Eric Vargas's Blog, page 4

The Mere Tide P68

In the taxi she bawled in the pilot’s arms. Sulfurous shame burning in her breastbone’s gulch hot as chark.

Destination?

Any fucking where.

The taxi got onto the River Loop following the Volga. It crossed on the Bay Hauser and drove North two miles and crossed again on the Brendan. On their third circuit it let them out at a park. The pilot carried the child to a concrete bench overlooking the faultless sulky glace of the river. A pinchbeck phallus of sunbeam erect upon its watery navel. Old pigeon feeders spread their crumbs for the cote while their husbands debated the merits of dognapping. Men in suits fresh from lunch returned to their places of labor. A lay mystagogue was coming down the boardwalk proclaiming this 24th of April in emphatic baritone but the winter chill spilthed downwater seemed to recall in the weathered counters of the bums other solstices both bleak and secular and when he saw the child he lost heart and hid his psalter embarrassed and hurried on.

What are your plans?

No plans. Dachni’s words more quiet than the clouding of her breath.

I havent said it enough. I want you to stay with me.

Fer why?

I want to be around you. I like you. I want to watch you grow up. I want you to be my daughter. Or sister. Or friend or whatever you want me to be to you. I dont care as long were together.

Is that really yer mean?

Anaya jaculated her backwards in soundless exasperation. Yes, she said throwing her head forward again. Of course I mean it.

Dachni got from the bench and began to amble about in dejection. Her chest throbbed. She seemed to be weighing the pilot’s admission. She kicked old beer cans and then she wanted a beer but she didnt ask for it and then she didnt want the beer. She wanted water but she didnt ask for that either. She walked to railing and looked out at the river. She found the ledge with her foot on the waist of a spindle and climbed up and sat. The pilot was at her side in an instant.

If you jumped what would happen?

Ye’d be right affer.

Thats right. Id probably be down there before you even broke the water.

Dachni searched this out and found good truth in it.

Youre the bravest girl I know. Youre the bravest person I know. Braver than me.

Dachni gave a sheepish smile as is done to the solicitous platitude known to be a lie.

But Anaya was serious. I mean it. Look at these people. Theres a scarcely a handful older than you however old you are.

Dachni looked at the couples.

Not those. Nor the destitute. Look at the rest. The professionals. The tradesmen.

Theys harly any dont seem ten gallons older.

Thats. Do you see anyone younger than that?

Dachni looked up and down the river walk. There were no children. None in the rebellious age. She shook her head.

The pilot nabbed a woman going by by the collar and her canvas weekender bag dropped to the concrete.

What are you doing?

How old are you?

The woman beat at the pilot’s wrist but the pilot lifted her up by the shoulder so that only heel toe was left grounded.

How old are you?

Im five, she huffed still struggling.

The pilot let her go. Can you remember when you were sixteen?

The woman straightened her jacket. Yes I can.

And you know its a fake memory.

Yes I know that. She bent down to retrieve her bag.

What do you do?

You cant interrogate me.

There is no limit to the dagestai. Answer me.

Im a market research analyst.

And you went to school.

Yes. No. You know what I mean.

You remember going to school.

Yes.

But you never went.

Yes.

Does it bother you.

I dont think about it.

But they gave you good memories.

I have to go.

Go.

The woman strode off, looking back angrily every few steps.

She were a liar.

No. Shes five years old. They grew her in a vat and they gave her memories and a skill and put her out. It isnt an unfair trade. What they lack in childhood theyll gain in their later years. Theyll most live to a hundred and eighty. Maybe longer. And its not as if their memories lose any of the flavor because theyre fabricated. They give them rich lives. Some of them have histories so traumatic that they require therapy. Thats how real it is to them. And if their job is lost its to the Bureau of Skills and Labor for retraining or augmentation. They dont have genetic flaws, their genes are the best that can be developed. Their prospects are made. An AI analyzes them over three years and selects their partner, and taecatchka, often enough theyre happy. Theyll never wonder about their future. Not in the way we do. Their conditioned not to. True theyre allowed to develop a personality of their own but theyre allowed to develop a personality. The rationale is they wouldnt know the difference and no one else would and its true. You cant tell the difference. How would you tell the difference between yourself and what yourself might have been? In a way they have it much easier, in a way much better, and in another way much worse. But you came into this world the hard way. Theres nothing certain about you. Your future is a maelstrom in a supernova. You might never belong. You might never find meaning in anything. You might fail in everything that means anything to you. It could be you succeed in driving me away. And maybe a time will come when youre standing on the edge of a bridge and theres no one to stop you. And your end might be broken on the pavement. Thats the truth of you. But. It could be you find the place you never want to leave. It could be you find a meaning so beautiful as to trip the tongues of a legion of poets. It may be well always be together. And maybe there will never be another bridge again.

Dachni folded her shirt over her hands.

Do you know what you mean to me?

She shook her head. No.

Look around.

Dachni did.

What do you see?

Trees an people an water an lottsa buildings big.

Does it mean anything?

Guess no. Or maybe. Doan know.

Meaning can mean nothing without others. When I see a tree I think of the shade it might give you. When I see a car I think Id like to teach you to drive. When I pass a restaurant I wonder what foods you might like to try. You force me to see meaning. Vision it perhaps emanations, shadows, but not the black or smoke blue that falls from the suncast but parings of the living thing see through and what it can do. Do you understand?

Kinded maybe.

Anaya smiled.

Dachni gripped her suddenly with madstrength. Does ye mean it? Does ye mean it? Really really mean it? An its ok to stay? An ye dont…ye dont…

Anaya squeezed her gently, shoulder to shoulder. I mean it.

The Mere Tide P67

The service shuttle paused briefly at the stop sign, headbanging on its carriage, damp running down its aluminum skin as though it sallied forth upon roads it would rather not, its brake lights in sustained red flare then dimmed, then joined the traffic.

Anaya claimed there would be another but the beaten halt enthroned knew not what another. She was blind to most this city and though it dwarfed the half resuscitated ruins of Perm it inspired no marvel. It bore a vague order articulable to the trashbins struggling to maintain a semblance of sanitation against the apathy of a population of technophiles beboggled by headgear connecting them to the net who gave them berth without remark. Who left a windfall wake of lagen ransacked by rats wherever they went. A loury drizzle manged the pinnacles of highrise and skyscraper, some masked over by vast advertisements of beverage and bread. Hologram spectaculars projecting along the flowing lengths of distant overpasses like the resplendent coronas of a concrete sun. Anaya wheeled her away from the angry lights of the squad cars through the parking lot to the sidewalk. The streets were devoid of any talk. The passersby, their heads canted at angles obtuse or acute and reaching out to touch things without physical reality and yet navigating their surroundings with assurance and even grace. Three streets fed the intersection before the clinic and they crossed with reckless ignorance of the traffic and the grate vapor that drifted over a putrid beggary egested out of areaways onto the five curbcorners like subsided porches. They looked like trash heaps and their smell carried through the petrichor and the exhaust. They monitored a translucent overlay managing the traffic that made the intersection look a green and troubled pool that would coalesce words on its surface but none dared a crossing for whom among them could be given the road?

Dachni also watched. Whats they say? she asked.

Walk.

What?

Walk.

The halt was crushed. She searched Anaya’s face for some reprieve or belayal but there was none and she shut her eyes and gripped the armrests and pushed. She rose tottering, touching her feet down to the glassy solar panels of the sidewalk, and did not fall. Anaya swiveled the wheelchair around and sent it gliding back towards the parking lot. By then the pilot had succeeded in flagging down a taxi. The doors slid back into the frame.

Hop in, he said.

But the shrill screak of train brakes were rising deep within the city and Dachni said, Thems go to the grad.

A bloated postdamsel slid their tickets through the vent in the glass and they bought ice cream with the change and sat in the cafeteria watching the trains dock and go. It hurt to breathe and was almost unbearable to swallow but Dachni managed her treat down in tiny bites. There were plenty others with them but the room was almost totally silent. Their heads all bowed to the gadgetry they were jacked to. Televisions were mounted along the wall and the reporters’ mouths moved but there was no sound. It was a long hour before the intercom announced their train and they went out and presented their tickets to the conductor. It scanned them, the machine, and handed them back.

The tickets read:

Car 002

Cabin 1

Class 1

In the walkin shower of their cabin they washed away the blood and toweled off and dressed again and the pilot unfolded the bed out of the seat and fitted the mattress cover to it and the sheets and blankets and helped the child to lay upon her. Through the tinted one way window they could see people rushing up bearing their luggage. Could see the city. At 18:32 a jerk transmitted through the iron couplings and they pulled out of the station.

For a long while the train moved as a flyut, sleek in the river of the highway’s lee. This city where night had no dominion slumbered none. Pockets of daybright were everywhere. Like stars brought close. Office buildings ranged like dressed mountains, the windows lit so that they appeared boards to a game of giants each a scenario to be solved by who knew what corporate strategy. To fill each window with light or vacate it so, and what the gain and what the forfeit? Road markers spurted by at regular intervals. A cartoon on the inside of a lane divider that if you abided the speed limit you could watch play out frame by frame. The track rose over a neighborhood of tenementhouses. Dense packed domiciles row on row, narrow streets between them. A few villas here and there. Far above motorcars followed the tunnels of their headlamps through the window shed of light falling haphazardly upon the city. When the track lowered they were by the highway again and they slowly surpassed a gypsiemobile. A barebones fiacre fitted with a combustion engine. The crazed romani on the bench steering by reins lashed to the front axle. The track bent to the south and they could see the downtown obelisks of light. As they crossed the Chagan fireworks were let off. Glittering arcs of phosphor that burst into flags of choral that hollowed out to silty tulles dragging down like tears in the rain.

