Eric Vargas's Blog, page 7

The Mere Tide P47

The labyrinth-Objects of study-Put to bed-Conjurations of the dark-The pilot’s comfort.

Twenty minutes later the the pilot was carrying her through a puzzle of umbrageous corridors broadspread with a thousand suggestions of monsters across its grim candle lit gothicity. Some hell the pilot had found it advantageous to home in. What seasoned tramps would avoid if they could help it and where no bindlestiff would dare night twice. Smeared gutters of tallow or wax kept this place alight, the wicks installed haphazardly so that their sick lucent congresses clustered or slurred. They descended a zigzag of stairs. Down a different flight far away. To a level where bamboo broke through the stones slabs. Thick clustered shoots of a mutation grown by means other than photosynthesis. It became humid. Vines crawled up the walls. Roots groped from the ceiling. And still further down. The floor no longer stone but dirt. The tunnel smelled of earth and ozone and in places the walls were set so close together the pilot had to advance sideways and elsewhere she must crawl. A dungeon infinite, any aughting know where lied hell’s locality. Deep down they came upon a catacombs. Pillars of skulls in a carousel. Sarcophagi filled with newly embalmed kings and prime ministers. A cyborg. And through a tomb into a cellar’s casket blackness to the pilot’s bedchamber.

A bed occupied the main of the chamber and its noir baldachin was like fine skeins of ash fented by a master so that it resembled a cage of suspended ink. There were bookshelves, no free space upon them, columns of books on the floor, plinths of books. So many it might have been the storage closet of a library save that it smelled of a soapy pine for it was laos she boated in the cloisonne enamel bowls. A jingoistic chaos of wicker charms hung pendant from the ceiling. Others iron, meandered into ursigils and coated in blackblood. A motley scrawl of hexes diseased the walls and between them hung oil portraits, trawlers of sea, fishers of land. Who fished for fish and men but men as unlike any had seen before. Who pyred their losses for the perpetuation of reality. A human skull on a pedestal. A table for alchemy and the concoction of poultices. A ristra of studded diadems and a lifesize christ purpureal crowned, who knows what heads theyd graced, how heavily they had laid. There were x-rays of dwarf knees. Open data slates slow scrolling the deployments of the MVD, reports detailing the feeding habits of certain species of locusts. In the corner a jhaggik, a malignant polylobed junk flora like a fat half digested pineapple. Long thin feelers sprouted out of its squash body that pulsed the color of brick and drooled a pink goop. Several had ensnared a toad and holding it over its porous membrane of a face slowly wrung it of its juices.

Is this hell?

I think were a little nigh of hell.

The pilot navigated with preternatural grace to the bed and parted the curtains and pulled back the cashmere duvet and bent to lay the child on the good pillowtop. Dachni clung to her. Come on, said the pilot unclasping her hands from her neck a finger at a time. Youre supposed to hate me right now. She got free of the child and composed her hands on her breast. She tucked the child in, keeping a corner of the duvet folded back so her foot was exposed.

Lift up a little.

Dachni lifted her leg and the pilot positioned a pillow lengthwise under it.

Ill bring some beer.

Aint huntry.

Well, said the pilot smiling and patting her knee. Ill bring some. She pointed at the jhaggik. Dont go near that. Its dangerous.

Dachni glared at it. It was shoving the flaccid frogskin into a orifice belching digestive fluids through the gape.

Aint getting near that fuckin thing.

Smart girl.

Get it the fuck outta here.

The pilot laughed. Aye a good idea.

She went and twirled a talon over it and spoke a word and it twisted up tight in a protective case and inflated to size and she picked it up and put it in an urn and clamped a lid upon it. Then she came back to the bed and bent to bestow a goodnight kiss upon the child and the child snarled and battered at her with her tiny fists but she pushed through and planted the soft kiss upon her forehead and made to leave.

Wheres yer go?

The pilot turned at the door.

I needs hold congress with a lout unknown to you. But whistle and Ill come.

Dachni pulled the duvet over her head. Git on then ye sunuvabitch.

I can stay if you want.

She peeked out.

The pilot relaxed into a stance vixenish fey, a mouth corner turned seductively up, a hip bowed out. If you want.

Go way.

She shrugged. Khasta.

The lantern illuminating the room drained away.

Hey!

I thought you liked the dark.

Pet em back on! Fuckin light! Hassent light? Is fored ta see ye idijit.

There was a long pause. Something clicked against the stone threshold of the door.

Ill get a flashlight.

The door closed and the talonic scratching faded down the hall. She hadnt turned on the light.

If it has been noted of the wicked that they are affined more to the sun skirted regions than the balmy coast it is because they fear more the judgments of the day then the predacity of night. For while the wicked may meet the noose of the town or the tooth of the lion yet the lion will not pronounce his devourment nor will other lions travel from afar to spectate. In the end it is judgment the wicked flee and private the death they prefer. This preference however is latent in children and the fear of shame is easily overcome by other fears and in unfamiliar darks evil has neither leniency nor clemency and may awake even in dolts a genius for the conjuring of dangers and make every hope a jacklight.

