a budding young author, yet still the proper word for sand remains brown or tan, I suppose. No matter the argument of the past, the grains still squished between my toes the same as if I’d used the word amber.
Those were happy times. I had friends and I had lovers. I ate food, hotdogs, I think that is what they were called and deep-fried artichoke hearts. Even now my taste buds remember the flavor, but that is all they do since my mouth is sealed shut. I have nothing but two calcium buckteeth that allow me to push through pink glass straining nutrients though calcium phosphate as everything else is pure poison to me.
The twin suns grow higher in the sky and I know it is time to return. For a moment, I am happy. I smile, inside that is, but know I cannot stay. No one can abide the sun for long stretches. It is below that it is safe, but sometimes I need to feel the sun on my covering. I feel no real pain, as I am missing a neurotransmitter that is responsible for sending pain signals to my central nervous system. This is dangerous for me, but the lack of pain also allows me to do more than the others, sometimes to my detriment and sometimes not.
There is a memory even older than the one just known. There is another place, a primordial soup where life happens, changes, and rearranges, that calls to me. Warm as only water can be under the harsh glare of the suns, it waits.
For me.
I laugh and the sea sings.
Jenny…