The train sheathed itself in the long dock of a bricken flue and the cars sighed out the engine borealis like dissipating wings as it fitted to the guider. On the platform Dachni thought them returned to Uralsk but then she saw that the signs were in English illiterate though she be. They followed the tunnel to its exit on Namalsk Street. The pilot hailed a taxi and the undrivered pegasus pulled up and hinged up its door to admit them.

Matthias’ reforms had done well for the city. Entire districts had been razed, the last of apartments demolished and out of them new constructions, tenements centered around a clocktower XCIX. That would in classical fashion maintain time accurate to the Planck length. A starport. For to begin receiving shipments from Venus in not less than five months. In the last rotted rind of poverty dissolutes loitered at the corner stores exchanging badinage and prophecies of dislocation. Attar of sour mank. Windows boarded up. Whispers of abductions in the night. They watched the taxi into a richer district where the class lounged on cafe verandas taking their morning coffee. Whose children were daycared away from them. Professionals of trades, of economy and industry and R&D. They passed the Cletis Hall Museum of Natural History. Past the corporate parks where is exercised financial monasticism, every man the monk of his trade. A playground. A town center. A mall.

Dachni slammed her fist against the back of the seat demanding a stop.

The taxi pulled over.

Dachni.

No.

The taxi waited for an opening in the traffic and performed a U-turn and pulled into the mall. It let the child out in front of the Royalex Theater.

Goodbye, she said and shut the door. History shut away forever. This new life requires her correct by will her slight scoliosis. To lend her chin a flavor of pride. Her arms taut and tongue prepared. She strode oblivious to the morning rush staring through her own double in the shopface windows.

You gotta tell him not to bottom out, called a pedophilic wit from a bistro line.

These establishments had been open some hours but the recruiter was only just spreading his doors knowledgeable that comfortable men do not resign their comfort famished nor dozy. He was wedging a wooden doorstop in place when he found himself approached by a tabid ghoul shambling downcast. His boots were gray leather. Color of the pavement on which they stood. He tucked his thumbs behind his belt buckle. Numquam Defectus. He rubbed his lip. Between them postered likenesses of the recruiter made the patriot’s call with a meticulousness that for all the recruiter’s sharpness made him appear a derivative. After a minute he guessed. No, he said. There wouldnt be any place for you.

The Mere Tide P66

She woke in a room. Eyelids inflamed by sterile notsuns humming electrically. Artificial isotrope alike at noon as twilight. The odor that stung her nostrils was the odor of iodoform. A constant combat between the foul and antiseptic. Conducive neither to life. She listed cold upon a bed of ice. Her drywall is porous to a demented tension unstated. Squeak of gurney wheels to and fro. An incessant translation of the body’s function in flat tone spikes. They have replaced her veins with iron rails for the conveyance of the slag thereof. Her drained fluids panning. State of indigence. Bridled outrage in outer wards. The agony is indeed silent. The suffering long. Deposits of coins go before the dispensation of coffee. Never decaff. The communications are indecipherable and it is the shrill alarm that heralds the muted crepesole clap. She sees through the brackets of mock jarrah the wheel of an intermittent buffet down the hall to the beast next door. Do they return these victims from that gorge? And is reality more sound for their dismembering. They are a bloody clergy and they are scraping people from their steel altars with their knives. The beginning of their ritual is the washing of hands. The anointment of soap. They enter rooms with knife and saw. Laparotomists exploring the thoraxes of the maimed. And what can sate their divinations? Carrying away bright red bags vacuum sealed in the shape of viscera from which the hierosurgeons do draw prophecies. Mattoids lay cool in drugged torpor tacit accomplices in their own demise and return in dripping cerements of cloth sunken where the beast has partook. Menials mop the floor.

She croaked the name of the king and Anaya was there and she was comforted.

Is it you?

Its me.

Waking again she sensed another just departed. Is it you?

Its me.

Who was here?

The doctor.

Whyfore?

You had a heart attack.

Whats that?

The door opened. Slab deadened traffic grew loud. Wheeling and shoe falls and reports and a lalochezia banter. Marlish marlocking by a besmocked staff. Silenced again.

Has the scarecrow been bequeathed a brain? Indifferent inquisition.

Shes awake.

A middle aged doctor came to her bedside.

Im not sure what the wizard could have done for you.

Dachni forced her eyes to accept the bright blinding artificiality. Wheres the sun?

Im a physician not a meteorologist. Turn on the weather channel.

Cold bone brushed her face. Lets move her to a room with a window.

Im a diagnostician. Not a porter. The doctor leaned on the gurney rail. Grizzled man of sarcastic histrionics.

Why dont you tell her what happened?

Something else that falls outside of my established duties. Hold on let me check my contract. His head rose and little lines raced up over his eyes. And no. No clause says I have to explain to patients why their bodies are failing.

Youre the doctor.

Oh alright Ill make an exception this once. I mean its not like I dont have a ward to look after.

The pilot glared at him.

The doctor rapped the hardplastic headboard.

Dachni started.

Can you hear me…Ms. Gillespie.

Dachni regarded him fearfully. With great effort she nodded. Whos you?

Who is I am a doctor apparently brought low to the duties of a page. Who are you?

Dachni understood nothing of his saying.

The doctor opened a folder and made a pantomime of reading it. Lets see, he began in extended sigh. Righty. Have you ever heard of Your Law?

Dachni coughed in excruciation. No.

Everything that can go wrong will go wrong with you. Like my gyro. Because the idiots in the cafe can never remember to hold the feta. Which is in a way your problem too. I dont get my sandwich you dont get a doctor who cares. But ah ah ah I see your crazy little alien is getting upset. So you suffered a myocardial infarction in the coronary sinus brought on by extreme hypotonia which exacerbated a preexisting aneurysm to the point that it burst like a poked water balloon which in turn led to a transmural rupture. You know if Id gotten my degree from the college of wit Id write a ballad about it. Oh I guess Ill just have to settle with enjoying your suffering. So to summarize your body is falling apart and your heart barely functions. But dont worry. Shitty hearts have futures in politics.

The pilot rose trembling. Get out. Prepare yourself for death.

The doctor cocked his head. Im sorry is that advice? I mean if it is dont worry Ill go and shoot up on ovocaine. Kind of the shortcut to Zen or Nirvana. Whatever it is.

The pilot grabbed a syringe from off a table and jammed the needle repeatedly into his chest.

Goddammit. Crazy alien. Nurse! Nurse!

The door flew open. Two nurses gripped the knob. Blacks the both.

The pilot threw the doctor into them. Do not leave the premises. I will be killing you in the next half hour.

Youre a mad shit.

Do not let him leave.

The nurses wanted no part of this and they fell over another out of the room.

Who was the assistant surgeon?

The mustached nurse stopped. Doctor Sommer.

Bring him in.

Doctor Sommer arrived conciliatory. Let me first apologize on behalf of Doctor Saunders. He has an excessively eccentric manner in dealing with patients. I know its unprofessional but he is the premier diagnostician of this entire region and really behind the sarcasm hes a good person. Dedicated his life to the field of medicine.

Wheres he being held?

Held? Hes not being held. He was referred to the medical director for reprimand.

Send a guard to keep him in a room set aside for his slaughter. You will need mops. If you let him anesthetize himself it will be your head that adorns the rafters.

I-I-I cant see how that would…

Then dont see. Only obey. Or youll join him.

Sommer was an avuncular gentleman with silver spectacles. Of middling age and full hair.

I want you to explain to her the operation she underwent.

Sommer looked out the door at the nurses looking in. Ok. He approached the foot of her cot. Um. Ms. Gillespie. You had a heart attack and we had to operate.

Chest hurts.

Yes its going to be quite painful for a few months. There are medications we could give you that would alleve the pain pending authorization from your…guardian.

Stop talking about me. Tell her what happened.

Yes. You see we had to cut open your sternum so we could operate on your heart. Youre really lucky to be alive.

Cut?

Yes. We used a sternal saw to divide your sternum. Cut it in half basically. Then we used a solution to strengthen the vessels in your heart so that…

Dachni wasnt listening anymore. She pulled at the hem of her gown. A livid millipede of a scar squatted on her chest among the furious crisscross of older wounds darker in their healing or decay. No, she sobbed covering her eyes. Stop it.

Im sorry?

Her voice was broken to shards. Stop cutting. No more cutting. No more cutting.

Sommer left and the pilot stayed at her bedside until she was comforted and then she left and later to return in a suit of blood holding a dripping skin bindle. She held it up.

Do you want this?

No.

The pilot bowled the bag out the door. It came undone and the severed head of Saunder rolled out and his scrotum fell out his distended jaws and unraveled to contained phallus and testes marinated in the jelly of his eyes.

Not stayin, said Dachni.

They sawed open your sternum. Youre going to be out for a little while.

Dachni felt about her arms, pulling out her IVs as she found them. The sticky electrodes that when she pulled caused alarms to sound. The pilot silenced them.

Dachni.

Says no.

She found the catheter and without even any embarrassment anymore pulled it and let the leaking hose fall through the hole in the gurney to the pan. She labored an obscenethin leg over the gurneyrail. Letting it hang by the hinge while she gathered her strength to lift the other. She gripped the rail and pulled herself close to it and tried to sit up. Sharp agony scissored up her. Oh god.

Lets lay you down.

