Notes: MF, FD, masturbation, mind/body control
The eye is blind
Stone made to wait;
The cylinder
Which seals one’s fate.
Harold looked down at his stylus and the words he’d written out on the digital tablet. He wasn’t sure he’d translated it correctly, but at least it sort of made sense. Not bad for the first round.
He looked up from the tablet to the screen. On the left side, the matrix of glyphs and their possible translations, guessed at and triangulated by era, context and geographic location. On the right, the four lines he’d been asked to decipher. Everyone on the team had a stanza to play with.
Only their manager, Dr Steve DeReal, had the whole text at the moment, but, once everyone had made a first pass at translating, the plan was to release it to the team -- originals and translations -- and see if anyone could iron out discrepancies and come up with a complete translation that made sense.
Harold’s gaze moved from the glyph matrix to the original stanza and back again. He second-guessed the word choices that resulted in a cadence and rhyme scheme in English. Poetry, or whatever this was, didn’t have to have those kind of mechanics; it could “rhyme” in terms of parallel or intersecting concepts, for example. He thought about approaching it from that angle, but remembered he wasn’t supposed to come up with multiple translations, just one.
Harold clicked his tongue at himself as he copied the matrix and the image of the stanza to a thumb drive. He had never taken work home with him before, but he couldn’t bear to leave the puzzle at the office.
* * * *
The sun is blind
Stone awaits
The shaft
That tells the future
Harold bit his lip as he stared at the alternate translation, thought about the importance of context. The clay tablet, impressed with a stylus, then baked, had been found in a cave set in the cliffs North and a little West of Hamrat Dum, Egypt. He’d never been there. He was a linguist and an archaeologist but his diabetes had kept him from traveling much. He'd only recently won the freedom of independent mobility in his own hometown of Chicago, buying one of the first Kenguru cars to roll off the assembly line down in Texas.
Blind eye/sun
Waiting/unmoving stone
Cylinder/shaft/rod
One’s future/fate sealed/told
He desperately wanted to see the rest of the text.
* * * *
That night Harold had a very long, satisfying dream. He was standing in the heat of Egypt. Standing, itself, was a typical component of his dreams, ever since he’d lost his left foot to diabetes. He was happy, but hot. He had to keep wiping his brow.
A beautiful, dusky woman, complete with diaphanous scarves and headdress, appeared. Harold had to laugh at himself for coming up with such a sexist, racist trope. He was in a field of wheat. Sex slaves weren’t going to show up in a field of wheat.
She danced for him, letting one scarf go at a time, to waft over the field and toward the cliffs behind him. He turned to watch them as they were pulled into a cave, far above and beyond him, a tiny black mouth amid shrubs and small goats.
Harold followed after the scarves.
The woman caught his hand and pulled him toward her, reached her free hand up to cradle the back of his head, pull it down to her breasts, which were bare. She smelled good, like lavender and myrrh.
“Don’t go. It will twist all your thoughts around, make you insane,” she whispered in his ear. The hand that had been holding his slid down to push gently, palm open, against his crotch. He could feel his cock hardening under the pressure. He pulled her down, crushing the green wheat under their bodies, and made love to her.
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