Eric Vargas's Blog, page 9

The Mere Tide P34

Adrift-Ntzineyii-Rescue-An inquiry-Dangers discussed-The view of the law. 

Monstrous came the raping rains and the vampire powers low hanging by the hangle puked Ragnarok and wretched the complexion of the heavens. Potency of the inverted isangelous rescripting the valse of thunder and tree fall and the raked weeds’ gnashing and there is a whirlwind gathers birds and slakes its gullet with the white elflocked shrives.

Swaddled in this display of the charnelverse she is treading in a tear of skins cleaved slick and rotten to her like some hideous molted miscarriage. Where she goes there is no shelter not least in her sick black hibernaculum.

Walking through a waste of agrostis she is come upon open air. Swallowed into the grave. She cracks a brittle labyrinthine bone cradle and it is a foxhole she has fallen into and this waste where the plemena had effected a stand against aerial drones that had annihilated them from two miles off. She composed a pyre out of the defenders. Fetching them out the wall burst trenches and foxholes like some banausic bonepicker in a lag of rotary motions. Their equipment had been looted but under a pelvis she discovered an ampule containing an effervescent elding ghost blue. She stowed it by the pyre and reaped the winter weeds, the hibernate flowers, two hours worth, and piled them on the pyre until the denuding of the bones seemed reversed. Shrieks of lightning barred the horizon. She had neither gunstone nor magnesium out which to strike fire and so she emptied out the elding and tried to strike spark out a shinbone with a tooth but more fell then lead in limbs is despair and the instruments slipped from her worn fingers. In the distance the whirlwind loomed and she could see the silhouettes of a herd stampede up the prairie chaos within and what voice spoke out was the screams of horse. And now fall the stones of heaven. Leaven the margent of her bed and fly the unharming fire through her toes and spiral up her shanks and a corset be and trellis her in vagrant tresses spilt across her bosom and do a dance pon her shoulders and with ethereal finesse whisk away her tears and down scars channel warmth and care not even to abate the rains.

She went on through fields of combed weeds gnashed back and across muddy metamorphosis of country roads littered with the gale stripped branches of a pinetum.

At a creek she rested upon a stump and had not long when voices sounded from upstream. Child pitch and child tenor. She didnt turn. Not when they neared nor when they exclaimed her.

A troop that rushed up and clamored her a thousand questions. She slumped to the ground. Someone ran for help. Someone else took her hand.

Youre going to be ok, the someone said.

A man came. He gathered her in his arms and bore her across the waters and across a branchblown bridge and up a path into his town and to his house. A woman awaited him. The frantic shoeslap of the children followed after. He took her to a bedroom and laid her upon the mattress. A postered police badge stared down from the ceiling.

What happened to her?

The man turned to face the clog of children in the doorway. All of you out, he said.

We found her.

Go.

All but one left. A girl in a full length cream trench coat and matching panama hat.

Emily.

Emily held out her arms, one hand clutching her cherry red tie. This is my room.

The man looked back to Dachni. What happened to you? Was there anyone else with you? Where are you from?

Dachni stared at the bossment of the shield. The bow of MPD a perch for an eagle whats wingspread formed the border. All silver.

Whats wrong with her?

I think shes catatonic.

Dachni looked past him. The walls were wainscoted. Quartered at her level and a mirror. Police memorabilia was everywhere. Mementos. Trophies for marksmanship. Framed letters. Photographs of this junior detective posing with the officers of the town.

The woman was in the room now. God what is wrong with its eyes?

Shes catatonic, said Emily.

Did you call Holiday?

You didnt fix the phone yet.

Go next door.

Ill get Mr. Trarper, said Emily turning and dashing round the woman.

The doctor was unavailable but his apprentice was. Young man. He put a stethoscope to Dachni’s breast and looked at his watch.

170/190, he said. 174 BPM.

Jesus Christ.

No the literature says thats normal.

So shes ok?

Are you kidding?

Between the visit of the doctor and the custodian of the law the woman fitted Dachni into jeans and a sunflower dress. No one discovered her lack of ears. When Trarper came he knelt and pulled the dress down a little. He had a scratchpad on which he’d written relevant inquiries as he had a forgetful nature. Dachni heard the questions as if they were of another world. As if there were no words for the things of which she had been witness.

The apprentice poised earnestly with her own pen ready to record any utterances. Trarper looked over his shoulder at her.

Has she said anything at all?

She clicked her pen twice and twirled it between fingers. Nope. I asked everything you did and she hasnt said a word. I dont think she can speak. Can shine bloods speak?

Its bez dushi, said the woman.

Trarper removed his cap and flapped it twice and put it on again. Ive been told they could. Maybe. I dont know. I dont know if we can do anything with this. He snapped his fingers over her eyes. Shes completely out of it. If she cant talk then well never know.

Is there anyway we can help?

Yes actually, Trarper said rising to his feet. Keep her overnight. Otherwise I have to cell her. Maybe they arent so vagrant as a gypsie but theres no telling how long this might take to sort out. Fact is I doubt it can be sorted.

We cant keep her here, said the woman. Theyre dangerous.

Trarper braced a hand against a hip. Thats. Its hard to say. Ive seen them hired to good labor. Theyre not lunatics. Which makes everything Ive heard come out of the frontier even worse.

What did you hear?

Theyre fucking homicidal.

Sean.

Bad word alert!

Trarper smiled uneasily. Sorry ma’am.

The woman turned worriedly to her man. I dont like it. Who knows whatll happen if it wakes up.

The man rubbed his beard.

Your choice Mikhail, said Trarper.

We can manage her, said Emily. Ill keep watch.

Mikhail looked at Trarper. You dont have any space downtown?