Thus in creep cirrhosis of the rake hour. Contours slaverous of maw or sweaty yoni oozing forth to suckle her hag dry with carneous labia. A sick squelching echoed, maudlin fellation of the dismembered organs of centaurs ejaculating shrill priapic and soteriological pleas through the principal flues and harlequin infamy exhibiting symptoms of the yaws. Ferrety elves are come to thief her satchels. A distaff damnata emulging out of grout to debut her in the bordellos of Tophet. Hapless Morrigu with her murders floundering at curb whilst passes a parade of the nullifidians in lab coats. But who fears judgment carries in themselves judgment formed and it is the validation of that judgment that so inspires terror. For Cain slewed also Adam, Adam residing in Abel, and god in Adam, and Adam in Cain. And so every man who slays the seed of his father slays also his father and his father in himself, and if it is so the American and the Mandarin, the Nippon, the Indian, the European, mayhaps even the Slav all descend from common ancestries then they from Mercury’s Guinness Station to the nitrogen miners of Pluto’s plantum to the hibernating colonists of Themisto dashing for the next star over, not least in Eden nor East of it, have slaughtered unfortunate Adam many trillion times over.

Anayaaaaaaaa!

A furious scraping closed upon the door and threw it open

Are you alright?

Es not!

Anaya slid to her bedside. Calm down what happened?

Fuck ded ye go?

A beam illuminated the pilot’s face. Dachni scrabbled the torch away and held it on top her head like an antenna and flipped onto her belly and buried her face in the pillow.

Somethins en here.

Youre in here.

Geht rid it, she sobbed. Dont wan it here.

Do you want to go back to your room?

Dachni hacked her winded breaths. Caught in a place she did not want to be and miles of place she did not want to go to reach a place she did not want to be. The pilot gripped the canopy rail and turned in a swing and sat on the bed. A heavy hand dropped onto her back.

Did you want to talk?

She shook her head vigorously, the friction warming the wetted pillowcase.

The pilot rose in an audible ease of springs and undid her wrappings and rolled them neatly and put them aside and lifted the duvet and slid in. Dachni rolled back in yelp of fear and sudden jolting pain.

Theres nothing to be afraid of.

Git away!

An ophic arm cupped her hip and shored her up to a newborn nakedness freezing. That cold Dachni could feel frost on the pilot’s belly. As though she were exuding the cryogenic sleep out which she had prematurely arisen. It made Dachni writhed. She shielded her face with the flashlight and the pilot drew it from her fists and placed it on the nightstand. Then she licked in her affectionate manner the scar that formed the taper of the child’s brow. Her tongue was slick, no roughness to it, a frigid moisture. Cold needling points traced up her shirt to her panting heart and blossomed out over it. The child’s arms floundered above her head and her elbows bowed out. She tried to push the coldness back down gasping shrill whimpers in the effort but obsidian rictuses of bone with lean grading leathery lips at their bases arched over her shoulders and latched to her scapulae. Two more on her either side hooked to her shortribs and a last pair perched in her omphalos. She struggled to deperch the talons from her ossature but they were fastened tight.

Hello heartbeat.

She squealed her little girl squeals of fear and struggled on. She managed a single talon off and then it bore down harder than before and a writhing wave rolled up from her toes and she arched her back and her head shook side to side.

The pilot whispered a cool salve into her ear. Her mint breath was breath from some arctic clime and the plume of it rolled tenderly over her face. She made a final feeble essay to break free of her imprisonment and failed and collapsed spent in breathless defeat.

Tis not thy blooded casement wherein is seated life but the lungs. For each breath is the last breath but blood dries in the chambers of the veins. Cults of blood are thralled to the hypostasis, below them are the materialists, below them the hedonists. Its like old times isnt it?

Let go.

Why?

Let gooooo, she cried and began to slap at her again like a vicious petting.

The talons detached. Withdrew to her breast and massaged there. Geyshla child. Geyshla.

Her heaving sobs slowed in their deepening and the furious pace of her hearted chambers slacked.

Youll be alright.

Saided was a monster, she cried.

I know.

She shrank, her eyes creased tight, a brittle kindermonstrum sprawled. Isnt a monster. Isnt.

I know, said the pilot.

The Tree

See the tree

That demoniac cyprus

Alone in the taiga

Apart of the encircling woods

See its limbs

Gnarled

And

Twisted

And

Leafless

See the trunk

Thick and strong

The Diseased bark

Like cancer

See beneath that frigid country

The withered roots

Spreading

Leaching the earth

Now, behold the Man

Contraindications of Gender Fluidity Via Linguistic Grounding

Of late it has become fashionable to proclaim that gender is a social construct, a gray scale referent alone to the infallible claims of the individual. Biologically gender refers to whether or no animate objects manifests male of female physical characteristics. The fad today substitutes that definition with that of grammatics, where classifications are arbitrary and allowing of colloquialism.

The inherent supposition is that meaning is not prelingual. But this falls apart in countenance of the mute.

Gender in its traditional (or if the term be taboo then biological) sense is not to be thought a bias when it instantiates worldwide across species and time, sporadic exceptions of protandry and acknowledgments of more than a binary subset notwithstanding, and have been dominant in all history.

The spectrum itself is fallacious in that its referent is subjective. A cathedral upon a takyr. It leans on the hearsay of the claimant without evidence and contrary to evidence. Here the mind is totally disassociated of the body yet paradoxically it is the mind making a claim upon the body. Opinions must rest upon objective reality. A person who dislikes turmeric does not negate another’s fondness for the spice, a person who dislikes cumin cannot dislike cumin without acknowledging its existence.

