Sensations

The Heart of Hearing





By-Kyle Gregor-Pearse

































Hot light scorches my eyelids as I turn my face up to the sky, pounding and insistent as it demands entrance. I open my eyes and all is blue. The sky is vast and all encompassing. It dominates my vision and fills my senses with its sight, its sound, its smell. The brilliant flashing azure that filters through the spectrum and into my waiting eyes, and the smell, slightly sweet, and cool, and the sound, rushing and constant, of all life.

The wind is a caress that moves me. A tiny speck of black in the sky, hanging in the air as though suspended by the filaments of a star, it turns and spins, waiting. Round and round as it glides through sky, uncontested in its domain. The lonely cry of the hawk drifts down on the wind, reaches my ears and I know. I hear its cry and life is around me. I can feel it now, the hare in its burrow, hiding from the sun. Grasshoppers, millions of them, long legs bending and snapping straight with the force of a jackhammer. And there, the leopard barely visible, speckled like shadows, lying in the tall grass.

All this life, connected so sparely. A fleeting glimpse is caught of the leopard and no chance is taken. Life quiets, Grasshoppers jump more softly, and the hare is still in its burrow. The leopard heaves itself up and walks toward the burrow, the shoulder blades are seen moving up and down under the glossy fur. It reaches the burrow and tries to know if there is anything worth having inside, but the wind, it is blowing in the leopard’s face, and the hare is utterly still. The hare cannot be smelt or heard, it is invisible to the leopard, and the leopard does not know.

The leopard lies down, nose facing the hole of the burrow, and closes its eyes. All is silent; nothing is audible but the hopping of the grasshoppers from one stalk of grass to another. The heat beats down on the dry ground. A heat haze blurs the horizon and shimmers like ripples on a lake. And I think I can hear the sun. Its beat is like that of a heart, a flaming heart so large that to comprehend its immensity would be to understand the leopard. It does not know the hare, it knows the heat. And as it lies next to the burrow hole, its body blurs into the heat haze and becomes indistinct. It is listening for the slightest sound, the borders of the leopard’s body become more and more indistinct, until at last it has faded out entirely, and to look upon the leopard it is simply another patch of sandy earth, speckled with shadows and shining golden in the sun.

The hare is still, its eyes are huge and black in the darkness, and it is still. It blinks, and again, but does not open its eyes the second time. It shuts them tight, so very tight, and it settles into itself. It does not move, and hardly breathes. And the sun waits. And the shadows wait. And the hare is still. Minutes pass, and the minutes turn into hours, and after a while, the air in front of the burrow hole shifts, and begins to solidify, and the leopard is there. It opens its mouth and a tongue curls up and licks its nose. Wearily, it raises itself onto its feet. It gives a thick growl and walks away into the tall grass, swishing its leopard tale and going on its leopard way. It will not eat today.

Inside the burrow the hare opens its eyes, the huge black eyes that knew the face of the leopard are large and shining. Its nose twitches, and it moves forward a step. The twitch comes again and the hare moves a little further out of the hole. The sun falls across the hare’s head, and its body is slowly revealed as it takes the slow steps into the open. Dust coloured fur bunched up at the neck as it smells the grass, and the sun. Front legs are set down, and the hare hops forward, fully into the warm, loving sun, its eyes close, its head is turned toward the sky. The sun that caresses and soaks into its skin. Nothing can be wrong, nothing can ever be wrong, as long as the hare stands there, being in the tall grass.

Things are happening then, in the cosmos. A billion light-years away, black and black upon black. Inky darkness and pinpricks of roaring light obscure a meaning as old as the leopard, as young as the hare. A comet will soon crash into Ganymede, and the hare opens its eyes.

The tale of the comet flares briefly, and in the blue is the fierceness of sound, cry of the hawk.

The comet streaks toward the moon, paralleled in a fraction of its size, all of its magnificence.

Thump.

The comet goes out.

The moon spins on.

And in the heart of hearing, the hawk raises its head and cries to the heavens. A soulful lament, echoed in the blue, the black, and everything.

So basically I`m looking for some creative criticism, ideas, things to write about, and just general advice. I`m new here, so I don`t know how much attention something like this will get, if any. I wrote this story after taking a walk in a field near my house during the summer.