Packed. That brawl filled us up. I guess I could let Marshall and Mills out but then I dont think theyd learn their lesson. Its either that or put ten men in a closet or add her to the mix and I dont think anyone would like that except the ones who would.

Yeah.

Traper shoved a hand into a pocket and got out a pair of cuffs. If the answers yes I can lend you these.

Mikhail looked at the dangling cuffs shaking his head slightly. Then he clapped his hands halfheartedly. No. I think we can manage. Fifty pounds of coma is exactly that.

The woman stepped forward and took the cuffs.

Might be fifty pounds of murder.

Sean.

Mikhail rubbed his wife’s back. No. Its alright. Because even fifty pounds of murder is exactly that. Fifty pounds.

Trarper flipped his notebook shut and put it away. Ill ring Harter tonight. See if anyone else has seen her before or maybe at least if banditry has been reported but with that storm I doubt anything is working. Ill let you know tomorrow.

Do you think well find the people who did this? said Emily.

There might not actually be anyone who did this. She might just have been caught out in the storm.

As beat up as she is?

Trarper shrugged. It might be. In any case even if someone did beat her up I dont think we’d find them.

Why not?

Well theyre probably long gone. And even if we did find them. Well. Maybe she was a thief. Or maybe. Even if she wasnt its not exactly a crime. I mean yeah its a kid and its wrong but these things are outside the law. And killing her aint contrary to the law.

Things Fall Apart

Chapter I

Ere fall the stones of heaven. The flare and the thunderclap and the stars driving headlong their downward course along the vapory shores of the world like a spread of gems on a wheel. The day was one of August, just so. The storms had not gone and the sun not come up yet in some farther quadrant of that glinting cupola the night had grown luminescent for the plummet of a point of sapphirine light like an egg. Old eosphorus unslotted at last. Tumbling twixt the nomadic house of war, the wandered house of sea like a comet and with portents no less dire towards a parched and godless earth like some fiery absconder fugitive among its brethren.

A ship then, such a ship as it is. A carrier twirling mutely aglow like a crude windup toy loosed of its gears. Its silvered hull blushing white and peeling fast away and the peeled plates winking phosphorescently in the midnight like chaff and the metal skirts molten belling upwards against a furious drift as if they had the constancy of wax and the spires unmoored from its belly turned in its wake like the splintered lances of knights invisible but for the stars eclipsed by their passing. And the engines fired madly. The twinned set mounted in the stern were one dead and the other dying, the portside machinery sputtering smoke and the starboard disintegrating in midair and the whole of the ship descending like some pyrogenic ore loosed from the sun.

All that night figures could be seen egressing the wreckage. Beings like stenciled apparitions shifting shade to shade in the warping firelight like the faint afterlives of some violent sect of the damned who in this vague existence bore a semblance of man and were perhaps of as much substance. They stitched across the face of the waters bleeding and dying and crying aloud for the intercession of a pantheon no less silent than those ravenous entities who cry themselves for blood and the blood of sons and more blood. And then they are gone in the darkness.

The raw redness of the dawn appeared the pilot. Fallen out this glass fanged portal, pursued by fire adown this welted superstructure. To tarmac. It rose. It staggered to the edge of the runway and stepped off into a roiling rutilant smoke. Far below there was a dull slap of water. The waves rippling out. And stilling. And stilling. It surged upwards and a bloody froth regurgitated into a blackish harbor beclot with corpse through which it must wade like some doleful sinner wrought out of a lake of blood. To this shore where fire has barbered the sedge. Up this embankment of ash, this concrete apron webbed by fissure, under a crumbled bridge where gray gilleted crows roosted in terror on the girders. It looked up, all their avian eyes upon it, went on. Ascended the sharp turns of these stairs. At the uppermost landing a guardrail in improbable contortion. Here the road. Slabs of macadam like a pair of ophidian vertebrates hammered out upon the earth whereon in scattering its fellow starfarers sat bestilled by the sheer immensity of their infortunes.

A few turned to watch it. That dark ananias. As if it were some fabled faith healer called upon to bring out the dead among that rabble of bloodblacked maimfolk no less drenched in blood itself. A parabolic gash wound about its right adderlike eye and that eye was cracked and flushed with blood, the capillaries all broken up and a hellish terra incognita contained within those tinctured pupils. Its right arm was splayed to a silver sheening bone and its trousers were wet with blood and its jacket wore dark unblinking eyelets around little shards of glass like the monuments of a rabid and parasitic denomination and its undershirt clung to it like a scab. In these tattered cerements it seemed a creature baptized in the liquefied bones of prior species as if somehow this impostor had usurped the blessing of antecessors with whom no lineage was shared save in the common temporality derived from that elemental egg which exploded the universe.

Nothing was said and it shambled mutely past the mazy ranks of the stunned and inambulate to the border of a sylvan hell beyond the roadside whereupon a rude stump like a throne it set and beheld the dusty gotterdammerung land where had terminated its fall.

A broiling hellscape. General with fire and germed with sparks flurried on searwinds blown for to gasp the land dry. In the west lay an apocalyptic backtrack through an old world forest. A long breach of trees erred and smoking like censers along a cauterized trough. Its eyes drifted. Here I am. Here I am. All before an inferno. All behind a cinerary waste.

The pilot didnt know how long it set there. When it woke it was without knowledge that it had woken or even that it had slept at all. Standing before it now was a waterbearer. A diminutive creature in a shawl of silicate rage. It carried in its arms an urn and it gave it…him. Her. Gave her water to drink. Tilting up the urn by the base. The pilot closed her eyes. The water was cool and good. When the urn let down again the waterbearer was staring back at her frail and unafraid in a clapping hurricane of fire that absolved in one ashy gust this benevolent phantom from sight and no amount of scrying would recall even a trace of it for it was gone. Nor was there any other to see for save herself there was no soul other upon the road for even from that nubilated terrain had the sun routed the survivors for all that they had yet been in darkness.