It may do well to compare different biological systems so as to shed light on the gender spectrum as it is understood by the activist community where it concerns transgenderism. Contrasting the emotional spectrum to the biological spectrum, binary though it may be. Assuming total honesty we can broadly categorize the universal emotions: Happiness, fear, disgust, anger, sadness. All recognizable on sight, barring any impairment upon the perceiver, any deceit upon the perceived, our ability to identify them developed concurrently with them since the evolution of sight in the Cambrian. Certainly there are permutations of emotion, hence ambivalence, but it would be hubris to designate any individual so special as they can lay exclusive claim to an emotional state. That they occupy a solitary ground none ever have tread upon. This would either elevate the individual above all others or else lower them below all others. Egality would be abolished in that single experience and the privileged individual would bestowed Carta Blanche in action as the solitary experience would prove the incommunicable justification. Such a person would be god.

Likewise the members of each dichomatic division within a sexual species have developed the means to identify the opposite sex. Imagine the chaos that would ensue if this very second species’ lost the ability to differentiate between male and female. If this were to happen to mankind there would be no end to duress upon those who wished to procreate but could not understand the reason for their sterility. This is not an extreme either. Extreme in the scenario but not in the underlying and explicit presuppositions of a gender spectrum predicated upon the individual exclusive to all other considerations. If a world where women cannot tell a woman from a man or women a man from a giraffe seems ludicrous it is because on the biological level mankind has an innate, instinctual understanding of biology instantiated in impulse and the evidence of this is the continual propagation of all species.

The Mere Tide P46

Crusades-Diagnosis of the wound-Strange technologies-The wound mended

These halls down which now the child is born are tapestries, the siege of Zara, the bloodletting of Jerusalem. These moments melded into novel horrors of old wars fought in jungles of carnivorous flora, where pestilential tornadoes devoured the fleshy canopy from the trees so that in battle the combatants fought in bloodshowers, where the trees screech like rattlers choking on their shaking tails and where the field’s perimeter is defined by the bearers of lamps thats fumes drives off the worst of those airborne parasites that the grounds with all its egalitarian inimicality can be contested.

They came to an infirmary. Dour gray the walls, opal translucence the plastic curtains dividing each stall. Dachni was put on a gurney whereon she hyperventilated herself to the edge of consciousness. Above her a lantern hung from the ceiling. A diminutive clone to that other altar overhanging lamp. A cross likewise was subordinated to it. It looked like a winged mace on the end of a flail and Anaya would later advise her the aienee had employed such weapons in antiquity and still did in updated forms.

The pilot laid out a heavy hardcase on a stainless steel instrument table and Dachni sat up watched the layout of divers devices strange.

Hows ta do this? she panted between panicked shallow breaths.

The right way.

Right ways? Whats is gonna do?

Im going to reattach your tibia back to your malleoli.

What? Kassin ye get machines of it?

The pilot closed the case and latched it and put it away. Any diminishment of you is an insult to me thus any treatment of you must obviously be subordinated to my discretion. Youll not.

Dachni shook her head. Crying openly again. Doan touch. Et hurts really really.

Either this or amputation.

Wats amputation?

I cut your foot off. She looked at the foot. The rest of the way.

Dachni reared almost standing. No! No! No! No! No! Doat do it doant stop Anayaa stop.

Anaya swept her off her foot and laid her back down neither roughly but without tolerance.

Want it work now! Fix it now! Fix it. Wered ascident. It wered. Its yourn fault! Ye did et. You you you!

She lunged at the pilot but the pilot held her down.

Fex it, she sobbed. Fex it. Fix it fix it. Please fex it. Is sorry. Is sorry please elp. Please help. Is sorry.

At this Anaya softened to the verge of tears and she daubed those of the child’s away with her hair.

Ill fix it.

Promise wont to be no cripple.

I promise.

Promise, she sobbed.

I promise, said the pilot.

Promises always entail some anguish in their keeping that otherwise could have been avoided and it is this in part that sets sentience higher than the instinct ruled members of the lower kingdoms. Who do fulfill their filial obligations but that cannot do the most trivial act further which often enough saves the life because it does not avoid pain. Here a travesty of pain. In lieu of the ministrations of an anesthesiologist the child was given three shots of Philadelphia whiskey and supped four glasses of water. Then the pilot cupped her atrophied calf and very carefully restored her foot forward.

Promises! Dachni bellowed.

The pilot ripped a strip off her limbus that was a festive easter blee and tied the foot in place. Then she studied the break. Moving to view it from various angles.

Whatns see?

Look yourself.

She would have looked but a voice in her said to do so would imperil her soul, her holding such a conceit.

After the pilot had mapped out the dimensions and extent of the break she took a glass vial and cracked it over her wound like an egg. A foamy liquid metal possessed of a mercurial intelligence. Mucilaginous. Clammy. How blue in luminescence. It swam into the break gathering fragments of bone, infusing the bone, fortifying it, solidifying into the consistency of gum to anchor the bones together.

