michaeljasper.net
Maps and Legends
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from Chapter One Kaitlin squinted in the dusty yellow light of the lamp on the floor next to her and pressed the knife exactly three-eighths of an inch into the wall of her spare room. Her shadow moved with her on the top half of the wall and stretched onto the ceiling -- a silent, distorted companion. Whenever she felt that tiny popping sensation of blade breaking through thick drywall paper, then slicing into cool, smooth gypsum inside, she felt a fleeting instant of guilt. Security deposit, her mind reminded her, then she pushed the X-Acto a bit deeper and began to cut and pull something new into existence. Some nights her labors were less strenuous than this -- just a simple scarring of the unpainted gray wall here (desert), an oblong amoeba shape encasing a mostly bare area awaiting the insertion of grass there (plains) -- but tonight Kait was busy carving out a valley. No way in the world, she thought, shaping her meandering cut until a two-foot-long gouge of sheetrock fell to the floor, intact, raising a cloud of white dust, am I getting my security deposit back for this place. Tonight she'd awoken at half past one needing to empty her bladder -- she knew she should've skipped that second bottle of Belgian ale while she was working late -- and then she'd had an even more pressing urge to pick up the razor-sharp art knife from her work table and trundle off to her spare room, an unheated room she always kept locked. The room she'd been spending most of her nights -- not sleepwalking, but awake in a weird, dreamy way -- with strange music and names tumbling and turning through her head like dry leaves in a lazy breeze. That had been half an hour ago. Now, her hands were covered in drywall dust and going numb, and Kait was thinking about pulling out her calligraphy brushes. All those places she'd cut into her walls in the past week of nights needed labeling. Blassinger Valley. Hollouman's Ridge. The Gediphal River. She didn't know where the names came from. She'd asked Pablo about it once, a few months back, without mentioning any specifics, but he claimed he just "trusted the process" and let the ideas and plots and names come to him while he was working. Easy for him, Kait thought. His work came with a Delete key and a Backspace button. Once I cut, inked, built, or painted something, it was done, like it or not. Blinking her sore eyes made the walls blur into grays and blacks for a few seconds, and Kait took a step back from the wall. Humming a wordless tune, she absently dropped her knife blade-first to the uncarpeted wood floor, and it stuck there, quivering. She pushed up the sleeves of the faded sky blue sweatshirt she'd pulled on earlier, before coming in here to work, and picked up the wobbly little lamp on the floor so she could take a good look around her spare room. Exactly ten feet by ten feet, broken only by a door smack in the middle of the south wall behind her and a closed heating vent jammed into the ceiling above her, this windowless space contained a vertical map stretching over all three walls and most of the north wall in front of Kait. Not just a simple one-dimensional map, either. This project had depth and dimension. On her left, a swirling ocean juggled islands of dried mud that jutted out defiantly. Each level of the ocean had taken Kait half an hour to delineate, as she tried to accurately describe the increasing depth of the Soninglan Ocean and the necklace of brightly named islands it contained: Songbird, Melodian, Baylit, Tribling, and more. On her right, a trio of cliff-shorn continents -- Blacklingoe, Fellingan, Rohingul -- jutted out like twisted vertebrae from the wall, separated by smaller seas and a pair of sharp gulfs. Ahead of her were the plains of the biggest continent, Forivin, nestled next to the forests and valleys protected by the Splitshell Mountains. The largest peak was represented by a rock she'd found in the tiny shoulder next to Jones Ferry Road one morning and subsequently jammed into the drywall, a perfect likeness in scale and shape to the real mountain, Balasander's Crest. Kait had never heard, seen, or read about any of these places before. She was making it all up as she went. Trusting the process. Or something. The looping song running through her head -- mostly a repeating four-beat bass riff mixed in with twitching drums, bom-biddy-boom -- came to a thudding halt as she blinked the last of the sheetrock dust from her vision. "Holy shit." Kait's map shimmered in the light of the lamp in her suddenly shaky hand. Only an oblong eight-foot-high by four-foot-wide section of wall remained undone. Unmapped. The rest of the map was done, textures and mixed media and all. She'd heard about people doing things like this, somnambulists or drunks or heavily medicated joes who got behind the wheel of their cars and made the commute to work and returned home without ever waking or coming to. Kait couldn't really remember -- unless she tried really damn hard -- any specifics about the other nights she'd come in her to do her detailed, large-scale art. She just woke up in the middle of the night and got to it. And she'd gotten good at it, the most creative work she'd ever done. The forested areas of her nine major continents were adorned with a mix of pine needles, sticks, dried leaves and bark, where relevant, all assembled in a realistic fashion, so that no two forests looked even remotely similar. She'd wanted to add water to all the rivers, lakes, and seas, but physics had stumped her there. She was most proud of her mountains, though, each peak hand-picked and positioned carefully. She set the lamp next to her favorite mountain range, in the eastern continent of Ezled. These monsters had taken her over a week to do, back in December, and she'd finished it the day after Christmas. She hadn't had anywhere else to go that holiday, and her freelance work had been nil, so she'd stayed up all night for three days straight, using her hot glue gun to attach the various gray and white rocks she'd found in a dry riverbed a mile down the road from her apartment building. The hilly trail leading up to the waterless barren had reminder her of home, and of course, her Grampa. He was the one who'd gotten her hooked, first on hiking, and then on maps. "Find the hidden places first," he always told her, smiling a cryptic, tooth-gapped grin at her. He always had mud on his face during a hike, from itching his nose with a muddy finger or rubbing his chin. "The rest of the map comes easy." Thinking of Grampa in his old gray-black jeans and goofy feathered hat with the pointy brim, the clothes he wore the last day she saw him alive, Kait reached out to touch the largest of the jagged white rocks. She ran her finger down the side, tracing the lighter paths of calcium stained into the rock. She'd drawn her only blank trying to name this mountain range, so she just called them the Something Something Mountains. She could label it later. When her fingers brushed the very peak of this biggest of the scaled-down mountains, Kait felt herself being pulled -- first as if falling, then as if being dragged -- somewhere else. The odd beat of her wordless song filled her ears -- bom-biddy-boom! -- blasting her eardrums now instead of tickling them, and her vision doubled. The air smelled sharp and acrid, like hot rocks after a sudden rain, and she felt something pinching her fingers where they touched the river rocks embedded in her wall. The mountains split open in front of her like a dark gray mouth, reaching out for her as the music crescendoed like thunder: Bom-bom-biddy-biddy-boom-boom! Kait's world tilted, and she could feel a key, essential piece of herself begin to peel away from her physical body, as if her soul was being stolen from her without a fight. As if she wasn't really there any more... And then Kait opened her eyes. She was sitting on her rear end in the middle of the room, looking up at the Something Something Mountains. "Holy shit," she said again, ears ringing, both hands pressed hard to her chest. The bass music thudded inside her head one more time, but then she realized that -- at what had to be two or three in the morning -- the sound was actually someone banging on her apartment door.
Continued...
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(Cover art coming soon)
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