She rose. She went down the road through a plague of fireflies born aloft in smoke. She walked as far as the JD bridge passing as she went a few nameless laggards who pursued her like zombies. She ascended a caged ladderwell up to the old trackway for to ascertain her surroundings from the perilous vantage of the lattice pylons installed along the track but the country was filled with smoke and it was not long before the winds howled her down.

Her wanderings now become blind. The crew had dispersed through the countryside and she encountered them so often, small moribund scatterings of vexed decerebrates brainsicked by incubus wondering dumbly a steppe scalded to the loam. Others who had infiltrated among the crispened trunks of pine and white oak for the cooler shade to be had there.

There is a meaningless woe present in the wake of all calamities and by that most dread she tracked her mates to a gutted wood where a few remnant bands had gathered in a grim menagerie of suffering where lies a woe to wash the stones. To mute them. Already the ground become a muxy batter so watered itd been by blood.

Among others she trickled in and set to touring the camp. Everywhere lay crew with blanched hides or skins that sloughed off like wet mache and some clutched limbs oddly truncate or flesh swolled by the displacement of bones. She came across the navigator where he lay in the mud. His face had been crushed and the frontal lobes squeezed out below his eyes like an intracranial vomit. These aliens that have fallen have tendrils out their heads both thin and thick and alive and his were dead and burst. Through this world and others they move by feet like the ossifrage and manipulate them with that likeness and they are two tongued. Beside the navigator were piles of limbs sorted by appendage. The hands outstretched in every vector, reaching, clutching. What for? Theres only air.

Her thread through this discrete misery passed her by a legless technician with a face abraded. The stumps had been tied off with belts but they still leaked steadily their oil hued blood. When the dying one saw her he clasped upon her ankle and began to gibber. She raised her leg as if out of a dungheap and tried to shake loose of him but he would not let go. She stamped his throat. A sad crunch that broke his windpipe.

Hasti!

Her feathered ears pricked and slowly wanded whilst the aural sectors of her brain divided out of that fearful ambiance the voice which had called. It called again and it was behind her. Another voice asked if it were the dagestai and the first agreed that it was so.

Dorsin?

The voice called back that he was that officer and the second said that it, Azilel, was also himself too.

Their voices led her through the dust. A strange sibilance of vowels that slipped through the teeth. They were doctor and patient set by sides on a felled tree debarked by fire. They were finely scaled in hues of green and dark discolorings after their kind and shades of blue as their kind did bruise. The doctor bore a steel spike through his side but the other seemed more the dire. They spoke in their own tongue these approximations and what they said was as follows:

Regret passing up captainship now? said Azilel.

The pilot smiled a witch’s smile, full of fangs. She held out her arms, that wounded one not so high.

Calamity is the sport of the divine, to be in one so excessive beggars asking: what watches and wherefore? And why art thou glum? Thee aught be an excellent sportsman by now. Wheres Hrecki?

Could I answer he were in fire, began Dorsin, Id trust justice yet reports have him scaped unscathed. Wherever the fiend is he is the epicenter of this sabotage, this or any other conspiracy.

A conspiracy, antiphoned the pilot, a conspiracy sure. Tis a true drought when even misfortune’s well’s dry. Or must illness now ration? Trust each shall have his portion, if I unknitted this scene itd be seen wetted by the ichorice drool of the leerer Yandvilai.

Azilel drew his smallest talon across his forehead. Gods damned is wasted breath. Hang their agents, theres at least necks a rope can compass but any betrayed aught examine their company first ere trying to hang the universe.

Dying prating hypocrite, hissed the pilot. Ill not misplace my blame.

Then find something mortal to share it with.

Tis a wide course in me where rage flows, thou shouldst care it not brook thee.

Azilel tapped the end of the spike almost contemplatively. He didnt look away but he didnt speak.

The pilot turned to Dorsin. What bane’s befallen you?

Belief of thine death, he answered. In thy blood I saw thee that thee were dead.

Romantic to thy end. I survive. But not in this way lixao, these are working hours.

Azilel leveled a twig towards the ship. What happened? he said.

Azilel shall desist speech. Wheres Mai-kin?

Deceased, said Dorsin. Command is yours.

The pilot laughed. Another trite shirker of messes.

Art thy blind that thy are mirthful?

Ive naught to do with this, said the pilot.

Tis a function of a dagestai.

Defined as does as wishes not whats asked.

Nor whats required, muttered Azilel.

I cede command, said Dorsin. Hithia Azilel Grevat you shall stand as my witness.

I so stand.

Not doing.

Tis done.

I recuse myself on grounds of conflicting interests.

Tis yours.

The pilot cast her sight woodenly about as if pulled upon by wires. Mine? she said. Mine? My designs? She gestured widely at the pines about. Cylindric beings strange of substance did I inaugurate the laws of the world? Does sickness spread on my account? No. Where is the xriagai?

In no one place. Probably you passed a piece of him along the way.

The pilot spat on the doctor.

And you? she said.

Dorsin looked up. He began to say but thought better the showing of it. He bent slightly at the waist and rolled up his pantleg. The leg underneath was broke. An angular tripod of ebony bones connecting knee and ankle, the two anterior of which were broken and all desleeved of flesh and fascia. The pilot bent to inspect it, turning it without concern of his wincing. She tugged the legging down.

Canst thou feel?

No. I wont again. Wilt thou not take command?

The pilot scratched viciously at her throat as though her voice were an itch to her. He guilts it on, justice art thou are? How many are we here?

Shy of a hundred, said Dorsin. Twas a winding route but common. Mostly we were on the road ere it began to melt. Its heat put us off. It will drive us out here too.

Is there a better place found?

Anyplace.