When her tibia and malleoli had been restructured the pilot set about working on the tendons. The strap of the inferior retinaculum was badly strained and she reinforced it with a glue as she did the others. The brevis had snapped and withdrawn into its sheathe and she fished it out with a suture. By this point the child had gone unconscious and the pilot did not wake her. She kept working the little calcium white worm out and when she managed it she pierced it medially about a centimeter back from the laceration. She drew the wire through and then she drove the suture through again near the exit and through just the epitenon and then again just behind the epitenon insert and through the tendon and out its laceration at the center. She mirrored the epitenon suture on the other side and then tied it to its counterpart and she did this and then did the same longus tendon and then she let in self-suturing wires into the wound like worms that bored through the flesh reinforcing and reconnecting the tissue, knotting neatly together and sealing little by little the breach to hide the things that made her.

The Mere Tide P45

Troubled workings-Rage

Dyspepsia of the heavens. The tressed levin searing the witch gloom a high white. Riot sonnets abrading the polluted salitter from the face of the squalled dala a thunderous syllable at a time. Wind has routed trees from their fastholds and the elements bray in orchestra. His musics are the fury and lo the sound the world is going out of the world beyond all rectification. A spaceman hath commeth.

Sickness had depthed the child into a welter of apathy and she was deserted of all opinion. Indeed a sphere is the same in profile and perspective. A dreamstate tainted by pyrexia. And is it the dream brings the fever or the fever the dreams?

She disassembled her rifle but this catechism provided nary relief and in its reassembling she forgot to attach the guiding rod to the bolthead and in her frustrated mashing together of parts snapped off the tapered tip of the firing pin and she threw whole contraption down.

A hot salt solution streamed down her cheeks. And such weighted thoughts and sickness and no rest. New sheets fitted her bed but she did not make it to the bathroom and she lay in the wetness. Man cherishes infirmity. Verily defends it gainst all remedy. He nurses his ailments with care, hoards them. She dashed the railroader’s lamp against the wall. She tore at her hair. Unmade the bed and cleared the books from the shelves and tore the good cream pages from the spines and ripped the calf leather and overturned the nightstand. She stood gasping. Out the nightstand had spilled a bottle of whiskey. She was young enough to mistake the stupor it inflicted for a calmative property and she unplugged the cork and drank deeply a fever stronger than ever she had known. It swirled angrily in her gut. She put a hand to the headboard to steady herself and drank again and set the bottle on the bed. Immediately she swiped it up and took a longer drink and paced with it through the room. Walking on the backblade of her injured foot. Hearing a crepitus grind in vague articulation like asteroids colliding in the fetid nebula of flesh. She glared hatefully at the pain. At the neat seaming in the garish bloatedness of it. She was suddenly convinced of the absolute necessity of the world’s end. She drained the bottle. She looked at the scattered parts of the mosin-nagant. She raised her foot and lowered it again. Then raised it a second time and stamped down.

There was an ugly crack and she dropped down. A fear long and loud erupted through her and escaped out her throat.

The door flew open and to the pilot arrived she held out her hands in accusation.

Was you!

The pilot’s ears dropped flush along her neck.

Es leaven! Ettin staykin gear!

The pilot looked down at her wound.

Ye dedded it.

The pilot stepped into the room and circled her. Art thou dispossessed of thine senses? She touched a talon to her forehead.

Dachni was clapping her fists to her skull and sobbing aloud. Wassent purposed! Happid ascidident!

The pilot crouched next to her.

Naint cripple.

Ishktii.

She wouldnt look. The pilot forced her. What she saw were her feet addorsed, the right eversed, the tibula vomited out the thin stratum of flesh in a steady damask leakage. Some ill of conscience might have wished her bleed a worser pollutant but the pilot claimed her always a child who bled child’s blood.

Thirsty, moaned the child.

I imagine so.

Etll eel. Water.

Its going to rot. Gangrene is going to hue you colors you have not seen before and it is going to stink and the stink will devour you from the inside.

Dachni received these prophecies with a sickening dread of their veracity. This mayhem in which was meant to bear her weight. Her breathing was shallow. The pilot removed a shawl, that same astronomical shawl, and shawled her in it and she mulled the fabric.

Fex it, she panted. Water.

Naught was broke. Do you understand that? Do you understand what you have done. How this moment has wrenched your life out its natural path and sent it hurling on some alter course?

Etll be kayed. Et well et well raelly. Wone it? Want water.

Youve crippled yourself.

Fer owed longed?

Forever.

Dachni shook her head. Naint true an lyin. Esent there nothin to do? Et weretint no mean on it. It happed mistaded. Was on the bed an step wronged an it came out an it wasnt no mean it wasnt promise it wasnt.

Do you want me to fix it?

Aghg, she cried.

Are you going to stay here?

What?

Are you going to stay.

Dont wanna stay. Has ta go. Has ta leave it aint judged gainst ye.

She began to cast about for some means by which to doctorfy herself but there was nothing. She kicked herself back to the bed with the foot flapping wildly and sat and tried to align the foot right but her courage in anything was feeble and it broke against such pain.

Even so the pilot, Anaya looked on with an egregious hurt. Holding her breast as if afflicted in the heart she did not have. Like a sudden flare of a latent case of dysthymia and she came forward saying: Good god child. How can you hate me this much?

