The Yellow Sign

Seeing Him is evidence of seeing Him

As I take my regular sojourn into the nearby woods, which I have named “Jotunheim” for the old Norse place of primordial horrors, I see foliage daubed in hues of gold and brown – of rust and evening sunlight. A stark reminder of the unavoidable writ upon the leaves, once vibrant and living – now given over to decay. As if to further drive this point home, the chain-link fence along my left side has fallen into disrepair, its once-ordered structure – the walls of Midgard – overgrown with dead and dying blackberries, whose tangled barbs and desiccated fruit weave between deformed links of corroded metal, both well past their prime and now pallid shadows – morbid caricatures – of what they once were.

The berries, which grow like weeds around these woods, have started to rot upon their bushes, and an undeniably pleasant odour of natural decay is omnipresent. I regret not cultivating them, and I think of what I could have made had I seized that moment, but instead, I let it slip away for the year. Deep and enticing blackness has faded, shrunken into a dry, lifeless scrap with no purpose left but to rot, slowly disintegrating into its constituent parts.

The air has grown somewhat cooler, and while there is warmth yet, the intimations of slowness and eventual halting lurk amongst the gilded rays of the sun, which is slowly beginning its westward descent behind me. As a natural accompaniment to the lurking coldness, subtle but unmistakable, the woods darken – the shadows lengthen. Trees, once verdant, are now skeletal and rapidly defoliating, as they don the creeping blackness like the Plutonian shroud of auld Saturnus himself.

I am surrounded by the nearness of death and an ending – the Ending. ‘Things fall apart’ dead leaves say as they are crunched underfoot. ‘Things fall apart’ I read in the twisting blackberries’ withered cursive, still thorny and hostile despite their relative lifelessness. ‘Things fall apart’ intones the chilling darkness betwixt unadorned, grasping branches, like the hands of autumnal revenants. The 11th hour has been struck, and it is the dying-time which life dreads and struggles vainly against, devising all manner of fortification against the pale masque, the avatar and spectre of inevitability – and their ivory towers too shall fall.

Thus, I have found the Yellow Sign.

– 513

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