But her jaw set half fright relentless and she propped up on an elbow, her torso straight as could be managed, and drew herself up shrieking. The pilot braced her and collapsed the rail and helped her slide to the floor and into a chair where she bid her tarry while she fetched one with wheels. A wireframe wheelchair with simple leather coverings. From the cabinet against the wall she took out a sporty duffel bag that contained a change of her clothes. Her wolf parka and undergarments. She helped the child in them and a few minutes later she wheeled the child out. The staff didnt intervene not even the medical director who implored the refusing constabulary to make an arrest. The elevators vacated as they entered. The pilot pressed L and the doors closed.

The Mere Tide P65

Dachni watched the truck pull out onto the road. She shut the gates each in turn and went back into the nave.

On the tread of the second stair up to the ambulatory festered a fat circlet of a scab. The way it was colored it appeared as though an infected wound were eclipsing a pale sun of pus. She couldnt tell if it had percolated up through the marble or if it had only been laid down but she didnt dare touch it to discover which. In the kitchen the drawers were emptied of anything sharp. Plastic utensils flanked her plate of eggs and grits.

Dachni spat. Wasnt gonna do nothin.

But her heart was gagging on spider’s venom and the diastole seemed loathe to pass this blood out its chambers. She went to her room. The pilot had thrown baking soda on the mattress and the blankets were in the washing machine. She pulled up her chair and sat for a long while on it. Then she got up and went to the corner where the mosin nagant leaned. Heavy in her hands. She sat on the chair. A pressure was building in her chest. All the scars upon her body, would there not be some upon her heart? She threw the bolt forward again and put the stock on the floor and the barrel in her mouth and looking to the side fitted her big toe against the curve of the trigger and pushed. The bolt shot forward. Dachni fought down her gorge. She swung the rifle into her lap and ejected the round and chambered another and replaced the barrel in her mouth and pulled the trigger again and the bolt slapped in a dull metallic clang against the flared barrel rim. She threw the rifle down taking her gasps in huge convulsions. She knocked the chair over as she rose. She staggered back to the bed and collapsed in a plume of soda, clutching her fiery heartruin, burning burning burning, withered lorn burning through her.

Muh-muh, she coughed. She moaned, trying to force her voice to make the words. Her tiny fists pounded the mattress. Engghhh. Innnngh. Muh…muhhhh. At last she burst out. Mommy! Moooomy! She gripped the footrail. Mooooomy! Want mommy. Want mommy.

Two hours later she watched the truck backup to the gates. The pilot almost leapt out. She jogged forward her arms out to gather her.

Im so glad to see you.

Dachni moaned a little.

You didnt wait here the whole time did you?

Dachni didnt answer.

Did you have breakfast?

She shook her head.

Well before you do I have some things for you.

What?

Anaya carried her to the truck and let the tailgate down and folded back the tonneau. In the bed were a number of art supplies.

Was all this? she whispered.

Well I know how much you like to paint so I thought itd be good for you to have something to practice with. So take a look. Anaya began to sort through her purchases. You have some canvas paper. An easel. Sets of pastels, oils, acrylics. Heres some chalk. Some charcoal. A couple different kinds of paper…

Put down, she said urgently and with no little fright.

Are you ok?

Ye need to put down.

Anaya set her down.

Her nails dug into her chest to remove that other fist clenched within. Pitched ringing whined in her ears. She was very thirsty and her lungs could not draw in their breath. Her arm hurt. She turned, took a step, and dropped.

The Mere Tide P64

All after Dachni found herself under peculiar scrutiny. The pilot seeking some flaw in her disposition that would permit further intervention. When she ate. When she napped. She did these two things and walk between the stations and the former almost not at all. The melancholy in the observing disconcerted her to no small degree and she kept to her room but that evening in the deepest of her drowsiness the pilot came to her bed.

She said: I have discovered the feint.

Dachni with cheek to her pilot looked up at her. Ye fainted? she said sleepily. How come?

The pilot pulled the blankets up to her chin and spread her hands across her forehead and bones ever cold slipped round her head like a crown of knuckles. Dachni drifted. Formless not into the valley but a pale green hollow in the shape of a sphere and shelled round by sable weathers perturbed by desire. A gravity towed the child slowly towards a flawless pinprick throbbing red that the seething bordure slavered over itself to reach it. The shell was as a liquid egg through which creatures precipitated in such number that from afar they looked like rain. Dachni saw how living rivers charged towards the speck only to be dammed at their source by jaws that moments later were cleaved by the mandibles of other beats and saw a cancer of limbs crushed and how the showers of entrails and blood sped away insects in swarms and lightning rip through them and how they subsided upwards burnt and lifeless into angry resurrection. And she saw a spur of that dark surface explode into a phantasmagoria of beasts of every description winged things of flinty glass and powdery beings doe shy and fleet and she saw the weathers drip leviathans into being with their sick fins so mawked through by parasites, moaning in want, and how their drool became as anusless worms that gorged upon their host until their swollen nethers burst in frenzied swarms of winged cannibals howling like kamikazes towards their aim. Through this chaos Dachni proceeded unmolested. Her velocity increased every moment and she aw that the red mote was an orb that grew to enormous proportions. It glowed buts it light did not touch her or anything and she knew dimly that her shadow did not fall upon it not its upon her and she realized there was no shadow and in that realization something latched to her and dragged her back.

Dachni woke. The pilot was above her again or still and she was rubbing her back. Dachni let go her pillow and rolled over sniffling.

Hello little one.

Wadda yun want?

Do you want to go to Harter with me?

She did not so want. She had wet the bed and she wanted to shower and to change and she did. She saw the pilot out. A late gray morning. Delicate snow falling. Standing in the gateway the pilot asked again.

Why dont you come with? Change scenery a little.

Wanna stay home.

The pilot smiled kindly. Deceit fools not me. You wouldnt like a little fresh air?

No.

The pilot’s sigh sustained her robes about her. Are you going to be ok alone?

Itll all be fine.

Concern was plain in Anaya. Ill be gone a few hours.

Ye been gone some seasons. Itll be ok.

I left your breakfast on the table.

Thankey.

The pilot went out. Five seconds later she reappeared. You know what? Why dont we go out for brunch. Theres a diner youd like.

Esent hungry.

You might get hungry.

No.

Dachni.

Etll be fine. Aint gonna…aint gonna do nothin. Gonna go back tuh sleep.

You can sleep on the way. After Im done we can go swimming.

Its too cold.

They have an indoor pool.

Anaya nothins gonna happen.

The pilot walked on her knees to where she sat and hugged her tightly. Are you sure youre going to be alright?

Itll be alright.

The pilot rose. Her hand trailing in her own. Ill be back soon. You wait for me. Ok?

Ok.

She went out. She heard her talons digging into the gravel. Heard the truck start. It pulled up before the gates. The window rolled down. Are you sure you dont want to come?

Dachni nodded. Itll be ok.

Im sorry I left you. I wish I hadnt.

Its ok. Everthings ok.

Anaya leaned out of the window. Youre my soul you know. Ill be home in two hours. I promise. Promise me youll be here when I get back.

Dachni didnt promise.

Anaya got out and held her face. Promise please.

But she couldnt promise.

The Mere Tide P63

In the library the pilot broke out her stores a cognac distilled in honor of Maxence Jaccoud’s ascension to the siège éclairé, that Parisian seat that the tribunes monitor with fear, and which the roi had sent her along with invitations to tour his country and was assassinated two months after his coronation and his successor Marchelle had not renewed the invitation. The keeper of the time, the mantle clock, had not changed pace for any nor all miseries occurred that hour of which the viewer may warrant innumerable but is of number. A mudslide in El Cuenco interred half a favela. The hijack of a river junk in the Philippines. An Ethiopian famine. A thirteen hour siege in the budget office of Hempstead, New York ended with the surrender of six unrepentant members of the JTT, their tabloid trial to be broadcast as their electrification two months hence. A patricide in China escaped at last to the prison of old age when at his promotion to local dibao the outburst of his confession was met with disbelief. And he would die an honored man. And even in Harter that very second an infidelity was unraveling out of the mizmaze of graded truth and omissions. All small destructions of spirit. All light vanishing in the endless affirmation of outer dark.

The pilot filled two glasses and set one before the child. She sat conched in a velvet fleece comforter and her nauseous heartmeat bestrung in its veiny web retched a heavy horrid din in her hers. She took up the cup the pilot had poured and raised it quivering to her lips for in all her imbibing she had not learned it loosened tongues nor that men could speak what they themselves did not know they knew.

It aintent yourn study anyhows, she muttered in painful breathlessness at last.

The pilot turned swiftly, her eyes misgiving. Youve changed too. I hadnt thought you would speak first. But preemptive defense isnt offense.

Dachni regarded her over her cup rim. It atent yer study.

Of course it is. We kill at will. Can we not also save at will?

Ets no reckon.

The pilot rested her head on the mantle. She looked over her shoulder in that way exceeding the lateral movement of men that the aienee could do in likeness to birds. Your death is not your own. What rot is windfall to ravens can lose nothing. And so your death belongs to me. Its not something to reckon. Even animals tend their own.

Ye aint human.

Neither are you.

Dachni glared at her.

Even in that alienness we find solidarity. Empathy arises through commonality. The closer the origins, the hotter the crucible, the greater the bond but this empathy decreases the greater the distance between agents because howsoever similar our beginnings our choices are our divergences. Lest we are bound by covenant we stray apart in such a state as we are now imperiled. Because you imperil me in choosing death. You shear me away and there is nothing I could give you because you are no longer. You dont think we have an obligation to one another?

Are ye fuckin serious?

Of course.

Everybody’s eating each other.

Unlike us.

