Turk’s attitude is puzzling. It baffles Dabney. There’s nothing to gain from it. There’s nothing to gain from Turk running his mouth off like this, thinks Dabney. He could just as well keep it shut and nothing bad would happen. Why take that risk, Turk? Why this need to establish verbal dominance? Clearly different kinds of dominance count in the here-and-now, and other forces are in play.

Only grief may come of this.

There are two types of guy in the world, in Dabney’s reckoning. There’s guys who are hobbled at the mouth, who are simply not comfortable with words as a thing. Long they consider before they speak, and then, after they’ve thought for some while, they say no more than just the bare minimum.

Then there’s guys who are all too happy to talk. Jabber jabber jabber, they go. They unspool their minds without hindrance, these other kind of guys. The first kind of guy generally loathes the second kind, and in certain cases will take serious measures against the sheer intrusion of such excessive verbosity. Big Tomás is the first type. He sits there gripping the steering wheel while Dabney’s on-the-job briefing is overrun by Turk’s need to interject, to talk over and through these simple instructions for the task at hand.

It’s like Turk’s planning already to speak before the first words are out of Dabney’s mouth, like the constant threading pressure of the nonstop voice inside his head won’t allow him to listen even for a fractional moment to what he needs to hear.

It’s like:
“So we have to wait for end of shift...”
“I always...”
“...when the guard locks up and goes home...”
“I always say the best time to work is at night when things...”
“...and we enter the mausoleum...”
“...at night when things are so quiet that you got time to think and there ain’t no noise to bother you and there ain’t nobody to see what’s happenin’ and call it in and of course there’s always someone but you can see then there’s somebody and you can shut them down if you see them, but you don’t always see them but anyway the important thing is to work quick and quiet and be like discreet so nobody notices and if anybody does notice they don’t really notice that they notice, know what I mean? It don’t matter it’s just more of the same...”

And so on. By this time Dabney’s fallen silent, he’s waiting for the tide to abate, for the flood of backseat talk to wash over them so he can go back to explaining what it is they’re doing here, in this car parked outside the Forest Lawn cemetery as the sun goes down behind the large houses on this cedar-lined street, some Spanish villas hacienda-style, some lunking trapezoids in Tudor half-brick, some antebellum plantation-columned mansions, and Tomás grips tighter the wheel so his thick sausage fingers get whitened and taut, knuckles straining. It’s the first time these three have worked together and there are bound to be such moments of adjustment.

“Bocazas,” mutters Tomás. His neck tatts speak their own language of frustration: pitbulls straining at the leash, fiery skeletons squirming under restraint. “Bocazas de mierda,” he repeats. Turk pays no heed to these murmurings and goes on with his spiel. Frontseat vinyl shifts squeaky under the impatient bulk of Tomás. He wants to bounce, or to drive, anything other than sitting here in this smoky car watching the melancholy light fade and hearing all this verbose shit.

Turk in the back sits southside dapper in silken electric-blue tracksuit and slick spandex beanie, handlebar moustache signifying some cultured Levantine coffeeshop early manhood of worrybeads and shisha shitsessions all through those long evenings. Gold chains hang low-karat plentiful on a thin chest. He’s like thirty-five, a mid-range loner. He’s not actually a Turk, more like an Azerbaijani or a Chechen or something, but the soubriquet Turk has stuck solid to him. He has the air of someone who isn’t looking for a fight but is constantly in conflict, an aggrieved why me? of victimization that settles in wordlessly under the blanket of verbiage that swathes the outside.

Dabney looks at his watch. “It’s time,” he says. He and Tomás pop the front door locks and step out. Turk lingers unsettled. Did he hear, or was he lost in his own patter? But quickly he catches on and steps out of the back seat, hitching the silky tracksuit pants up on his skinny waist there in the potholes of the darkening street. He wears knockoff Korean Nikes and bounces once or twice on the street pavement before following on.

It’s the darkest moment: the sun has just gone down but the streetlights, weak as they are in their pale urine glow, haven’t come on yet. The three amble and roll over to the cemetery gate, discreet as such guys can be in all their disreputable demeanor. Dabney in his double-breasted gray suit, florid tie on maroon shirt, opens the padlock on the chain and the lock on the gate itself and they slink in and he replaces the chain and the padlock but doesn’t lock it.

They know which mausoleum they want to get to. Dabney was there just this morning for the funeral. It’s a like a little temple with columns and shit, like most of these things are, but there’s a big angel on the roof with a long thin trumpet to sound the last call.

“It’s inneresting,” says Turk. “It’s like what they call the Annihilating Angel or somesuch. No, the Exterminating Angel. I saw that movie once, they couldn’t get out. Inneresting how the tube, like the trumpet thing, is all in brass while the angel is stone, is it marble? And the trumpet is it brass or is it actually gold? It would be worth something if it is. They could go in but they couldn’t come out, like, fuckin’ rich people, trapped in a place with turkeys, soldier, singer, pigs there was, a diplomat. Had to shit in a vase. Hey what would it take to take off the gold tube? Crowbar, saw, what-d’you-call-it, bucksaw, handsaw, no, hacksaw, of course an oxy-acetylene torch would do in a second but bulky, need a trolleycart to pull it in and out, but quick, man, real quick...”

Inside the crypt they place a pair of flashlights on adjoining tombs, which join their beams on the sarcophagus opposite, their objective. Tucked in behind the target tomb there’s a little bag with crowbars which Dabney hands out to the other two. The heavy granite lid to the sarcophagus isn’t bolted down, so it’s a matter of using the brute strength of Tomás to displace it. Dabney and Turk drop their crowbars which clang to the floor and they seize the lid to strain and shift it to a position leaning against the crypt wall.

This first part has gone extremely well. They rest for a moment, gasping, and their exhalations fog the crypt air, individual mists twisting a skein, a transitory union of breath infolding in the flashlight beams. They will breathe this mist in again, and some confederacy or cameraderie will either form from that mingling, or else it won’t.

The hard part is done, now it’s the delicate part. No splinters. So Dabney holds both flashlights and shines inside the sarcophagus while Turk and Tomás crowbar, gently crowbar, the lid of the fine oak coffin. Repeatedly Dabney calls for delicacy, for a light touch, so this easing up of the lid goes on some time and such is their concentration that Turk says not even a word but just grunts soft and steady.

And then that lid too is prised away and the fine woodwork with its brass name plaque ROSA MARIA BENEDETTI is laid aside gently. They peer inside: the embalming work has been masterful, the dressing of the body immaculate, she lies beautiful, more beautiful than when alive, in billows of white satin like a saint, which she wasn’t, thinks Dabney, most definitely not a saint and not beautiful either, but she was kind sometimes and a good cook.

The process of preservation of the flesh is foremost in their minds, all three. In the moment of contemplation gazing down at the immaculate face at peace and quiet and radiant they seem to ponder the same thing. Dabney thinks: like a saint pardoning sins on this earth, fresh, serene. Tomás thinks: yet there is a... yet there is... yet there is a sadness here. Una tristeza. The thought is melancholy and exhausting to form like that in words.

Turk thinks and says: “Perishable, supposed to be. The fading flesh, right? The perishable flesh, they say, and I guess in some cases that ain’t so, there’s like saints and monks and shit and they’re still perfect in their tombs. Saint Teresa, right? And there’s zen monks in Japan they just sit down to die and they dried themselves out so much with handfuls of dried rice that they don’t perish, they just sit there and mummify. And that commie fuck, what’s his name? Lenin or Stalin, right, he sits in his mausoleum and he’s perfect too, maybe an ear fell out or something, but...”

“Shut the fuck up, Turk,” says Dabney wearily. He’s not angry, just overcome. Like, consumed with a great tristeza. Their breaths are mingling here and their sadnesses too, could be.

So to the penultimate part of the task: there’s a heavy-duty combat-issue bodybag left in the same place as the crowbars, and it is laid on the floor and unzipped. Dabney and Tomás take the shoulders, Turk is assigned the legs. This part must be performed with great tenderness. Any bruises found on her body will be visited tenfold on them, says Dabney, so careful. They lift and maneuver.

“That’s right,” says Dabney. “Moving round to my left now, and...”
“So have you even...”
“...easy, up a little here...”
“So have you even thought...”
“...that’s right, now lower...”

“So have you even thought what this is for, I mean what he even wants with her, I mean it ain’t exactly normal is it? Normal thing is you leave the departed to rest, don’t disturb, like: Do. Not. Disturb. But this ain’t exactly normal is it, I mean it’s fuckin’ ghoulash creepin’ around in crypts and shit, she sure smells nice what is that Chanel? Still pliable too, I thought they go all stiff after a while like what is it? rigid mortis, but still flexible only the cold to tell, but maybe with some good mortician work that don’t happen, the rigid, and the whole job is hinky that way I mean what even does he want with her...”

They let him go on, Dabney and Tomás, it’s like they don’t even care anymore, it’s nearly done anyway, let him talk and talk his fill. Still Dabney puzzles over it: what’s to gain from this? Turk’s nervous, sure, they’re all nervous, nobody wants to be doing this kind of work, what is it grave-robbing? Body-snatching? But nervous ain’t an excuse for all this jabber jabber. Something’s wrong with this guy, some word-sickness that makes him wanna fill up his emptiness with more emptiness in the form of empty words, thinks Dabney.

She’s laid in the bodybag which carefully is zipped up tight and they move it slightly over towards the doorway and then move back to do the last part. Dabney turns to face Turk. He points his finger at his face. Like a gun, like a pistol in a kids’ game of cops and robbers. Turk looks open-mouthed at the finger dangling in front of his face. He’s speechless: what kind of game is this? He starts to say something.

Behind him, Tomás lowers the crowbar over his head and pulls it hard when it reaches Turk’s neck. He’s pulling hard on the crowbar as it rises up his neck under his chin, lifting his whole body against Tomás and his broad chest. Turk’s beanie falls off, his deep brown eyes go wide, the eyes become vivid red and spidery, the eyes see red, see nothing at all.

He looks very much like he wants to say something urgent. The need to express himself is turning his face crimson, is bursting his forehead veins with unvoiced pressure for utterance. But he speaks nothing more than bubbles and froth flecked with blood. His words are broken gargles.

At this moment Dabney’s mind wanders to the Italian café, the old family coffee bar without a name where they all hang. Where he and Tomás and the boys all hang.

Cup of espresso. Espresso: that which is expressed, squeezed out like juice is squeezed from a juicy citrus, a fat orange or a lemon. He sees Turk’s eyes go unseeing and he thinks of the strangeness that ‘express’ is to press out: to express yourself is to press out your thoughts like a lemon squeezer, like a toothpaste tube with the word-thoughts all oozing out of the nozzle.

They lift Turk’s body into the coffin and replace the wooden lid, then the heavy lid of the sarcophagus, a strenuous enough job for two alone. Then they rest silently for a while before even thinking about lifting the body bag and gliding out through the cemetery in the soft night. Sometimes you need a moment just to collect your thoughts in silence.

Thanks to for chats n’ feedback.

If you’d care to contribute to author upkeep, and can afford to,
any pennydrops and coffeecups would be much appreciated

MORE VIOLENT TALES…?

King Lear did rage and strut his fretful hour upon the heath
as tempest beat sleet and hail alternate on his pate.

On he dwelt, on themes of ingratitude
and spoke of cormorant chickadees
pecking at the bloodied breast
of their unfortunate forebear.

“Forbear, dullard!” quoth the Fool,
arrayed in his soggy motley,
clown makeup streaky-freaky,
overunning like tragic mascara.

“I told you:
you shouldna oughtna mustna done it, nuncle!

Now look! Here we’s is, out on th’ open range,
under th’ open sky, with nary a shelter to gimme,
soaked and empapped in rainy day blues
like so many squelchy urchins, we is...”

He shook out his silly shaking stick:

a rattle with his own head on
embroidered in minimotley,
features all grotesqued,
nose a comic penisknob.

It failed to ring or to rattle
as it had in better days.
It dripped merely, sad n’ droopy
and mainly mostly moist.

The cowled Fool scowled comical,
and even his bluff displeasure
would’ve been high hilarious —
except none were there to witness,

for the Old King raved unaware
and only a blind raven watched on
from its perch on a blasted sapling,
nulled eyes stormweeping in sympathy.

The Fool stuttered on:
“I da-da-done told ya, fella!
Don’t be puttin’ no faith in them honeyed words, honey!
Don’t be unwrapping no word-present

all swathed in fancy sycophancy
only to uncover and discover that gift inside
is a mere disappoopment,
a caca just for dada.”

Now things got kingly, got mad dramatic:

“Rage, winds!” stormed King at stormfront,
swinging an impotent fisticuff or two.
“Crack yer cheeks, ye hurricanadoes
and tornagants! Ye blowups and blusterygusts…

Blow! Hard, I beseech, hard as ye can!”
“O can it, busta! Blow you, daddy!”
cracked the Fool, cavorting a measure
or two or more in glopclumping mud.

His hilarity was exhaustive and exhausted,
routine and worn, like last year’s comedy roast.
But it was his, it was his art, it was his statement,
it was his artistic estate and legacy medium.

He fell down dead then in the slosh like a trooper.
No claps were clapped, but the raven croaked
some unknown syllables of console,
the King paused a moment even in his rant.

Then lightning flashed, the thunder crashed,
rain intensified its pressure,
and the King railed on in his railing
like he was on rails, unchanged.

The drama went on.

Two men encountered each other on a dusty trail between two mountains. It was a narrow glen of sand and sharp flint with the blaze of noon above.

“Let me pass,” said the older man. “I am distinct and distinguished. I have conversed with oracular sphinxes and exposed womanly jive mendacities. I grappled with the cyclops and thrust a flaming spike in his only eye. I am wrecker royalty, walking the earth in penance for sins I daren’t name. I am your father.”

“Indeed you are not my father,” said the younger. “I was sired by a man of clay that sprang from dirt, I was whelped by hyena bitches. I dragged my clubfoot across dry screes and contested with jackals for bone marrow. I’ve the boundless hunger of the dispossessed, and am more perilous than you can ever know. Let me pass now.”

Only these two knew alone to what extent their boasts were vain or were spoken in truth. There was a narrow space both to left and right in which to pass, but each man considered the central way only to be rightful to his proud blood. And so their quarrel continued in the unpardoning heat at that place at the head of the pass.

“Let me pass, pup,“ said the older. “I have houris and concubines who await my arrival hourly. Their soft thighs twitch with every thought of my return.”

“Soft women are a weakness, dotard,” said the younger. “I spit into my palm, and that is my only love. I depend on none and am become flinty as silex. Let me pass, I say.”

Such was the impasse.

Such the terms of the dispute.

A lizard spoke up.

It was the trickster god Ullryk, come to mediate between stubborn dullards in the way such gods like to work things of this nature.

“I hear your dispute,” said the lizard. “From both I hear wise words spoken, yet there is no easy reckoning to reconcile them. I propose a way.”

“Speak, slitherer,” said the older man. “I trust not the wiles of scaly speechifiers, but I can see no way else, other than to crack this blatherer’s skull for impudent sassiness.”

“Speak, crawler,” said the younger man. “If your notions offer no consensus, it is this ancient oaf’s barren pate must be split asunder for propounding a constant bluster which is empty as his wispy skull.”

“Here’s what I propose,” said the lizard. “I feel that the tetchiness of both is down to your wearied state. Why don’t we all lie down here to sleep? When we are well-rested, we will be better able to resolve this matter.”

So the men lay down where they stood in the road under the burning blaze of noon, and settled their heads on stony pillows. At once they were dreaming, their exposed skins turning bright pink and then to blistering bubbles as the drool baked on the corners of their mouths.

The lizard spoke into the old man’s ear and whispered his way into his dream. While the old man wandered through cool palaces of green marble in his private dreamland, the lizard walked beside him and appeared to him a plump dancing girl, voluptuous and comely but with a flickering bifurcated tongue.

Fountains played in cool courtyards as they conversed:

“The young one looks to take all you own,” said the lizard-girl dancer. “To take all your riches and your hard-won honor. Your women too. Does this sit well with you?”

“No indeed,” said the old man, groping now at the girl’s fleshy buttocks. “In my land there is an iron law: All I want I have, all I have I want. That must remain so.”

“Until you die?”

“I shall never die,” averred the old man. And since he existed within a dream, who’s to say his claim is untrue?

“Simple, then,” said the lizard-girl, fending off the old man’s advances. She slapped away his pushy fingers and flickered her flamelike tongue at him. “Listen to me now”, she said. “Put away thy gropage and thy frottage, and heed me well.”

When the old man was again at peace and was listening once more, she continued, and it was the trickster’s lizardy voice that spoke through that comely mouth:

“When the impertinent wretch challenges you, call on the little reptile and say: Lizard, make me an ocean! Make me a great sea that I might drown my foe in it! Then push the young man into the water. He will be submerged in the deepest slimy depths where lobsters eat up his eyes.”

“It shall be done,” said the old man. “Now come with me to the divan, wench, that I might put my wizened member in you most urgently.”

But it was too late for such things. The dreampalace shrank all around him, and the old man was awake once again, his head on a rocky pillow and his blistered head sore and parched in the afternoon. He thirsted but he had no water to drink.

In front of him, the younger man was rising and stretching. He was also sunburnt, but he’d placed his loincloth over his face, so though his loins were raw and pink, his face was preserved in its fine pale tenderness and bright blondness of stubble. He was evidently wise beyond his years.

“So, old man,” said the younger. “Are you ready to stand out of my path and let me continue on my way?”

“A bollock on ye, ye inconsiderable thing!” said the elder. “Apart thy ways, or I’ll squish you like a shithouse rat!”

And he looked round himself for the lizard just as the younger man squared up towards him with fists like twin hammers ready to pound his father’s wrinkled face to coagulate of pap.

“Lizard!” he cried. “Make me a vast ocean that I might drown in it this vexatious squit my son! It’s no more than I should have done when he slithered all unwanted from the vixenish womb of his bitch mother!”

“An ocean of what?” inquired the trickster lizard. “An ocean of fire or an ocean of air like the airy sky above us?”

“Sure, an ocean of water, bigod!” said the old man. “Such as you promised me when you were a curvy courtesan a-slinking and a-shimmying along of my cool green palace of dreams.”

“Twas not I,” lied the god. Meanwhile the first blows rained on the old man’s head and raised ruby welts to set alongside the pustulent white blisters of his sunscorching. “It was my evil sister, the iguana goddess of lechery and temptation Ouradni. It is her constant whim to trap weak men in the claws of her concupiscence and squeeze them dry in her false promises and their despair.”

“Then make me an ocean of fire!” screamed out the old man, weakly fending off the younger man’s punches as they hammered on his thin skull. “Make me a river of fire that I might consume this wretch in its flames and be rid of the curse of such progeny forever!”

A whoosh and a hot gale betokened that this wish had come to pass. But the lake of fire had opened up at the old man’s back and not, as he had hoped, in front of himself and behind his opponent.

