Fiction: The Far End of the Earth by Susandale

The Far End of the Earth 

By Susandale
QuailBellMagazine.com

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The clouds above him were moving in a melancholy way. And as the sun climbed the skies, the Cherokee son walked a path that took him to the top of a valley that dropped between two mountains. And while he was descending into the valley, he heard mountain hearts yet beating with the songs of creation.
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​He looked around until he found Yun’wi Gunahi, the long man with his head in the mountains. He blinked, and Yun’wi Gunahi became White Horse, his father. His father outlined in the mountains, his father’s heart beating through time to connect him to his son, the wild child of the Cherokee.

Flames of sundown spun him circularly around the fire dances of the Cherokee, and the fire dances took him to the flames of the flame thrower. One to the other; one moment in eternity—to eternity.
    
On an impulse, he looked down. And what did he see strutting in front of him, but the Cherokee spider. 'The spider who brought fire to the six grandfathers,’ he remembered. ‘Last night when I was spinning dreams, the spider was spinning down to take fire from the eyes of a panther. She spun it within a web and brought it on her back to the Cherokee fathers.’ 
    
The spider heading west. Following the spider, the wild child of the Cherokee.’ Sunset blazing the skies with dazzlingly-delirious colors: he and the spider walking a line of gravel to come to rugged cliffs poking up from a choppy sea. 
    
‘I am at the far end of the world.’ 
    
He saw the sky rising to let the sun in to sleep; the sun with sleepy eyes and heavy eyelids; she'd been up all night searching for her errant daughter; a sunray dancing around the clouds.
‘But when was that? Long ago? Yesterday? Is yesterday long ago?‘ 
    
Even as he stood pondering, the sky was rising higher yet to release the baby stars of twilight; flashes of points and twinkles tumbling out to roll over one another.  
    
The spider went a' spinning. And the Cherokee son, with a sea song in his ears and a carpet of moss under his head, fell into sleep; layer by dreamy layer into the depths of blue-black night into deep, wide sleep. 
     
He awoke in a pre-dawn breaking under silver skies. Stars tip-toeing across the skies when he stretched to stand and walk away from the sea. He was leaving behind the land at the end of the earth. He was not ready for the end, which was also the beginning. He was lost in time and lost to time. He was walking into the beginning that took him into metamorphosis. Metamorphosis taking him into a state of simply being. Going on a journey with no end in sight—no destination known.