Through twelve evocative tales of longing and loss, Exiles Incorporated depicts a volatile world of hostile landscapes, where humans strive to belong amid the cruelty of conquest, the madness of desire and the transience of love. In the first story Uluru, set in dawn-of-creation Australia, the four elements of Air, Wind, Fire and Mother Earth bury the mystery of Spirit in a ground rumbling with strange voices.
“Don’t leave me, mama.”
Spirit burrowed deeper into her guardian’s bosom. She craved closeness, but Air, Wind, Fire and Mother Earth wanted to bury her in the wilderness. She was only a shared dream to them. An unfathomable weight slowing their advance. Let the ground swallow her.
“I’m scared, mama,” she shivered. “Scared I won’t find my way back…”
Home. A realm of dark fog. She didn’t know what she was or where she came from. Only that she’d woken misshapen in the four elements’ minds. She’d not arrived alone. Voices followed. Rattling cries underground only she could hear. Let me out. Let me out. Let me out.
Air, Wind, Fire and Mother Earth accelerated into the void. The golden orb above had summoned the four elements to carve a new world with their thoughts. This was dreamtime, explained Mother Earth. First to flow from their minds was a dry, blood-orange plain. The second, a suffocating roof of endless blue. Why the elements created was a mystery to them.
Spirit was a mystery too. Too inanimate to challenge; too unsettling to ignore. A lone thing lodged in their consciousness. When the time was right, they would feed her to the parched plains. Until then, Mother Earth absorbed the gentle questions dripping from the child’s mind.
“What am I mama?”
“I’m not sure, little one. We don’t know yet.”
“When will we know?”
“Soon. Our dreams will tell us where you belong.”
“What’s a dream, mama?”
“It’s what brings this world into existence.”
“Will I ever dream?”
“We don’t know. Just be still, little one. Just be still.”
Spirit watched as Air, Wind, Fire and Mother Earth spawned the landscape, slowing to stillness then sleep. In dreams they convulsed and contracted, bleeding together. Fusion culminated in a splintering screech and the grinding of invisible jaws. Krrrraccck. Chuggachug. Krrrraccck. Chuggachug. Krrrraccck. Chuggachug. Spirit thought space itself would shatter.
Each time one element was most powerful, their primacy signalled by a spasm of colour. Air’s white vapour. Fire’s reddish smoke. Water’s blue swirls. Mother Earth’s hazy green. Ripples of energy surged and subsided with a boom and a crackle. Droplets of light spurted upwards then softly descended.
There were two kinds of droplets. Sleepers and dreamers. Sleepers hovered with uncertainty, then evaporated. Pffffffftishhh. Pffffffftishhh. Pffffffftishhh. Dreamers flourished, swelling into material form, flecking the void with silver-grey streaks, brownish-green smears and fluffy patches of white ascending to blue. Plink. Plink. Plink. Rivers. Trees. Plants. Rocks. Jagged, beautiful, solitary rocks. Spirit loved those most. She did not change, so was neither sleeper nor dreamer. Not real or unreal. Somewhere in between.
While Air, Wind, Fire and Mother Earth woke from dreamtime and sped into the dark, Spirit drew patterns between the rocks in their wake. The fragments changed colour in the sunlight, from orange to red to pink to brown to amber to yellow. Plink. Plink. Plink. Once part of something, now alone. Spirit wished a huge rock would reunite them all one day.
Exiles Incorporated is available to buy on Apple Books, Amazon and Google Play as an e-book, plus on Amazon and Barnes & Noble as a paperback.
PHILIP PARRISH 