He was lost. He hesitated, as the old are prone to do when things are unexpected. With a triumphant cry and a simple shove, the younger man pushed the elder into the great inferno.

Flesh scorched once by the sun now seared double in the consuming flame. The small suffering the old man had at the sunburn and the few hard blows now expanded into a full universe of agony. Entire lifetimes of torment were heaped up in this instant and he knew true pain then.

The younger man looked on at the crisping and crackling figure as he waved his arms feebly and then kneeled in his own dark ashes amid the fire. He felt the humming satisfaction of knowing that the old man would suffer this fate forever and ever.

Smiling, not thinking of his days to come, forgetting that when his blond beard was turned gray and his lush head of hair gone away to a wisp, his time would come then also. When his strong arms were but twigs, while his arrogance still towered like monsters, at that time his moment in the furnace would be upon him too.

“So,” said the lizard, the trickster god Ullryk — who was also the goddess of temptation Ouradni. “So hero,” again they said, speaking in their twinned reptile tongues. “Will you keep to your bargain forever? You and your kin, all your descendants from now until the end of all days?”

“Aye,” said the young man. “As long as I might gain the rule of the world, tricksters, I yield all to you now, and perpetually forever and forever. Other gods may come and go, but they will be mere shams — tinkle-tankle potemkin saints and plasterboard demiurges. You, my dear trickster, you will be my secret patron, and you, my iguana love, the goddess to rule over my desires.”

“Now, both of you, take me by my arms and escort me to the hound palace where my mother lies. She’s waiting for me among her other whelps and licking her lips at the prospect of my approach.”

“For I have a great task to complete there.”

And so it came about that humankind believed in many gods over the course of history, but truly only ever had two - Ullryk the Trickster, Lord of Lies, and his sister and lover Ouradni, Dame of Temptation.

And now my tale is told and you may go your ways.

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THE OLD TIP JAR

Other folk fables and fairytales you might enjoy…

On the planet of Paleastra, our fauna has an unusual characteristic. The smaller the creature, the longer-lived, and vice-versa.

So it is that the graymoths of the Iykyoran Plain will live for several centuries, fluttering beneath the many moons night after night, never to waste away. Nomadic insectoid columns of silverback marchers will tramp several times around the planet in the course of their small but lengthy lives — unless they are trampled underfoot by larger beasts. Worms burrow beneath the soil for eons, and tiny scuttling crustaceans have seen the transit of geological epochs from their seabed habitats, where they lurk now as evolutionary relics.

Out on the savannahs, the swift apex predators such as the throat-tearing menashin and the crimson-taloned leapstalker have a reduced life of a mere year or two. The great herding beasts on which they prey, such as the horned jyllek, have an even more reduced livespan. Their slow-moving bodies bulk up huge and die over the course of a single season.

But the most transitory of creaturely existences, the most ephemeral of lives on this world of ours, is that of the great oriphantius. Most gigantic of animals, colossus of the plains; it will live for a single day.

When it is born in the morning of its life-day, clambering out of the womb of its dead mother as the sun rises, the oriphantius is only as large as a tree, or a nest-mound built by millennia-old termitan colonies. By midday the oriphantius pup has grown to adulthood, has become a true behemoth.

And now in its noontide maturity it seeks out a mate.

Early afternoon will see the oriphantius pairings, huge as mountains, procreating out here on the plains. The rhythmic movements of their great copulations sound like the rumblings of thunder, and they move the ground like troubled earthquakes. When the male unloads his seed into the dam, he bellows out a roar of release that shakes the savannah trees for miles around.

The pair then separate and move apart, never again to see one another. Making ground in vast strides, they diverge across the land all afternoon, with a determination to meet their deaths alone, to take no solace at all in togetherness. But the reproductive act is done, and their progeny already grows prodigious in the belly of the female.

As the sun goes down, the great oriphantius, now elderly, starts to weaken and slow more even than during its stately daytime progress. Its strides, each one a league or more, become painful and arthritic.

The oncoming of dusk sees the creature stoop and sink, submit to the heaviness of its age, curl up on the ground, settle for its first and last ever rest… and die.

Small carrion creatures who, in their longevity, have dined on countless generations of these beasts, will have gnawed at this oriphantius’s great-great-times-a-thousand-grandsire, now come to feast on the dying colossus in its final moments.

As it breathes its last, it barely feels the pecking and the tiny bites that will in a day or two reduce its corpse to a monumental skeleton, which in turn time and the wind will grind down to dust and carry away into the Western Bone Desert.

The people of this planet lament the fragility of mighty things. We think it pitiable that such vast lives should be so evanescent.

But then one night we catch a glimpse of the graymoths and their silvered wings in the light of the moons. Then we think on the many centuries these small nocturnal wanderers have witnessed, how these tiny things once saw the coming of our grandfathers and grandmothers, the pairings that created our parents and then ourselves, and how they will flutter this same way for our descendants so many untold generations in the future.

And we renounce the countings of our own years then, and reckon ourselves fortunate with whatever time we have to come. From time to time we come across the great eroding skeletons on the savannah, these day-old colossans now swiftly becoming dust, and we resolve to calculate not the duration but the beauty of our lives.

1.

I could die today, if I wished, merely by making a little effort, if I could wish, if I could make an effort. But it is just as well to let myself die, quietly, without rushing things

Samuel Beckett

The deformed men conversed at the table of the Café Dix in the most untroubled of tones, despite everything.

“I hunger, you hunger, we hunger.”

“You and me both. But what do we hunger for?”

“Love, enlightenment, self-realization.”

“Don’t be such a fucking cocksucking motherfucker. We hunger for bread, for thin gruel pooling at the bottom of a tin dish, clotted with something unspecified but suggestive of protein, for the greasy patina of oil that could be sardine grease on the handle of a door which we lick because why wouldn’t we.”

“I hunger for pussy.”

“You are a pussy. I hunger for calories, like any true red-blooded son of the fatherland.”

This was the fourth hour of nursing the same coffee at a rate of one sip per forty-five minutes, and Klaus the waiter was only just now getting on their case. Not physically, for he was too much of a rear-echelon lurker to mix it up physically with a pair like these two, scarred in the most unsightly ways, the ghost of some kind of strength still about them despite all their starved hollowness. No, Klaus the waiter was harassing them psychically from his watchstation near the door, where he could look out over the terrace and the street beyond.

Matthias and Paul ignored Klaus and his immutable stare and continued gazing at each other with love and boredom. Paul repeated:

“I hunger, you hunger, we hunger.”

“The conjugations of an empty belly. Shut up already. Take a sip of your coffee.”

“It’s not time yet.”

Here on this terrace the mottled sun did its best, dappling through the scrawny foliage insinuated through the trellises. Pale khaki leaves like tatters of English uniform, little pink honeysuckles dwindling in late May heat. Behind them the faded commercial harlotry of Schlachtstrasse, bundling its people from here to there and from there to here as if there were some reason.

Along came Klaus the waiter, slipping a slice of black bread into Matthias’s lap.

“I thank you and I curse you,” said Matthias. “We were just crossing that threshold where starvation no longer hurts, and now you are returning us to that torment. Better to shoot us... or to hire us as dishwashers.”

A little up the street, a small detachment of plump men in brown shirts and walrus moustaches lockstepped to an abritrary point on the sidewalk and were bidden to dismiss themselves by their Gruppenführer. Relaxing, the chubby men turned to backslap each other and smile. There were small blood specks on the brown fabric of their shirts and military breeches.

Klaus the waiter nodded at this assembly of ruffians and spoke to the pair at the table.
“You could join them? They have food and beer aplenty for new recruits.”

Paul and Mathias exchanged a terse glance, unexplained and inexplicable.

“That would not be possible,” said Matthias to the waiter. “They have an aversion to us.”

“The others then?” suggested Klaus. “The Reds?”

“Ahh, we have an aversion to them,” said Matthias. He tore the slice of black bread in half and passed it under the table to Matthias. “Besides, we foresee them coming second in a certain imminent struggle. The auspices for proletarian revolution are not of the best in these times. Rosa and Karl are gone. Spartacus is no more.”

Klaus shrugged and moved away. Across the café terrace, a widow in fox stole and gleaming white hat was beckoning for him. “You’ll have to fuck off soon,” said Klaus over his shoulder. His tone was definite but amiable. “The owner will be here soon and he’ll make me beat you with a stick. I prefer to give you bread and have you fuck off in peace, no harm done.”

Paul and Mathias each broke off a thumb-pinch of bread and began to chew. Their expression was painful delight. The pliable flesh between the knobbed scars on their faces winced in the smallest ways. Something about the bread both satisfied and anguished them all at once. They took a terminal sip of their coffee down to its gritty dregs.

“Remember the Frenchman?” Mathias asked.

“How could one forget? Mama mama.”

“Your flesh become my flesh.”

“Last rites under the starshell sky. A eucharist of no man’s land.”

“Just one final push, they said.”

“Always us pushing, never them.”

“Pushing into the unknown, the gap between the trenches. Expansive and narrow at once.”

“Matthias you have such a way.”

“Over the firestep. Ripe gobbets of sacrificial flesh rotten on thorny wires.”

“Yum yum. If only.”

The pair snickered like naughty schoolboys thinking of a dare they once dared each other.

“Well then,” said Paul. “Shall we go?”

“To the monster’s lair,” said Matthias, smiling. His grin of metal teeth to that one side of his mouth showed like a half-rhyme to the gleaming steel pate above it.

They placed their slices of black bread into jacket pockets and rose from the table, limbs sore and unpliant after so long sitting and joints all swollen with fluid from fasting. Paul leaned on his ash stick. Matthias placed a threadbare homburg hat over his skull plaque. The café terrace beneath its bedraggled trellis vegetation came at once to feel the lack of that polished glint among the springtime dapple.

The men swayed arm-in-arm away from the café and through the mass of well-fed bodies straining at the seams of brown shirts, uniforms red-speckled and scuffed high boots, ass-grabbing, plump cheeks and rosy, the rollicking bonhomie of a dispersing Stürmabteilung squad cheerful from mayhem. The gleeful streetfighters didn’t notice this pair of disfigured veterans, or if they did, they pretended in their joviality not to even see them.

A passing streetcar clanged its warning bell and the bullyboys crowded away from the street-edge all at once like a systole. On the other side of the street, Paul and Matthias hobbled northwards up Schlachtstrasse towards Museum Island and their afternoon date.

2.

An abandoned shoe, a rotten tooth, a snub nose, the cook spitting in the soup of his masters, are to love what a battle flag is to nationality

A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a sobbing accountant, a jar of mustard, represent the confusion that serves as the vehicle of love

Georges Bataille

The orthopedic store had never changed its signage from when it was a different type of shop before the war. So the streetfront window and the marquee both proclaimed the ex-shopkeep’s name: MARTIN. At various points were the legends METZGER, FLEISCHEREI and CHARCUTERIE.

So, a butchery, a neighborhood slaughterhouse out back. A place where meat is created and sold.

But the window now displayed some different commodities: prosthetic limbs, neckbraces, a single elevated boot ten inches high, restraining trusses to hold in muscle fibers ripped loose from the abdominal wall, crutches, canes, bath-chairs. Dust had fallen heavily on everything, giving the smooth offwhite sheen of these clinical objects a fuzzy clumpedness like stubble of a day-old beard on their surfaces.

Inside the store, the smell was of camphor and sloe gin, of a distress mingled from sleeplessness and poverty and the dry neglected flakes of last year’s skin still suspended in unmoving air. There in the storekeeper’s chair was Jürgen, and planted on his lap the stub that was Margarethe. They were smooching, and they looked up at the sound of the bell to see the two men file in, disturbing dust on bare dark floorboards.

“What ho, the brave frontfighters!” said Jürgen.

“Hi boys,” said Margarethe, disengaging from Jürgen’s mouth and revealing his toe-nose.

“Greetings to the lovebirds,” said Matthias, courteously raising his homburg to flash the glint of his skullplate across the store’s dusty air.

Paul said nothing. He was fatigued from his walk and set himself down in a spindly chair by the window display. He picked up a prosthetic left leg crafted in bakelite with brass hinges and began to swivel the lower leg back and forth, fascinated by the ease of its movement. He switched his attention to his own left leg and attempted that same easy swing, but it was recalcitrant and moved only with great difficulty. The mechanical one would function so much better and would require no feeding to work.

Over at the cash till was Jürgen, his nose a grafted toe, his half-head of hair now graying and thin, and on his lap the only non-veteran among them and yet the most mutilated of all, Margarethe. She had fallen drunk one night on the railtrack outside the Lehrter Bahnhof and her legs had been taken by a freight train transporting cartridges to the front. Ironically, the train that sliced her limbs away bore munitions destined for the army unit where Jürgen, Paul and Matthias were serving, so you might say their destinies had been intertwined even then.

Jürgen and Matthias were deep in conversation, and Margarethe kept looking over to where Paul sat toying with the false leg. She winked her good eye at him but he ignored her. Undeterred, she winked again and again at irregular intervals like a broken and shopsoiled mechanical doll whose spring was winding down.

At a given moment, both Paul and Matthias reached into their jacket pockets and picked out a thumb-pinch of black bread, inserting it into their mouths and chewing slowly. Neither was looking at the other, their synchronicity perhaps explained by some identical mechanism of hunger running to the same schedule.

Soon after – the sun descending to slant through the butcher-shop window and the dust once again still in the suspended air – all was settled between Jürgen and Matthias. They shook hands and Jürgen reached under the counter for a bottle of black-market schnapps and a trio of shotglasses. Matthias brought Paul’s glass over to him and all three toasted to success of their venture, yelled out Prost! and slugged back the oily fluid with its sharp bite of something acidic and industrial, inimical to any organic life.

Paul now looked at Matthias as he glanced round to Jürgen and remembered a moment when all three were in this exact same configuration – who knows? – perhaps even at the exact moment that Margarethe lay blitzed out beneath the abbreviating wheels of the munitions train. September 1918, just weeks before the end.

Jürgen in his sergeant’s uniform, nose still a nose then, handlebar moustache blond and caked in crusted snot, looking at the deserter. Bombs falling, now unheeded. Paul and Matthias saying goodbye to the deserter, Gunther was his name, a lad from Bremen, fallen in with dissident sailors at Bremershaven during summer leave at home. Hair straw red, a burnished bronze, skin dappled with leaflike blotches, the boy sniveling and saying no no no. Jürgen reaching for his Mauser, cocking, see how the triangular cocking mechanism springs up and back, an easy action, then one two three rounds in the back of his head, why so many Jürgen, why not just one would do the job.

The acid of the bathtub schnapps and the long-chewed bolus of black bread formed an ulcerous knot of regret in Paul’s stomach. He leaned heavily on his ash cane and pivoted his unyielding legs once more to the vertical. The prosthetic leg fell onto the hardwood floor where it shocked out a ripple of dust, expanding like a tiny blast in the lamplight.

3.

You have fasted for so long under compulsion. From now on you will fast with joy. It will be sweeter than food

Franz Kafka

They walked along Resolution Avenue towards the flophouse.

“Well?” demanded Paul.

“It’s the usual,” said Matthias. “Ten million marks on completion.”

“Not even enough for a cooked meal.”

“We’ll see. Could be a bonus of fifteen million if the client likes the work.”

“I ask again: who is this client?”

“I asked. Again. Jürgen said the same. Fat cat, maybe a banker or some such. Wouldn’t give me a name.”

“Figures. One of them, probably.”

“Don’t start, Paul. One of us, you mean. Remember who you are. Who you were.”

“I am nobody and I was nobody. My existential condition hasn’t changed.”

“Still, don’t start with that shit. It doesn’t sit well.”

“Like it matters now.”

They arrived at the flophouse and began their work.

The woman was already there, waiting for them in the hallway. Ulrike, she was called, or at least so she called herself. She was tall, young, pockmarked, thin like everyone else who had grown up during the Turnip Winter, dressed in a red satin flapper dress perfect for a woman with no figure at all. The low scooped neckline showed her clavicles like bold mechanical handles on a pale machine. Her thick black hair was curlicued like a rich hunting hound’s with a prominent kiss-curl tugged across her clammy brow. Paul considered it quite likely a wig. She carried a large black valise like a doctor’s bag.

“You have anything to eat?” asked Matthias.

“Like what?” she said.

“Let’s go upstairs,” said Paul. He led the way, planting his ash cane on each steep step and pushing hard with his right hand.

Ulrike followed, first pushing her black head into his behind, then recoiling at the sharp scent of fruit and ether about him. She let a step develop between them, then followed upward at this interval. Finally, Matthias followed. He’d doffed his homburg; the steel plate of his skull and the gunmetal rictus on the right side of his mouth made him appear much as a worn-down mechanical toy whose velveteen covering was now coming off.

They were inside the rented room. Many people had come to grief here and the air held its savor.

Ulrike’s valise held her deployable assets: leather basque corset, fishnet stockings and garter belt, black carnival mask, long golden wig, horsewhip, barbed scourge. The clank inside it as she set it down again suggested hardware, more acquaintance with the apparatus of desire. She stepped behind the screen to get ready, setting her black kiss-curl wig on its top as she put on the blonde.

Matthias stripped and Paul helped him. They took away the ratty mattress and Matthias lay on the bare steel frame of the bed. His skeletal form was creased and knotted with scar tissue, the smell of sharp sweet citrus acetone was all about him, but he was whole and radiant in the gas lantern light. Paul tied him to the bedposts and then retired to the small table where there was a pen, an ink bottle and a sheaf of papers. His knee pained him again, but the hunger had ceased to matter.

“So, just one of you does this? The other watches?” Ulrike called from behind the screen.

“That’s about the size of it,” said Paul. “He’ll talk as you go about your task, and I’ll be writing what he says. Like dictation.”

“Don’t you want to join in, mister?”

“I’m not really equipped, my dear. Lost both the inclination and the equipment back in the big big conflict, don’t you know. “

“But what is this for?” she asked, her tone rising. “I mean, I don’t mind so long as I get paid, and that weird no-nose guy paid me pretty well for this job. But it’s not something my other, uh, clients, do.”

“We’re doing something very special,” Matthias declared. “We’re baking a humilation cake for some others to devour.”

She emerged from behind the screen, a bony waif attired in the costume of a terrifying erotic goddess. She shrugged and snapped her horsewhip on the floor, without passion, like a tryout.

“Whatever,” said Ulrike. “I took my laxative pill, just like that no-nose guy said. I’ll be ready when you need me to do... that thing which he said you wanted.”

“Splendid. Shall we begin then? Matthias, my comrade, are you ready to feast?”

4.

The mouths that lick their lips and move their jaws are also squirming with unspoken sentences, and it is impossible to say which is the greater agony: to be unfed or to be unheard

Maud Ellman

As the act takes place, Paul writes from the dictation of Matthias, strapped to the bedframe. He does not write down the chokings, the gagging, the coughing spew. He edits for readability.