Make due here.

Azilel pointed towards a distant glow in the dust like a second sun. Not for my sake alone, he said, but our priority should be the Nghorro, we need desperate mending.

The pilot laughed. Its fastly docked and no concern the tide.

Azilel glared balefully. Weve no tools.

She let off a slow disapproving series of tongue tsks. Never a less unjestful lot. Draw thy splinter then assemble to me.

He gestured offhandedly at the spike without looking at it. Im pained beyond duty, whom shall I subrogate to my stead? Myasti.

No.

No?

Thou shalt come with me.

Hes head of the iatric compliment, said Dorsin.

The matter? Were he my head hed go. And my head attends.

I would not send him.

And you are not Adelinda. Azilel, go. And be no long time.

Azilel touched his wound but there was no dissuading her. He pushed off from the log and turned stiffly and hobbled away.

The pilot watching him go hadnt heard the officer speak.

What?

I said it would be a pitiful waste if he died.

The pilot spat. Youre all dead here. I dont see why I needs go through the motions.

 

Things Fall Apart is available online at Amazon here.

The Mere Tide P33

Anti-pleroma-The prophecy true

Listless now under crescent waxing, gibbous wane. Major maria and gray coast of crisium apart of lacus and sister mares who save thee first and ever edging the void would patron the passion of the wrath. She drank and drank and covered herself not from the cold but from the sun and the shadow engendering curtain of her corpus’ shambling occluding the last of the divine in this lowest of the trichomatic hierarchy of the insane blind and maimed shored upon this cellar hell of sarkia. Wisdom thou hast bound the light but not taken down the screen and shall come a day when light cannot abolish dark for even now evil knows itself and purposes has.

Riding up a shallow ravine she entered a clearing where was a cèilidh disbanding. Men smartly dressed, men of means. Eight of them. They were saddling their horses.

Dachni’s drew her mosin and stood it on her thigh. Their gray plump and bespectacled captain was already mounted and he rode his horse before hers and it raised its head and snorted and Dachni reined it around.

Good morning little one.

Hello.

And to where are you bound this fine morning?

Upways. To a church.

Are you a nun little one?

No.

His gaze dropped to her horse. Tis an excellent…

Dachni leveled the nagant but the brute snuck up behind her swung his club.

She woke bedded in the cold slouch of tree shade bateared by two fans of blood. A mazy sky of boughs drifted above that blinking collapsed together. She dragged a scarred hand limply across the vast vicious cicatrix crosshatch of her stitchless discolored flesh to a headside pain. Through the cleamed hair pain but no ear. She peeled away the scab strands. A wicked hole flush with her skull. And no ear other. She covered her eyes. She searched for her ears again but they were not there. She rolled carefully onto her stomach and pushed herself up and atwixt her thin ragged thighs saw blood dripping out the savage gape. She pulled her knees up under herself and tried standing but it was as though some thorned malevolence indwelled her womb. She cupped her face in her hands and bit her fingers and managed to rise. In a shuffling limp she moved down to the ravine and with great difficulty squatted by the water and hooked out her holes sperm viscid and fisheye gray with a finger and after a while she hung her head and cried.

The Mere Tide P32

An interview with the law-1Y-Dachni takes her leave-Divested

Ten minutes later the police arrived. A pair of officers who knocked on the glass of the door with their billyclubs and pointed at Dachni and beckoned her out. She exchanged glances with the recruits and then she parted of them.

Outside on the sidewalk one of the officers pointed at the head. Where did you get that head?

Dachni held up the head. Desert.

Did you shoot that man?

Aye. He were probbed hunnerd yards off an hit em with a heart shop. He harlied time to see nor shit.

Didnt you tell Sergeant Lowe that he tried to rob you?

Aye.

How could he do it from a hundred yards off?

Dachni’s face made a worried twitch. She set the head on the sidewalk. Well. Wasnt maybe that far off. He were close enough. He had a knife an it aint as ifn ye has no tentions is good runnin.

He was running at you.

Caint rob a folk runnin away. Look it were jess ta make it sound somethin better for em thass all. Know aint big. An aint smart. An aint pretty. So theres ye knows…hasta be somethin ta trade.

Wheres the body?

Desert. She waved her arm vaguely to the east. Its reckon somethin days away.

The officer looked at his partner.

I dont want to, said the partner. Im not going to.

Alright miss why dont you come with us.

Caint go with ye cause needs is list.

You cant enlist.

Who the fuck says you?

What?

Fuck you.

Listen youre too young to enlist in the army.

Thass esent your say.

It is my say.

He reached for the child and the child ran back. She threw open the recruitment center door and ran through the lobby to the hall and down it. The sergeant’s voice was coming through a door and she threw that door open.

The sergeant rose from behind her desk, the recruit chaired before it turned.

What the hell is going on?

Is to list!

The officers barged through the doorway and dodged back from the thrown chair. It dented the drywall. The sergeant grabbed Dachni by the shoulder and pulled her back. The officers kicked the chair from out the doorway and entered.

Whats going on?

Im taking her to the precinct.

Is she under arrest?

No shes an orphan.

Dachni stomped her foot. Not true. Not matter is gonna list.

The sergeant came from around the desk and righted the chair. I can take this from here, she said.

The officers glanced at another. We cant have that running around alone. Criminal or not its a health hazard. I mean look at it. Tell me that isnt what comes before cholera.

Ill sort this out.

She looked at Dachni. Wait out in the lobby until I call you.

But needs to list.

The sergeant turned to the recruit she was interviewing. Wait outside for a moment. Then to the officers. Both of you out.

The officers, the recruit, left. The sergeant shut the door and relieved Dachni of the nagant and leaned it against a bookcase and gestured for her to sit. Dachni sat on the floor.

In a chair.