Dachni didnt answer. She sipped from her cup and set it on the table. Ye aint never seed a bear eat its bearlins?

No. And neither have you.

But they do it.

Are we bears?

Yer talkin noncess.

Even a cannibal might not forsake the possibility of a dialogue.

Whats cannibal?

A cannibal is someone who eats people.

Ye doan talk ta food.

Thats right. So dont make people your food.

Dachni shook her head. Its nah howta say. Its happens. Ye seen it. Ye go anywheres of folk of want an theyll sink teeth on ye bone. Ored go anywhere an folks fighteds out an piece inta fields an rumor say it them flowers an trees is eat dead inta ground an ifn ya eat em ya eat people anyway.

Who was the source of the rumor?

Enna bar.

Well. Its not a rumor. Thats decomposition. At death cells break down and the proliferation of necrophagic colonies consume us. Plants do the same, absorbing the dead through their roots. And any carnivore who happens by is welcome to the meat.

So is right!

No.

Howta hell not?

Because people are not dead. Howsoever flesh is esteemed as fine cloth whether tulle or silk or charmeuse it is mere cloth. Beauty resides it but that truth is in the surface alone. There is a depth to us deeper than our osseous architecture. Deeper than the marrow. Theres truth also to that framework but it is a truth invested in itself and penetrates no deeper. The overflowing soul coats it in itself where it derives any meaning at all. A man who loses an arm cannot be thought to be less but the extinction of a man divests the world of a world. All the tragic happenstance that conspires us to excellence or vice, the rhapsodical whirlwind of instinct staved by the rational nail, the holy tedium, venial folly, usurped triumph and achieved defeat, poetic intellect. The grand richness of wit lack and humor and greatest of all the will. A body vacated of such grandeur cannot be called living. And yet the form is the representation of life. A corpse decayed is the natural process by which the earth is replenished but to hollow out the breathing torso, to greed the skin and glut on the organs of increase, that is the crowning horror desolate to the host for which all bespoken is allegory.

Ya eat Jesus.

Catholics eat Jesus. I refrain. In any case the sacrament has nothing to do with me.

He doan keep howed anyways. Jesus dont.

No, he doesnt.

Nothin keeps. Ye dinnint.

Im here arent I?

Tells Jesus es always here.

The pilot searched their rococo confines. What do you think?

He aint here.

Was he ever here?

No. Ye can tell whens a folk is in a room an they aint no tell on him.

Youve turned quite apostate.

True aint blasphemy.

He exists though.

Course does.

What do you think he would say?

Who gives a shit?

You wouldnt be interested in hearing a god opine?

Do what?

Give opinions.

What would the matter? He caint do nothin no more than nobody else.

Even if he were here.

He aint never come down.

Then how did people know of him?

Dachni didnt answer.

Do you think hes scared?

Dachni looked at a tall oil mural. Gray haired harrowed giant with enormous erection masticating a human torso red at the eaten edges. Wouldnt be no blame to be. Across from the infanticidist was another in likeness, a naked lunatic at feed his own fly hounded genitals trying to copulate with the extricated womb of his victim. Whos that?

Thats for you.

Who is it?

Thats Viakki Yel Caidsii. An avatar of Yandvilai. Its no god of suicide but of rampant and insatiable hungering.

He looks it.

Was yesterday the hardest day of your life?

No.

What day was?

Well drowned.

When your father threw you in the well.

Aye.

Well. He drowned himself.

It prolly isnt true.

No it isnt. Dont you want to find him?

Dachni shook her head. Dont care no more.

Well. Im here still.

Yell fuck off at the suit.

What is the ox liver’s forecast? Ill not argue, I protest Ill not again.

Ye will. An better the soon is does.

The better to confirm your beliefs of me.

Yer only you.

True, I am myself. And we are all ourselves. All unfortunate reflections of the same unintermediated infinite, the same aspectual manifestations that by the mere virtue of existence refers back to its origins, that wellspring from which gods and mortals alike owe common ancestry so that the signified and the signifier coexist in the same entity. Spiegel Im Spiegel. Seelen in Seelen.

No souls.

When did you learn German?

No souls.

No god?

Dachni shook her head.

For all that he cares.

An a shit neither.

Well. I dont think thats true. I think your god is a king of shattered bones tacked to a rotted unpieced tree from which he was never able to descend. I believe he thought he had it in him to do so but when the time came lacked the strength. Because he was only a stepping stone between the high forms and the meditative age of Apostolic dominion. At the dawn of the renaissance it was over for the begotten revolution of science reared upon its roots and waylaid them totally with their rabid reductionalism. God understood his children would rebel, what he could not foresee was that they would win. Or refused to see.

What about Ntzni?

Pride disbanded the Epiinymos but even they were not so foolish as to arrogate the sole right to create to themselves nor did Ntzinieyii allow us indulge in that fantasy neither. Which is the difference between our geneses. Theres the same cautionary tales, the same anthropomorphism of nature, the same litanies of illness, nation rise sick and fall. Whats different is that we are forced to acknowledge the naked horror of our sordid origins without claims of favor or transcendancy, no claim that all is right with the world where you, you must ever confront the grotesque rottenness of your species and scrounge about in the very viscera of the world searching for glints of some illusory history that never was and future that will never be. You predicate worth upon gods but what has the divine to do with the mundane? A god dispelled of personality and presence and reality, reduced to a value hierarchy is bereft its organizing force. A god begins time. And we can all claim to live under the reign of that time.

An Yandi? What woulds say your ta him?

See me not.

He sees ye. Done seened him. Hes here. Ye caint take him back.

No. You cant. But theres something else that perhaps even Yandvilai cannot stop. Maybe.

What?

Tolstoy writing on martial affairs criticized the misappropriation of physics by military science when calculating fighting strength. He said what ever lacked in the equation consisting of force and mobility and technology and supply was a mysterious unquantifiable variable that was the spirit of the army. But what he had not realized, perhaps afraid to realize, was that the focus of science in all its pursuits and permutations has been to reduce that variable to zero. That variable which is the divine element.

Ye said there was no divine.

I never said that. I asked what impact had the lack.

But ye said…

Call it the will.

Fine.

In any case success is always near at hand because it is believed to be at hand. But moreover because it is a pleasure to crush a man. In breaking a man the misanthrope replicates himself like a virus raping a cell. As though he were converting a bitter enemy to his number. In their specious moralizing they deem themselves immune to this cruelty and of course decry it the moment that cruelty turns upon themselves but in truth many escape to death satisfied that they have effected real good in the world. Some cornered take refuge in the mock of suicide and it can be done. Rare is the man who will not break. Those who dont are oft enough spared by the laziness or disinterest of their tormentors. But thats not what brought you to the jump.

Et esent your sayed. He aint cared shit longed tist tides. Whats ta do with that? Ifn god dont want ye whats of point? What can ye say?

The pilot regarded her sternly. Who says it matters? Who says it matters? Were here. Theyre not. Were here in their playground. Im not giving anyone the satisfaction of watching me keel over like a dog. The apathy of gods is not too great a burden. It can be lifted. And it can be set down. The choice is up to you to do what thou wilts with the weight. Casting it upon the backs of others is easy. Learning to bear it. You bear it with your soul. Trying to make god care serves to worsen. I dont know what total rejection from god would do to you but it wouldnt kill me.

Itd kill ye.

Suffer me out of existence for he must suffer my being even if it is in the past. Or make you kill others. Tis the difference tween us. I destroy whats outside of me. You destroy yourself. But neither is a solution.

Solves some problems.

Since when is your speech spite? Learn to live without gods.

Ye mean turn atheist.

I mean learn to accept youre not wanted and in such acceptance go your way. I dont say it wouldnt be a torment but what else would you do?

Ye caint dopt nobody elses gods.

On the contrary.

Ye still got folks.

No, said the pilot shaking her head. Im like you. But you have a mother.

Shes dead.

I am not.

Ye aint mothered. Aint a mother.

I am if youll let me.

No.

You dont want a mother?

No.

Do you have any regrets?

No.

And a father?

Is essent a matter.

If it wasnt the evacuation of god from the world what was it then?

Whats what then?

What happened that made you want to kill yourself?

Decided happened.

Youve never decided anything in your life.

Plenties cyded.

Example.

Dachni cast about the room as though her history were in some part contained in it.

This is first.

The first decision in your life and you decide to kill yourself.

Dachni narrowed her eyes.

You dont find that strange?

Does ye?

What unbalanced the scales?

Sake magle. Sayge sake….Say aike. Say right.

Why decide to kill yourself? What was your reasoning?

Dachni wandered her eyes to the floor. She didnt answer.

I am surprised.

Thasts a lie.

Is not. Ere the ponderer can ponder his place he must first conceive the place.

Hells that mean?

A cat will lay down to die in the wilderness but youd be hard pressed to find any member of felis hurling itself in front of a bus. Suicide is ultimately an act of abstracting the self into oblivion. An understanding, however primitive, must be possessed of history’s depth else you could not fathom to snuff yourself from the future. And so I find my own self incredulous as to your claim. You traversed the desert and at the first oasis attempted to drown yourself in a waterhole. And yet what reason could have prompted you? Maybe your intellect is inadequate to such articulations of logic but I dont believe that. I believe in the insufficiency of a suspicion. You are distaff of a proud lineage of logicians that however excitable never moved without a foundation in reason. Too much. They might jump off a bridge but not without being sure theyd hit pavement and that headfirst.

Hahta hell is ye knowed anythin.

I talked to Catherine.

Ta fuck for?

To obtain a portrait of you.

Tih fucked a would pictured for?