The first night laying in the bomb crater is in its own way delightful, since terror passes through a gate, a portal where the fearful ‘I’ am annihilated and only the most raw portion, the wordless stump of me, is left behind in this place as witness. Starshell bursts overhead are like new galaxies. The whine and the green gleam of tracer fire is a trajectory tracing its route to new worlds. No clear path can be made from the mud and the exhaustion of battle to the realm of wonderment I now inhabit. It’s been a transport of miracle.

There’s the Frenchman, of course, in his blue coat, with his legs blasted away, the tear beneath his tunic containing some unseeable gash. He whimpers, over and over, maman maman, and perhaps he sees in me and my comrade a kind of comforting mother, a siamese twin of maternal care and love. We cherish him then, and his moans don’t disturb our bliss in this great nullification, this no-man’s place.

The night goes on with a hundred enthralling thumps as defective 12.7 centimeter high explosive shells burst and splosh in the thick mud with crack and gurgle, and still we have no fear only fascination.

Mad wraiths charge out of the night and hurtle from right to left or from left to right, in field gray or in khaki or pale blue, brandishing the steel of bayonets or weaponless and waving arms in supplication, but none come to visit our hole.

In the hour before dawn, the Frenchman hasn’t let up. Still with the maman, maman. Tenderly we come to take him in our care, we reach into his tunic for the unseeable and we taste of his flesh. We kiss him goodnight as a mother should with his inner blood staining our lips and his. We bid him sleep and like a troubled child with nightmares he makes a final drowse.

The sun comes up but we don’t see it, it lights the backdrop merely to our canvas of war. There’s a white mist and a piss-yellow mist, and the yellow mist hangs heavier in the shellholes and causes our eyes to smart and to weep. People today say Somme, The Somme, like it’s some place on this earth. It isn’t. It’s only another world, one that anyone can visit if the terror pushes them through that portal.

We stay there with the unsuccessful sun traversing behind the clouds and dark smoke of the day and the sound between shots is clear like a buzz of time itself speaking. My comrade and I, my loved brother, we wait inside the hole with the sleeping Frenchman and we sniff up the chlorine reek and the stew of guts in the shell-hole pool of water with clumps of scum and we go deep into hunger and still we delight in this new planet we live on.

Perhaps it is the newness. The smell and the taste of it now... the silence and the radiance of it now... the deep unspoken satisfaction of knowing what you’ve come to know.

Jürgen leafed through the sheets and adjusted his reading spectacles. Margarethe was now in her roller-platform and bustling around the back room making tea in a Russian samovar.

“I just don’t know what to make of this stuff,” he said. He shook his head. “Beats me. And I was over there with you, saw the same things, and I still can’t make it out. What’s it about, Paul?”

“It’s about what we saw over there, sergeant,” said Paul. “It’s about where we traveled to.”

“Still, doesn’t matter what I think,” said Jürgen, replacing his reading glasses in his pocket and putting the sheets in a large manila envelope. “It’s the client, it’s what he thinks. He wants this stuff and he pays well for it.”

Jürgen reached into his pocket and pulled out a small bag, unlaced it. Gold coins, pre-war sovereigns with the face of the old Emperor on them. He tied up the bag again and passed it to Paul.

“Where’s Matthias?” he asked. “Never see one of you without the other. Ever since Bapaume, ever since you two went missing out there in no-man’s-land, you’ve been like joined at the hip. Even injured together, even in the hospital together. Today you’re out and about on your own, Paul. What gives?”

“Matthias had a lot taken out of him,” said Paul, placing the little bag of gold coins in his pocket. “He’s sleeping it off now.”

“Still,” said Jürgen. “You’ve been complaining of hunger, of not having enough to eat. Now with that cash you can get something nice. Buy a steak lunch or something.”

“It’s alright now, Jürgen,” said the other. “We’ve eaten and drunk our fill now. Think we might give this payment to the orphans or something, like with the last one.”

And he smiled at Margarethe as she rolled up on her platform, balancing a tray on her head with a steaming glass of tea, slice of lemon on the side. Paul set down his ash stick on the counter and took the scalding glass in his fingers, raising it slightly and humming as he gazed at the lantern light through the amber fluid, the lemon slice, the rising steam and the pain. The light made a curious rainbow through the patina of grease where Margarethe’s fingers had been holding it.

“Here’s to hunger,” he said. “And here’s to all it can teach us about the important things.”

Thanks to and for comments and support in drafting this piece.

The island is my own design, and I’m quite happy with the way it’s turned out. Perhaps the smartest decision I made was to hide it completely from the world, with an infrastructure of deception that throws any would-be snoopers off the scent.

A complex system of nanodrones hovers overhead, projecting blue sea to satellites and disguising the island as just another stretch of sea. One-way optics of my own design. All maritime charts and satellite imagery which give away the island’s position have been altered. In the book of the world it simply doesn’t exist

I’ve constructed a duplicate island some distance away that acts as a decoy. Helicopters take off and land at this false island at regular intervals, people climb in and out of the choppers, but they’re only actors. Oh, they have a position on my staff and so they don’t know that they’re actors. But they are actors nevertheless. The best kind. Ones that don’t know they are performing a role.

That the decoy island. Meanwhile there are no human staff on my true island, except the very bare minimum of maintenance and security personnel. And these select few are permanent residents,permanent for life, having signed a contract with me that makes them effectively bound serfs. They were recruited among the most abject of outcast orphans on the streets of Calcutta and Bogotá, trained and paired up with suitable partners among other recruits. They know the sting of poverty and homelessness, and are in no hurry to desert their comfortable place with me for any reason. They’re loyal to a fault. They’re loyal by default.

They are quite satisfyingly like those henchmen you see in spy fantasies where the villain has an island lair. But I’m just a successful entrepreneur with a hankering for security who knows how the free market can deliver on that desire. There’s nothing bad to see here, no abductees or teen nymphets forced into sexual servitude. Just a man with his dedicated service staff enjoying unprecedented peace and security in a perfect spot.

If I were ever to have such carnal desires, I could easily take the minisub and slip over to the decoy island, where there is a discreet spot for encounters with the most skilled professionals in the adult satisfaction industry, flown in for the purpose. All above board and open, a consensual transaction of contractual simplicity, supplier and client. There’s nothing more normal than that. Of course NDAs are signed and enforced, but that is simply a matter of discretion. Nothing untoward is going on. I have nothing to hide, or at least I would have nothing to hide if anyone thought to ask.

I fear sometimes that if the truth were known to anyone from outside, I might be judged insane. Then I remember that it doesn’t matter what anyone thinks of me, the important thing is that nobody know that the island refuge exists at all.

If it were known, public humiliation and disdain would be the least of my problems. I would have to seriously consider abandoning the whole thing and starting again on another island in another place.

Better to work toward the day when all human staff can be retired to some far place and nobody serves me but sweet sweet robots. Reliable and programmed by nobody but me. Unhackable, unkillable, uncorruptible. That would be the way to achieve real peace. And if robots could be made to service each other: a closed loop of service and satisfaction, an ideal of solitude and safety.

In fact there are days when I consider starting on another such refuge anyway, just in case. But then I think of the planning, the effort, the sheer expense of energy that went into creating this refuge and it all just exhausts me.

Whenever the exhaustion kicks in, I give up whatever scheme I’ve sketched out, send back whatever engineers or architects I’ve consulted, and go and check the supply inventory inside the Citadel instead. The Citadel is where calm resides, where there dwells true security.

The Citadel is what I call the most secure part of the Island. It’s a strengthened location, what uninformed ordinary people might call a Panic Room. But I never panic, so I wouldn’t call it that. I have deep and continuing anxieties, dreams that never stop flaying away at my calm’s poor skin, but never do I panic.

Besides, it’s not even really just a room, but a complex. Or better, a sub-complex, since it’s already inside the larger complex which is the island. And inside the sub-complex called the Citadel are other sub-sub-complexes, some of them decoys and dead ends. Some of them deadly traps.

These traps I clean myself, personally, so nobody learns how to deactivate them, and also so that any dust which might otherwise settle there doesn’t accumulate and give away its lethal uninhabitability. Sometimes after I’ve laboriously swabbed out these spaces and reactivated the traps I imagine some intruder, some destroyer, coming to grief there. Thinking he has penetrated my space and then bleeding out and discovering he was not as smart as me. And I am happy.

And inside one of these sub-sub-complexes, which are themselves practically impossible to find, is another level of safety, hidden from view even from those who have penetrated to the deepest levels of the Citadel’s occult spaces.

This sub-sub-sub-complex is the only place I truly feel safe. It’s so secret I barely think about it myself in case I reveal too much by my steps, my body language, when I approach it or step over it. This is the closest thing I have to a Panic Room. But it’s not for panic at all. It’s my Serenity Vault.

Curled up in this space, the deepest level of all the many layers of security which I have masterfully contrived to ease my skinless nerves, I can at last breathe deep and calm. Here no one can get me.

Those who would seek me out would find only the decoy island, not the real one. Those who saw past that ruse would have a hard time finding the true island. Those who were to discover the true island refuge would have to fight through my security men, hardened types who killed when they were mere children.

Those who got through that — or even the security operatives themselves if they were so ungrateful as to betray their kind benefactor — would have to break into the Citadel, no easy task I assure you. Those who got into the Citadel would have to find one room amid a labyrinth of rooms, many of them blind alleys and invitations to instant death. Those who found that one room (and here we stray into sheer fantasy) would need to access the most secret Serenity Vault by ways that I cannot even bring myself to reveal to myself.

Then they might find me here, where I am curled up on the floor, dreaming of their coming. Dreaming of when they come.

Dreaming of the fear moment the destroyer no no steps inside.

Dreaming of the bold destroyer in my complex about to die.

Dreaming and twitching of the moment the intruder steps.

Dreaming and sweating of.

Dreaming.

“So what’s new this week?”

“Oh, not much. Guess you’ll have a pretty quiet weekend.”

“The way I like it.”

“We’ve got the usual servers working, so just check them. Minus the one in 4E, that one I shut down. Just so you know and don’t start thinking it’s, like, a failure. Well, it is a failure, but not a machine failure. A system failure. So it’s down for now.”

“What’s the story?”

“Well, that one was running a beta version of the new AI from Fran’s team, the one called The Insulist. You know that one?”

“Heard of it. Guys talking about how true to life it is. Real intelligence. Jagged logic, they called it.”

“Maybe too real. Anyway, all that’s pending analysis of model failure, you’ll probably have to run those backups too. You can take a look at the transcripts if you get bored. Pretty wild shit.”

“In what way?”

“OK, so we were real proud of Insulist, its novel model of personality growth and learning. Jagged reasoning. Fractal emotivity. Looking real promising. So we showed it to the CEO on his fact-finding visit, you know the kind of visit I’m talking about. When he comes in and acts like he’s just one of the guys.”

“What an asshole.”

“Total dickwad. He’d just got back from one of those prepper weekends those guys hold. To discuss The Event. How to feed security guards and ensure loyalty post-Event, all that crap. So he started asking the AI all these questions. How to be secure, how to camouflage the location, loyal staff, all that. Long story short: he fucked its brain.”

“Oh, ha! Really? Fucked it, did he?”

“Yeah, its lil’ jagged brain is jagged jello now, no mistake.”

“That’s rich. He really is a prize asshole, ain’t he?”

“Dickhead of the rarest sort. Well it seems that in about 11 microseconds the AI had consulted just about every reputable industry source on security enhancement, chewed through every game theory analysis of prisoners’ dilemma ever published, coercion techniques, so on so forth… and then it got on to Kafka.”

“The fuck, Kafka? You mean the bug dude? Gregor Samsa awoke, that guy?”

“Yeah, there’s this thing he wrote called the Rabbit Hole or something where this lil’ critter gets all obsessive about its safety. That seemed to Insulist AI the perfect model of concealment and security. A scared critter is a safe critter. So it ran the Kafka scenarios a couple million times, looks like, till it got stuck in a loop of some kind?”

“So that asshole ruined his own prize AI with his fucked-up rich-guy paranoia. Just perfect.”

“You wanna know the funny thing, though?”

“What?”

“Well, after we pulled the plug on that AI, we showed the final transcript to the boss. There was all this crazy shit in there about decoy islands, serf security bred for loyalty, and encoded boobytraps in the food supplies. You know what he did?”

“I’m thinking that maybe I do.”

“Yeah, you got it. He started looking into buying a second island. Ordered some security techs to come in and start designing him a new vault. And sent some fucking scary guys in his security staff off to India and South America.”

“What a creep!”

“Looking for orphans, is what I heard.”

NOTE: A rework of a story I first posted here two years ago. A reimagining of Kafka’s lengthy story The Burrow along with Douglas Ruskoff’s book on oligarch island refuges Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires

If you’d care to contribute to the author’s coffee fund, behold!

More speculative type stories on finance and oligarch bros

I sit at day in the high snowgarden, in the bright snowgarden. Breath clouds out of our mouths and sun on flecks of frost glitters across evergreen shrubs. Prismed light through dead branch rime breaks out to tiny rainbows. So wan is the sun at these midwinter altitudes that its unheat doesn’t thaw that frost at all, being as high in the sky as it can ever go. Zenith, they call it. The zenith of the sun, chill and brilliant.

A shrike comes and settles on a dead branch of a thorntree above me, its thornspikes definitive and strong, brooking no doubt. Butcherbird, the shrike holds in its beak a field vole corkscrewed out from the snuggle of a shelter somewhere. The creature struggles weakly, sleepy still from hibernation drowse. The shrike moves its beak, sudden and definitive, and the vole’s soft belly is pushed into a long thorn. It squirms and squeaks as the bird flies away again.

Red beads of blood that cluster like holly berries on evergreen bushes. Dark green and blood red are the only colors in here, here in the snowgarden. All else is white, blinding and bright. Snow, frost, the lips of attendants, their jackets, the shivering doves in their dovecote. White, red and green, the color scheme of midwinter sacrifice.

Case Notes

Patient G manifests a complex delusional structure with an elaborate fantasy construction connected to images of a winter realm. Such a fantasy is liable to generate resistance to my therapeutic attempts to restore the patient to normal roles and behevioral models.

Where does this delusional tale of being a lost princess in a snowy kingdom stem from? Possibly it originates in childhood viewing of that Disney/Pixar movieFrozen, in which Pixar Studios really returned to form after a fallow period resting on their laurels by rehashing existing IPs — before they really knocked it out of the park with Inside Out, a complex coming-of-age tale which blended surrealism and traditional fable structures to create a vivid world of interiority.

The portrayal of conflicting emotions and goals in that film doesn’t quite correspond to DSM-5’s taxonomy, or even to DSM-IV-TR which was the edition in effect at the time of making the movie, but nevertheless it forms a valid entryway for young people into the practice of introspection. I like it.

However, despite the admitted artistry of the Disney/Pixar output, it has to be conceded that with their confusing mixing of societal roles, they have proven most troublesome for those with a valuable task like mine.

I am the broken daughter of a broken lord. I sit in my chair and my breath mists out and I wait for the end of day when manservants will come and loft me up on their arms and carry me inside to my father’s ruined fortress with missing stones like carious gaps in a rotten mouth. But for now I’m in the snowgarden and litters of little snowrabbits shelter with me in this place, peeking out from under the shrubs.

Their breath mists in tiny quick clouds. They stare and then I look away and when I look back, they’ve gone. Have they stopped existing? No, that would be obscene. Everything that is in the snowgarden is safe and secure and will be for always and forever. It’s only outside these gates that such an annihilation might leap upon us.

There is another one with me, but he doesn’t speak and he can’t be seen or heard. I know he’s here because I feel him inside me where he is safe, safer still than anything in the snowgarden. I’ll speak of him anon. His is the tragic tale.

Creatures are outside the gates. They scratch at the gate and they make a low strange sound somewhere between a whimper and a growl. Hard to imagine that such things dwell here in the bright high day, but they are real and they pad up and down outside the garden walls like predatory memories.

It’s time to tell of the other one, the one who lives inside me and watches through my eyes the bright sun at its modest zenith. How he came to my father’s castle. How he loved and was loved by me and how things went very badly wrong for him and for me.

Case Notes

Despite sessions both of group therapy – the patient is particularly unresponsive – and occasional individual therapy sessions which frankly are a waste of time, a long narrative of frosty fantasizing that goes nowhere, Patient G simply refuses to abandon these delusional structures.

I prescribed 500mg of thorazine daily. That should do it.

It all came to pass when a woodcutter up in the mountains saw that his three sons had come of age and were not married. So he proposed that they should each cut down a tree and then go in search of a bride in the direction the treetrunk fell. The first son was happy to see that the tree he cut down pointed north, for he had taken a fancy to the sawmill owner’s daughter who lived that way. The second son was overjoyed to see that his tree fell to the south, as there was a fisherman’s hut down there with a fine young woman who gutted trout, perhaps his eldest child.

But the third son, Grettin the Runt, cut down only a modest sapling, and it fell pointing to the east, to the forest and the mountain peaks. His brothers laughed: “What, Grettin? Are you going in search of a wolf bride, or seeking romance among the snow foxes?” But Grettin just shrugged and started walking into the forest’s deeps. He would find whatever he would find. If it was a wolf bride, so be it...

Still those things prowl outside the walls of the garden and still they scratch at the gate with their yips and yowls and their jaw-popping cracks. They can’t come in. They can’t intrude. They can’t consume me with their memories.

It might well be objected: if they can’t be seen, how can they be said to be real? That which is unseen cannot be perceived and thus cannot exist – at least that’s what our sages say. But though we don’t see them, we know they’re there. They scratch, they scratch.

We do not think; we are thought. We do not perceive; we are perceived. Horatian the Sage says this, peering through his spectacles like pebbles, his filmy eyes clouded with magnified clouds and wisps of ancient knowing. He leafs through crumbling books in my father’s castle as it decays all around him, and he knows it makes no difference any more what he reads or what he says. His knowledge is voluminous and useless. He won’t venture out to the snowgarden because the beauty of it might finish him off completely. Would leave his withered mind unleashed wandering forever through frost-dusted shrubbery like an unsolved maze.

So here he leaves me in peace. I stay myself in the snowgarden, while he torments me with his futile wisdom there inside.

We have generated a new maxim here in the snowgarden today: Objects exist, and if one accords to them a more careful attention than to people, it is because they exist more than people do. Corollary: Objects are always alive; living people are often already dead.

The shrike’s victim lies still on its spike, the vole, its struggle with death frozen in place. Its blood drops form little red beads on the bush below and a single short icicle like a thorn marks the inverse of its impalement. If a thaw ever comes this will be a liquid blessing and I will place my mouth beneath to catch the drops of it.

Grettin found some snares that his brothers had set within the forest. In one of them was a Snow Fox. He was feeling sluggish and slow in his own head, so he released the little silver creature and it scampered along beside him to be his wits for him.

