Unclip my soul by Charles George

Unclip my soul by Charles George

There are ways by which you can unclip your soul.

The first method involves jumping into a river from a tall cliff. It nearly made it on my list, because of its swiftness and ease, but on closer inspection, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the soul would find its way back.

There were meandering monks, whose order had only one object—the object of keeping the sovereign’s soul once he slumbered. The King’s soul used to inhabit a kite, and the designated monk used to fly the kite for the night.

But I had no such luck.

It was fused, to my body like sugar with milk, and my grandfather said that he didn’t have much time.

No one had the only way.

Though soul a-sundering wasn’t attempted for more than 10 generations, my grandfather had succeeded singlehandedly by studying the monk’s textbooks.

He got more wealth than we could count, from the emperor.

But my father failed miserably for he couldn’t come back, and many days, when the wind didn’t blow, I heard his footsteps behind me. Or his shuffling, as he followed me.

Definitely, to guide me.

Soon I wanted a door to the state which my father inhabited.

“You’ll have to find your own way,” said my grandfather, as his white mustache drooped from the spray from the sea, as I stood nearly suffocated after he had hung me upside down from a nearby tree. “But I don’t think, that you can.”

A-sundering your soul by asphyxiation was definitely a no-no.

“Don’t cross it out,” said my grandfather, as I shook my head. “Never cross anything out.”

During my research, I’d come across another one, and it was to visit the darkest and the highest cave.

“Don’t think that you can make it to the cave. It’s a treacherous climb.”

He added. “Do you have enough strength in the waif of a body of yours?”

He clambered up the cliff and shouted as he climbed the cliff face. “Don’t punish your body too much, or else your womb won’t produce any children!”

Steel coursed through my sinews, as I heard those words. I took the harness in my hands, got a grip on the rock face, and my limbs moved of their own volition, as the held, clawed and climbed.

If I ever came across sundering my soul, before it was actually sundered, it was at that climb when I floated above myself, and observed me inching closer and closer to the summit, demolishing my grandfather’s pace.

When he arrived at the cave, he wheezed, but I didn’t even notice my hammering heart, and the thin mountain-top air didn’t squeeze my lungs.

He lay there, as if sleeping in a dream.

“He has his eyes open,” I said.

“When you can unclip your soul, you don’t close your eyes,” said my grandfather.

“He hasn’t shriveled.”

My grandfather’s nostrils flared, and his eyes sparkled with venom. “When you can unclip your soul, you don’t shrivel. Don’t think that I should have brought half a human here—a mere girl!”

For more than a decade my father lay in this cave, not living not dying—as if frozen in time, and all the time his soul gathering scraps from our table.

I remembered, a biscuit or two disappearing. A shattered vase with sugar. Sometimes half of the food from my plate disappeared. I had thought that it was a deficiency of my gender.

But now I knew.

I staggered.

“The air’s coming,” said grandfather, as he covered his face with his sleeve, and stalked to the mouth of the cave.

My knees tottered and I sank. Sank beside my father, who wouldn’t wake from his waking dream.

“Don’t you ever come out—girl!”

As if I would even attempt it! Wasn’t I my father’s daughter? A father who had been suspended in the chasm of –neither alive nor dead. A chasm from which there was no return.

Or shouldn’t there be?

I breathed deep. I breathed deeply the somnambulant air, and let it seep to each and every pore of my body, and thought that it’d work.

I would unclip my soul and go to the twilight where my father resided.

Go there, so that I could get him back.

As the air turned, I continued breathing deeply, and the world around me dissolved. I found my feet, and dangled from the ground like fruit from a branch.

A figure in white stood over my father’s reclining body.

Father.

He turned his face towards me, and it was as if he hadn’t aged a bit.

Father.

The world vibrated as he opened his mouth.

Father, I called again.

Something pulled me from behind. The world trembled again. I willed my body to breathe in the narco air, but the chord connecting me to my body retracted further, inch by inch and I clawed the air, for any purchase, to hold on to the place where there was my father.

Father.

I sat bolt upright, breathing in the somnambulant air.

“So that does it,” said my grandfather, disillusion dripping from his mouth.

“You have the constitution of a horse.”

I was so close. So close, that I glimpsed my father. His soul.

Alas, it was not enough.

Not enough to bring him back.

But there was another way, as I glimpsed the ocean beyond the sheer cliff face.

Jump, my heart cried.

Jump and float, and the air moving above you may sunder your soul from your body.

Jump, my heart said.

Without waiting from my grandfather’s unnecessary blessing, I heeded my heart’s call, as I flew out from the cliff face, towards the sparkling ocean below.

The wind buffeted my clothes, and as I weaved in and out through my nostrils. Weaved in and out, in and out, till I couldn’t even discern where I stopped and the wind began.

For what do I see, beside me? Another shape. Another one, another being?

Father.

For had he followed me, from the cave. As he always followed me, guiding my hand, lest I do the wrong thing.

White flashed and I could discern a wavy white beard.

For not wanting to be bested by a mere girl, he had followed. He had followed to see if a girl makes it, or better to hinder.

To hinder.

The wind and air twisted me away, and what could I see, but a hand, but not just a hand, a hand being shaped or a gleam of a dagger.

The dagger came towards me and I twisted away from the entity, which was my grandfather.

Twisted away, as drops of water sprinkled, around me, and the world exploded around me in rain drops.

I was evanescent—the state I wanted to be, and I hovered in the air and in water—in the real world and in the ethereal one too.

The emperor wouldn’t be all too happy to know that his chief sorcerer was corrupted. Corrupted by the age-old vice.

Hubris.

As I was not just of air and the real world. For I was of the air, the real world and water, and the entity couldn’t do me mischief for water blocked every blow aimed towards my tether.

And what do I see, but a tether floating towards me, and a disembodied soul at the other end of it.

My fingers closed around the tether, as I pulled and floated to the cave, to the reclining figure on the ground.

They found purchase, as they tied the chord to the thread emanating from the body.

And then my hands like swords, as the water swept away the ethereal knife out of my grandfather’s hand, and enveloped him in a giant water drop, sundering the tether from his body.

I had reached the cave, not disembodied, and my father limped back out—out—leaving my grandfather’s prostrated body in the cave.

* * * * The End * * * *
Copyright Charles George 2024