The Terrain--prologue

In the beginning was the word, and in the end, the word is all that remains, for without it, those who put faith in its feeble fabric have only perception to rely on as it casts a shadow over the past and paves this dark highway of tomorrow in blood. Hugh Vicker sat in the backseat of the car with his window rolled down watching the passing, abeyant branches as though they were threatening hands. A sharp corner spun the car out of control. He saw a violent equation: man and woman plus windshield, as it calculated out its red sum. After a few soundless, lost moments, after a few tumbles and flips and poppings of glass, Hugh sat in darkness. The yellow car lights slanted against the steep hill they landed on, their glow highlighting the contour of his mother and father, motionless.

He lost one of them for each eye.

Seasons would give way. The calendar pages would blow apart in the wind and the candles would melt to their bases. Dreams would reoccur, nightmares would be remembered but not articulated, visions would open and loves would expire. Later, due to unrelated circumstances, Hugh would lose one eye for each one of his parents, like two stars dwindling into the vacuum of a spinning galaxy. Two lamp stands, two snuffed flames, the lost revelation of two lost prophets.

But there was a tic in Hugh’s perception he had from the time he was a small boy that lay beyond his lost sight. An ocean of color prompted as much by voice as the corporeal, as much by a number as a letter, as much by days of the week as months of the year and as much by a gong as a note. It was an ever present, ever changing canvas and he was its ever faithful admirer. It was a subjective landscape of shape and shade bending with words, scintillating with sound, darkening with silences, falling with contrivances and always in rhythm with the constant. It was so constant that after he lost his sight he would rely on it more than his sense of touch or smell. Having nothing to gaze with but the eye of his mind he journeyed through this terrain, all expansive and pregnant with possibility.

This is what he didn’t see.