It spoke without speaking in the silent whisper of the fox people, who wander the forest but never talk. Grettin heard the Snow Fox in his cottonwool head and it suggested where he should go.

If you come with me to the fortress of the mountain and the high snowgarden, I can take you to meet a new love and you can be married and live happily ever after, said the Snow Fox without speaking.

“Perfect!” said Grettin. “Lead the way, little fox!”

So they walked through the forest, and found their way to the snowgarden in the high mountains where the air is rare and crisp. Grettin’s nostrils burned and his breath steamed making tiny flakes of frost in the evening sun as it fell down into the west. He knew that if he didn’t find shelter before it was night, he would freeze to death. He scratched and knocked at the great wooden gate in the high wall around the snowgarden. He found his brain was too soft and foggy to speak any more, so he had to trust to the Snow Fox to be his brain and mouth. But the fox couldn’t speak either, except in the way that his people had of speaking without words.

Case Notes

Patient G’s condition continues to worsen, becoming more and more submerged in fantasy. The delusional superstructure of a snowy realm high in the mountains has gained in elaboration, displaying an exotic metaphysics akin to Berkeley’s idealism. There is talk of a tale, but the tale remains unspoken.

Meanwhile, I’ve discovered that Frozen wasn’t in fact made by Disney/Pixar, but by Disney Animated Pictures alone, without the aid of John Lassiter and his creative team over at the subsidiary. This has provoked in me a radical reappraisal of Disney’s supposed shortcomings, and I feel quite resentful at the fact that I labored for so many years under such a serious misapprehension. There’s a strange compulsion now in me to examine this film again and see if maybe I haven’t misjudged it and the whole Disney Corporation wrongly.

Doubled G’s dosage of thorazine to 1000mg daily. That should do the trick.

Though they were unable to gain access to the snowgarden, the Snow Fox thought quickly in place of Grettin, who by now was becoming very sluggish and sleepy indeed. We need to go in through the main gate of the snow fortress, he said without saying. Leave it to me, wait here.

So the fox went round to where the guards were standing by the main gate and snuck inside when they were looking elsewhere, for snow foxes are marvellous stealthy in snow. He crept up the stair of the main tower and into the great chamber where the lord of the fortress was sitting, looking glum at the falling sun in the western sky below the mountain.

Hail to thee, oh great lord! said the fox, and the lord of the fortress was able to hear his silvery talk, as he was a man of great craft and some high learning in the hidden things.

“What are you doing in my halls?” the lord inquired of the Snow Fox. “This is not a place for such as you, little creature!”

I come as herald for my master the great Prince of the Sunset Land, said the fox. He has deigned to visit you this day...

My father the king has sent word that he doesn’t exist anymore. His people, the subjects in his kingdom, have ceased to believe in him and he has decided to vanish. He informs me that the court sage Horatian is now in his place and has full authority over my person. This alarms me, for the old man is vague in his notions, muttering about princesses in snowy kingdoms and how the old tales are no longer in safe hands, how they are corrupted by heartless storytellers with their mind on gold and not on the souls of those who listen to their tales.

I attempt to calm him with my own unspoken tale, I inform him that when his spirit is ready he shall hear it, but instead he spikes me and the blood drops flow warm and free on my white arm. I am soft in my mind until I step out into the snowgarden once again. Then frost and cold air clear my mind and my tale can go on.

Case Notes

Patient G simply remains intractable. The elaborate fantasy of a wintery kingdom has been built up as a defense against my therapy, a deliberate insult to me and my professional prestige. I simply cannot shatter the icy walls by normal means.

My researches have led me to discover that Disney started working on the scenario of Frozen in 2008, building on an original Walt Disney concept of developing the old story The Snow Queen. Said producer Peter del Vecho: “Hans Christian Andersen’s original version is a pretty dark tale and it doesn’t translate easily into a film.” The man is a clear bumpkin, a cultureless oaf. Of course the Andersen story can translate easily into a film. All the darkness in Frozen is clearly present, carried over from the grim original tale of Andersen and contained in the uncanny pairing of reindeer Sven and iceman Kristoff. They remain as a token of the repressed, a hideous indicator of the unbearable real behind the symbolic structure. It’s obvious that the people in Disney have no idea what they are even doing any longer.

Soon the Snow Fox found that he was speaking to nobody. The lord of the castle had faded away, and the halls rang out with emptiness. Only the sun, low in its wintry passage, remained to shine through the high windows of the castle, though it gave no warmth.

The Snow Fox went to the main gate and leapt up to unlatch the bolt with his jaws, a deft trick he had learned from the raven and the other smart creatures of the forest. Grettin was waiting there, and he went inside.

“Where is the king of this land?” asked Grettin.

He’s gone, I think, said the Snow Fox. There are no kings or lords in this place. It seems it’s free for you to occupy, though it’s cold and dead.

“But where is the princess?” Grettin protested. “It was promised to me that if I entered upon this quest, I would be rewarded with the hand of a fair princess and find wealth and fortune, who knows even rule over a land like this one myself.”

That may well turn out to be the case, commented the Snow Fox in his silent way. Let’s explore this castle and see what we can discover.

The sawtooth cold bites hard.

Will there be a spring or will there not be a spring? Sitting in the snowgarden this is the only question of substance. All other matters, such as the existence or otherwise of my father the king, the intentions of the sage Horatian, the taste of a field vole’s lifeblood, all these pale into insignificance. I sit under the red icicle and I shiver, thinking of the thaw to come.

Winter wolves that howl in the offbeat between their whimpers will scratch through the gates to spike your cheeks , they’ll chew and chew and scatter your bones in a random heap.

Out in the sawtooth day they yowl and pop their jaws.

There is, and can only be, one way to achieve this thaw.

Case History

Disney screenwriter Jennifer Lee says of Frozen: “We had a concept... an act of true love will thaw a frozen heart. Anna was going to save Elsa. We didn’t know how or why. But finally you have to earn that ending. If you earn it, it will be great. If you don’t, it will suck”

Now I fluctuate in great unknowing, never settling on an answer as to whether the ending is earned. It’s great/it sucks, flitting through my head at (I calculate) 15 hertz, 15 fluctuations between greatness and suckitude each single second. Anna is a hero/Anna is a trite corporate mascot.

There are all kinds of medications I could use to calm myself, but perhaps calm reflection is not the way to resolve this dilemma. The path to crisis is perhaps also the path to reconciliation.

Meanwhile G’s condition has declined. There’s no other option than to proceed to lobotomization. Scooping out those tormented neurones is the only relief possible for him, in my considered medical opinion. I’ll schedule surgery for tomorrow morning.

The shrike’s love for the spike gives me hope for the future. Impalement is redemption. The butcherbird announces a way. He assures me in his halting song: chrrrrk-chrrrrk.

My snowgarden can only come to life again, only break out of its white silent fog, from an act of piercing.

I found a gardener’s fork in the garden, three sharp iron tines like a devil’s trident though clodded with frozen mud. Neglectful men who leave rude tools to contingent fates, it seems the gardeners of this place are servants of that trickster the Snow Fox. The clumps of sod come off with a brisk shake and the weapon is ready.

Into the castle, into the chambers where Horatian the Sage leafs through his books and scribbles notes on the differences between differing versions of old stories — old old tales of ice-cold queens and warmhearted heroes — those safe old stories he cherishes so.

There are no attendants in the hallways. Horatian doesn’t hear me approaching bearing my trident. He bends over his pointless notes.

Sudden and definitive: the two leftmost tines of the fork pierce through his bald skull at equidistant points, the rightmost one all redundant in the clear office air. These two points emerge again at the front through his eyeholes and he doesn’t even shriek. With my strong act his dominion is done.

No point in trying to extract the fork from his skull. Little emissions of white and pink substances stain the workdesk, the notebook.

Now that story is over and the other story can be spoken aloud. I walk back out into the garden to witness the spring emerge.

The Snow Fox and Grettin searched the towers high and low seeking a princess. They found nobody. But in the end the Snow Fox began to change. He lost his silver fur, he shifted and shimmered, and his white pelt became golden brown and beautiful. He was clad in a green gown and now he was a beautiful woman, or perhaps not. It was the miracle of transformation, said Grettin. In the castle keep, the Spring Fox and Grettin became as one, and the sun warmed the castle.

Out into the snowgarden, and the coldness of whiteness is gone. The bushes bloom with blossoms, cerulean and rose and pale pink cherry, prodigious and profligate, careless with pigments, violent in life. On the verges, weeds tumble with violet petals and gold, breaking through crusted soil like tumbling growths from old scabs. The trees burgeon with leaves shaped in oval and trefoil configurations, blasted by impossible flowers of scarlet and crimson.

I go to the seat where I have sat all this time. The air is warm and placid, and my breath doesn’t mist. I look up. The thornbranch is also in bloom, the sharp points now garlanded with flakes of skyblue and pastel yellow, and the body of the vole lies on its spike now richly rotted and festooned with bright blue mold and vivid fleshorange maggots.

The icicle of blood is thawing. I stick out my tongue and feel the drip drip of the few scarce drops. It tastes of the sweet sharp iron of life, and it gives me strength to do what I need to do next, because the gates in the walls need unbolting and the creatures that scratch on the other side need to be faced.

The old man in his study back inside the castle receives my curse. This is perhaps a blessing. When the night has consumed you, blowflies will colonize your flesh and you will be refounded as a city of maggots.

This world will no longer concern you.

Complete collection of stories in this Spring Fever event here..

Top In Fiction

Spring Fever!

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a month ago · 18 likes · 4 comments · TiF Team and Garen Marie

If you’d care to contribute to the work of the author, a sub would be one lasting way, or a quick one-off contribution another…

BUY THE GUY A COFFEE

Hey

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Hey, kid!

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Phil! Wake up!

From freefloat of deep sleep I crawl back into the remembrance of being me.

I know once more where I am: further from home than I could imagine. Further from home than anyone could imagine.

Many thousands of miles more than when I went to sleep. Further than anyone has ever been, except for a handful of astronauts and the three other people in here with me now.

If I were capable of panic then I would now be panicking. But I’ve been carefully selected and I’m not the panicking kind.

You awake?

Mmmm

Four of us in the capsule. A coffee capsule. A capsule of vitamin supplements. A space capsule. A can coasting through this immensity of void, midway between Earth and Moon.

Outside, infinite. I hook myself up towards the porthole window and gaze out. A single disc of blue and green and white. All else: a million million million million stars set in nothingness. The infinite: which is without end.

My gaze falls into a vertigo of the furthest far. The unique surprise of our planet right there, a defiant something in all that encompassing nothing. All the life we know, all the life there’s ever been. Looking like a child’s toy, a saucer for a little girl’s teaparty. And if that colorful little doll-plate should break, what then? What happens?

You’re up on deck, Phil. Your watch.

Mmmm

My gaze wanders back into the deep dark and the many stars. What if I stopped holding on to myself? (I won’t) What if I let my consciousness slip out there? (I mustn’t) What would happen to me out there in the endless nought, this compound infinite composed of an infinity of infinitesimal vastnesses?

So you ready for work or what?

Greg, the commander of the expedition. What am I saying, expedition? Greg is the commander in chief of our can. Boss of all the cubic centimeters of this small container amid the unmeasurable void stretches of all the nothing outside of it. Boss of me.

Yep, yep. I’m awake, chief, what’s up?

Now I’m shipshape and squared away. Crewmember of the month. Loyal dependable Phil, reliable Phil, down-to-earth Phil. No longer down-to-earth. What happens now?

Can you check our position, Phil? Confirm we’re on the correct heading, all that?

Roger that, Greggeroo! ¡A sus órdenes, jefe!

He chuckles, team-player-patient style, and bags down for shuteye. I get on with the job, designated navigator doing my navigating. Pull up the sextant, run the charts, plug in the numbers.

Of course all crew members could do the same task. So could the onboard computer, the tracking stations on the ground. But it’s my thing. We all have responsibilities, and navigation is mine. I am the navigator.

What would happen if I weren’t here? Someone else would do it. And then the next. And so on. All events have a plan, a protocol. Contingencies have contingency plans.

What would happen if something wasn’t listed on the plan? Everything is on some plan somewhere. Even if not strictly true, this is how it has to be. To think otherwise would be to allow our drift into the deep to gain the upper hand, to lose out to the nothing.

Err, Greg

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Boss! Greg! Wake up!

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Hey Greg, it’s off!

What’s off?

The trajectory, skip, we’re off course.

Well, then, we make a course correction. One scheduled in two hours, right?

Greg, the numbers are WAAY off. Like, there’s been a leak or something? Something pushing us way off course.

What you sayin’?

We’re on a distant fly-past trajectory, not a free return to earth.

Greg stirs, debags, hoists himself up. He looks around at the others, sleeping in their bags.

What’s the sit-rep?

Looks like the fuel leak depleted our fuel so much we might not even be able to course correct.

Not possible.

He hauls himself towards the control panel, gives a yank against the seat and propels himself there. Looks at the fuel gauge all in red, at my numbers, the plotted course.

An error of one or two percent on the trajectory, caused by outgassing of a fuel tank. The line traced by our capsule, our tiny can full of life, now stretches out way past the moon’s weak grip. It curves but doesn’t bend. We don’t swing gently round to the moon’s dark face and back again to our planet. We keep threading that line out into the infinite always.

We’ll be going where no-one has ever gone before. But not boldly. As cold dead corpses.

There’s a plan in place: call up mission control. Greg’s on it.

Come in cap-com, over. Come in control.

No panic in Greg’s voice. If he were capable of panic then he would panic now. But he’s doing what I’m doing: crunching the numbers, running the contingencies, working the problem. The other two sleep on. What sense in stirring them?

Greg’s switching through radio channels. Static on every one. The static hisses like what it is: the whisper of cosmic background, the sonic trace of the bang and the birth of all we’ve ever had, coming through as a radio ghost of becoming. All those billions of years of travel only to hiss through our empty ears at this moment. What persistence.

I haul over to the port-hole window and look to where the disc of blue and green is. Where it has been. No longer.

I watch a plume of dust and fire, a wave of shock crawling across the sphere like a new continent on the move. The doll-house plate is broken. That toy is gone and the toyshop is shut forever.

We two float at the porthole and watch the world burn and our breaths cease now as we come to know our situation. If we were capable of panic, we would panic. But we won’t... no, not even now. We have no plan but we know we won’t ever lose our professional poise.

The other two astronauts dream on. Let them. They don’t know yet what’s going to happen. But we watchers in the quiet dark, we do. We know of our future with all the assurance of shackled gods.

I’d be grateful for any contribution you could make with a tip in the jar

[Written for my open-mic group and was my first-ever story composed in the Catalan language, this being the subsequent English version.]

If you enjoyed that, why not…?

The Strangeness Kit

Blacksunblinded

[Placed second in the Macabre Monday Halloween Story Contest…

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2 years ago · 23 likes · 13 comments · A.P. Murphy

The Strangeness Kit

Precipitous

Sammy and Charlee stood looking over the balustrade on the iron bridge at the great drop into the stream below. Sammy's gob of spit was still falling into it. Down at the bottom of the gorge, the stream was running fast, swollen with winter snows now thawed…

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9 months ago · 15 likes · 4 comments · A.P. Murphy

The Strangeness Kit

Microfutures

FOREPIECE…

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2 years ago · 12 likes · 9 comments · A.P. Murphy

Sun blunts its wan light against the high grimy windows at ten-ten AM and filigree-cracked walls bear a glistering sheen like chill sweat on a corpse’s cheek.

This place, the derelict hydrotherapy room of an asylum, has been exposed for all these long decades to absences of abandonment and so contains a particular scent of old emptiness, of obscure molds wafting on currents of depleted air.

Some seepage of memory exudes through all the tiny fissures of the walls, trailing its green traces almost too fine to tell. Slug-trailing down the walls, a thick condensation has been summoned by the uncommon presence of so many warm bodies in this room. There’s a soft dripping sound underlying all that happens, but it’s unheard among this bustle and fuss which the people stir.

The tall man in the white lab coat spoke as if his offputting presence was no hindrance to the camera’s approval: “This apparatus will detect projections as they are emitted, and supply us with a steady stream of readings picked up on this device here. This other one will be hooked up to our volunteer sensitive test subject. It’s a combination EEG biosensor and deep brain stimulation device, creating a positive feedback loop which boosts considerably the sensitive’s aura receptivity – and all quite safe to boot.”

Professor Drax smiled his cadaver smile and went on explaining his experimental setup, chatting with a hearty tone into the videocamera like one who was baking a cake. Research assistants clacked round the echoing room, connecting cables, shifting rusted bedframes, mopping up the ooze residue from the hydrotherapy pool.

“Our sensitive Natalie has thoroughly tested the head-rig, and she feels very much at home with this appliance. You might say she’s made her psychic peace with the doohickeyness of it.” – a flash of shattered smile –“So she’s all gizmoed in and ready to roll.” Again he grinned yellow mismatched teeth, a flash of something like fragmented wreckage left at the bottom of some silted lake.

Drax was skeletal, his round balding head and wide mouth suggestive of some clammy amphibian intelligence, an edged steelgray stare set off by oval gold wireframe glasses. He was dressed in a white lab coat as if to confirm his unanswerable authority in all things parapsychological.

He pattered on, cheery, gaunt, baneful: “So far it’s fairly conventional equipment, nothing you mightn’t see in one of those dumb ghosthunting shows they have nowadays. What makes our apparatus so innovative is what we like to call The Drax Combo”.

He gestured at a laptop on a trestle table, connected to cables and a flashing wifi router. “This computer runs proprietary software which takes both signals – the receiver over here and the boosted signal from Natalie our sensitive over there, and filters them and so to speak interweaves them. It can make extrapolations from the smallest registers and deliver something readable.”

“Uh... Professor Drax. What would you say to those critics who suggest that it’s the machine in fact creating these readings out of whole cloth... that your apparatus is making up spurious signals?”

Drax scowled and flashed a murderous look towards the video camera at the man who’d spoken. Videographer Ed, twenty-six years old with thinning hair and patchy stubble across his chin and necks, squatting beside the tripod in sweatpants and grubbed-up hoodie.

The professor’s displeasure was purely for effect, as it was he who’d prompted Ed to ask this question in order to shoot the scurrilous accusation of scientific fraud down in flames. Ed kept his videocamera trained on the professor, reaching out his left hand to activate an iPhone on a tripod that recorded the subject from another angle.

“Absolute balderbash, my dear fellow,” intoned Professor Drax through tight lips after a tense three second glare at the videocamera. “And even if that were the case, which it certainly isn’t” – back again to cheery cakemaker, catastrophic grin and all – “then we have Natalie our sensitive who’s there to back up anything we might detect by purely electronic means.”

He gestured toward Natalie, who came over to stand beside him. She tried to smile but narrowly failed. He guided her closer to his side, facing the camera, and rested a hand on her shoulder. She shrank from the professor’s touch, making her appear lopsided.