The Mere Tide P44

In the shower-The pilot’s comforting

Anaya had no bathtub. She levered back two wrenches clamped to valve bolts behind the lampshade showerhead and the spoutlets sputtered to strength and sheets of mistle yawned off the tiles.

How is it?

Dachni touched her hand to the water and jerked it back and flapped it grimacingly about.

Hot hot hot.

She adjusted the leftward wrench.

Better?

Dachni tested the water again with the care of the burned. Pehkay.

Anaya locked the wrenches in place and stepped back and began to divest herself of her garmentures. The silk fringed pashmina shawls and the plaid kilt of the same acrylic as the chess checkered cardigan serape fronting the bone king of Mictlan. The pilot draped these articles over an arm and crossed the washroom a titanic bald flawlessness gliding with the cocksure lissome passivity of olympians. Glistening shades of dark green and subtler hints of amber shading with the flex of her paired spines like those serpents helically entwined round the apothecary’s stave and ruby blue downed ears more majestic than the remiges of eagles. She hung her coverings on a wall mount by the door and when she came back smiling her sorrow rimmed affection Dachni lunged.

How now?

The child clawing up that great trunk reckoned the sealing of those pneumatic pipes would evermore avenge all wrongs but Anaya in her imperturbable fathoming bent and met their lips together. A kiss void cold and with such tenderness as to draw the pins from her elbows and she crumpled to the tiles and bawled.

Thrones and principalities what misfortune hath wrenched thee so out of my remembering?

She wailed and wailed. Heartbreak and loss and the Judas of her hate lifted her from the floor and stepped back into a wreathing aura of gray orange diaphanity diffracting through the steam. The water browsed her hair of its monochromatic elderliness of ash to a maiden hue crow black and leaden streams sleeched from her toes. That great breast against which she was flush was frigid, likewise the dandling arms. Scales colder than the hot tetchery that cried her. And growing colder. Icy tracing of her backbones. The soggy bandaging slipped way and cold breath across her cheek and palms like the bellies of salamanders in their lightless keeps caressing soft down her as the catholicon lullaby decanted in her skull’s auguries.

Come on baby stop your crying. Come on baby stop your crying now. Come on baby stop your crying. Come on baby stop your crying now.

Dachni needs a minute to snuffle and to wipe the cough and discharge of her laments but the water did come down. She looked up past the inquisitive stamp of the pilot at the falling rain like discrete packets of puppet strings and the pilot awned over her smiling and nipped her chin and tickled her at rib and foot and she choked a chimeric squeal of betragedied giddiness that died in rue and then the pilot hooked a tooth and directed her sight to the tiles where tassels of steam stretched upwards thin as harp chords. Or what spirit could play the ether or what music be played and is it for the ears of mortals or are gods their audience?

In the steam were the pilot’s elixirs of purification. She bent at the knee and reached up a bottle.

Hold on.

She did. A pale shivering simian clasped to.

Anaya squeezed out a bottle a strawberry shampoo and massaged it into her scalp. It seared her open sores. She bowed her head to evade the pain and Anaya shielded her eyes from the suds.

Laeshii co, nim iglii vas hatl fae lo min.

She didnt and the pilot closed her eyes for her and pivoted her under the water. A cream showerfall curtained her face and diluted and cleared and Anaya soaped her loofah with an exfoliate and dislodged plates of gore from her person as if debriding some horrent rash. A fould tide grueled towards a drain. Anaya flossed the bloody gunk from between her outcrop ribs and moved her about in the water, letting it rinse her and her whole petite mutilation seemed exhaling a vaporous malaise yet she was that cold and the pilot altogether rimy in the hot chrysalis of mist. Below her the drain had failed to evacuate the junked viscera cleaned of her and a lough of gore spread and she thought she could see some shrimpish monster suspended just below the surface. Like some strange fossil where the bones have gone and only the flesh remains. Sorrow overcame her. Tears began to slip out her eyes again and it was all that would do their damming the weak fluttering down of eyelids like a staccato close of dawn.

Little one.

In these little one’s bones seeped the weariness that makes feathers of the burdens of the world. The arm crook her head nestled in jostled her but the last strength she had was to cover her face and cry. Gowaygowaygoway. The steam curled over her and she the yin in this cradle of cold. Her fists uncurled like dying spiders. Purge these toxins have poisoned you the livelong. Is it colored? No. Anaya kissed her. Soft perambulation of tonguetip across her forehead. Her bosom tightening.

Are we talking?

Dachni moaned that they werent.

Smooth slick flexility textured not unlike leather. Never was there such a thing. Union of the mammalian, the piscean. No her chest was flat, she gave no milk.

We slept on the deck once and he asked: Are you a woman? He said: You smell like a woman.

The words were far away. Whuh?

Nothing. Are you alright?

No, she sobbed. No.

Anaya hugged her. Freezing in the steam. In the hot rain patches of frost. Soft lips drifting across her temples. Her eyes.

What a world this is.

On Violence Part One

An unguessed kinship exists between the disaster genre of late, in which the most apocalyptic excrement devised by cinematic writers are played out, and that genre that is known as torture porn, typically filed under horror.