She got up and sat in the chair. The armrests came almost to her shoulders and not least because her deepened hunch. The sergeant resumed her own seat and put her elbows on the desk and clasped her hands levered them down.

You cant enlist in the army.

Dachni nearly leapt from her chair but the sergeant continued.

Im going to be frank with you. The army is a formal organization with standards that you flatly dont meet. Youre too young, too short, you dont meet the weight requirements. Speech impediments are disqualifying, illiteracy is disqualifying, and while Im not a psychologist I think Im looking at a walking pathology.

Dachni looked at her boots. Is seventeen.

Whatever. Rules are in place for a reason.

Thass it? Thass all. Not even a why?

I told you whys. Ill can them again. Too small, too light, too dumb, too psychotic, too inarticulate.

Dachni was wringing her hands over another. Desent hafta be mean of it.

You wanted the answer.

Well now what?

Dont ask me Im not a social worker.

Dachni was tearing up. She wiped her nose. Hows…hows get citizenned?

I dont know apply for it.

How?

Im not a track record. Figure it out yourself. You might already be American. Where are you from?

Urals.

Do you have a passport?

Dachni retrieved her passport and put it on the table.

The sergeant needent examine it. Youre Russian, she said.

Nooo. Thass fake. Look inside.

It looks real to me. And if its fake why do you have it? Why give it to me?

Dachni didnt say.

The sergeant stuck two fingers through the pages and spread it on the table. It looks good to me. So. Time to go.

Wait.

No waiting. I have others to process.

Well what to do?

I dont know. Go back over the border. Join the MSV. Theyll take anybody.

Dachni almost said something but then she turned and walked out. Shuffling downcast past the sympathy of recruits. The officers waiting outside with her horse took her to the precinct. A small building with white walls. They sat her on a bench by the cells.

Wanna go.

Where would you go?

Whys it your business?

Youre a minor.

Whats minor? Ub minor.

A child. We cant just let you go.

But they didnt watch her either. At their lunch break she left out and mounted her horse. She was next at a diner and in that diner she stared blankly at an omelet she had needed help to order. It vented its steam over the long sable spill of night. The waitress bused the tables. She was staring at the cold fold of eggs and then she was staring at the plastic veneer of the table. The lights shut off. Someone said something to her and she got out of her booth and went out.

Searching for her map at the edge of town she remembered suddenly that she had given it away. She tried placing herself in the world but all she managed was to know she was lost. She shut her eyes. She was going to cry and she didnt want to. Her eyelids grew inflamed. A car had sawed into the street. Its headlights slicing away the muted pigments of night. It drove past and at the intersection its stoplights flared like the eyes of the demonic that slurred away as the car turned onto the main street. She took out the passport and felt the paged face with her fingers as though she would read it as read the blind but this face too was in no language she knew and she let it fall from her fingers and rode on.

Ontario P3

A final tarry, a pause, a last intake of air ere our northern procession. As I was on a train I feel a word musts be spared for those noble machines, those silvern heralds of civilization. There is perhaps no better mode of transport than the train, certainly on land, and because they have not yet invented rails that can float upon the seas. Trains are depending, clunking, shuttling, telescoping, crowded tubes that oft offend the olfactories, are uncomfortable, glacial, thunderous as hurricanes and fitted with brakes that can reach pitches higher than the lusty breeding of caterwausl. And I do love them. For such cries are alarums that someone has arrived. But all of it I love. For who resents dependibility? Who would speak ill of a well kept time schedule? And who hasnt been warmed by the cough of heat pipes on a winter night? If their fusilages are crowded well what of it? All transports are crowded atimes and so it is not an unique fault and any smell too is really the fault of man and not his invention.

Are there other overland modes? Verily. Can any compare to the beast? No. A bus will reach any destination it is true but what a controlled environment. An intercity bus? Why theres not time enough even to get lost in yourself. Still a dice throw better true than being on an airplane for woe to the man who forgets his altitude and attempts to let in some fresh air. That will secure him a train ride! But look at how fast the wonder has gone from that invention. I feel it to be a crime against the soul that any man should be forced to suppress the oldest desire, that for fresh air, which even the lowliest cur is entitled to, and that the best that can be hoped for is the monotonously unpleasant breath of another stale and recycled and that none aboard have come from a country where the cuisine is fabled to be spicy. True it is with great loathing that I board any flight, although the greatest detraction may not be from the flight itself but the preceding two or three hours of being corralled and manhandled in the name of my security.

But on a train oh you may stretch out to sleep. You may dine at your leisure and even atimes take a late night perambulation while the distant lights of villages whisk by. The window of a train is always the framing for a picture. True theyre not as exciting as a marshutka which against the stacked odds of poor maintenance, shoddy roads, unsober drivers without too much tether to this mortal coil will get the daredevils and misers among us to the destination but I would advise anyone to bring their articles of faith or even take up religion for the duration of the trip. In all I would not reccommend to too often risk your life. But a train. A plane can be held up by as much as a poodle or some wayward mujahadeen but whenever was it told of an Iowan train hijacked and redirected to some anteloping veldt of the Serengeti?

But a train. All transport has a melancholic element in their wheels but in trains is this sorrow most pronounced. Perhaps it is that even if you are returning home you feel yourself embarked upon an adventure. And embarked. For as land dwindles aftward so does the station disappear into the urban blur and the destination, perhaps days away, is no where in sight.

The Mere Tide P31

The Speech

Mr. Tamhall, Governor Arrington, President Orrin. Thank you for being here and thank you for the time and expense of hosting me. Thank you to the institutions which made it possible for me to speak on this occasion. Thank you also to Chairman Pelson for the contribution of this venue. To those listening whether here or abroad, whether in urbanity or country or domed within the outer colonies of space, whether you are a member of the future generations whom we here seek to serve, you have my gratitude for your time, which always has been a precious commodity though perhaps today more than ever.