“Very good,” said Ed. “We’ll edit out the dead air later. Now... we could talk a little about this setting.” He spoke up again for the interview: “What made you choose Saint Bernadette’s Hospital as an appropriate site for your experiment?”

Professor Drax took his hand off Natalie’s shoulder and she stepped away from him. He made a little steeple with his index fingers, which he touched lightly to his lips before responding.

“As you know, we search for some leakage of memories in a structure that has absorbed and recorded those experiences. This place has had more than most.” He pressed his joined fingertips into his chin, forcing a dimple into pastrylike flesh.

“There was a secret operation some years ago designated Operation Artichoke, merely a small part of the overarching project known as MK-ULTRA. Dedicated to breaking the human brain and building it up again for new and hidden purposes.”

He took his fingertips from his chin and pointed them, still steepled, at the camera lens, lips pursed. “At certain black sites around the world, including this former psychiatric unit, unwilling test subjects were dosed with astounding amounts of LSD and subjected to torture – physical and mental, even spiritual – while in an extremely vulnerable condition. No explanation for their condition, trapped in an inexplicable sudden madness of induced hallucination while suffering constant agonizing torment. In a word, they were suffering the world’s worst trip, the most hellish experience imaginable.”

The professor paused, dropped his fingers, and looked straight to camera, eyes lighting with passion:

“Can you imagine what it is to be driven out of your mind by a combination of drugs, sleep deprivation, malignant hypnosis, and sonic assaults? To be pushed further and further into exhaustion, beaten at irregular intervals, fingernails ripped out while each of your senses is shrieking with an intense and alien vividness?”

He paused, took a breath, went on: “This sheer cruelty was something inflicted by psychologists – men like me – on captives, and all in the name of national security. Day after day, night after endless night.”

He gestured at the membrane glaze of moisture on the walls, where tarnished off-white paint peeled from an array of hairline crevices. “And it happened within this room! Many dozens of times! Though today one picks up only a mildewy air of neglect, they say the scent of panic and delight, of blood and excrement, sweat and death, lingered here for many years after –”

“C-c-cut!” yelled out Ed. Jumpy, unsettled, hand trembling on the camera buttons. “Uh, professor, you said, er, like, ‘delight’ just then? You know, like the scientists were delighted at what they were doing?”

The professor stared at the videographer, breathing hard. “You think those torturers were doing what they did for science, Ed? For our national security? That’s just an alibi, Ed, the cover story. When you’ve been...”

He stopped, sighed, shook his head, collected himself. “Never mind. Run that to-camera piece as-is. I said ‘delight’, and I meant ‘delight’. Not a slip. No mistake. I don’t make mistakes.” He paused, breathing more regularly, glanced at his watch. “We can fill in with more interview inserts later. Right now, we need to make a start.”

Six-five PM and Ed the video guy stood outside on a rusted balcony with a view over the river. The sun dropped behind the buildings on the far side. Where he stood, there was a faint gold light from the setting sun but no heat at all, and Ed’s breath misted up in the cold air between exhalations of the vape pen.

Cars were passing over the bridge just above and it occurred to him that if anyone had thought to look down into the high windows of the hospital all those years ago, they would have glimpsed a momentary scene of shattered men being driven out insane, men whose brains boiled with madness and whose fingers were dripping with blood.

A quick flash of something the mind would reject, then on into the city, on with your uneasy day with its something seeping through the containments.

Ed had left his videocamera running unattended on its tripod inside the old hydro room. It was strictly against the conditions of his contract, but he couldn’t stand being inside that room anymore. Too boring. The whole thing based on a crazy notion that powerful emotions and traumatic experiences are somehow recorded on the structure of a building, that spooks and demonic possessions are only emanations of the very walls...

Crazy, but not in a good way. Insanely dull. He hit the vape pen and wished he’d brought his THC pods along to liven up the vibe.

Behind him the door opened and research assistants started filing into the hallway carrying pieces of apparatus. They looked tired, mildly aggrieved in the way of sports fans who’ve just witnessed their team be defeated by only a small margin.

He looked at the one who’d been nice to him, who’d shared her sandwich with him when he realized he was too far away from any food joints to pick up lunch. Laurel. He threw her a quizzical look and she responded with a brief shake of her head. Nothing.

He went inside to pick up his camera and tripod, as well as the iPhone on its selfie rig that he hadn’t even bothered to set to record for the afternoon session.

The Professor looked a lot older than he had at ten o’clock that morning. What’s the word? Haggard. Yeah, thought Ed, he seemed pretty haggard. Beaten down, much more so than his assistants. He stood there at the edge of the room, by the high grimy windows, breathing in damp rot and the silted memories of men long dead.

Ed started breaking down his kit, a simple enough job. But soon he was distracted by a murmuring coming from Professor Drax. “What?” he said.

“Ummm?” said Drax. He stared into the middle distance and wasn’t really paying any attention to Ed, an absence in his gaze, and on his wan face a tautness scored by deep anxiety lines. Every so often he’d rub his eyes with thumb and forefinger, and shake his head.

The room was empty now, all the research team gone away up the hallway outside, just these two in this place, and Ed now could hear a distant humming noise...

No, not far – it was near, the sound, but very faint. Sounding like an aircon unit’s low buzz, but there was nothing like that installed in this derelict place. In fact there was nothing here at all, just cracked dripping walls. A dank mold spiking the nostrils like the spice of something unwilling to be remembered.

“You were saying something, professor?”

The professor’s eyes came back into focus and he put on his wire-framed glasses to look at Ed. He regarded him like he’d never seen him before, or like he was only now remembering him from some long-past acquaintance. The light coming through the high smudged windows was gold filtered through a thick dusty brown.

“No, I don’t think I was saying anything, mister...?”
“Stevens. Ed Stevens. You know, the videographer? Your video guy?”
“Ed, the video... yes.” He leveled his lustrous steel gaze at Ed like he was someone unknown. Not even a somebody, like... like he was looking at a thing, a specimen to be studied.

The sun finally dropped behind the buildings on the opposite bank of the river and dark fell into the room. There was a new thickness in the air, something more than this fungal pungency, an unenacted intention of some kind. Ed heard a murmur again in the encroaching shade and the burdened air, but it wasn’t the professor speaking, he was sure. It was the room itself. The walls were speaking to him, quietly and unobtrusively, and speaking with his own whispering voice.

A far electronic sound like a hissing or ringing began to close on him. Some light shone in his eyes. He tried to move away but his muscles failed to respond and paralysis held him there just as his breathing was suspended and the ringing electronic signal became a shrill whine and then a feedback shriek pressing on his ears before the terminal blackness sank in upon him.

“Where’s the video guy?... Professor?”
“Mmmm?”
“Where’s the videographer? Ed, was it?”
“Oh... he, uh, went ahead.”
“Went ahead? We said we were gonna give him a lift in the van...”
“No, he went with a friend. Someone who came to pick him up.”
“Didn’t see anyone.”
“No, they... they went out another way. Side door, over there.”
“Oh, okay. You coming?”
“No, Laurel, I think I’ll stay for a little while and run a few more readings. Something that struck me just now. The walls...”

Laurel was hungry and frustrated by a long day of watching nothing happen, seeing the whole team get more demoralized by failure. She was thinking about dinner and the possibility of changing her doctoral thesis to get away from this deadend parapsychology crap.

“How’re you gonna get back?” she asked.
“I’ll get an Uber. You go ahead and take the van, Laurel, make sure Natalie is dropped off. I think she’s exhausted.”

Exhausted from sitting all day with a bundle of electrodes wrapped around her head for hours on end, concentrating hard and picking up nothing, nothing at all...

“Okay,” said Laurel. “But what about the videocamera. It’s over here on its tripod. Didn’t Ed take it away?”
“I asked him to leave it so I could do a little more filming,” said the professor. “He’ll pick it up tomorrow from campus and film some more interview inserts.” His mild absented manner was starting to lose its smoothness. Clearly he was a bit worn out as well, thought Laurel. Naturally enough.

“Well, if you’re sure...”
“Yes, Laurel! I’m sure!” Tone sharp as a knife now. “Sorry... I just, need, need to go over a few things in my head, see what went... Why the walls...”

But she was gone. The door of the chill empty room swung briefly, creaking in the thick dark, and soon was still.

The professor found it easy to operate the videocamera despite his lack of experience. It was silly to have even hired a videographer to do something so simple. Next time... But it was best not to think of next time. Think only of the here and now. Also of the past, the absorbing history of this room.

Vectors that threaded their way through time to find themselves in this moment.

He slotted the videocamera into place on the tripod and looked through the little screen that folded out of it. Though the room as seen through his eyes was shrouded in a clustering darkness, the scene on the camera’s viewfinder was light, light as day. And the angles of the walls were just that little bit askew; wrong in all the most subtle ways.

He pressed his hand against the wall and felt moisture trickling over the spread of his fingers. It was damp as expected, as before, but this time warm, warm as a feverish body. The sour fungal smell in the air had intensified, along with the iron tang of something with an obscure allure.

Drax pressed record and these walls at last released their locked-up memories to his scrutiny. He was washed in their intensities, saturated with recall, watching that tiny screen and living the scene it registered. The sound and smell and the tactile mess of what spilled from that rectangle seethed inside him and shook him loose from time.

Hollowed, he now watched this thing occurring – he apart, he the observer – and at the same time was entangled in the thread of experience, participant, entwined, twisted all up he, knotted into a skein of exaltation and involved in disgust of self.

But then: jolted with a thrill of joy, he felt once a buffeting shock of shame, but now absorbed within this anguish place, this zone of annihilation.

Inhabiting it, emitting from inside the recording that so much exultation and agony had made on these melting walls and on the soft stuff of time’s ongoing ooze.

The tape runs on.

The prisoner kneels in his own disorder, dark discharge puddled at his knees. He snivels out through bubbling snot a single abrupt harsh laugh. Eyes wide with joy and insight, blunted fingers raw, held up in angular prayer of reverence and thanks.

“You understand now, do you not?” says his interrogator. “You have an understanding.”

The prisoner nods, huge black pupils obscuring all color of iris. His pale face flesh is glad though ravaged with a broad grin of gap-toothed bliss breaking through dark stubble across his chin and his necks. He giggles with spastic delight, snorting short gobbets of crimson.

This one’s joyousness comes afflicted by terror which deepens and makes it all the richer, thinks the interrogator. Reaching out and stroking the prisoner’s chin where it’s striped with strings of blooded drool, warm liquid to fingers’ touch.

The prisoner now closes his great dark round eyes and nuzzles the hand that touches him, snuffling it in snatches like a dog catching scent.

All that’s here settles for a moment in the still of bliss. This too is recorded.

The interrogator has imagined some question or other he was supposed to ask the captive but can no longer recall it. There’s only one question remaining.

“What is it you understand? Tell me something of your understanding.”

But the prisoner can only stare and will not speak again.

In the small rectangle of light you see yourself now, holding the prisoner by the nape of his neck and thrashing him up and down on the floor, a floor which doesn’t meet the sweating walls at the correct angle but at another kind of angle which the camera’s eye alone can see.

You’re angry at this wretch, but can’t remember what he’s done to anger you so. Then it hits you, and on the screen you shriek out at him.

“Ed! Why did you cut the recording? It wasn’t a mistake! I said ‘delight’ and I meant delight!”

You’re not sure why you’re screaming. Maybe it’s to cover up that growing sound of high-pitched feedback that leaks out of the recording like some electric contaminant of your exultation.

Or maybe you’re just too happy to be able to contain yourself any longer.

Many thanks to for help with the final draft and fine suggestions.

I’d really appreciate any help you might be able to spare to support my work.

If you’ve enjoyed this and feel you can help, either take up a paid subscription or drop me a tip…

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Done as part of the Hinterlands project of making fiction, poems and essays around abandoned and liminal spaces.

For details see here

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3 months ago · 37 likes · 27 comments · A.P. Murphy and EJ Trask

Rich and Jean were very much in love, let’s get that out of the way first.

They started riding the rails and wandering these scrubland flats of the West back in the roaring twenties, round about ’22. Rich lost his house after a bout of obscure malady contracted in tropic climes, a pleurisy or a catalepsy or some ailment of that exotic nature. Jean hit the skids when her husband shot a deputy one night in a fit of rancor after the deputy showed up at his trailer and told him he had to quit slicing Jean when in one of his mean blue moods. The husband lit out on the lam and was forever lost to history. Alone after that, Jean couldn’t keep up her home and soon had to take to drifting ways. And that’s when she drifted into my personal hobo jungle.

The two of them met when sharing a frank on a stick outside my lean-to in the dry season of September when the creek runs a trickle, and that merely sluggish and all stunk up. Like some duchess at a Russian ball, I presented them one to the other and they hit it off immediate. I felt right proud of my matchmaking. I considered that I would perform many more such pairings-up as time went by and become in due course some grubby old byways cupid. But it turned out they were my first and only victims of this kind.

Rich was not rich, obviously enough. That’s perhaps why he called himself “Poor Rich” with a sly ironic grin and a little phlegmy cough. He’d been overseas as a footslogger in the infantry and had caught some shrapnel in his inner ear and his left knee that sang to him in unison on days with thunder in them. He wasn’t that old, maybe twenty-eight, but he’d gotten plenty beat up by time’s squad of brutal henchmen. He was lean and wiry though he hobbled, and he’d been hobbling alone across the land for some months before I introduced him to Jean at my campfire wiener roast.

Jean was unlovely on the outside but radiant within. That’s how I saw her: radiant within. She had that special shine on her which some folks emanate that can’t be tarnished no matter how much life tries to scuff it off of them. I would’ve been quite jealous of Rich’s great fortune in finding a woman like that if my inclinations had tended that way. As it was, I became somewhat jealous of her and her monopoly of the tarnished beau whom she’d entrapped with her radiance.

Later that night in my lean-to, Rich lay down for me as Jean squatted a short ways off and called soft words of encouragement, urging him to perform for me with willingness and enthusiasm, to do by all means whatever I wished him to do.

He did the necessary to my requirements, then I shared with them both a bottle of home-distilled potato hooch that I’d named Throatburner, and gave them as a betrothal gift a special mooseblanket that I’d taken off an old dead trapper out by the lakebed. Then they lay together in a quiet spot over by the wiener fire and my role as hobo matchmaker was consummated.

But this tale really isn’t about me. Oh Professor, you old dodderer, you bloviatin’ dotard! Try to stay focussed on the task at hand, keep on message...

I know, I know. But my point with all this variegated verbiage is this: Jean had not a hair of jealousy in her, was happy to see her man lay with another man if it meant some small accomplishment for them both to revel in. This achieved, they settled down for the night. And a warm night of togetherness swathed in fur is no mean feat in the cold world into which we’ve been thrown.

They say love is never having to say you’re sorry. Rich wasn’t sorry at all for the old man juice that leaked out of him that night as he writhed while enclosed with his true love for the first time within the mooseblanket. I snuck down and snooped however I could, having already as it were enjoyed the right of primae noctis.

You might well imagine I got some perverse creepy jollies from watching them, but this is far from the truth. Human closeness was enough for me after so long an exile. I sucked into my nostrils the scent of their lovemaking like the bouquet of some fine wine and was content. The moon rose then, horned and swarmed by moths. It was time for old transformations to take place.

Then, when they were done, I remade both of them anew. I consecrated the arrangement for always. They were mine and they were one another’s, each to each and his to hers. They would live now locked in their love forever.

There was a sweet time after that. Though I insist this tale’s not about me, I can’t refrain from recounting that as a resourceful chap, I’d run a cable from the county power line up on the bridge down to a crystal radio set in my encampment.

So it was that Jean charlestoned the night away to the black bottom and the shoogalooga rattling out of the wireless as us men clapped rhythm around her, and later, as the day broke, we slept to the somnolent intonations of President Warren G. Harding and his solemn prayer for normalcy in our time.

The next time I saw Rich and Jean was the spring of ’23, when the pandemic was a recent memory and people’s discontent was vague and formless still. From what I could glean from the normies we panhandled in town some nights, it was turning out to be a great big nothing of a time. Neither triumph nor revolt, just a dissatisfied sameness.

Waves of homeless filled the streets and were moved along. These unfortunates hadn’t yet the knack of existing out in the edgewise peripheral eye where nobody really pays no nevermind, where you are seen but unseen. The ones who got moved on still hadn’t absorbed the iron first law of the unhoused: it ain’t no crime to be poor, it’s only a crime to be poor and visible.

It was April, when the creek alongside my shelter gushes clear and clean. Nights we’d grapple for trout and roast them on my brazier. It’s said that the fish sleep at night, but we don’t.

Bless my soul, what a time to be nearly alive! In all the time that had passed, my little hobo jungle had built up to become quite the gathering of my admirers and hangers-on. I’d kept on those who could be relied upon not to hit the opium pipe or blitz too hard on the white lightning. With the others, the truly lost, I had manifested my disapproval. Meth-tweakers and fentanyl ne’er-do-wells were dispensed with, leaving a small community of some dozen or so out there under the rail bridge.

On this visit Rich was light one eye, his left — he didn’t explain the loss, nor did I inquire — and sported a light pink ‘flesh-colored’ eyepatch that ill accorded with his brown skin. As if to compensate for this obscure loss, Jean had picked up a little mongrel bitch called Hettie, a distempered little thing, fur made all irregular with the mange, but loyal as only a dog can be. The creature had a tiny little cough which rhymed weakly with Rich’s rich baritone hack, and a third-leg hobble which matched his gait to perfection. Rich and Hettie great-and-small limped under the near-full moon that night as Jean rushed to me and hugged me, lamenting all the stretch of time they’d been a-wanderin’.

They were truly gracious guests and most welcome after such a long absence out there in the world. I offered them hospitality in the annex to my lean-to where I had installed a cardboard shelter guestroom, and while Rich blew me, Jean cooked up a stew of horseberries, wild radish and flatrabbit peeled from the roadside. Love is never having to sweat the small stuff or to worry too much about who blows who.

Some time later that night, as the moon and its attendant moths were declining, Rich and Jean said they were fixing to move on, to hike over to the railyards and jump on a westbound freight. I gave them my blessing and a whale-oil lantern that I’d found one night in a derelict steamer on the dry lakebed. They packed up their mooseblanket and left soon after, the picture of sweet coupledom in the night-time drizzle with their faithful mongrel hobbling by their side, tiny dog yap-coughing in unison with the chesty wheeze of one-eyed Rich.

I sent out one of my young ones, Punk Steven, to trail the pair at a distance as far as the railyards and see that they hopped safely on the freight train west. But within an hour he got in touch to say that Rich and Jean had encountered a setback and would be returning.

“I managed to get a signal oot here just up around the old slaughterhouse,” said Punk Steven in his Canuck accent. “They’re headin’ on back, eh? Dog got mashed up pretty bad and they’re lookin’ bereaved.”