At first glance they could not be more different. Disaster films are by their nature vast in scope, invariably pits a group of survivors against some contrived natural calamity, which humanity as represented by a microcosmic group must either prevent or survive whereas horror is almost exclusively calustrophobic, focused upon a small group of stock characters that are picked off sequentially in as creatively a brutal manner the writers can conceive by whatever the monster of the proverbial week is. The shallowness of each group is self-evident.

Pick any disaster film of the last decade and examined close enough the gradual impression must emerge that none of it means anything. Simply to say that nothing exists behind the frame. It is a testament to the human capacity for suspension of disbelief that entire coasts can be washed away by a tsunami or a city annhilated by an asteroid without a single casualty being shown on screen. The falling man comes to mind. All those poor financers splattering on New York streets.

If disaster films focus on the destruction of civilization than horror is obsessed with the obliteration of the body. There is no limit to the tortures which the human body seems to be subject to. As any number of horror franchises can attest. If the stories are lacking the mutilation is not. There are however certain limitations. Nothing sexual, nothing against children. Or at least on screen.

What unifies these two genres then under the umbrella of a metagenre is that neither brings into quesiton, in fact neither attempts to bring into question, the validity of a civilization, its values and beliefs. Inevitably a disaster film ends with the triump of a band of survivors but oft enough the credit overture serves as a prophetic amnesiac whereby the audience forgets the coming slaughter that would inevitably ensue from the scarcity of resources, the lax of laws, the propagation of plague. It posts a sterile world, an inherently decent mankind successfully and inextricably yoked to benign ideals.

The torture film, while obsessed with human depravity, depends for its life on existing outside civilization and so is robbed of any ability to comment upon it. An odd trait since horror so oft occurs in city and suburb. Perhaps horror is sterilized in the objective typfont of newsprint. Nevertheless a horror film may or may not end with the death of the final survivor but this is irrelevant because the structure of civilization is in no way threatened. How many centuries, how many millennia, must some end of the road murderer operate his abbattoir operate to equal the battle of Borodino?

The lesson to be drawn then is that plots may be extreme to any degree so long as they do not pose discomfiting questions, so long as they show nothing the audience didnt want to see, so long as nothing is subverted.

What then to make of the war genre? Like the Puritan missionaries penetrating the Indian wilderness the army deployed is a crosssection of the nation that sent it. All foreign lands are inherently barbaric and a metropolis is nothing more than a wilderness of concrete where armies are expected to perform outrages surpassing the wettest wicked dreams of De Sade.

An early scene from Black Hawk Down depicts an M249 gunner, identified as Wad on his helmet’s cat eyes, opening up on a crowd, and no one dies. They simply disperse. It is an unbelievable scene but not an incomprehensible scene. In a film that revels in its own sanguinuity it nevertheless refrains from indiscriminate carnage because that is not the proper venue of that particular strain of sadism.

Overseas, as is almost always the case for US films outside of the revolution and civil war periods, the platoon or company combats a natural event embodied in the presence of the enemy with the means of the horror film. That is to say it would be so if accurately depicted. A film must at all costs avoid or downplay offenses against civilians, innocents, otherwise they would be as guilty as the stalkers of slasher flick, though there has been a disconcerting trend to lionize generalized butchery, the melodramatic Okinawa scenes of the miniseries The Pacific being such a case (capstoned by a ridiculous moment in which the semi-protagonist Sledge admonishes a fellow soldier for shooting an unarmed boy [ever more ridiculous because the shooter is in clean fatigues and thus uninitiated], thereby satisfying the requirement of his enlightenment as to the common humanity of mankind). By turning their weapons upon a deserving and sufficiently dehumanized enemy (or more perniciously an enemy humanized after the slaughter) they satisfy the violent urge without violating the accepted mores of the civilization, requiring nothing but a reflexive jingoism.

In BHD not a single act of cold bloodedness is committed. Not a single civilian is killed by US forces, not a single enemy combatant is wounded to incapacitation. There are hardly any cries of anguish. It would almost be a wonder anyone at all died if it were not for the fact that the audience desires a sanguinous sanitized slaughter. The narcissism of the film appropriates a mass starvation event as its setting and the audience accepts this without even the slightest curiosity as to the history. Never is it questioned the unfailing and inherent goodness of the soldier. Notably it is omitted from the film that the real life character of Grimes was arrested on pedophilia charges.

While propagandists worldwide understand you must exaggerate the worst characteristics of a national enemy those that fight them must overcome them and in any war there is often parity in arms and armament. By discharging their weapons at a suitably dehumanized foe the audience vicariously indulges in an actor’s navigation of a forged scene with all the mock sacrifice and ritual and idealism required to achieve the desired emotion, typically patriotism via patronage.

The vacuity of such films, the empty braggadocio and fanatical nationalism, has undoubtedly influenced the general public. How could it not? If all film strived to be moderately informative audiences could not help but by strident effort be more informed, though it is certainly possible sheer need of ignorance might succeed.