We stand today on the 23rd of February in the sixth year of the sixth century of the second millennium at the great pivot of the years, the great fulcrum between disorder and order, between chaos and stability, between a brighter dawn or an age darker yet than that which has gone before. Today human poverty has been reduced by an order of magnitude unimaginable even forty years ago though nowhere near what was achieved in antiquity and yet our ability to destroy ourselves has paradoxically maintained its furious degree or if changed at all has only increased.

Today marks the succession of the first unmauled generation, a generation that has unlike any other in recent history escaped the wake of our ancestors who for their mistakes cursed their sires for far beyond the fourth generation. Man being a harsher judge than god. Perhaps we refrain from casting blame though blame may be laid for we are not substantially different, nor do we resent our forefathers for we too have made mistakes our children must suffer for. Failures of fortitude, failures of communication, failures of courage. We ask understanding from the youth and forgiveness that they too must take up the hard mantle and shoulder on. But shoulder not alone. This older generation would shoulder this burden alone I believe to be the general feeling but we cannot. Every man, every woman, to prevent every child must answer the call to defend the ideals of this country, young as it is, ideals, not ideologies, for we must remember that it was the rigid mind that scourged the greater part of mankind, ideals we have not always lived up to, ideals betimes we have betrayed, and if this is call is a call to arms it is also an entreaty for forgiveness for the wrongs that we have done that have led to this moment of intractability and for the wrongs we will do to lead us out of it. Ernest Hemingway wrote “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.” In this we may all soon become criminals, but we should hope not to become recidivists nor unrepentant. For my part to the youth of this new era you have my most heartfelt apologies. But also you have my most heartfelt hopes. I will not pretend that the future shall be any easier than the years that have gone before, in fact we predict they shall be markedly worse. Again I and I am sure the guardians of this age ask forgiveness for the state of the world and this terrible impasse, that we could not improve it beyond what has been done.

Nevertheless the world turns and we in it are the heirs to its turning. Whatever tomorrow brings we wish it bring not war but war we shall if called upon to do so. But also shall we make peace if peace there can be. For even in this dark hour we pray it not yet the twelfth and even if so we shall endeavor to rewind it back another hour and find a route to peace.

The wheels of this earth have ground some four and a half billion years and they will turn perhaps another four and a half before the sun expands. Thus we find ourselves at the meridian of the world but we may perhaps be at the end of human life on this world at only a scant three hundred thousand. For all our failings of which there have been many we hope that we amend them through our labors against the common enemies of man to which all mankind is susceptible, whether man or woman, young or old, protestant or Catholic, black or white, Russian or American. We here in this country young, and usurping its namesake from an older institution are as guilty as any of being human and being full of human frailty but we also have human strength and human ingenuity which if utilized to its utmost may see us through this darker storm which if we survive without compromising our humanity will bring a brighter dawn.

Our forebearers inherited a world far from their choosing and yet abandoning not their responsibilities softened a world more brutal than ours and if we likewise assume the same responsibility may make a kinder world for tomorrow. This shall not be an easy task and if it is darker before dawn it is because the smoke will blot out even the stars. This too I lament. But lament without despair. For I know as do many here assembled and listening that though the wheel is in the ditch of the ages our shoulders are against the wheel.

To those against whom we are opposed and who oppose us I invite them into dialogue, with respect on both sides, not from positions of fear or suspicion but with mutual openness. But there is no openness without vulnerability and no vulnerability without trust and no trust without faith. In that spirit we welcome a drawing down of arms for though this peace has not been well it has yet been peace and peace we should prefer. To those who feel neutrality the safer option you have my empathy. However I ask is it work the risk to remain uncommitted against the bulk of tyranny, hedging that greater powers will if not defeat than at least match it, is it better to oppose tyranny in its ascendance or at its apex? Remember that nothing in life not least of all life is guaranteed. To those domestically who question whether taking the pledge, whether choosing to commit to this vision of a better world may be in vain, I say nothing is done in vain that serves for the betterment of all people, though they succeed, though they fail, and yet the prospect of the dissolution of all that we hold dear is too much to bear and the hope for a better future too much to resist.

Aster put the tablet away and eyed his comrades assuredly. Were gonna make a difference lads.

The Mere Tide P30

At the recruiters-Fools of the call-A premonition

West then far into country and from people. To towns she would not enter but for the outskirts. To dash into bars to requisition whiskey with a mask on. 

One day to enter a street where in uniform a woman stood on a street corner. And all caution. This female a sergeant surveyed the street for the listless and meandering suddenly confronted with a calamitous mishap of child bearing down upon her holding aloft rifle and head.

Oh shit.

Dachni reached the sidewalk by miracle unscathed and cursed upon by the halted traffic. She danced round the sergeant who backed and backed.

Look look its head an can shot up aldy an goes took an Alessa work of could citizen look look look! Hey true really is was in the desert an said hey an this here nigger come ta try an rob of horse an stuck him a yaonet an tooked his heart thisis is head. Crossed everwhere benned the world an in the mounties an up an down an tubed an thowed an saw floods an locusts an rain fire I the desert wayyyyy sly ompta heathen home an foughted rusks an broke a train an caught a king! Look! Look! Its the head turned out an has favor of Yandvilai so ettl brin ye wricked luck in any kinder fight haps rings rings an woo! Sightly goes moon an hard breaks it down to sun.

The sergeant had backed herself to the wall of the recruiting center. The door opened and a corporal no more than looked out then was set upon.

Hidy hi! Which one are you?

Ohholyshit.

He slammed shut the door and then opened it cautiously and looked to the sergeant. What?

I have no idea, said the sergeant.

Dachni was still jumping about and the sergeant stilled her with a hand.