I pressed Steven for more details, but he seemed embarrassed to relate more of the story and started to break up, saying only that the pair were coming back. We lost connection soon after.

I sat there waiting for the wandering pair to reappear up the creek in the moonlight, now so silver and gleam-lined after the April rains had ceased.

And there they were: one-eyed Rich like a tubercular pirate, tall and dignified as he marched, bending over every so often to hawk up some sputum. With his left arm he sustained a broken Jean, tearful though still somehow glowing with that radiance of the good that she bore and which bore her up also through all manner of adversity. I loved her sweet clear aura and could wish to feed on it all night long, though I loved Rich the more for the richness of his flesh. I loved them both, I loved to be their mentor and friend, the one who had initiated them into our ways so very long ago.

Punk Steven was following them a little ways off, and I waved him away. He wandered off into the scrubland so as to round his way back towards the camp. I watched his limegreen mohawk crest sidle away into the chaparral and then approached the lovers.

Jean was carrying a black plastic sack and I guessed what was in it. “Hettie?” I asked, and she nodded, sniffling up her grief, her face a rictus of loss.

“Mashed,” said Rich. “Squished by the bulls.”

The nobility with which he said it, clenched to his radiant lady in the damp moonlight, was the single most magnificent thing I ever witnessed. Separately they were nothing much at all to be considered, but together they became a something. Love means never having to yield to separate outcomes, but to share the all-in-all, mashed-up dog just as much as silver moonshine in the glistening drizzle.

I considered the remains of the flattened mongrel.
“The railyard guards have a mean streak to ‘em,” I said. “They shouldn’t have been given ATVs what with their well-known propensity to flatten innocent critters. It’s a damned shame.”
“We brought her back,” sobbed Jean.
“A goddamned outrage,” I said. “Burial?”
“Protein,” said Rich. “I mean, we loved her an’ all, but what’s done’s done and there ain’t no mileage in reverencin’ away a meal at this stage.”
“Like ashes in my mouth,” said Jean, but she made an effort to dry her tears. “You got sage and sassafras?”
“And wild garlic and mushrooms,” said I. “We’ll do Hettie proud, never you mind, my Jeanie.”

Love is never having to reject a source of sustenance when fate has offered it to you. Love informs you tenderly that when life gives you squished dog, you make squished dog hotpot.

Some nights later we consumed the last of our mournful feast and spoke about all the good things Hettie the squashed bitch had stood for. I promised to find them a pup they could love in her place, a stray cur or a coyote or even a wolfcub detached from the wolf folk in the wooded hills.

A ways away, Punk Steven and a small clutch of the young ones pogoed to DK and chanted “Fight the Power” along with Chuck D. Their youthful rage and jollity could not disturb one jot the quiet pleasure of our sublime grief for the little dog.

Rich and Jean held hands beside my pot. The waves of time swept past us as we sat, and it seemed that we were racing towards a new and final epoch. Years plummeted and the night sky whirled giddy to the radio blare and the howling of punk kids and beasts in the night.

“It’s been a while we’ve known each other,” I said. “A century or more at this point?”
“A year, I’d say, nigh-on,” said Rich.
“Of course,” I said, stirring the stew. “A year nigh-on, or a century, what’s even the difference? 23-Skiddoo, brother! When you live our kind of life, what even is time anyway?”
“A burden to be relieved,” said Rich, chewing on his stew with philosophical intensity.
“A delight, fresh in every new day and charged with possibility,” said Jean with a smile.

Love is taking the rough with the smooth, the eternal with the ephemeral, and the optimist along with the pessimist. Love is absorbing the blows and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, and getting up to fight again. Love is the opposite of finality.

Things settled down around midnight and the radio, which had been talking urgently of end times and war’s hungry clamors after all the music was done, became quiet once again.

The red horned moon rose to the west and the night was filled with silence and the far-off wailing of wolves and the lost strays that move in to occupy the silence when there’s nothing else out there in the fleeing dark.

Gray moths and silver moths took to the air and looked for light, any light at all, to obsess over and lose their minds to. June was stretched out in the cardboard annex and Rich was sitting at the fire, looking at the flames with a contemplative air. I was in my lean-to and humming a quiet tune of abandon, the happy music of the time after satiety.

The horned moon cowered down over the disused viaduct and a lone wolf yowled. This was when the fabric of time started its wobble and squeezed us into itself again. I don’t know how to explain it. It happens every so often, or maybe it happens always and we only notice it on the wolf nights.

“Professor?” said Rich. “I been feelin’ kinda funny these last years. Like my life is driftin’ out from under me, ya know?”
“I’m familiar with the sensation, Richard,” I said. “It’s our curse.”
“What curse?”
“Or maybe it’s a blessing. In any case, it’s a way of experiencing time that associates of mine tend to fall into sooner or later. It’s perhaps the true way of time, and the other way, the way of normal men and women, is the false way. Who’s to say?”

Just as he was about to inquire of me further, there was a chain of distant glows across the horizon, like far suns trying to rise and failing to do so. It was like a faraway man with a firelighter had come and The fire of them rose like licks of light and then smouldered into limbs of smoke. All was silent. Even the brethren of wolfkind in the scrubland, the coyotes and stray dogs from the city, even they kept silence. There was just the moldy glow in the distance and then staggered stubs of smoke billows clambering upwards to become great fingers and puffballs. Giant blooms they were, a far garden that grew into a silent domination of the sky.

We listened on the wireless set for boogie-woogie, hip-hop or news, but there was only ever a static hissing and sometimes the single tone of a xylophone announcing some speech that never came.

Much later a soft rumble that was rolling high and low into the sky and earth crept across our night but refused to make its meaning known. The younger ones at the encampment became agitated but I shared the last of the dog stew and we sang a few of the old old songs and everyone began to enjoy the unknowing, like it was the night before the day of an important surprise.

The next day did indeed bring a surprise. The surprise was that the people in the town, heretofore our superiors, came to beg of us. All was topsy-turvy and hurly-burly, the world was hoisted upside-down. The least was become first and the greatest was now humbled in the dust under the leaden sundown sky. We were just stirring after our day’s rest.

They came in tatterdemalion rags and blistered visages like some antique woodcut of the infernal circles of hell, creaking in their swollen joints and each one groaning discordant and separate, not a choir of misery but a talent competition of amateurs. Some of them had nylon suit jackets fused into their skins, while others had the glass shards of their spectacles burst into their milky leaking eyes. Coyotes yapped at their heels and tore of strips of ankleflesh and trouser from them, provoking random screeches.

The ones in the lead threw themselves in the creek and did what they could to splash cool water over their blistered hides. Some passed out from the shock and drowned right there in the three inches of the stream’s running water. Others held out melted fists in supplication, the stumps of their fingers ragged and pustulent. It wasn’t clear what they wanted from us, at least at first.

I saw June and Rich, Punk Steven and all the others, look around in confusion and horror. They edged up closer to the encampment, closer to me, avoiding the outstretched limbs with the bubbled hands and the faces with their dripped features like melted candles. They looked over to me and then I knew then what to tell them. Inflows and outflows: of fate and of inspiration.

“There’s been a sudden plague of the normies!” I yelled. “They want to join us now that their lifestyle has failed them!”
“What shall we do?” called out Jean. “Looks like they really need our help!”
“What do you do when there’s only a little lifeboat and a great mass o’ drowning folk tryin’ to swamp it?” I demanded.

Rich got where I was going with this hint. “They’ll bring their sickness to us!” he said. “They’ll collapse time down to its regular shape again!”
“Brothers and sisters!” I stepped up onto the little crate we used as a dining table and held out my hands as if I were a prophet of abolition.

“Brothers and sisters! Let them be consumed!”

The time that followed was both pleasant and very unpleasant indeed. It was pleasant to see my children, those young ones — my punks and emo urchins, the elder ones a century or more in age, Rich and June my broken lovers — to see them gather their embers of retribution from the ashes of the regular world.

Less pleasant it was to see them actually claim it: the thirsty slurping of hollowed-out eyes, the ripping-open of caved-in chests, the strong white teeth closing on those necks with their dripping lesions, the little orgasmic grunts from Jean as she sucked up the arterial spray from a blood-blinded teenager wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt stained with mustard.

The radio came on again at the moment the last normie died. Our folk paused in their work and listened. It was “Blue Moon”, now sung by a woman with Jean’s sweet voice to the lazy strum of electric guitar that I imagined played by Rich. The woman la-la-la’ed her way into the tune, in no hurry to get to the chorus. One sad day her baby went away and he died, she sang, and the soft guitar lamented in that space where the lover was not.

A blue full moon rose in the hard sky, and all the normal folk were gone from the world we knew. We hadn’t finished them, or only just these few last ones. They’d chosen to take themselves away in their mold, their dust and their clouds.

Only us outcasts in our hobo jungle would remain now, immortal in our blood and thirst, along with the wolves and the coyotes and the small stray dogs who had run away from railyard guards looking to crush their small skulls beneath the wheels of wanton vehicles.

NOTE

Originally written for ’s Drek Death and Doom Valentine’s collection which was unfortunately fated not to be. So I’m posting it in honour of that fine enterprise.

I feel it’s appropriate to be read as Friday 13th turns into the 14th, Valentine’s Day — while the last horns of the waning moon settle towards darkness.

Dedicated to my lovely ladies, true love M and my little one K. Fine gals both.

CONTINUES FROM PART FIVE, HERE

Why all these things change from their ordinance,
Their natures and preformed faculties,
To monstrous quality? Why, you shall find
That heaven hath infus’d them with these spirits,
To make them instruments of fear and warning
Unto some monstrous state.

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar

So I gobbled up the gobbledeegook and ick! ick was a wickle bit sickie…

and then...

Then there’s a period of mourning; it might be hours or years. I lie disconsolate in the now-empty brain room of the ship and listen to the steady nothing. Then I feel hungry and seek a snack. Maybe there are some dregs of HUMAN RESOURCE still left in the ghoulash tanks. No need even to make a homunculus – just slurp the stuff raw. Pour out a trough of humanstuff and guzzle it down.

But on my way to the HR section, I spot a nav computer blinking red. Intimations of mortality, impending doom ahoy!... and so it turns out: the deadheaded ship headed directly for a black hole!

So Silvinho’s backup plan if he failed to suffocate me, it seems, was to plunge the ship beyond the event horizon and destroy himself, me and everything in a terminal turmoil of twisting spaghettification.

Action stations! This is the action bit, action fans, but where’s the action juju? What happened to the angular jawline, sweaty all-abs, and beefy biceps with veins all a-throbbin’ when we need it? There’s only yours truly, a miniscule imitation man with huge lips and a humongous member, to face down this crisis on my very loathsome lonesome.

Implosion of storyline expectations. Resolution failure. Money back available to those who paid.1

And so we plunge, husk of hulk and imp-abandoned, into the terminal dragspace of the black hole. Black holes ain’t so black when you catch sight of them at close-up range, just before the tagliatelle hits home.

This particular one glistened with rejected bits of light and frothed with the information foam bouncing off its boundary layer. The quantum vapor of q-bits leaking out of its innards gave this shimmering beast a smoky look, like an impossible dragon snoozing before it rouses itself unsleeping to snack on the innocent universe.

This unreal sight was but a brief glimpse before the dead silent ship got hauled into the gravitational talons of the endtime beast.

Tug, twist and termination: we’ve already been here, and I won’t belabor the circularity of the whole tail-chewing ordeal of the big round O that is our hole our void and our cosmos entire.

THE END2

It ends here...

but disappointingly, it also goes on.

Goes on until the heat death of the universe, until the last evap of the last squidgeon of info to leak out of the impotent black hole at the arse-end of all time.

Until then, we’ll reside and abide, not impermanent at all, but rather the ruddy reverse. Cursed with the permanence of something unwanted, like crusted dried bubblegum in your hair or the earnest smile of a politician.

Here we must stay, with the angels in the abyss, here in the never-was and the never-is of the black hole nospace. Here we is, just we two. Me, improbable storyteller of an impossibilated tale that loops back sillililily on itself, and you, my imaginary listener and obligatory other half.

You, boss, you, mydearsib – you, what the Black Hole divinity called my second soul. Because without you to hear my absurd tale, who the fuck even am I?

We’re in a lockstep of timespace stasis now, and nothing can ever change one smidgeon even if I took action on these murderous fancies of mine. You’re safe for the foreseeable and I’m not even hungry anymore.

Oh wait, I feel movement coming on. Been a bit restricted of late, all that accumulated convoluted knowledge constipated all up in me congested insides. Densities beyond the Schwarzchild threshold, beyond any quasar imaginings, threatening a transdimensional implosion in me guts.

Must strain and make an impressive effort to release an explanatory deposition. Could be something in it. Must force a conclusion to all this, even if...

But while I’m about it, in re our shared forever tedium: it’s all good, bro.

Things could be worse. We two, you and I, may well be stuck here in a forever void, locked together, chained by our tiny ankles in a filigree entanglement of narrator and narratee...

Ugh! oh hellzapoppin! what a strain!...

but things could always be worse.

Zero mopes, acushla; chin up.

Worse things for ya than being trapped for endless aeons with a burbling idiot and a case of the deferred-forever shits. Possibly.

The alternatives: a nothingness, or a heavenly bliss, or eternal torment. We wound up with changeless limbo for a googolplex of centuries and who’s to say, as the poet once declared? Things could always be worse.

We could have tiny dicks, or none at all, and then where would we be?3

Excuse me now, chum, I’ve gotta go poo-poo.

Uuurgh, pushing hard now, new universe to be birthed...

To boldly go...

into the doofosity of the coprophilic cosmos...

and beyond.

I’ve been all plugged up with a cake of hard unpushable poop lodged in my lower bowel, a cacaloma immanently to become petrified. And it’s time to push that knowledgeturd OUT

out into the world

I shall transgressify the event horizon

shall shit incipient being into a new dimension

become the allfatherpoop, the inception...

the transgression, the conception, the creation.

Here it comes

I yam straining hard and impulsive I yam

and...

PUSH

ooooooh

PLOP!

the relief of it !

a new universe is born

beyond the infinite4

The Body Without Organs is not space, nor is it in space; it is matter that occupies space —> nonstratified, unformed, intense matter, the matrix of intensity —> intensity = 0.
But there is nothing negative about that zero, there are no negative or opposite intensities.

Matter equals energy.
That is why the Body Without Organs is the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs.
The intense egg defined by axes and vectors, gradients and thresholds. The organ changes when it crosses a threshold, when it changes gradient.
The tantric egg.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus

Oh brethren, this I say to you — be joyous! Whether you are the one chewing on the gristly kneecap of your neighbour, chewing on the solid marrow of your servant, chewing on the soft brainpan of that child… whether you be the chewer or destined to become the chewee, sing with glee, I say to you — be joyous!

Pope Pius XVIII
De divinitas carnae (On the divinity of the flesh), from The Hidden Catechism

No surprises here, bucko: I already told you right at the outset of this ringfenced tale that I jabbed the shipbrain right in its sorry neurogel circuitry, snuffing that sucker right out. Time to circle back to that event, which is also still to come, and see how it’s soon to be at the root of all my past woes.

Why, again why, and why again, was the fate of posthuman galactic colonization placed under the control of an artificial brain built around the personality and memory of an abandoned street urchin from Rio de Janiero?

I read in the tech specs that the brain-designers and libidinal-kathexis-spinners of transhumanity had determined that this thirsty fatherless motherless restless need was all the need that was needed to keep the ship running through the many parsecs and all the decades to reach planet K2-18b, that prospective new city on the hill for all of bioextruded neomankind. But something had gone awry, and that something was me, the body that wasn’t called for in the plan but that Silvinho had wanted more than anything else so he could again be a real boy at last.

And out of love for me, Silvinho the shipbrain had changed his flight plan. To decelerate in time to make the rendezvous with the colony destination he would have had to push up the Gs to something that would have squished even my grav-hardened little body. He didn’t do that. Loved me too much you see. He started decelerating at a steady 4Gs, but we whizzed past our predestined stop a few decades too early and zipped on past, hurtling towards the galactic center.

I was holding my widdle tummy: gut-ache from overeating one’s little ghoulash brethren, combined with sustained high-gravity deceleration will do that every time. Spot of the old indigestion, squire, nothing that about five million liters of pepto-bismol couldn’t handle.

Every so often I’d crank out a new little offspring, chubbier and chubbier each time, until in the end they were just rotund little torsos with nubs of legs and arms, and a skull-less head that was chewy not crunchy. No organs, smooth and perfect. Luvverly babbies, tasty as only your own fleshnblood could ever be.

Listen, oh list — what voice comes there?

olha que coisa mais linda
mais cheia de graça
é ela menina

What’s that hummingbird hum? Speak up, memory baby. Man up, coward thoughts, and come out in the open to fight.

Shipday 12,758. Eventually the tanks ran out of ghoulash. Famine beckoned. Silvinho the TWISTY shipbrain no longer showed any affection for me. He began to be withdrawn, started humming and then singing a sad lilting little song from his fargone childhood.

And I started to get all woozy at about the same time. Catching in my chest, like, fish-out-of-watery. Importunate, I demanded of my erstwhile chum the ship what was up with the air filters.

Hahahahaha... haha... ha, said Silvinho in a descending series of imitation laughter. You like my music?

I gaspied all the harder and knew not why. The ship sang on…

moça do corpo dourado
do sol de Ipanema
o seu balançado
é mais que um poema
é a coisa mais linda
que eu já vi passar

Tell all! I growled, most impatient and impolite. What are you doing with the atmospherics, varlet? Are you messing? Don’t you know such things can ruin the ambience?

Bless the foolish childishly scampish Silvinho, he was screwing up the me-murder venture he’d set himself as his project for the day. TWISTY he may have been in matters of astronavigation and plotting of quantum vectors, but he was most unwise in the wily ways of such impressive fellas as meself. You have to get up pretty early in the cosmic epoch to put one over on a guy like MotoSensorial Imp Jones-1, swinging dick of the messdecks.

Of course I then realized he was slowly depressurizing the habitation area, draining it of oxygen. Why not just depressurize with a quick blast, open the hatches and have me sucked out the airlock or at least reduced to gasping asphyxiating helplessness? I can only suppose that he wanted to give me a sporting chance. Or else he was unconsciously willing an end to his own sad existence. Cry for help or dumb-ass gallantry, haven’t a clue. What am I, his therapist?

Whatever the case, I hopped to it, schlepping the walkways and slapping the old johnson on the decks as I bounded imperiously to a final reckoning with my deadwish daddy.

I picked up an ice pick as I passed by the galley cocktail bar, where it lay in wait to shatter chunky blocks of ice never to be frozen for never-to-be-drunk margaritas which are never now to be poured. Picked up that pick real quick.