The Dawn Star’s Anger

I am not guilty of ingratitude
And no less than you do I belong
And no less truth exists in good
Than in evil

I Trekked A Painful Valley

Lord I trekked a painful valley

Ive got the wallowing hard blinds

I got the blind valley shadow blues

You know I got the shadow valley blues

The valley tryin blues

Ears blacked by the news

 

You know I trekked a terrible valley

I got friends I aint seen in a thousand years

Ive got a thouand tears a thousand tears

I got the valley tryin blues

I got the cryin gravedirt blues

 

God I trekked this valley

You dug it up god

Dug up every thorn

Every thorn I ever stepped on

Since the day I was born

 

God Im walking down your valley

Aint got no pews to kneel on

All I got is thorns

These blues I cant give away

God theres some burdens Jesus cant take away

You know these blues are mine

You know these blues are mine

All down the valley theyre mine

The Mere Tide P43

Returned to the Basilica-A posse-A confrontation-The mercy of the pilot-An anointing in ash

An hour later they passed the remnants of the fires each in turn a blackened mar of gravel. At the culvert her burial was undone and she thought the pelican escaped but when they had passed she saw another smoother place in the road where the bitumen had coagulated after a melting.

Remember always the consumptive promiscuity of fire. It can only give if it doesnt have you.

When they reached the cathedral there was a tumultuary twenty milling outside the gates. Their mutters carried over the flat country and you could see some dip towards the duomo like plastic birds as if impatient for the commencement of mass. Dachni whimpering hid under the shawl. The pilot rubbed her back reassuringly.

Someone in the crowd noticed them and that someone shielded his eyes as though the sun to his back were being reflected against him. Others pointed and some shouted and some ran up, hiking their legs to clear the deepest snow, a noisome mosaic of personages advancing like the flutter of a quilt. Almost twenty, closing round the pilot.

Good god almighty.

Who are these that darken council? she said.

Whats in that star sack?

Whats your carry?

What causes the dead enquire into the business of the living? Fetch thy necromancer thou unjeweled corpses and demand his reason why he hath sicced thee upon me otherwise be gone.

God did you ever hear such shit?

Dont pay him no mind theyre all crazy.

Fingers pinched up the shawl and Dachni shrunk back and the pilot aboutfaced and hissed.

Nor a houndsman. Tis far of the time whence I should perish. I have dreamed it. Hung head to head in a web.

A bounty huntress was yoyoing a scroll with huge bobs of her arm.

Is it the thing?

Looks so, said her partner.

Hey John.

Hey fucking Phillio.

That thing.

The pilot bared the polished palisade of her puce fanged maw. What thing? she hissed.

The barbated one lost his footing in the snow.

They were at the gates now. The pilot turned her back to the clamor and knelt and unclasped the child’s palsied pallidknuckled grip from around her neck and helped her through a rent in the wood.

That is the one.

You stay inside, the pilot told her.

Dachni clambered in and turned. Through the hole all she could see were legs and she stood to look through a higher rent.

The pilot was facing the crowd like some provost cornered by a seditious pupiltry. How to sever the lines arrived this trouble to my house. Or what scapegoat offer up to satisfy their desires. And should I then go to a cave. The huntress was offering a forty sixty cut which her partner amended to that of even splits. Others argued jurisdictional rights to the waif felon, others pietistic appeals and for the sake of Christendom stamp out this homicidal virulence now ere the spirit itself descends into the general vicinages of man and what blasphemy was it to house the devil in a house of god disused though it may be.

The pilot smiled.

The crowd parted for a heavy bruiser badged of lapel to whom they were compliant insofar as at his order to settle they did.

The law of Matraple, spoke the pilot.

The law fixed the pilot with a gaze of arrogant stolidity insufficient to the masking of a certain wariness that the pilot perceiving caused her leer viciously.

John, he began. I dont know what itched you to harbor that little miscreant but youre gonna have to hand it over.

Among the phallic pipeorgan crowns of his deputies’ shadows his stood out farthest yet moving to disadvantage the posse the pilot’s elongate imprint did subsume them and a further yard. He tongued a tobacco browned wad of phlegm from his gums and hawked it.

Ssek, said the pilot.

What?

Nein.

I thought the conclusion was I dont speak the tongues and no debater neither.

But I am, said the pilot, and in the contest of tongues won and in feats of arms how could you best me? Or what conceit overcomes the discretion so well exercised before?

And after you broke my bread. You never got no fetter nor fuss from me about squatting.

If in your folly you misthought it your place to correct me then the fault is your own. You have given nothing for there was never any means by which you could take.

I could book you.

The body is mine, dearly paid for.

The law arched a brow.

The pilot assumed a regal air in which her categorizing gaze drifted to the morning star reluming them with a conspicuous and irreverent egality. None spoke. She seemed in communion with that dull orb and when she finally deigned to perceive them it was with a benign interest as if at fallacies whose very life were spurious and she seemed vexed that the deafness she afforded their claims might have revealed their insubstantiality and in that revelation might have sublimated them into the speculative ether of nothingness.

Ignorant peons begone, she said.

Why you slim shit.

Return to the cloak of thy master. Whom you address you could not guess.

Im my own master.

The pilot scoffed. Not in all you have seen of me could you fathom who I am.

Youre nothing.

Think again.

The badgeman did need convincing. Nor would he argue further. He drew back his duster. Holstered in his belt was an ion revolver of a model documented to have ignited ethanol in the bodies of sots.

An eye of the pilot narrowed to a slit out which the irises regarded him with viperous intent. Her ears stretched straight back. Ill burn down your shitly little podunk.

Ill call that bluff.

Call it. The planes are fueling now. In twenty minutes they will be dropping fire on you.

