Soul Fillet 20 September 2025 (translation of a short story called “Filet de soul” written in French on 8th March 2011 – See the original here or copy and follow this link https://geethabalvannanathan.com/2011/03/15/filet-de-soul/)
Courtesy freepik.com
She struggled, but it seemed useless, as the net enclosed her on all sides, fitting her body like a glove. The antimatter of its braiding was of the same ilk as her own immaterial body, and so she was unable to go through it. She watched helpless the ectoplasms of the ghost ship slowly hoist her towards them. She remembered the advice of her grandparents, who had been her guardians since her parents' death, and told herself she should have listened to them and not ventured so far from her sweet native soulitude.
It was all the fault of that cursed spring, of that nutty unicorn illusion, and of her tightrope-walker nature, which never resisted the urge to swing in the air between two equally deep chasms. The black holes of the fiery soular system she had entered by mistake or stubbornness—she no longer remembered—and which had finally disembodied her after a burn a thousand times more intense than unicorn fever had struck her down.
Yet all the signs had been there: the panicked looks of those who had just learned the rite of passage from the customs officer, the biting cold escaping through the only window to the other world—placed so high that it was impossible to look through the glass, the smell of sulfur that accompanied each explosion of the beings passing through the door, of which only a pyrography remained, each aligned alongside the others made before it. In short, a spectacle that would have dampened the fantasies of even the most ardent pioneer, but she had carried on, drawn by the idea of this stellar discovery.
The snub-nosed customs officer who sat counting his money at the edge of the two worlds had kept making her fill out so much paperwork that she almost ended up with the wrong papers. "What are all these delaying tactics?" she had exclaimed, exasperated, to which he replied that this was the price—yes, one always had to come back to the price in this world—of passage to the other world. They had to think carefully, and these weren't so much delaying tactics as preparatory tactics for a decision that would be final.
As a good intermediary for the overlord of this world who transmitted his orders to him through the hollow horn of a unicorn of other times, he took it upon himself to tire out those determined to pass into the other world so that only those who could no longer be malleable puppets would finally take the plunge. In any case thought the lord, looking at his navel, which needed a lot of vassal care to keep it from detaching itself from his body, this kind of people would be of no use to him because they would not be obedient vassals. For it took blindly obedient beings to caress the motionless body of the lord, which was becoming more and more flaccid and incapable of containing this quivering bit of flesh in the middle. The massage had to be done in concentric circles starting from the extremity of the body and in tighter circles to get closer to this purplish navel and the task became not only more exhausting but also more repugnant. Indeed, through immobility the lord became an enormous fatty mass whose deadly effluvia were exacerbated by the arrival of spring and reaching the extremities to attempt to execute at least one circle became an increasingly impossible task during the lifetime of each vassal. Suffice to say that the overlord was very difficult for any being to grasp, and she told herself that any other fate would be better than being condemned to grasp this monster, especially since spring was fast approaching.
The manoeuvres continued for quite some time, and the bitter retorts from both sides almost put her in the bad books of the customs officer with the snub-nosed face and the dead eyes, but in the end she managed to finalize her efforts. All that remained, the customs officer had told her at the end, was to get rid of the rest of the sinful confessions in order to complete the rite of passage. Turning to him to ask what that meant, she saw a sadistic glint finally rekindle the dead fish gaze of the customs officer who told her with a grim smile that she was going to be burned with a blowtorch so that the sinful and the flesh would detach from her and she would return ethereal to the other world leaving her remains as an ornament on the wall of the "lament asians". She had a moment of panic but it was too late, it was the price to pay she told herself, resigned, and moved forward towards the door made of blowtorches.
She remembered an unbearable burning sensation accompanied by a deafening explosion, and the next moment she was floating weightlessly in a hushed space whose silence and thick darkness were broken only here and there by gentle lapping and rays of intense luminosity that strangely illuminated nothing but themselves, leaving the rest of the space in darkness. She barely had time to feel, or even see, other immaterial beings floating near her before a mass of ropes had been thrown over her and she was being pulled inexorably toward the ghost ship. Once hoisted aboard, she was roughly lifted, and what was her surprise to come face to face with a now-familiar face—a rhinopithecus, she thought, before losing consciousness.
When she came to, an ectoplasmic version of the overlord stood limp before her and beside her the ectoplasm of the customs officer was slowly and deliberately rubbing a huge blade against a black hole. As she stared at him, dumbfounded, he turned to the overlord and asked him.