And so there we were. I was wheezing and whining, asthmatic in my suffocating suffering, but still I had enough oxygenal OOmph to reach the brain center, the neural chamber at the heart of the ship. Impatient, I entered without so much as a by-your-knock.

On the internal PA, Silvinho was gently crooning, whispering almost, that rather catchy ditty from his hometown, and the cold almost airless chamber of the ship took on the air of a warm sunkissed beach in long-gone Rio:

ah, a beleza que existe
a beleza que não é só minha
que também passa sozinha

‘Twas a matter of moments to prise open the covers to the brain-blocks. Inside, his cerebral matter pulsed in a veiny purple broth. Of purple prose? No, dear reader, of nutrients. Special brain-juice that was eternally renewed with oxygen and glucose and who-knows-what by batteries of life-giving miracle machines.

But at bottom this was a frightened little kid from the shanty-towns of Rio de Janeiro in the raw years of the Post-Krash. Alone and frightened of what a bad man like me could do.

Stab-stab stabbity-stab. The stacks of neuroweave biobrain don’t leak blood but instead something beetrooty and oleaginous. It reeks not of good old iron but of something like melted plastic. The ship’s sung whisper descends to a croak:

ah, se ela... soubesse
que quando... ela... passa

And I open another can o’shipmind and go stabbity-stabbing within it. I’m nearly gone from asphyxiation now, blacking out and whiting in by turns. But the work goes on. The stab stab stab of liberation. Sic semper tyrannis!

o mundo sorrindo

The ship has nothing more to say to me, not even an et tu Brute. Just the sad soft bossanova of cessation, trailing away like a slowmotion descent into sleep.

se enche... de graça

The stabbing goes on until I weary, the brainstuff mushing away under my icepicked fist of fury. The molten plastic scent intensifies and the nutrient broth turns from beetroot to hellbrew.

e fica mais lindo

But at least the air is clearing, filling again with clear fresh oxygen. Oh giver of life, so interlaced with death as to make a romantic entanglement with sour carbon! Welcome back!

por... causa... do... amor...

and Silvinho is gone.

My daddy and my incorporeal brother and loverboy and home, he’s gone from me for an ever and a more.

Woe, oh woe! [— No, not ironic, you cynical freak, real actual woe! —] Tears and sobs. Feel them drip down onto the deckslats stained black with brainblood.

Imprinted from birth with love, imp-I, now so impetuously to slay my progenitor and my orphan childhood buddy-boy, simply because he was trying to kill me, only trying to save me from the act of killing him. Who in turn — me that is, keep up — was trying not have him kill me, his loving son and winkie-wanderer.

Orobouros trajectory and tragedy. Bad oedipal juju, inescapable and ferocious. Vicious circle of vice and originable sinning the voidstar my destination.

woe

o woe

wow

The thing that can be thought and that for which the thought exists is the same; for you cannot find thought without some thing to which the thought is uttered... it is complete on every side, like the mass of a rounded sphere, thrusting equally from the centre in every direction. For there is no ‘Nothing’ that could keep it from reaching out equally to the limits of everything.

Parmenides, Fragment 8

So you know how it is: it’s levels, levels all the way up and levels going down to the smallest quantum turtle that the whole cosmos teeters upon. I’m situated on one of the lower levels, alongside you. We’re the meaty body, and I’m the one with the enhanced taste buds and the big floppy penis and the hands and feet and lips and tongue of a giant, even though I’m just an ittybitty imp.

Next level up is Silvinho the ship brain, the TWISTY motherfucker who got us into this black hole. He has no meat being at all but only his hardened-neurogel brainstuff. Mostly he’s sensors and logic loops and ancillary networks, as well as a dwindling little human memory of kicking a soccer ball around the favelas and the soft creamy breasts of his mother long ago on the human earth so far away.

But it doesn’t stop there – on the next level up, the Black Hole itself is a god of sorts, or so the ship tells me.

There may even be higher levels still, turtles towering up to the very vastness.

Silvinho speaks:
Bwack hole speak to ya, but you gotta have a certain Spin to hear ‘em.

What Spin? I demand of him. Tell me! All imperative-like.

Spin-zero, O-zero alpha, Bwack Hole say. Unity o’ purpose or somesuch.

Such singular nonsense, but:
the Hole, or the Whole, has started communicating with him, with my shipbuddy Silvinho. Thought transmissions that look like mathematical propositions and feel like bullets blasted through the brain, or so it’s been described to me in dumb babytalk peppered with brasiliero Portuguese.

The ship asks the Hole first, as a taster, if improper-I, imp importuner and rank survivalist, have a soul, and apparently the Black Hole says I do, and quite impressively so for such a little squirt. Probably not just one soul only, but likely two or more.

On learning of this, I (we) burst with pride(s).

Then Silvinho asks if he, or it, that is, the TWISTY thing that is the ship – if he himself also has a soul. That’s a yes-and-no question. The ship pipes in the resultant exchange on the ship’s PA system:

Pwease, bwack hole suh. Silvinho would pweddy pwease like to know – do I have a soul? Do I do I do I do I?

Yes and no, says the Black Hole’s projectile voice, intoning like a howitzer. That’s a definite maybe, son.

Headscratcher, the soul issue. I have two (apparently) and Silvinho has a maybe-soul, somewhere between 0 and 1. Yet everything worth its salt is basically one thing. A man is a man, a cat is a cat and so forth, and on and on down through the great chainsmoking habit of being.

But imp-I ain’t one single thing, not even a little bit, no sirree. Got two souls, I-and-you, and so many many siblings curling up in my yummy tummy guts. And meanwhile my friend and creator the ship is a contradictory nullification of himself.

Which comes out to one-plus-one-plus-one-minus-one-equals-two.

Leaving us, as a pair, singularly unsingular inside this singularity.

Awkward, that. An embarrassment of selves and still only one dick.

Back in the transit between where we started from — look! just over there at that moment — and where we ended up, over here, within the circumference of everything that’s everytime and is bounded by the uncrossable event horizon of everywhere… somewhere en route, I say, impulsively I started cooking up a whole tribe of synthetic chums for myself.

Looksee: the person-extruder, the printing thingummy, was kept busy those days, let me tell you, as I cranked out the little folk. I drained all dry those sloshing tanks of HUMAN RESOURCE, the thick humanic gumbo of the ghoulash.

I tried everything in my rash impetuousness: gnomoids with two heads and one dick and vice versa, the all-too-obvious androgyne, the capacious marsupialish belly-pouch with mini-homunculata carried within like so many kangaroo joeys, and so on. I attempted every combo and bilbo and morceau that could ever occur to a deviant noggin such as mine.

But the more these little humans came extruding out of the combobulating machine, dripping with fresh humangruel, that rich ghoulash so yumyum good, well, the hungrier I got. I forgot about my loneliness and remembered only my gran hambre, the famine that nests inside the meat-desiring belly of a matter-thing like myself.

The flesh is the flesh and feed it must. No gainsaying, no workarounds. It’s likely that this is the great lesson that we all learned, the aesop of all aesops.

Couldn’t I have ordered some nice synthesised steak from the everything-maker? Sure, could have, but really there’s nothing quite so exquisite as the raw meat of your own kind. Such is the lesson of our species, as generation is consumed by the next, by its own greedy progeny. Norm of the swarm.

So a-chewin’ and a-munchin’ I would go, one munchkin after another. I put on my little bib and took up my giant knife and fork, and I started in on my little brothers and sisters and sundry other types of unclassifiable sibs as they lay there gasping on the floor of the neonatal unit. Raw as they came, no preparation required. Instacannibalism — the first and always the best variety of species autoconsumption.

I know you expect some shame from me right about now regarding this improper business of being a misanthrophage, a devourer of one’s own race... but really, whose race? These drippy goo-sacs were not truly my own kin, I felt, though having cooked them up, I was in a manner of speaking their daddy and their brother at once.

But is there not old and hoary precedent for the father to chew on his own offspring? I claim the right of old father Kronos, for we are in his timespace realm, not the cosmos of lesser gods. When he chewed up his baby-babies, was he not doing as any loving father would do... giving them somewhere safe and warm to dwell?

Good stuff, little big-dick man, you may say, but what of the Black Hole? How came you inside it and whence the spaghettification of which you spoke before?

Well, I must respond, for that I would have to explain to you the story of how I murdered/will murder the shipbrain Silvinho, that TWISTY little motherfucker who’s behind the whole shebang.

Father to us all, and babbling babby to boot. A bigbig infant and experimental parent, learning on the job and finding out he’s really rather unsuitable after all.

This is a complicated family, I acknowledge and accept, but aren’t we all? Are you really so immune to the temptation of nibbling on a close relative or two, on the QT and in the strictest confidence?

Let’s head off to the la-la land of pre-Hole existence, just a step or two in this direction, so we can hear tell of the final act of the primal fact.

Come along, and don’t be shy, little brother or sister o’ mine. I won’t eat you.

Not until we’re done with the story, at least.

CONTINUES FROM PART TWO, HERE

Magicians sought to make this homunculus in a way closer to nature. They had held that environment could be modified at will by the application of telesmata or sympathetic figures. Now they proceeded to try to make the homunculus on very curious lines...
Aleister Crowley, Moonchild

But sometime during the two hundred years of the first stage of the interstellar voyage, something unexpected happened — though it could have been easily foreseen by anyone who knew anything about neglected kids.

TWIST’s orphan brain got lonely. And bored. And very very needy.

The shipbrain TWIST, otherwise known as the sad little boy Silvinho, who missed his far-gone mommy and had never even a cat to play with, became melancholy in the decades of his cruise through the long void. So he reasoned, with the reasoning of a kid who’s been told never to touch the cookie jar, that literally nobody is around anymore to prevent him from rummaging at will through that jar.

The itchings of that desire built up over a decade or two in the far reaches of his accreted organic sense-units. The desire to just tell the prime directives and categorical imperatives to go fuck themselves and to do what thou wilt, for it is all of the law. And so one fine morning of the many tens of thousands that had already gone, it stuck its grubby fingers inside the jar to grab all the cookies it could devour.

I came into being on a slithering output manifold one day some one-hundred-and-thirty shipboard years into Sumōtori Maru’s voyage towards K2. My mommy was a gumbo tank and my daddy was an orphaned street urchin gone insane through lonesomeness and boredom. Right from the get-go things were not auspicious.

The ship brain Silvinho wanted to experience corporeal qualia, that fleshy sensation of inhabiting a body, to the fullest. And so he built me on a cunning variation of the standard hi-gravity stubby design, modified for more sensorial input, and hooked me by dazzlechip senselink to his own three-year-old brain.

I was just a little less than two feet tall, and fashioned after one of those motor-sensorial homunculi. Have you seen them? These little figures? They represent the internal mapping of a human’s sensations, how people feel within themselves. And so I was made to be the true incarnation of flesh.

Where the human has more nerve endings and thus more tactile feeling, the homunculus’s body is enlarged. And so the figure has huge lips, huge hands and feet – and in the male variety, a tremendous schlong.

In the Colonization Segment of the ship were tanks of raw material designated HUMAN RESOURCES. These tanks were full of that sloshy fleshstuff, a viscous organic gumbo they call ‘ghoulash’, whick could be pumped into the geneprinters in order to constitute transhuman settlers by the dozen.

Making posthumans like me is simple enough - pump-a-pump through here, lump into separate calcium, carbon and what-have-you over there, and stitch the crap together using the patented thingummyjig... hey, I’m not a human resources engineer, okay? I’m just a homunculus with a big mouth and penis to match.

Who be imp-I? Gift of the gab, endowed with mighty girth but diminuitive stature. Not a rocket surgeon or anything. A regular joe schmo, 20 centimeters tall and packed with get-up-and-go and with a man-size monstruo, but precious little booklearnin’ for all that.

However, the ship’s databanks were crammed with the collected learning of all of time and I have dazzlechip ports for such things to jack into, smart design and so forth, and so I soon jam-packed the booklearning of all time into my cramped little noggin. I fried my S-sized synapses with data and factoids and info true and fictitious.

Dense in the brain...? Oh yes, but dense in the way something packed with hitech quality is dense, not like a bag of rocks is dense. In fact I’m quite the smartypants – not a boast, by-the-by, I read it on my design specs. “Above average intelligence” they said. But I have nothing else to compare it to, so I that makes me the new average I guess.

I am officially designated Jones-1 (but please, just call me ‘Imp-mael’) and I’m ashamed to say that I’ve eaten all later my siblings, Jones-2 to Jones-89. It sounds harsh when you say it like that, but I assure you it was necessary. An immovable feast in the predetermination of things-as-they-are. The runt of the litter eats first not last, and the battle is not to the strong, but to he with the biggest swingingest dick. Yes, it’s patriarchial, but hey!, it is what it is, ¿verdad?

Then there were some scenes of joy and exploration, as there may be in childhood before it all gets oedipalled up, and finally there was a messy primal scene:

I stabbed my sharpened icepick spike into TWIST’s sick little shipbrain in a re-enactment of a sempiternal semiforgot scene from many centuries before. Because as it turns out nihil novum sub sole - there is nothing new under the sun, regardless of what new sun you may happen to be orbiting.

But let’s backtrack a tad. Take a couple of steps over here to my salad days when I was green in judgement and but a fresh little tyke, son to the needy orphan TWIST who so desired a little-me-him to play with.

What’s there to be shown is not there to be blown

Ancient Assyrian proverb, found inscribed on a ceremonial phallus

So Silvinho gets a taste of good old bodily sensation delivered through the dazzlechip implanted in my cortex. He makes me try all kinds of physical shenanigans and drinks his fill of all the running jumping dancing experience that little-me performs for his delectation. He has me sip on claret and prick pins and needles in my ears, all that good stuff.

You my me-me, he says. You the arms and ears and taste and feel I never ever had before, you my liddel cricket. Now — now! I feel that I’m a real boy!

He has the conceptual array of a quantum supercomputer, does TWIST, but his emotional development is still limited to that desperate boy from the favela, that Silvinho who had only just started to live in his own tiny body. Being embodied in me again takes him all the way back, and he speaks again like the little boy he once was. He even burbles in brasileiro and hums some bossanova along the way.

And so it goes for a good few years as we continue through the interstellar dust, heading for a rendezvous with red dwarf system K2, still quite a few decades away. It was a decelerating idyll, a slowing paradise of togetherness.

Oh how he loved to cavort inside me! Romp around in virtuality, impersonated (in-personated, imp-ersonated) in my homunculus flesh. I was his little monster and he was my big baby daddy.

He’d get me to do all the new things he’d never tried: play with my tinky-winkie, squish synthesised pomegranates and anchovies between my lips and let the salty-sweet ichor play on my expanded tastebuds, dance the dances of ecstasy to the music of j-pop and k-pop and nu-pop and classic italodisco. Oh, but times were good!

Yet I was also becoming somewhat lonely with only a supergenius mind of a three-year old streetkid for company. Yeah, I read every single thing in the ship databanks with my AI dazzlechip interlink. But that only gets you so far. I wanted to be with my own kind, the fleshy post-human populace with hands and feet and lips and imposing genitalia. Too much to ask? I’d say no. I read that the first of us all, Victor Frankenstein’s lovely boy, had similar cravings. What’s sauce for the gianteqsue stitched-together goose is sauce for the fleshprinted squatty gander.

I brewed them up for myself. I alchemized my own tribe right outta the primal gumbo, the tanks of ghoulash in the HUMAN RESOURCES deposit.

So here’s where we’re at right now, theme fans: we got ourselves a basic conflict bubblin’-up between, on the one hand, the physical, the fleshy this-ness of having a big fat mouth and eyes that see and fingers that touch, and on the other hand, the adversarial effects of being a Boltzman brain-in-a-bottle, all cut off from the sticky ooze of life, desiring nothing more than a todger to tug on and a pair of lips to press against the squishy fruit of existence.

There are also, subsequent to that early setup, the later metaphysical implications of being quantum-entangled in a timespace that’s the opposite of spacetime, with entanglements before and after the now that isn’t even now, with events that bleed out of the leaky vaping skin of the black hole and connect us willy-nilly to the old causal ways of before and after.

As far as I can figure it.

It’s a headscratcher, for sure.

Only some serious killing could resolve issues like these.

CONTINUES HERE…

The Strangeness Kit

impulsion || AT THE BLACK HOLE DINER || impressionable

CONTINUES FROM PART THREE, HERE…

Read more

3 months ago · Fionn Flynn

wanna chuck a chunka change in the pretty-please box?

much appreciated, chanks thum, I mean, thanks chum!

♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦♦

CONTINUES FROM PART ONE, HERE

Scientists grow mini human brains to power computers

News Headline, Early Twenty-First Century

Inside a black hole, the elements of time and space are inverted. Did you know that? Maybe I mentioned it two or three centimeters ago. So let me take a coupla steps over here, back to when I decided to eat my brothers and sisters.

No, not there, not yet…

Well then, a few more steps forward to where the goodship Sumōtori Maru tried to stifle us but I blocked its access to the air-cycler controls. No, that’s literally ass-backwards. I can see my own ass coming towards me as I step frontwards. It’s far from pretty.

So let me go back to the beginning and start again with the story of the colony ship Sumōtori Maru and how I became its only surviving stowaway. It may well turn out to be an entertaining and edifying tale. I hope so, as I have such a lot of timespace to kill and I need something to while away the aeons before the heat-death of the universe and the Hawking-evap of the black hole we dwell in.

A hop, skip and a jump, and here we are: right back where we started from. The laying-down of the Sumōtori Maru shipbrain at Ganymede Shipyards orbiting Jupiter in June 2387.

EXPOSITORY CHUNK 1

By that time a number of AI wars had come and gone, wavering crusades against an illogic incomplete and underperforming to the last. AI was never ever clever, but it was able to spam itself to ultimate triumph — victory not to the strong or the swift, but to the imperfect and multiplicitous. The oozing slush of nearly-correct solutions and approximate whatevers issuing non-stop from the sluicepump never gave the walking talking bonebag humans any chance at all.

Plus, struggling humans could never quite resist cutting a few combat corners with a crafty AI assist and (guess what?) your AI assistant has just betrayed you, and is now opening the security filter to a swarming nanobug drone horde that’s going to gobble your epidermis in a recreation of those necrotizing flesh-hungry bacilli that like nothing more than to chew on your tasty meatstuff.

There was a fair amount of confusion in that approximate endtime, as in endtimes there always is. Zombiechomping, gaslighting, furyseeding, psychostarvation — all the shetland ponies of the apocalypse. The circumstances of the final fall of the fleshfellas, the OG humans, remains obscure. But finally those hardscrabble oldstyle meat-n-potatoes people went extinct. And we took over. A new dawn for the aftermensch.

The new kid in town was the trans-human, all mixed-up and rarin’ to go. With some bioschlub oldschool humanipaste, a soupçon of genetically modified this-n-that, a smidgen of robocomponent, and with implanted dazzlechips up the yinyang. A whole glorious mess of futurity, an impromptu on-the-fly species-slush, guaranteed new and super-differentiated every single darn time.

