Khepri by Oliver Dodd

Oliver Dodd - Khepri
DU-DFSTN10

The clatter of the fire escape sliding down rings throughout the city. They’ll all be moving soon. The silence, people tucked away neatly in neat apartments with neatly set tables and looks of terror on their faces, allows the slipping metal to echo more than usual. The only other sound I can hear, have heard for some time, is wailing sirens and occasional clandestine gatherings.

My chin meets an iron rung of the ladder and I feel the already loosened teeth loosen a bit more. Voices yell after me. It’s not hard to climb down fast if you’re not afraid to fall. I had told them that, but they refused to follow. People look through their windows as I drop past. Before they can say anything, I’m gone. No one will see my face, obscured in layers of fleece, eyes narrow and focused slits. I can’t remember the last time I made eye contact with anyone, the last time anyone looked into me. I don’t remember a mother. Sometimes, it’s unclear if there ever was one.

I weave tangled trails as my feet hit concrete and I run, with no particular logic, through the emptiness. I’m sure people hear footsteps, but none are brave enough to come to the window and look down.

At this point, few want to know what’s out there, but I do. I want to know what lies beyond the horizon. I want to see the flowers bloom across the desert. I want to smell air and not exhaust. I want to eat soil, smear mud across my eager mouth, cup sand from the mirage and let it flow through my fingers like the water of the rivers that once ran.

The darkness begins to lift, the barrier of the city drifts away. It is finally safe to stop. No one dares cross this threshold. No one with any authority anyway. There’s always the possibility of others like me, others with no home, others that want to see the disc of the sun rolled across the eastern horizon. Others that do not fear the scarab, but embrace him.

I tie my laces together and sling my shoes over my shoulder. I have not been barefoot in some time. My feet ache, but the warmth of the desert meets them, comforts them, forms to them and I realize that I am home.

It’s growing lighter.

I continue on my path.

It’s growing lighter.

There are other bodies in the distance. They turn and our eyes meet, sink into my me and and further into me.

It’s growing lighter.

His figure silhouetted against the growing sky and shrinking darkness. The disc moves rapidly, his hands keeping up with it’s quickening rotation. No one sees him head on, but his profile is distinctive, his face replaced by the body of a scarab, a scarab full of eggs and opportunity.

When I cannot look any longer, when the sun is placed where he wants, where it belongs, and I find myself blinded, I look to the ground. As his fingers, the fingers of Khepri, run across the earth, I finally see. I finally see the desert bloom and the riverbeds fill with rushing water, clearer than a crystal, and I remember what it was like for us to be alive.

—

Raised in Atlanta, Oliver Dodd delved head first into production at the age of twelve. In 2008, he founded the label Konstructure, releasing techno, electro and experimental electronic music. This is his fourth release with Detroit Underground.

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