Not that kind of a picture. Not a drawing.

Who ell said ye of drawings?

There is no picture. I meant a psychological profile. Childhood anecdotes. I wanted to know what you were like before we met.

Yer crazied.

Is it crazy to think you didnt exist before I met you? That I could evoke you out of darkness absolute? No. Nor ist insane to want to know more of you.

An ye went a ta wrong person. Ye caint rust nothin that sunuvabitch says.

Yes, so I must listen to what she didnt say.

Dachni swiped her cup from the table and drank. What were her said?

Not much. And there was a dinner and a long look out the window before I got that out of her. She doesnt drink you know.

Where is she?

With her father.

An wheres he?

In the grad.

What wus her say?

She said you werent her sister.

An him? The dad?

He said you werent his daughter.

Dachni’s face made a pained twitch. She finished her drink and stared at the raised ring in the bottom of the cup.

She aint yer fuckin sister neither.

Half-sister.

Aint either.

She said the same but shes still your sister.

She doan think so.

It doesnt matter what she thinks.

Well she done said fucked it.

No. She said that but its not all she said. She did come around. I thought it would have been Henry.

Who?

Henry. Her father.

Whatd he say else?

You dont want to hear it.

Cause its true. Its jess him more about sayin not wantin people.

Yes.

So then say it.

He presented me with a formal disestablishment of paternity and went on to lay out quite meticulously the case that he had never been an equitable parent.

Thasses it?

Yes. He left the apartment afterwards.

An Cathy?

Anaya got the bottle and relocated to the couch and refilled the child’s glass and poured her own cup full. In the end Cathy said you could never understand people because you never believed they existed. I told her it wasnt existence you doubted but substance. I told her it wasnt others you doubted but yourself.

Thats crazy.

Are you cold?

Ye could say a fire on.

Does your arm hurt?

Hurts ta hell.

How are you?

Will ye put on a fire?

Dachni.

What?

Say your name.

Dachni turned suspicious.

Denying thyself cannot insulate that self from injury. Look at yourself. It hasnt worked.

What?

You never reference yourself. And now youve take it to its logical conclusion. But therein lies the paradox. How can a self nonextant commit suicide which is the annihilation of the self? How can a thing that doesnt exist have community? Have companionship?

Yer talkin crazy.

Who are you?

Ye done said.

But what did you say.

Yer you.

Dachni clawed uneasily at her ear until blood ran from her hair. What else did she say?

Catherine? What makes you think she spoke beyond that?

Cause she did. Whatd she say?

Anaya listed. You dont want to hear. Lets get back to you.

She said. What is it.

Why do you want to hear it?

Cause shes sister, sneered the child.

Its only…

Only bad. Done knowed that.

She didnt say it thinking Id relay it to you. It was a private conversation.

Tell.

You want me to tell you the worst so you can go on hating her.

No. Want ta hear the truth.

The pilot rubbed her face. She prays for your death. She visits the Lady of Our Ascension every Sunday and implores the mater to abandon her role.

Esent tat ta fuckin news.

Shell get over it.

She alwees hated everbuddy.

Did you hate me?

Everone hated you.

Did you hate me?

Dachni drank. The two soulless vacancies in her skull fixed her.

I dont believe that, said the pilot.

Ont no cares bout nobody but theyselves.

Then why arent we killing each other constantly?

Who aint? An its groups. An ye caint do it constant ye gotta breath in tween of fights but it dont mean folk aint thinkin it out knuckles.

Were in a period bloodier than most and will grow bloodier yet, but this isnt true the world over. Right now in the grad there is an exhibition of the neosurrealist Edger Sobel at the St. Francis Art Museum. Belgium has an eight percent poverty rate. You cannot presuppose homogeneity in a system even if there are averages. τόδε γὰρ καὶ εἴσι.

Seen nuff. Doat wun nothin doned weth ets. Folks ky same jess one gets it. An efn does mean she dont an then a murder sneak rings outta nowhere an stales it with a knife.

You know what youre describing?

Life.

War. Life isnt war. Life isnt suffering either. Life is life. And suffering is suffering and joy is joy.

Lifes fallin outta deaths an back to it.

Let me ask you this: Is it your belief that death negates meaning?

What?

Do you think meaning is impossible because of death?

Dachni couldnt understand. She shook her head. Well ye shut up? Yer the ones what worded.

And youve a way with Words.

That aint yer real say. Yeve got other says.

Ill not say those says to you.

Why?

Because Im trying to pull you out not get you in deeper.

She sipped her brandy as though to demystify the subjects at hand but all they did was grow more muddled. Whats meanin?

Anaya’s face made a funny twitch. Sorrow and pride. She joined her hands at the palm blades and fanned her talons and the hands again in a gesture of encompassing. Theres your genius. And isnt that the question? What does meaning mean? How is it defined? And what its reference? Is it a locality to be visited? A reservoir to be tapped? Anaya bowed her head. She lifted the bottle but rethinking put it down again and covered the mouth as thought blessing it. Were I to confess myself. She took up the bottle then hastily and downed many drams in a balloon of cheeks and air rush up through the draining spirit. History is predicated upon us. In part. But what of the nonactor? What of the inert? No. There cannot be such a thing. Even the littlest crumb under shade of grass performs its role. Does meaning butt the object? A subject is also an object. Ject means to throw. Ob means inversely. To throw upon oneself. The object objectifying the subject. The subjects rejecting their objectification. If I had to contest. Id say what manner of narcissist in the acme of onanism could through what solipsistic recursiveness delude so illegitimate a conclusion as to pronounce the self justifies the self. What justification could there be of trivial an existence delimited by time. What hope could such fragile trifles harbor? A brick in time’s wall. At best this sensation of purpose is an evolutionary development akin to the thorn to delay reason’s onset that instinct may bring us to procreation ere reason obliges us to self-slaughter. I am that I am.

Dachni slouched like a puppet. Yer purtied as a voice. But it aint…it aint…

Yours the prettier and the music of my ears. Youll be a singer of a day.

Never reckon so.

Ill teach thee sweet melodies. I long to do so. But your question. What is meaning? In that way certain phenomena defy physics and so defy intelligibility things occur that defy meaning. Because they do not permit life. Today is the second centennial of the subsumption of Portugal by Spain. What followed the conquering is called Lamento da Mãe, because Portugal was the aggressor spurned on by Madre Nelinha Cabral. She escaped with her entire family to Canadian asylum. She lost not even a cousin. Her descendants are alive today all vocal advocates of Portuguese independence. From Ontario. For their abandoned supporters every male over twelve, every female over ten was executed. Of course the dragon reales killed everyone they could get their hands on. Nineteen million. Can you even call that a crime? Its reported that the amount of ash was equal to that of Heard’s ’84 eruption. It was such a shock that the survivors rather than attribute meaning to the slaughter preferred instead to deny it significance altogether and to this day there is not a single church in the province in repair no matter the investments by Rome. They did name it. The survivors called it Drenaje. The FDR called it Impuestos. But parents would rather inter their children in dead earth rather than lay them upon the pyre of a god. Because meaning, however horrific, carries a connotation of goodness, and because god is so often mistakenly conflated with meaning the backlash is against him. But for all the overpowering sensation of purpose yet meaning’s rim is ever and anon haunted by the whispering slaver of futility. There are none more susceptible to this than professors but even strong men quail. But it must be this way. Were meaning an artifact exhibited at a carnival for the foolish to annually mock the educated would be most assured but it is its very insecurity from which any meaning is derived at all. For meaning is the tensive root that feeds on the grave. And is no reservoir. Nor the sunlight synthesized by the soul. Because it cannot be reduced to a process thought a process occur. My great fear is that it cannot be lost. For the risk must be run. There must be some souls who in wretchedness and despair dissolve the bands of common fellowship and with their deadened eyes forsake life. But not you. Not you.

Dachni shook her hung head. Theys too much. Too much.

Suffering.

Aye.

Anaya turned her gaze to the replica of the judgment and Charon and the snaked scarfed elfear. Let me ask you. Those girls in the mountains.

Dachin’s face gave a mean twitch. What about em?

Do you feel sorry?

Fer what?

Anaya took up the bottle and drank.

What?

Suffering is with you.

An also with you.

Yes.

Ye wunnint reckon et too much?

I must be careful how I speak of this. Everyone suffers.

Meat be everun aughted die.

Wrong answer. Youve suffered inordinately but youve also brought much suffering to others.

Never evilled nobody.

Is that true?

Is.

Do you really believe that?

Dachni set down her drink and thought hard and at the end nodded her head. Yes. Never ded no hurt.

I can think of a few times.

Like what?

Anaya didnt answer.

Ye know mebbe yers wrongs. Itd be great a more happy that way.

You dont think anyone would weep if you were gone?

You wouldnt.

Anaya looked aggrieved.

Ye might.

Of course I would.

Nobody hives a damn now hows gonna gived ifs gone? An deaths is all inda end.

For everyone.

Ferred aye.

What about god?

He dont own no fucks.

I care.

Who cares?

Im not god but isnt that something.

Aint.

Why does god have to care?

If god doan care hows anyone gonna else? Whatre ye gointa say ta him? Hes wrong? Yer smart but even ye aint god.

Scream his wrong. Rail like a breechlock all thy words. If your landlord disavows his property does it mean the tenets must also? Can they not discover the proper running of a complex? Are we not the caretakers of this drifting obloid?

Fuck this shithole. Aint nobody gonna cry an it gone.

Id cry.

Ye’d be dead.

Id cry.

An wouldnt a damn be.

No one has to give a damn. No one has to do anything.

