The Half That You See by Rebecca Rowland (best summer reads .TXT) 📕

A leather strap in her mouth gagged her. She trembled, but remained aware. The other women, however, wore absent gazes, glazed eyes.

One robed man from the fire untied the treeless woman from the others and brought her before the flames. Tears stained her face with reflected fire, and she trembled, her naked flesh slicked with sweat.

He gripped his machete’s handle, but remained frozen. He couldn’t take them all. It was an impossible situation.

if these shadows have offended

Whispers and shadows, all.

One robed man held the treeless girl’s shoulders and pushed her to her knees while another held her head. The girl clamped down on the bit of leather, which stifled her pleas.

A fellow robed man opened a wooden box and removed a large, silver hand drill. He stood above the woman, placed the bit to her head, and cranked the handle.  Color drained from her, making her skin a canvas for the red and orange flames of the nearby fire. Her screams intensified with each turn of the handle. Her hair tangled around the drill bit and crawled upward toward the robed man’s hands like vine tendrils.

She fainted during the third hole, but the other masked men supported her weight.

The retired detective watched from behind the scrub, gritting his teeth. He could not look away.

The robed man drilled seven holes in all. When he finished, he handed the drill to one of the others, who cleaned it and placed the drill back in the box. Another acolyte brought over a sapling growing in a large basin.

The robed man dug with his hands and gingerly lifted it from the dirt. He shook the plant, sending a shower of loose, dark soil to the ground.

Another man washed the roots with water from a silver decanter until the water ran clear.

The robed man carried the tree to the woman and began to feed the root ends into the holes.

til truth makes all things plain

The retired detective looked down. Beside him, another machete lay in the dirt, identical to his own, but rust fully covered the blade.

Echoes.

He had been here before.

Across the pond, all the women from the previous night now hung in the trees, the sun shining down on their heads, the saplings growing, rooting down. Bound cruciform, like naked grapevines in a vineyard during the winter months, they served as potting vessels.

However, unlike the woman he found with the cropped roots, these women remained alive. He saw their movements in the strangler vines, slight, like a light wind through branches.

Maybe it was time to report this.

He picked up the phone on the second ring.

He wasn’t interested, was he? Did he really want to know? To see? To feel again?

“Hello, Detective,” Keys said.

“Retired.”

“We all know that the early retirement thing wasn’t fair. But that’s politics. At least you got to go out with full benefits. Better than most, I would say. An ugly affair. But IA always had it in for you. You were too high profile.”

He grunted.

“You really made a name for yourself, you know. The mighty and falling is what they say. How about you come look at this case.”

“Still no.”

“You’re not going to make this easy on me, are you?”

“Leave me alone.”

“You can leave the job, but the job don’t leave you.” Keys laughed. Deep, like old machines still running under the ground.

He slammed the phone in the receiver.

Memories took root.

Outside, he glimpsed a hawk in a tree take flight, snatch a rattlesnake from the ground, and flap its wings to return to the skies, snake wriggling in the raptor’s grasp.

He picked up the phone, wanting to throw it across the room. But he stopped himself. The phone cord dangled from the cradle, not plugged into the wall at all.

His fan roared like a lion. Cornelius lay by the bedside.

The man took a melatonin. He took a propranolol.

The spine of a book by his bedside read Aimé Césaire Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. He flipped it open, randomly, waiting for the pills to take effect. He read the underlined words. Ending. Beginning. Germination. In the margin, in his own handwriting, he saw a scrawled note, like a child’s rhyme. He couldn’t remember writing it.

Food for worm,

ash from tree,

the soul is the only

part that is me.

When he opened his eyes, he found himself on the island in the lake, and the roots of the large banyan had grown over him like a prison.

No, he was rooted, toes growing as crooked roots, digging into the dirt. The banyan did not trap him; he was the banyan, rooting down, searching through dirt or silt. Finding water. His fingers clawed through the slickness searching for sustenance. His hair tangled in tendrils like Spanish moss. His pores sprouted nubs. Wind-dancing pollen on angel hairs caught the wind and flew.

He opened his mouth and out poured the words, and roots, and pollen.

He wasn’t sure if anything was more real than the soil between his fingers, or the thick fog in the air.

He pollinated. His flesh made bare. Red photosynthesis. Cells clamoring for the sun.

And then, when the sun came out, the mist that surrounded the island wisped into nothing. So did he.

Lonely Is the Starfish

Lena Ng

I have a tank full of pets. The tank measures 91.4 cm (L) by 45.7 cm (W) by 48.3 cm (H) and holds 189 liters of salt water. I keep the pH rigorously maintained at 7.8, the temperature at 25oC, and the salinity at 35 parts per 1000 units of water. There are three angelfish who like to emerge through the vegetation and poke around in the tank's corners. The jeweled moray eel pretty much keeps to itself, hiding its big head and plump body between some rocks, its bright eyes surveying its surroundings. The two azure damselfish swim leisurely back and forth.

Although there are more interesting creatures in the aquarium, my best, most favorite pet is the starfish. It measures fifteen centimeters at its longest diameter with five stout, spiny arms. It