Bullshit.

Tell me who I am.

Nothing.

Those who insert themselves into the histories of strangers oft disbelieve the most credible statements. Assumptions of impotence in the enemy are symptomatic of the hubric mind. But Ill not demonstrate vainly. Draw thy steel. Or who did you think I was? Some feckless syjin mislaid midway upon the waste of life? Look at me. Tell me who I am.

The law reached for the revolver. There was a wet crack. He bent but he didnt go down. His incisors lowered in bloody tresses of spit. Doves would have called you kin had you not eaten them for thou hast failed in thy heresy. The law fished his teeth from the snow and straightened unsteadily.

The pilot had his revolver and she surveyed the countenances from behind the sights. Go. Before you ruin your lives.

At barrel’s end none would risk it. Their bridled counters of despise to ground or heavens. They turned. They walked away. Some backwards glancing but without word. When they had reached the treeline the pilot pulled open the gate and came in.

Dachni cowering in the marble snuffled puny weepful mewls.

Hello little one.

Nevered lefted! she wailed tearfully.

Anaya acceded she hadnt and gathered her into her arms. Outside a man had left from the treeline and paced through the snow. The pilot stepped out again and Dachni clutched her jaw.

Nooo, Anaya no out no out. Anayaaaa.

But the pilot was already crossing the road. What could he do to me?

At the sight of the pilot the man stopped and called out. I lost my glasses. Thats all.

The pilot crossed the last spanse between them and peered down at him.

L-l-lost them, he stammered.

The pilot set the child down in a bank of snow and gestured for the man to continue his search. She looked into the woods. The posse was still in sight marching slowly through the trees. She began to dredge the snow. The man did. He looked at her.

Dont look at her, said the pilot.

The man averted his eyes quickly but in another minute he was stealing glances.

The pilot lifted him by the collar. What the fuck did I say?

I cant even see.

Youre lying.

Its no lie.

The pilot dropped him and he slipped to his rump and rolled over and backed away.

I need to find my glasses.

She leveled the revolver at him. You dont wear glasses.

The man took a few steps back with his hands raised then turned and ran.

The pilot watched him go and then she picked up the child but as she was walking back she she stopped and pawed the snow and came up with the spectacles.

Vaeshka. Wait here.

She turned and demanded the woods deliver up the blind man unto her and he appeared warily and they held a brief congress and then broke of another. The man returned of his sight bowing to the pilot’s backside as he retreated into the wood and the pilot stalking back towards the cathedral gates outside which lay the bounty on whats papyrus was the rendition of the child. The pilot crumpled and ate it and bore the original inside and closed the gate and went down the aisle to the altar where she placed the child and unhooked the crucifix from the base on the wall and winched down the lamp and came back and opened its doors and beckoned to her.

Come here.

Nuh uh.

Come here now.

Dachni lunged at her with the bayonet. The pilot merely bent her knee outward and the point shot past and raked sparks out of the living stone and then she was airborne dangling by the skull before the pilot’s saddened face. She no longer had the rifle. The pilot leaned it against the altar and set her inside the lamp.

Whom do you worship?

Dachni peered at her thrice sided incunabula with a constrained terror. It was swinging slightly back and forth.

Who?

Noned. Yandy.

So be it but not to that will I pray or sacrifice to. Arms up.

Dachni blinked at Anaya. Who touched tenderly her cheek.

Come on.

She raised her arms.

Anaya took her sweater by the hem and began to lift it and she dropped her arms and fended in panic and wail but Anaya cooed and sang and with caresses soothed her fighting to the speechless and petrified querying of her ineffable hurt.

Feral fettered child to the cypress go, bring a kindred spider, find the roe. This then a bath then a tailors then mass. Haxshi ko priagii, haki nog prentat erage. Tis it is alls alright.

Aldes us.

Tis.

Stoooop.

Calm.

Anaya lifted the sweater over her head and removed her bottoms and the blue boxers with the word justice blazoned boldly across the front. The wemflesh revealed seemingly composed out of bruised scarring. Fantastical discolorations of atrophic quagmire like the camouflages of certain beetles dwelling among the roots of equatorial jungles.

Widely I paint head to toe, first the soles then bridge of her nose, under her mouth, the pits of her arms, betweeeeen her thighs open open, and down her spine between each finder and under the lids of her eyes and with care even unto her messy hair.

She powdered her eyes and at last let ash trickle upon her from her fist as if through the neck of a sandwatch. When she had done she slid a leg behind her and sat back and bid her out.

Dachni achooed a plume of duff.

Anaya evoked her again and she croaked a hoarse refusal. She was taken under arms and lifted out and she threw her arms around her and sniffled into her neck. Gray beads slurred heavily down her cheeks and she smeared them on Anaya’s collarbone and she shook like a dog a pall of ash from herself and stopped to cough and shook again.

Anaya backed out of the pall. You didnt sleep.

Ihmim.

Why dont you sleep now.

She put loose fists to her mouth and shook her head and the loosed ash hung like a worn afterimage of the fling of her hair.

Are you hungry?

She croaked sadly no.

What would you like? Or how about a bath?

Eghh.

Do you want to talk?

The least of things she wanted to do.

Pick one.

Epbgehh.

Bath it is.