Then why cry hell? Why hell cry?

Because we choose to. We have the choice. And I for you. For you for you you contumacious little heartbeat. Theres a richness in you. A raspy quirk, a singularity of tongue. Every word a triumph. The small kindnesses. You woke me up in a halo of flowers. A cold night of us together has warmed me many nights alone. Who wouldnt grieve over the bones of those?

None.

The world needs you.

Everyone dies.

Everyone is born.

Ets emptied out.

People?

Aye.

Theres nothing in us?

Gutty parts. Hasent meanin even if is yer meanin.

What possesses value may bequeath and receive the same. Can steal it away.

Never said was worthed nothin. An ye aint nothin. Nothin ever was nothin. Cold agyed tever. Folg can ay ever.

Why correct speech if all is meaningless? Why exchange one babble for another? Why should it matter if youre understood unless you desire to be understood? The very passiveness of language’s acquiring grounds it in the community of the biological. It speaks to a yearning to belong.

No.

If anyone can say anything what gives veracity to your unrespected say? Or say your true ifn ye is of worth.

What?

The pilot reached out to the child and the child shrank away shrieking.

No touches! No touches!

Why not? We speak why not touch? Listen you are not all that is real.

Dachni hid herself under the fleece. No! No! No! No! No!

The pilot took her gently by the arm and the child flapped the other in dismay, screaming like a bereaved banshee.

Calm down, said the pilot. Calm down.

It took a good minute. Her tear drenched face and snot drenched lips. Looking as though she could not place how she had gotten there. The pilot wiped her face with a sleeve.

Thats enough.

Noooo touches, choked the child. Nooo.

But the pilot massaged her scalp. Dachni rolled her head low and dropped back down into the hot fabric and hid herself. The pilot pulled wide the little opening at the top.

You dont think community is possible.

No, she wailed.

Then why bother knowing the people around you?

Go wayyyyyy.

Why talk to them?

Dessent wanna talk! she squalled. Ets you! Go way! Goway! Goway! Nobody asked yer help! Nobody wants ye round! All ye do balb an noise an wakes et all worse! Whats us yer want? Goway!

She slumped weakly down. The pilot refilled her glass but the child pushed it away at the proffer.

Why are you angry at me?

Auggie gef. Ause irr orkented. She tried clarifying her insults but the tunnel of her throat was raw and desolate of salt and all that would come out was a moist choking.

The pilot rewrapped her in the comforter and they sat a long while listening to the stutter of the clock hands. Dachni began to cry again. The pilot laid down on the couch, her head in the child’s lap. The child regained a measure of composure and placed her hands on the pilot’s face.

Would ye keep a life as this? she said.

I kept a life as yours. Am trying to.

Thats you.

Its us. Were in the same place.

Yer here.

You dont think things can improve?

Ye said morrows better but hassint been a tomorrow wasnt high ghast.

I believe you told me that.

Ye said it.

Theres been no betterment?

No.

Then what have I been doing?

Dont know.

Why do you want to die?

How came ye wanna live?

Because hell is entered through death, not the other way around. You worship Yandvilai.

Aye.

Yandvilai co-rules Iphsisavios with another and we never know what this being is. If you approach this from the perspective of literature you could argue that Yandvilai’s betrothed is never known because you never know what your wrongdoing is wedded to. Or how wrong your wrong is. Yandvilai is no good god Dachni. Thats the god of ravenous betrayal. Keep that in mind.

What did ye say happins when ye die?

You are dragged down to Iphsisavios if thats your worship.

But its not a real real place.

The pilot leaned close. Nay. I was made there. But thats another world. Lets be concerned with here. Here for all the tragedy and mishap life is worth living and it is us who can make it worthwhile. I dont speak of the outweight of pleasure over suffering neither advocate the spartan existence adequate but the beauty imbued in the world, the art of the artifice. Youll never escape this hell if you run from it. You want to throw yourself off a cathedral and splat on the stonework and theyll bury you in the earth out which youll arise a day to suffer anew. And Yandvilai has not complete dominion over this world. Hell is a pit without abyss, you never will get free.

Life aint everlasted.

Hell everlasts.

Dachni reckoned this true.

So you go to hell and being tormented at every turn you decide the only means of escape is to throw yourself onto the pikes of your torturers? And youre utterly bereft of curiosity as to why youre here. Or why anyone is here.

Esent no revel out. Its the world way.

I dont think so. I think you traveled to the floor of the pit ere you were ready and when you came back up your eyes were clouded over with the curdled dross that wheresoever you cast your sight you could only see through the pit blood. You plastered your own mask over reality and sealed off every glint of light until it was walled off completely. Evil is everlasting true enough but so is goodness.

Yer sayin thes esent hell.

No. Im saying whether or not this is hell is irrelevant because its proper addressment isnt venesection.

Why care if god dont care? Dachni punctuated her stammered words with blows ladled upon her knees.

Because the relevancy of gods is immanely overstated. Their potency is show. Potency is power.

Gommorans mighta told diffint.

Gomorrah laughed. There is no level of depravity that cannot be subsidized by technology. But wherefore art thou god’s apologist? Youre apostate.

Says who?

You want to die.

Dyin aint blasphemy.

You cant profess to be a follower if you cant abide by the pillars of the faith. What about the injunction against suicide?

Esent commandemented.

Murder of the self. And if each carries in himself the divine then self-slaughter is a slander of that divine. The triad of celestial attributes do fall short. You know what I think?

Dachni shook her head. Dont care, she whispered.

Thats not good enough. Meaning and meaninglessness coexist but the geometry of creation is uncentered, wherein even the outermost edge of the nexus is yet a locus complete. The elemental stuff possesses an intrinsic potentiality but it is us sentient who attribute or bereave them of meaning. Suppose a child is gifted a watch on his birthday which he carries round his life. One day walking along an avenue he espies a young boy and being an old man bequeaths the watch upon this urchin. Now the old man has only given the watch but not its history which the watch cannot communicate aside through hints in its physical appearance. But say the old man kept the watch free, what story would there be to tell? In relinquishing the watch he divests it of its history that yet exists. Its incommunicability renders it devoid of meaning to any casual passerby but to the recipient he immediately confers upon it his own meaning independent of its history, whatever it may be, be it profound, be it trite. In this way the world is sustained.

Dachni clutched her heart for an offtune twang.

Throw the watch away.

A watch discarded and forgotten can be said to be shorn of some essence for a watch both keeps time and tells it and that informative act requires another. Unless we argue the hands move of their own accord, that the culmination of background labor to move the swing has purpose and nobility beyond the craftsman. That we reject the necessity of the witness. We can lose our meaning even if we believe in our meaning. Things can become meaningless. Can fall apart. But if they do why even commit suicide? All your pain and anguish cease to be intelligible. How can you claim even to be in pain rather than subject to electrochemical reactions? You descended too soon. Because youre supposed to travel the verboten roads ere you are ready but not so unready as you are. You must prime your unreadiness. I think you glimpsed the immaculate nadir of the pit. The mere tide. I wont say you stood at the shore. Life can worsen far beyond anything youve seen. Ive swam that tide and broke the surf and come back and I dont plan to wade in again. The fallacy of Gomorrah is that people derive the misconception that evil is inherently self-destructive but thats a fable. Goodness is eradicated as much as evil. Perhaps even more. The question is with whom do you align yourself with. Evil men abide the law where the law is supreme and good men will stuff children into ovens in the black years. Which is to say that there is in the neuter denizenry of the swayed wastes an opportunistic lean quite procrustean. But those neutrals are shades we must be beyond. Who would abandon his brother to hell? I would not even forsake Catherine what makes you think I would forsake you?

You like her better.

Catherine.

Everone does.

I dont think so. Shes like you.

Esent.

Shes like you.

How?

She doesnt have any friends.

Dachni glared at her.

Shes a freshman at St. Paul Regional. She attends no parties, eats lunch alone. No sports, no clubs, no friends. Shes quit the church. Her favorite singer is Ellis Lee. She leads an excruciatingly lonely life. But when I asked about her grades she showed me her report card. There was a near flawless fake defiance in the presentation masking over the underlying desire to impress. Impress without disdain. Impress to gain acceptance. Her scars have made her insecure, the same as theyve done to you and your mountain rearings have left you both unprepared for communal life. But for all her social awkwardness shell be alright. I convinced her to make friends with a country girl also rather lonesome. Do you know what she said?

Dont care.

She said she wouldnt know what to say. I told her just to ask if she could eat with her. That if nothing else it would get her started.

Shell fuck it up. Shes that stupid.

Shes not. And youre not.

Ye does like her more.

Thats a monumental misjudgment.

Ye went ta her. Not to…not to…

Not you.

No.

But that isnt true.

Is soed.

Far from truth. Why didnt you take the phone? I could have been to the hostel in two hours. I would have taken you here. Or taken you anywhere.

Dachni finished her brandy. She wiped her face with her wrist. But ye dinint.

Delivered in such bitter spite that Anaya reared up and snatched the glass from her and flung it. It exploded against a column in a shard mist. Indurate belligerent! I talked to everyone. I looked everywhere! Everywhere you went I was on the heel and you flew me. I reasoned tis best shes afforded thinking time. Time to decide. To choose if we aught meet again in this life. Do you understand? I adore you you illiterate thorn! Every day you were gone you were the haunt of my thoughts. My dreams were plagued by the absence of you. Ive suffered ceaseless dread. You complain of rejection but refuse me! Why? What havent I given you? Am I so trifling as to warrant no notice? Why wont you have me? Why? I demand answer. Speak! Untangle thy tongue and speak!