Whats going on?

List! Aint ye for list?

I…what?

Dachni hunched over and burst upward. Lissssstin!

This is a recruitment office.

Aye! Aye!

I…wait. Are you trying to enlist?

Aye! Its rain fire.

The sergeant looked at the corporal but Dachni dropped the head and snatched at her blouse.

Listen! Listen!

The sergeant took the hand and put it from her. Hold on, she said. Hold on.

Nagghhhhhh.

Hold on. Whats your name?

Essa. Ess. Less. Alessa. Gillespie. Alessa Gillespie.

Ok. Calm down. Calm. Calm. Calm.

Dachni slouched in impatient exasperation.

Hurrrrry.

First things first, said the sergeant. Is that your horse?

Dachni looked into the street. The horse was meandering nervously in the lanes while the traffic swerved around it and the drivers shouted and blared their horns.

Thats horse. Its not.

Get that out of the street.

Dachni dashed for the horse flinging as she did the head down the sidewalk where it rolled spraying blood against the storefronts. She picked up the trailing reins and led the horse to the sidewalk and looked for a place to tie and did so to the door of a furniture store. The manager would have protested but then he saw her scapulars of teeth and ears and he thought better of it.

The NCOs were conferring when she ran back. Hey hey hey.

They looked at her.

Can you tell me where that head came from? said the sergeant.

Offa nigger.

How did you get it?

Fightin. He hadda big ol knife an he tried ta rob the horse but run up to his charge an slid an stucked him in the belly then shot him off blaw! An tooked his head.

Ok, said the corporal. He looked down the street at the head. You cant leave that lying around. Get it and come inside.

Whoakay!.

She skipped down the sidewalk and got the head and dashed back. They held the door open for her and she went in. In the lobby a dozen recruits watched. They sat their seats and watched this diminutive homunculus track shapes of blood in the carpet. The sergeant pointed at an empty chair.

Sit there. Stay still.

Dachni plopped down and beamed at the staring faces. Outside the corporal was securing the grade to a bike rack in front of the office.

Wheres yall froms?

The recruits looked at her. She looked at them each in turn for answers slow in forthcoming.

The grad.

The same.

Aster.

Grad.

Roseville.

Beograd.

Aha.

Where are you from? said a boy from Pelican.

Mounties. By Perm.

Are you Russian?

Dachni spat. Shit no.

The corporal came in. Dont spit on the carpet.

Dachni clasped her hands to her headtop. Sarry.

Dont say sorry just do it.

Ok.

He rubbed the spit out with the toe of his boot. He leveled a finger at the recruits. You all are responsible for this hot mess until Im back.

Yessir.

Sir.

Aye sir.

He gave a last doubtful look at the child and then went out of the lobby down a hall.

Whatre you doing here?

She looked at the Roseville recruit. He was young but big. His hands big and clean.

Gonna list. They say list an ye get to be American.

I think you have to be American first.

Noo. No no no that aint true they said ye could list an then ye can. Ye aint got ta be already.

Another recruit watched quietly. A somber youth of twenty. Its ok. Im from the country too.

Whatre you doin here?

He jangled his keys in his pocket. Waiting on dinner.

Does they feed ye too?

Yep.

And drink ye too?

I guess.

Hows it sounding gethered?

I dont know.

Laurence said that this is the great pivot.

Laurence?

Voice on the radio.

It is that. How did he say it? We in this generation…are part of the great pivot from chaos to order or something.

No out of the great disorder.

He called us the first unmauled generation in three centuries.

That isnt going to last. If what everyone is saying is true.

Shit, said a city son. I wish theyd get on with it.

The corporal came back to the lobby. Dont worry, he said. Were already on, the with is coming.

Amen to that. Im ready. Its going to be hard but there isnt a damn thing in life easy worth doing.

Shit. Patly grew up on the leather tough edge of the jagged edge of a rusty town. Its going to take more than a head to scare him. Thats the truth. Where did you get that head anyway?

Dachni looked at the boy from Aster. Head?

Yeah, he said pointing at the head in her lap.

Oh. Founded it.

You just found somebody’s head in the desert?

Everthings in the desert.

The Aster recruit looked away with his chin in hand. Yeah.

Dachni watched him. She watched the others and she had in that watching a dread intuition that there was not one soul in that office who would not be dead in two years. And silent prophetess would that thou couldst have spoken for each would perish and every man and woman who in this place signed their name to the line. The Aster recruit paralyzed at Gomel would be fed alive into a grinder to become nutrients for the clones, them of the grad obliterated by artillery and the rest in their way even that demure son of the country who knowing better but hoping more would be bayoneted in a ditch under an apple tree.

I have the video, said a recruit named Charles.

Play it.

Come here.

They gathered round. Charles coughed into his elbowpit. Would do again when inhaling vesicants. Excuse me. On the tablet a man stood behind a podium in a stadium. Charles pressed play and he shifted into motion.

Ontario P2

Ere delving irrevocably deeper into this peregrination (aye I know a train I took but it rings thus much better) I feel I would be remiss in not sparing words generally describing the typical progression of work at L- in which I had long been swaddled and some of those personalities whom as events would prove I would be leaving forever.

Before we delve irrevocably deeper into this peregrination (yes I know I took a train but it sounds so much better) I feel I would be remiss if I didnt spare a few words describing the typical work day at L- in which I had for so long been swaddled and an introduction or two of my compatriots whom as it would turn I would be leaving forever.

Work at L- began at 5:45 with the obligatory offering of quarters into the upright altar of the fickle gods of vending who under their own perverse logic would grant or withhold their confections. We had not yet discovered the proper means of appeasing these jovial heavendwelling hucksters and their chief minister was never to be found.

