White Elephant's Graveyard - Fridayflash

Bit different this week, I have steered clear of the usual word acuity and just gone for a story. A weird one, inspired by the pictures.







The Coyote trickster turned to whisper in the ear of Geronimo.

"They have taken our name in vain and given it to one of their birds who spit death".

"So? This is not new to my ears. Black Hawk of the Sauk tribe has been personally cursed forever in this vein".

"But now they have set these silver birds to roost on our sacred ancestral lands. They lay claim to it yet again, but this time they mock us in doing so".

"How so?"

"They bury their dead on top of our own".

The Coyote sunk to its haunches and offered its back to Geronimo. Still uncertain, he climbed on and threaded his arms round the beast's throat and held on to the creature's dewlap. The beast sprang back up and they set off on their journey.

Geronimo was agog at what he saw. Every type of metal bird it was possible to conceive of, laid out along the desert like the pebbles of a sand painting. Some had spilled their guts on to the sand, silver droppings too dull to catch the sun's rays.

"What is this place?"

"The soldiers call it the Bone Yard".

"But bones are not made of iron. Guns, rifles they are cut from metal".

The coyote brushed at its ear with its paw. It might have been take for the gesture of a shrug, only he proceeded to then tap the ground. Geronimo understood and lay with his ear pressed to the ground. There he could hear the true bones, of his people and the prey they hunted asleep in the desert sand. But beneath that even, the cries of older spirits. The bactrians and bison, wapiti and sloths lying so far down, no sandstorm could ever reveal them. They were protesting the weight pressing down on them. Talons and claws around their throats and gullets.

"They say they are Tomcats, Eagles, Hornets and Nightingales, but they are no creatures we recognise. They profane our resting place and they challenge your naming of things. They seek to usurp us all. To take our land once again. To strip us of our landmarks so we no longer know where we are".

And Geronimo was struck by a vestigial rage. The old warrior spirit was rising in him once again, in this desiccated land.

He rode on the ghost of his war steed and consulted Cochise. The latter told him of his time in captivity when the pale faces tried to instill in him the myths of their mortal god. He related a tale they told him of a tribe who marched around a city wall seven times playing their pipes of war and shouting, so that on the seventh tour the walls shattered and fell away to the ground.

"This is what we must strive for Goyaale".

"But metal is harder than flesh, bone and adobe walls".

"Indeed. We have to summon beyond the Apache world. I call for a global pow wow".

So medicine men communed with shamans. Shamans conjured necromancers. The voodoo men couldn't quite conceive that it was metal birds rather than dolls of men that were required. Smoke signals billowed around the underworld where their message could not be seen above ground. Cold corpses packed sweat lodges, while the drums sounded their sonorous call. Animal familiars and totems pricked up their ears. The spirit plane was alive with hubbub and intent. From Vietnam, Cambodia, Iraq and Afghanistan came the dead. From Somalia, Grenada, a great host of spirits churned and writhed.

They beat their bloodied hands, their ectoplasmic stumps, against the soft earth, the arid desert sands, the stone-sowed plains. They pumped their upturned palms, shook balled fists and waved magic sticks. Their pent up energies bored through the foundations of mountains and hitched rides along river beds, so that no ordinary mortal had any sense of their uprising. They were whispering their incantations into the very rock as they sought to move at the pace of a grain of sand. Linking arms, fusing with the web of the rock, gradually they formed the most perfect of circular chains around the earth's belly pregnant with their fury.

And a great crackle of energy surged and charged around the veins of Mother earth. Electrifying her, she shuddered and held out her wrists, like a penitent or a suicide. But she kept drawing her arms up towards her own surface, disinterring her own resting place. As she broke clear into the daylight, it was clear that the Spider Grandmother actually had eight limbs and each was raking up the ground of the desert. The metal birds were shaking and quaking before her terrible grip, pulling up the desert floor like a rug that need beating for dust. The ground was shaking with just such a resonance, that the birds' own bodies started humming and cracking. She had set their song inside their own skeletons and they snapped and collapsed in on their own metal bones.

And when it was over, the air was still and silent once again. A gentle wind blew the sand to cover up the tracks, though the birds had their wings and guts plucked irreversibly from them. The man from Hollywood had encountered no trouble in journeying to keep his appointment. But as he surveyed the rental wares that were beyond repair, he just shook his head. "It ain't that kinda movie" he said, stubbing a cheroot out under his leather boot. "It's a patriotic one where we win". And he climbed back into his Jeep Cherokee.