Dachni cowered in terror.

Ive made sacrifice to your despicable god. I have debased myself. Compromised my authority, ruined my finances. Ived climbed mountains, been shot, been knifed, gone hungry, abandoned my home, forsook my crew and you think a visit means Catherine holds the greater of my favor than you? How many have fallen dead in order to protect you? What warped disregard could convince you I dont care? Are you an idiot? Are you fully devoid of perception? Answer me!

Dachni withdrew further into her blankets.

Anaya sank back down to the couch. After a minute she looked at the child. Im not sorry.

Dachni looked forlornly out at her. Will go, she whispered softly.

No. Youre not going.

Will go ifn ye want.

You fucking idiot I dont want you to leave. Just because Im angry doesnt mean I want you to leave.

Whats mean then?

Vaik Aiani. It means I want you to to acknowledge the things that have been done for you.

Never asked none of it done though. Why isnt caint ye unnerstand? Yer always scary an never say not to do somethin cause then yell get mad an yell an its scary.

Im not going to hurt you.

But ye has an plenty done.

Im sorry.

An prolly is.

Do you think Im a lie?

No.

Do you think Im lying to you?

No.

Are you ok?

No.

And you still want to kill yourself?

Dont know.

Well what makes you want to?

Theys no goodness.

You dont feel a connection to anything?

Not really.

Not to me?

To you some aye. But only you.

Not even the dead.

They doan matter.

Of course they matter. And the living matter.

Deaths…

What?

To everyone. Ye used ta lieve it. Hell ye as much gived it preach.

Not anymore. Listen to me. So long as you have just one link isnt that worth keeping alive? Consider the quality of the link. Youre not alone. I care for you. I always have, I always will. Did you ever have someone say that to you?

No.

And you believe me?

Kinded maybe.

Anaya put an arm around her. Youre a half starved abused eleven year old of course youre scared but Im not going to let anyone hurt you. I swear it.

Ye caint bring that true. An ye know it.

Ill try. I promise that.

Yeve promised lots.

Ive kept my word.

Not all of it.

As much as I could. Listen would you move?

Offa sofa?

To another country. I can relocate my crew right now. We could go to Buenos Aires of Cincinnati or Hokkaido or Yellow Knife or anywhere. Would you go?

It wouldnt change nothin. It aint about place. Its about the world.

At least somewhere else you wouldnt have to look at the ugliest part of it.

Thass juss bein blind.

Then will you stay with me?

She shook her head. It aint gonna git better.

You dont believe that.

You dont know.

I know youre scared but we dont give up. We dont. I havent and youve come this far. Ill ask one more try from you. One more try. Just one more. Ill do all I can to help. Ok? One more try.

Its…

Its not too much.

Would ye wanna die if ye were loned?

Yes. But I wouldnt. Because if you died the only thing that would be left of you is my memory of you. Id have to live. Id have to live so you wouldnt fade away.

Dont say that.

Its true. Its how I feel.

Its too much. Dachni held her arms straight out. The angry puckered scars bright maroon. Look.

Youre beautiful.

Yer crazy.

No Im not.

Thess esent pretty. Its hiddiess.

The pilot clasped her bare shoulders. No horror. Glorious beauty.

Yer fuckin crazy!

These are the signs of you. They never diminished your beauty. This is only an enhancement.

Ets all fuckin apart.

Then well hold on to what we can. And if nothing is left to hold to then well fall together.

The pilot sank her fangs into the middle talon of her right hand and tore it out. She held up the dripping talon. If youre going down, she said. Im going with you.

It wont be ok.

I dont care. I dont care what happens. Im sticking with you.

Will ye promise?

Upon forfeit of my word my name my title, all belongings, every vessel that contracts the fabric betwixt the stars.

Dachni wiped her face.

The pilot sealed a bond with a kiss. Can we go to sleep? Im exhausted.

Dachni nodded. Was aimt fer that, she said. But ye snatched out the hair.

The Mere Tide P62

In her bed in the fastness of the labyrinth the child was given two glasses of water to drink and was laid down beside by her who stroked her weary head. Dachni mute in the arms. The pilot pressed their lips together and frigid talons slid up her belly to her breastbone.

Release thy breath.

The words were in her mouth neither conscience nor nuisance.

She let go her breath.

Anaya inhaled through the vents in her sides and seasoned the air with her lungs and let the breath pass into the child. A combed credo to receive. Cold to sorrow bones. Sorrow in the delicate inflect of the chords small words to seat in her bosom. Their lips parted.

Let it out.

And when she respired Anaya savored the breath in her lungs as a preciousness a long moment ere acquitting it to the world. Rhythmic flow. Blue flow. Life’s relay. Her arms wrapped slowly round the pilot and in all its sorrowing it was not only a kiss. And could another through the undertaking of the labor of her heart suspend this labor for a lullaby.

After a long while she slept. When she woke again the pilot was still passing her breath to her and to know to be so vigiled made her cry.

And you will find the same friend elsewhere though he answer to a different name, dwell in a different country, jest in another tongue, there is the common manner of the face in which all are versant. Of evil men and women vile fear not, even if they hold you, wreathed Caesar once penned who after the bonetaker laid him low and forfeited an empire that all loss is equal should you live a thousand terms or perish in the womb. Fear neither that evil men live beyond you or are triumphant for nothing can be fixed by breaking.

The cold damp contact of a kiss graced the child’s cheek. She looked at Anaya.

Can I hold you?

Dachni was already in her arms but she nodded.

Anaya pulled her to her breast.

A morning showering I espied in the patterns splotching upon the cassiterite. In the light the drops exploding seemed winks of star birth, the lamp limning the rings that in their numbers propagated a thousand ascending surfs of clouds or tides that with vision’s drift subsided towards the drain down which tide cloud eyeblink ring all vanished and yet without exhaustion of form for until the cessation of the water this void was perpetually filling and how like life bursting bright in the great slurring stream is this swirling into the maw of that ultimate sink that nevertheless is powerless against life for it is only an emptiness not the teeming source from which life proceeds.

She traced around the ungerminated hilum of a nipple. And this beautiful ring is you. How inadequate are ourselves in the expression of beauty but what travesty then if I could compass you with a word and yet like each heaving tide of those same aggregated rings this lament is supplanted for also how wonderful it is our recognition of the beautiful things and should we longer remain newer patterns would emerge and even after the conclusion of the shower will for when the water is cut off there will remain puddles sadly slowly evaporating on the canvas of life alone and denied the solace of the participating in the great ruckus of the dying tides. And were I to attach a rider to this tale I would condemn it pride the desire to arrogate all the rampant meaning of the world or to withhold it for everything is as complex as this showerfall and us drainbound souls seems watching aught in our transient awe be content to tender what meaning we can, however trite or profound, and let our fellows prove the rest.

But the stone was lodged.

A blue steel morning rained them. They watched the rain. The water overcame the barricades and spread towards the chancel black in the darkness over the face of Michael. Many days there will be rain. The water lapped at the altar steps. New leafage upturned like delicate cups twirled in the water. Little twig arks for bugs. A loon’s nest. Small piping hatchlings among the remains of their eggs.

Anaya lifted it out of the water. What are you all doing out here? She turned to the child. They must have been blown out of their tree. Its strange too. They dont nest this far south. Do you want to see?

Dachni didnt want to see.

Well we cant leave them adrift.

Dachni turned and plucked a scrawny wetdowned piper out the nest and held its head under the water.

Anaya slapped her hand away and restored the hatchling to its nest. It sputtered and cried weakly. Anaya glared at her. Whats wrong with you? She rose and went away and came back with spiked tea and they blew into their mugs. Later still she set off into the rain on a mission more obscure and when she had gone from sight Dachni got up. She no longer had the cane. She took the stairs up to the ambulatory and shuffled along until she came to the belltower shaft. A staircase rose at right angles. She ascended to the belfry. An enormous bell hung from the yoke. Phosphor bronze. She shoved the muffled clapper against the bell lip in a sad toll of note over the world. She climbed over the short wall onto the roof. The dozens of pinnacles installed along the flank of the basilica towered over her crowned by saints and angels in cloaks of rain. But these were gone ages past and who are the saints in senectitude to be canonized in this age? What angels of terror with what scrolls and trumpet tongues and is it the horsemen deserted or the horsemen past? Faileth even them now. Slate shingles slippery underfoot angled steep and some missing so that the underlayment was visible. A gray sordid rag of country spread before her as though it had sopped up the scoria of true creation and trashed. She could see Matraple beyond the woods. The ever smaller units of its square constituency. She unwrapped her arm of gauze and looked at the triad of synclinal knife tracks meandering down her arm with their hints of vindictiveness and pleasure of self-pity. Three claymores wrist to elbow. Pale in their splitting and slightly translucent at the rims. She moved slowly down the roof to the promenade. As she closed upon it she saw the pilot below who had already seen her.

Dachni!

Anaya was coming back from the carport and she threw the suitcase she was carrying into the muck.

Dachni mounted the balustrade and sat down.

Anaya ran to the wall. Between the buttresses she seemed small and the child was taken aback to see her so dwarfed.

Dachni!

The buttresses divided from their piers and arced over the glass roof of the aisle to the level of her vantage. She peered down the lesene envisioning herself below. Would she be broken? Would she be distraught? Would it hurt. All her life was flowing through her now. Papa said Alessa, she said.

Alessa! shouted the pilot. Alessa what are you doing? Alessa go back inside.

Alessa stepped to the railing looked forlornly down. Her head shaking, cool rain salt by sorrow.

What happened? Tell me what happened.