Glory of new-found mystery
The rhythm of the feet now changed
Embracing magic once estranged
Bodies melted in ecstasy;
Like long lost pagan symphony
The moon the clouds in night did chase
Fervent dancers in trembling daze
They locked their arms in restless link
Skies defined them in magic ink
Of lucid embrace transient phase
Reading of the poem:
Lonely – Cosmic Balance
Based on challenge by Ronovan Writes using the word “Chase” in line C of the decima.
In brief, for a Décima, there are 10 lines of poetry that rhyme and there must be 8 syllables per line.
There is a Set Rhyming Pattern we must stick to: ABBAACCDDC or ABBA/ACCDDC.
For more information or to view other contributions, please follow the link hereRonovan Writes Décima Poetry Challenge Prompt No. 53: (CHASE) in the C rhyme line. | ronovanwrites
Wolves hurry
across the landscapes
fiery crops
burning high
Bosom utters not a sigh
crossing through the flames
Horses dive
through etheric lanes
shaking manes
hooves thunder
The moonlit sights a wonder
etched into our hearts
Two to grieve
My breast torn did heave
coils cleft
none bereft
They ask me now in pieces
crescent moon to leave
Reading of the poem:
It had been a while that she had started building the Merkaba. This was not an easy task as the weaving of the energies had to be done on a regular basis and based on a specific pattern. She wondered how it was that the Elders had succeeded in passing on this information to her during her sleep but every morning when she woke up she had a precise plan in her head for which points remained to be woven. On and on her nimble fingers wove into the air the patterns using the energy from the skies and from the trees outside her window.
Sometimes, it was also in the evenings that she resumed the weaving although it was best done at dawn and concluded with the rising sun. Day after day, she tirelessly wove the energies that emanated from her kinetic dance using both her hands in specific mudras as well as her intent focused on specific areas in space. The merkaba was to be a sphere-like construct that would be big enough to hold her whole body within it. It started from a point around the top of her head, near her crown chakra and expanded several metres above and away on each side of her body before finishing at her feet. Here too, the Merkaba had a distance of several metres before the small conic shape of its extremity ended with a cord-like construct within the soles of her feet.
Once the Merkaba was almost fully woven, she sealed the outer parts, leaving only a few slits in the front side to allow for entering or exiting the energetic vehicle without friction. The first time she had tried the vehicle on a test ride, it was an exhilirating experience, much akin to that of going on a roller coaster ride, except that one did it with the astral body including particles of the body and not the full body. She remembered the thrill of that joy ride for several weeks after the experience was over and for days after the ride her body had still felt out of balance as she struggled to keep her astral body in check.
A couple of days after she had finished weaving the Merkaba, her light body had been fully activated. This was achieved by input of a large part of her higher self that entered through her eyes into her body and activated the dormant genes within her to allow for release of the particles that would accompany the astral body within the Merkaba. The gene activation was necessary so as to allow for the mutation of the DNA that would allow her body to release some of her particles and then reintegrate them without destroying them later on
The Elders informed her that this process was necessary for her to be able to travel so far within the Merkaba and make it back to her body without mishaps as the particles would act as a genetic map reintegrating the shell that was destined to hold them, a process akin to genetic imprinting. They assured her that she would be safe and should be grateful for the chance bestowed upon her to accomplish this trip. She realised that it was indeed a beautiful gift from the Source to be granted the possibility of ascending while still alive.
Once the trip over, she maintained very few actual memories, however, of the Ascension trip and what she had found out behind the veil was now part of a hazy string of memories that resurfaced from time to time. She remembered the appeal of the remainder of her body when she had left it to travel within the Merkaba as it had remained on Earth scared, disoriented and incapable of taking care of itself properly. She remembered the beautiful blue beings that had surrounded her with tokens of love, compassion and empathy for humankind.
She wished she could repeat the experience again but the blueprint of the Merkaba was no longer given to her by the Ancient ones. It was as if this was a preliminary test that they had allowed and despite her various appeals to them they remained aloof and did not transfer this information to her unconscious mind anymore. She wondered whether she would have to seek the help of a hypnotist in order to retrieve the blueprint or at least some memories of that beautiful Ascension trip she had made but somehow something always stopped her from pursuing this for now.
Every full moon night, she would look up at the skies and sigh as the looming moon reminded her of what it was like to be in the skies among the planets. One day, she swore to herself, she would travel again within a new Merkaba she would build. She would perform her kinetic dances again appealing to the cosmic dancer to grant her once more the knowledge of the right steps so that she could build up the appropriate energy waves required for the weaving of the Merkaba. She knew that sometime in the near future the Elders would come back to her and reveal the pattern to her again as she had been feeling their presence of late. She smiled up at the moon that seemed to smile back at her.
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