Fed or no we would then proceed down to the unheated docks where a truck or two would be waiting. The neon pink or green truck locks would be bolt cut and the rollerdeck pulled up and the work of unloading would begin. This consisted of me with box cutter opening the boxes and sending them down the rollerdeck. I kept with me always my music and in the autistic cold and dark of the trailer I always had that to warm me.

The shift manager was a muffin bubbly black half my height, twice my age and who went by the name of Cathy. She had a biting wit. A way of arranging brow and lip to imply a confused disbelief, that yet was known and fully understood in the slight eyeroll and underlaid with the faintest accusation and pout. I was very fond of her. Her ever lament was Eric, what are you doing in my docks? Years later I would meet her double in Anna, a Ukrainian babushka in training who managed a hostel in Odessa who once put the question to me: Eric why do you bring all these random sluts to my hostel? But Im getting ahead of myself.

Cathy’s second in command, that is the only other person who had full time was Al. Al broke both his arms within six weeks of each other and was being investigated by HR. He was eventually cleared but Ive always had my suspicions. He was an aging frail Saxon and had a bushy caterpillar of a mustache that really was too dignified for him as he was quite ugly. Nevertheless a good feller. Sometimes we had to replace light bulbs around L- and we would go about with a long pole with a suction cup at the end and unscrwew the bulbs and replace them.

Once I was having some difficulties and he remarked. Yeah you take ten minutes to get in there.

To which I replied. At least I can still get it up.

There were several others but I feel I should end this vignette with another Al. Al Bundy. Who had four children, two wives, and described his mistress Sandy (a harlot different from the wives) as always being down for a schlob. He was plagued by gas and in summer, spring or whenever the heat evoked the industrial fans from out their closet he would position them so that their current would peel away his hindside flatulence and deliver it to the newest arrivals. He was to my mind a man divested of every vanity. A friend of mine John asked him a morning what his plans were.

For life, he said. In general. Where do you see yourself in ten years?

Al’s way of answering was to reach into his backpocket and take out a cold prewrapped hotdog three quarters of which he subsequently inserted into his mouth and severed with his teeth. The remaining quarter he returned to his pocket and hobbled away in the kind of contented ho humness of brewery bums.

We marveled. He was like Lazarous who finally seeing beyond the vale stopped giving a shit.

That man reached zen, John said.

I wasnt so sure.

My friend, Conan, whom I was tripping up to Canada with, when he heard this and other stories said: Those guys are fucking retards.

Ontario P1

Il y a plus de choses dans le ciel et la terre, Horatio,

Que sont rêvés dans votre philosophie.

Now as I was a young lad having scarcely oped the third decade of my life I was temporarily, for some years prior and ensuing, and as you can imagine at that present, lapsed deep into a lethargy I believe afforded the intelligentsia too much and to their detriment.

At the time in question I maintained employment at L- but the monotony of physical labor, several years of which I believe is the proper foundation of higher learning, had lost its charm and I found myself yearning for something beyond the bawdy company of my fellow porters. As fate would have it a good friend of a mathematical bent whom I had acquainted in primaries suffered a sudden paroxsysm of the soul, the result of imbibing too freely the tale of Cervantes’ ingenius gentlemen and so maddened bethought himself to see the world.

I confess now that though I have the aptitude of a brawler I have to my great shame the parallel nature of an attendant when it comes to intellectual pursuits and the territories of the spirit and it would be my friend’s invitation that would water the explorer in me. Perhaps mitigating this fault, or perhaps an overcompensation, is an impetuousness to leap into whatever novelty presents itself an option and so at the end of a long night of binging in the recesses of Madam Yorko’s Tepid Tavern (tended even now I believe by the Iracsible Harry despite his stroke) I eagerly accepted his invitation to accompany him to the afar (and then barely settled region) of Ontario.

I never know how to prepare for a thing and so my preparations for almost anything I have never done before is to pack a bag of clothes and strap on my wrist a watch that does not work. Necessarily this barebones approach is totally insufficient but as the wise author of Ecclesiastes notes wisdom is a defense and money is a defense, and armed amply with the latter I prepared to learn painfully (for all lessons cost money) the necessities of such an undertaking.

In this particular case I did acquire one other item without which the whole attempt would have been futile. A passport namely. I wont go into the details, the bribes, the fraud, the vials of ox blood decanted into squibs and set off outside the post-office for the statute of limitations has not yet expired. But suffice to say I acquired the means of international travel through no little difficulty and the help of several of my friends from L-.

The logistical respects of the voyage (For I had not the slightest inkling of the locality of this Ontario, and fortunate for me that it was not some Siberian hellscape at the nadir of winter or some crocodile prowled Sahara) I left totally to my journeymate. The purchasing of tickets, the selection of routes, the gathering of supplies, water, food etc.

Upon the day of our departure we met at the Amtrak station in C-. We were in good spirits. I felt myself greatly relieved to find that my friend had not taken on too much baggage more than myself and I counted myself prematurely wise in the realm of travel. Nevertheless we drank to the journey (to the unwarranted disconcertion of the conductor) and boarding the train and stowing our luggage awaited the jerk of iron couplings that would announce us on our way.

On Parting

Dedicated to a thing gone by and those associated with it.

Weep this? Weep Othello in his bed

Weep thyself when thou art dead

But if our parting is what thou weeps

then in thy eyes thy tears do keep

for we are all together in this time

and in our way all affined

Do not break the spread of time

Nor wish it slowed or delayed

Our time has been enough and weve had years to say

all our thoughts in a single day

whatever confession thine heart doth hold

regret remorse love’s hate and hate’s twain

give it to thy speech and be bold

confess as though we are priests

and in that spirit attain some peace

then speak thyself in thy mind: This time be mine and if love hath thee for me thou shalt atimes be master of all of mine as I for a time of all of thine