Alessa shook her head slowly and whispered: No.

Go inside. Ill meet you inside.

No.

The pilot started towards the front of the basilica but before she had taken two steps she came back. Dachni!

For a long while she didnt say anything.

Ill come up. Ok Ill come to you. Just stay where you are.

She looked at the buttress. A terrace of stonework with a mausoleum or shrine to a dead adherent of the faith at each landing. She started up. Dachni stood again and then she knelt teetering on the balustrade. She held out her arms as if to take flight and she felt the cutting tear in her arm and her arm began to bleed and she lost her balance and grabbed the rail. She blinked at the blood. The vertigo had not been there before but now she felt a dizzying weariness. She stood again and sat down. She couldnt see the pilot below. And then she could as she surmounted the gabled roof of a shrine. When she reached that part of the buttress that flew off she walked through a crowd of petrified martyrs and hopped the balustrade.

Ok, she said. Im here.

Youre there, agreed the child.

The pilot took a step towards her. She held out her hand. The child blinked water out of her eyes.

Take my hand.

Dachni raised her hips and slid off the rail. A colder air enveloped her. The falling rain slowed to suspension. The drops in parallel one to another. The same steady velocity. Same slight kilter. Then they rushed past and fell far below. It felt like her scalp was lifting from her skull. She slammed against the wall and cried out in pain and then the pilot was hauling her up and holding her tight enough to pressed the breath from her lungs. The pilot was yammering frantically in aienee. It was: Varshokt hoi mikan fra paetri ikinii sae ko tae’fan li-kiaii. And on and on and in tears.

New Project

Hey drunks and readers just announcing a new novella in the works. Set in the same time frame as The Mere Tide it follows Private Reshetnikov Syvatoslav Tarasovich as he and the 113th моторизованный гвардейский (Motorized Guards) endure the impoverished psychosis of camp life immediately preceding the war between the Russian Federation and The Interim Colonial Government.

Excerpt as follows, expect the novella to be available in February:

 

In the cold and cauterized dark they rose into the early morning and squatted along the rim of a scraggly incline like crows on a wire and waited for dawn. They made no fires and they didnt talk and they didnt move. When he looked east there was a gray light aggregating on the hills and he alone rose and started down the knoll like some mute apparition shifted out of the blackness himself blacker yet as though a vaporous shade slipped out of a provisional dream.

He came onto the little clay trail where nothing grew and walked the barren strip to the riverbank. He knelt and sipped from the frigid waters like a penitent. When he look up again Aquarius was waning. The autumnal equinox. No sound but the flowing of water and who knew the eras it had flowed. This fragile uncharred earth. He peered into the waters to see what image might be given back but he was not there and was not there.

They filed down the slope under a moon half-hung in day. Sweating despite the chill. Through the highlands of the Urals and to the south where the Mughalzar Hills rolled endlessly away. Land untouched by the hands of man likes ome prelapsarian reserve. Some looked deep into the open country and he one of them for every man knew the hour was coming when they would cross that border and every man knew that hour they would die. And they would die to the absolute last.

Days to come like gold. They ate out of tin cans like an armed company of destitues. Metal forks with bended tines. Their beards grew and grayed with dust. They reached the muster where the division had rallied. The sprawling miles of camp shrouded under a tarp that would mask their presence from satellites and drones at too obtuse an angle. A mladshiy leytenant directed them to a tent where they dropped their gear.

He slumped onto a cot and it capsized and he sat on the floor and held his face in his hands and then he was asleep.

By the sixth of October their pay was a week late. Him and nine others requested mast and a trio of yefreytors ripened their corpuses with brass knuckles and billy clubs. They lay in their canvas tent around the coal stoves. In the long march from Ufa Siyanin had distilled vodka in his rucksack and he produced it now and they got drunk and Upensky produced his needles and spoons.

In the anesthesized haze that followed they sortied out and fell upon the first they came across, mechanics from the 113 th . The pound of fists loud in the motor pool. He squared off with a man in an orange jump suit. He ducked the wrench but not the screwdriver and it augured his bicep and he punched the man and grabbed his hair and bit off his ear. The man howled murder and he punched him in the throat. The man doubled over choking, clutching his neck. He started rifling his pockets and then he was watching the wrench rise, watching it fall.

He woke in a hole in the earth. A half-finished well perhaps. He thought it raining and when he looked up he saw a ring of men around the mouth of the hole pissing down. But it was raining too, the shroud being pourous to water. He slumped down. A knot had formed above his temple. In the nights he leaned with his ear to the wall as if he’d log by vibration alone the tectonic motions of the molten abyss. As if somewhere in his gyrus lay the primordial germ knowledgeable of the cataclysmic tides of the long ago on which they ride. Or perhaps a pebble some miles aneath his place of rest. Towards the middle of the week pieces of paper fluttered down. He looked up. Syanin stood at the rim.

завтра, he said.

 

The Mere Tide P61

They abandoned their bridgemaking, the furrowing of the fields. The pilot bandaged her stigma in gauze ready stored in a pocket and they lunched on the isle upon vinegar drenched hoagies assembled that morning. Good toasted baguette, red onion rings, tomato, salami neatly sliced into rounds, slices of American cheese, lettuce, circles of pepperoni.

Dachni though this assortment of spice sat unwell in her and late that night it all came up. A vibrant torrent of diced digesta that drenched her legs whilst hind scooting to the bathroom forthwith to occupy for hours. Her entrails were in a tangle wicked shibaric. A brashy drowning of spiders in a blister. Uterine turbulence. Tristesse enwombed absorbed in its own grief and apathetic to pleas. Upon the closet she doubled over guarding a pelvic infernia trying to defecate what refused to pass. Her moans were grievous. She slid to the floor and crawled under the showerhead and pulled the iron fob dangling at favor of her altitude and washed off her legs. The room filled with steam. She crawled back. She twisted up the waist of her broadshorts where they pooled about her ankles and beat upon her knees. A bloody mucous slickened her thighs. She kicked out of her shrift. Her belly score scarred, with artificial navels and bump taut. That navel at zenith is that one natural. A weight protrudes it. Tumor go outwith this life is brief and you are not life. Heat not of steam but from the frictious spasm wracks within sweated her. The water patted against the tiles. Prophets foresuffer what the blind suffer in now and in remembrance. She gripped her thighs and endured the rolling tattoo of the pelvic thew, the involuntary shunting outward, wheezing through teeth, until she too pushed, essaying legs spread with ramage, bobbing after each effort like a smith’y bellows, pressure building at a coordinate just behind her infolded lips until finally at the sixth bell it broke and there was a long slurping out into water and she spent fell in the hot of the water.

When strength again imbued her she clasped the vomit bearded bowlrim and hauled herself sitting and looked in. Inverted whitsun delivered from a womb of horrors into a manger for shit. Ejecta vaguely fetal backgrounded by a piss bloody gloriole. Child of child bound for purgatory take thy viaticum this prayer and run without backwards askance lest thee turn salt. But lo a thin wet membrane of what rough beast peeled back from a sable pinhead and the schadenic freude perceived her and winked. Dachni flushed it down.

In the kitchen she sorted drawers for the sharpest knife and returned to her room and locked the door and laid on the bed and cut at her right forearm. She would have opened her dexter veins but her pierced hand could not grip the handle. She shut her eyes. A few minutes later a doorknock opened them again and by then it was not easy to do.

Dachni.

Aye?

Are you ok?

Aye.

Youre bleeding.

Dachni glanced at her arm’s coat of gules. Something of the faintness behind her eyes in its rosy creep. Its jess the ye knows. The well ye knows.

The I knows?

Ye aint gittin ta lick it.

Dachni.

Ets ok.

Can I see?

Ta hells for? Ye know what et is. Done heard it ye aint spoked ta lookin at folks as that.

Its not that kind of a look. Its a lot of blood.

Theys always a lotta blood.

Dachni.

Whell ya let it be? Yer always sayin things is horrible an ets jussed a lettle bleed. It aint no kinded hurt.

Will you open the door?

Dachni felt herself draining away and she knew it was herself and she must focus everything into her speech. Ifn ye wanna talk jess talk amorrow. Dont wanna talk ta ye.

Open the door.

Dont bust et down.

I wont if you open it.

Anaya they aint nothin wrong. Caint ye keep a lone? Jess a night jess wanna sleep.

Can I tuck you in?

No.

Not even a goodnight kiss?

No.

Do you want a story?

Anaya.

Let me see you.

Its alled alright.

Open the door.

Whyre ye fucked over some blood?

Open it.

Ifn ye bust the door all yer gonna do is fuck up a door.

The doorknob rattled and a metal clicking sounded from within that was the picking of the tumblers. The door swung open. Dachni reared howling, arms outstretched as though in accusation and a jet of blood splashed a crimson band on the pilot’s visage as she fell into her arms. The next moment she was being run down the hall past processions of bloodshed. Mons where clouds of fire were wrung of burning men and Matles where the glades became as a cauldron for the boiling of men alive before the pyre of Cranberry Mountain. This procedural crushing of the human corpus. A worker being crushed by a bailer. In the infirmary the pilot laid her on the same cot on which she had mended her foot and and she strictured the paired artery by means of a knuckle pressed into the elbow pit and the bright rosen spit slacked to a seep and the blood shallowed to the gully floors of the barbarous hacks. The pilot applied a pressure bandage and secured it with gauze but did not stitch it for the child begged no needles, no wire, and after examining the wound and the wanness of her countenance determined that she would live.

The Flowers Of June

The flowers the flowers the flowers of May coming around in June

The flowers the flowers the flowers of May blooming just for you