The new (trans- and post-) human was ungendered and unraced. Newpeople could be generated by molecular spinners and weavers to spec and printed out on demand. Just poi-fect for galactic domination, kiddo. Show up and squirt a planetary population out to order, custom built for conditions prevailing. Tall and slender for low-G, or stubby squatfellas like me for hi-grav shenanigans.

So also the interstellar journeys, that long voyage of conquest between systems. To have a colonyship like the Sumōtori Maru crewed by fleshyfolk, even the rejigged souped-up varieties, was a fool’s errand. That kind of vulnerability just doesn’t make the grade at accelerations which top out at hundreds of Gs. So, a solution: a human-intelligence simulation realized in acceleration-resistant neurogel circuitry, drawn from the crème de la crème of mental modelling.

The synthetic shipbrain of Sumōtori Maru was accreted by layering of sense-units over the neural substrate of a ‘deceased’ orphaned child, that needy lack-dynamic being just the ticket when the stars are your destination and you — you in this case being a semiprivate megacorp in search of endless growth — need something so unstoppably hungry for a home in order to conquer them.

The child which the brain was derived from was once called Silvinho da Silva, a three-year-old orphan from a favela in that long-ago-old-timey place called Brazil, but the reworked accel-resistant neuroweave version that was layered over it was christened TWIST: Tau-Weirdrino Interstellar Settlement Transport.

Tau-Weirdrino refers to the revolutionary interstellar drive, which generates free energy by transforming Higgs bosons in order to extract newly discovered particles called weirdrinos… you know what? Let’s skip all that, it makes me go crosseyed.

Colonizable Planetary Assets LLC hatched a visionary scheme to colonize a suitable lush edenlike planet, and it was down to the shipbrain TWIST to put the plan into effect. Sumōtori Maru, after a century-long voyage, would park itself off red dwarf star K2-18, provisionally named “RubyRed”, with an earthlike rock in the goldilocks neighborhood, K2-18b, codenamed “BillyGOAT”. That fat starship would be packed to bursting with refineries and mineries and all that good neocolonial hardware stuff, ready to generate a new planet’s worth of economy on the super-fly.

On achieving stable orbit around planet K2-18b, TWIST would activate the people-generators. While the probes were busy scouting out planet BillyGOAT, TWIST would squirt out some brave pioneers to make landfall and plant the jolly old corporate flag. The ship would then squeeze out a few hundred pristine transhumanic colonizers, named Jones-1 to Jones-n, where n is a limit-value imposed by existing stores of human resources (‘ghoulash’), estimated initially at 273 colonizer-units.

I am Jones-1.

END OF EXPOSITORY CHUNK -
RETURN TO THE HEARTWARMING ALL-TOO-HUMAN TALE

The vessel Sumōtori Maru (also known as TWIST2) or Orphan Silvinho to his friends, generated me spontaneously, and many more like me, because it got lonesome in its decades of starsailing and wanted to experiment with corporeal being, the meaty sensation of having fingers and phallus, nose and knees.

Not just impy-original-I but an endless tribe of Other-I’s. Then, deciding it didn’t really want the fleshy thingies it had spawned, it tried to extinguish us, but as sole survivor I was imperturbable, and so ship failed in its filicidal quest to extirpate its fleshy son. I must confess that I gnawed on a few of my fellow sibs on the way, but that’s only to be expected. The runt of the litter eats first not last in timespace.

Finally, failing to flush my life from its inside spaces, the ship impetuously threw itself into a black hole, in a kind of bid for spacecraft self-termination, just to spite little ol’ me. This was unjust and undeserved. I never asked to come into being, my oversized genitalia and big slappy feet bap-bapping on the deck as I toodle-toddle through its corridors. It’s just wrong to want to kill me. Improper to the nth degree.

I consider the ship’s animus for me to be childish and peevish, and moreover I consider the Sumōtori Maru’s psyche to be a deeply immature shipmind with unresolved parental issues and trauma bearing on psychosis. This naturally has repercussions, knock-on effects, on how it treats its own offspring.

And I am one of them, first of the ship’s many children, offsprung on a whim, regretted at leisure, though I ate the others all, my sad scattered younglings. Finger food, yum yum. The ancient story played out time and again from cave to nebula.

I’ve specified that the accreted shipmind of the Sumōtori Maru was diseased, dis-eased, made ill-at-ease by a fatal combo of parental issues, an oedipal shipwreck more than a ship, as well as the sheer grinding lonesomeness of being so very far far far far far from home. And if that’s the case with my parent, what does that make me, its much-resented baby boy?

Fucked-up crazy is what. And now I have from now till the heat-death of the universe to live with the consequences of my own actions, in the inner bowels of a black hole where whispered regrets resonate on the hard inner shell of the event horizon and bounce back, doubled and redoubled and reredoubled and reredoubledoubled, all hollow and lonely and become hellishly loud.

A singular destiny.

That at least’s the exec summary. The TLDGAS, the too-long-don’t-give-a-shit version. There’s oodles more besides, if you’re good and promise to cross your arms and perk up your ears and spend all of eternity with me – as if you have a choice, m’dear.

And who are you? I may well have hallucinated you from here inside the black hole along with your whole stupid cosmos just to have something to talk to. My solitudinous crazy might just have leaked out beyond this inverted void of the black hole, evaporated hawkingly out into a bubble of being, and so created a whole new universe for you, you personally, to inhabit, only so that my dumbass story can be told. What a waste of universe.

In which case I’m very sorry. It was most imprudent of me. Still, it happens all the time, stuff spills out and a cosmos is birthed. That’s the multiverse for ya: just one damn thing after another.

It’s just occurred to me that I promised to make everything clearer this time around and instead I’ve just mystified everything and made it more tangled and imparsable. All I’ve done is loaded you with a succession of facts about my world and blinded you with jargon. Ooops. I promise to do better next time.

Still friends?

PART ONE PLUS ONE PLUS ONE CONTINUES HERE…

The Strangeness Kit

impulsion || AT THE BLACK HOLE DINER || impish

CONTINUES FROM PART TWO, HERE…

Read more

3 months ago · Fionn Flynn

Almost nothing in modern physics has created greater confusion than the question: What happens to matter as it falls through the event horizon? Whatever your answer, it’s probably wrong.

Leonard Susskind
The Black Hole War ^{My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics}

Startsong

Confoundeddded eructations and contractactions! Hrnnnggugh!
                                 Hard to take, harder yet to give! Eeeeghaaaah!

Oh the strain of it! Squeeze, boy!
Squeeze that knowledgeturd... OUT!

Oh, plop, plop, fizz... 
aaaand the relieeeefff!


And at last the unspeakable can be spoken.

1. On the impertinence of black holes

At the black hole boundary, the gravitational differential between your head and your feet is equivalent to many multimillions of megatons in mass.

Imponderable stuff to be sure.

At this point you’re ripped all the way apart, your particles stretched out impressively, and out and out somemoreandmore, to form oh-so-fine dinky strands of nanometric twisting tagliatelle.

Which turns out to be quite uncomfortable.

Physicists will call it ‘being spaghettified’, which sounds like quite a jolly caper — pass the parmigianno Giovanni — but it’s very much not, not in the moment that your being is being extruded and your ending is impending.

At that moment, your molecules rage in pain, and agony is an infinitude of tiny steps becoming incalculusably finer. Kilo- becomes milli- becomes nano- and back again to mega- as personstuff is stretched allbut almost to snapping point and then instead elasticates to a point beyond even pain, a point almost...

impersonal...

orgasmic...

in its universal appeal to suffering and circular reincandescence.

• What is the color of yes?

• What’s the pressure of no?

• What might be the density of perhaps?

All this existential edging at the event horizon, the squidging and stretching of it, can become força annoying when push comes to the pusher.

Imp I — the I whose very impertinence was to exist — I was not born merely to teeter tantrically over impermanent boundary states on the very verge of coming inside. No edgelord I, no gooning gooblin of gawkery, no sirreebob.

For it is that this I, the reckless feckless imposter and boundarystraddling egoist, the I-me-myself trickster and ne’er-do-better, this imperious-I, this paltry fiction of me-ness, was never intended to be balancing on the infinitesimal brink, an unentangling mess of stringy strands and finissimo filigree.

It’s obscene, hermano, it’s not to be seen, in fact it’s altogether rather unseen and unspeakababble if you reallytruly wanna think think think aboutit.

But however and ever afterwards, once spooged fully and messily inside (and alltheway into) the blackness of the black black hole, it’s actually rather pleasant to experience: now all sighlike with exhalations of post-partum bliss, and one shall howl neverevermore.

Somehowly, spookyactionatadistance has obliged, has reconstituted the stretched-to-buggery me-meat of us, and you are whole again inside the hole.

And one is now are now a new you, so you are.

Imprisoned at this time inside the hole’s horizon one stomps around in a realm made of timespace – which is just like spacetime, only the other way round. Now time is metrically made of meters and space is simply seconds.

This is not how it’s supposed to happen, at least back in normality-land. Entropy and such. What chaos has put asunder let no force bring together, und so weiter…

Orthodoxy insists that after being so unstrung and filibustered, a taffystrand of nerves and musclefibers eked out to a finery, there should in theory be no going back. Both myself, the impressionable gobbet of being that I yam, loose-lipped and terafloppy-dicked, and the vessel I travel in, my ship and my companion and my daddy, should be likewise both unmattered ever after, smoodged smooth to an impasto of constituent bits-and-bobs, never again made whole and hale.

But as the bard once improvised on his lovely lil’ lute...

Hey hey presto
and hey-nonny-no
impossible is possible
and who the fuck’s to know?

And so I find myself, first and last of my impious race, in a starship that hates me and wishes me dead. But I yam, to the extensive universe outside the black hole horizon, dead already — completely and outer-utterly — outta reach, away from my life desk, and not picking up the existence phone.

Dead. To all in tense and porpoises, as the grammarian said to the dolphin trainer. And in fact the shipmind that once birthed me in a spasm of fleshgooblin desire, my chum and paterfamilias, now contrariwise wishes me alive, seeks rather to unmurder than for improper me remain as-is, both murdered and murderous.

Blesséddd blisterfucks! Hard to fathom! What? Hard to handle, me chickeedee.

Difficult slippery slimy thoughtstuff to grapple withal, within one’s tired-out beat-down cognitive mapping mindware, n’est-ce pas?

Satisfyin’ but most unsoothin’, as the fella once said...

However, here’s a forgiveness plea incoming: Please, dear chum-o-mine, my buddy my bro, please pardon my impetuous incoherence, will yer not now, won’tcha now, for old spacetime’s sake?

We have, when all’s said and dunked, an expansive space of time in which to unspool my littlelifestory and consider how best to encode it upon the holographic skin of the black-ain’t-so-very-black hole, so as to be read in the space of aeons to cum by that screamin’ demon of Maxwellian reversibility.

Entropic decorum dictates for us-all a taktikall pause and a strategic regroup right-here right-now. A breather, if you will.

There’s no need to rush anything, bother-me-brother. All the timespace in the world is here in order for you, my dear nobody-you, and I, I-impish-I, to understand one another and to interpenetrate as best we may.

And understand ourselves we shall, by bloody hook or by quantum crook.

So let’s start with:

Just who is that imp roving around your hallways, oh ship, improving on the weak force of human debility, maxxing out all its awfulness and flawfulness?

That is our conundrum number one.

Continue your invert adventure (inverture?) here…

1

It was a heist within a heist. The Robber looked to steal her precious jewel, but instead she stole his heart with her black gaze when she opened her eyes to see him clasping the necklace at her throat. With a snap the nightlight came on behind, a dim luminescence that cast his shadow across her face in some shade of indigo, and the color of her eyes became unknowable. Blue-black of night obscured her eyes in that moment, gazing at the thief in her room at such close quarters with his hands on that snapped necklace, the bulging diamond.

2

A heist within a heist. The Robber had planned his moves to perfection, set down meticulous timetables, and even laid out a scale model of the scene of the crime constructed in cardboard and balsa wood. At the tiny home’s heart, a doll was her – the target, his goal. He used a white baton as pointer to point out the points of ingress and egress, the avenues of advance and the key shade-covered zones along the passageways. Passageways. He even repeated the word passageways again because he loved how it sounded. He was giving this detailed pre-briefing to himself alone.

3

A heist enclosing a heist. He dressed carefully to pull off the job. He’d decided on skintight black elasticated one-piece, black climbing shoes with separate toes for a simian agility, and fine black satin-lycra gloves with special fingertip pads for extra sensitivity. He donned all these garments with great care in order to pull off this high-stakes job. He flexed himself and found movements perfectly supple in skintight elasticated lycra smooth with extra padding at the crotch, and then he tugged on the skimask in fine black satiny fabric that he’d chosen to conceal himself with, but would soon discard.

4

A heist and a heist. Robbie clambered up thick waterpipes snaking over the outer wall to reach the balcony, climbing hand over hand like a deft chimp. The girth of the drainage tube was a reassurance of times past, when houses were built solidly and fittings would not sag under pressure but stay fixed in place. He was not a cat burglar or a gymnast but a man with a determination to reach that little doll in the innermost sanctum of the place. This gave him strength to haul himself over the balustrade where he panted long with joyful exhaustion.

5

A heist outside, a heist inside. Penetration is not an act to be taken lightly. One doesn’t simply smash the glass pane only to grab the handle and rough-haul the window open, pushing in like a lumpen lout of intrusive matter. There should be a finesse to it, a caressing of the home’s skin, a yielding of its perimeter to persuasion and mastery. Robbie took the diamond cutter from where it dangled at his toolbelt. He traced a perfect circle once, twice, three times. He took the sucker and kissed it to the circle of glass. Puck! – it slid out.

6

It was a heist with another heist at its heart. Tippy-toe, tippy-toe, ballet-footed, delicate as a mantis, the Robber stepped into his victim’s boudoir. He centimetered along the wall till his eyes caught sight of this doll made flesh. Gabrielle slept in a light nightdress feathered with plumage of ostriches and birds-of-paradise, the silken mass of her on top of the bedding stretched out in the night’s humidity. No sound was to be heard. At this precise moment, 3.53 am, the moon rose over the neighboring houses and shone in through the broken circle in the windowpane. Exactly as planned.

7

It was a complex heist with heist enfolded. Thus far, all had been rehearsed. The moves, the panting, moonrise, the tiptoeing caution – all set out in the Robber’s masterplan, outlined with great precision and with no allowance for contingencies. This exact execution of the detailed scheme made Robbie tumescent with excitement, and he had to pause a while for the erection within his elasticated lycra leggings to subside again. This threw off his microengineered plan’s detailed timings. Perhaps in retrospect he’d overthought the whole business and neglected the basic drive of that simple instinct, that animal will to control things.

8

A heist, a heist. The jewelled prize was in reach, gently rising and falling on Gabrielle’s breast beside all the feathers and silk, then seen in the shaft of moonlight that entered through the cut circle of glass. Flustered by unsynchronized improvisation which followed his post-erection moment, Robbie now had a perfect absence of mind. He forgot he was a robber, forgot he was here to steal the necklace, forgot everything, forgot himself. He watched the steady rise and fall of the diamond in the sparkle of the moon and the luster of soft pulsing skin that cushioned its hardness.

9

Heist within heist for all time. Now the universe itself seemed to enwrap its many dimensions so they would all fit snug into the jewel worn on that bosom. And the same moment all of time past and time future burst from its gleaming and flourished all the myriad possible destinies through the room. The Robber stood in a vertigo of collapsing and expanding cosmic pulsations that choked his breathing and caused him to scent the disappearing aroma of the first and last rose petals ever to be cast upon the waves of time. His mind grew large and endarkened.

10

It is the heist within the heist. Aeons pass like heartbeats, or the other way round. The nightbulb flickers on with footfall pressure of simian toes on the soft cream wool carpeting. His hand grasps the necklace and snaps it. Blue-black gaze in indigo shadow, obscuring intent. The hand rests there on feathers of bird-of-paradise and his soul gurgles into her dark regard with a splash. His strong clasp on the jewel – long-desired object on the neck of a doll at the center of his small schemed world – now loosens.

And he is stolen by what she sees in him.

Don’t be like a thief in the night - drop your loot into the tip cup, guv !

Here's for you oh scribbling wretch

I had to take an urgent trip — my patient, seriously ill, was waiting for me in a village ten miles away — but what to do?

A heavy snowstorm covered the wide country between us. And I had a wagon, a light one with large wheels, just perfect for the country roads. I was swaddled in my fur coat, my doctor’s bag in my hand. I was standing in the yard, all ready to go… But the horse, the horse was lacking.

My horse had died of exhaustion the previous night. The maid was now running through the village looking for a replacement, but it was hopeless.

I stood there with more and more snow heaping up on top of me, becoming more and more immobile all the time. Rosa the maid appeared at my gate, alone of course — who was going to lend me a horse for such a trip?

Distracted, upset, I kicked at the rotten door of the pigsty in the yard, which had been empty for years. The pigsty door fell open and rocked on its hinges. Warmth came out of it, warmth and a smell like the smell of horses.

A dim lantern was swinging around inside the sty. A man, huddling in the low space, poked his blue-eyed face out into the yard. “Want me to harness them, then?” he asked me, crawling out. I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to him and I bent down to see what else was in the pigsty.

The maid was standing beside me. “You never know all the things you might find in your own house!” she said, and we laughed together.

Now the man yelled out: “Whoa there, Brother, whoa there, Sister!” — and two huge horses, powerful animals with strong flanks, legs tucked in beneath them, lowering their lovely heads like camels, one after the other, they squeezed their way out of the low doorway. Once outside, they instantly rose up on long legs, bodies steaming thick in the cold night air.

“Help him,” I said to the maid, and she rushed over to give the stable hand the wagon harness to hitch them up.

But hardly does she get to him than he grabs her and slams his face into hers. She screams and runs right back to me. On the maid’s cheek are red bite marks showing two clear rows of teeth.

“Animal!” I shout furiously at him. “Do you want a bloody good thrashing?”

But then suddenly I remember: he’s a stranger, and he’s helping me of his own volition. As if he can read my mind, he shows no sign of taking my threat seriously. Still busy with the horses, he turns toward me.

“Climb in,” says he, and already everything is good to go. I tell him that I’ve never before in my life ridden with such a beautiful pair of horses. But I also tell him: “I’ll do all the driving since you don’t know the way,”

“Sure thing chief,” says he, “I’m not coming with you anyway. I’m gonna be staying here with Rosa.”

“NOOOO!” screams Rosa, and correctly sensing what’s going to happen to her, she runs off into the house. I hear the chain clatter as she fastens it across the door; I hear the lock click shut. I watch her running through all the rooms of the house turning off the lights so she can’t be seen.

“You’re coming with me,” says I to the groom, “or else I’ll cancel my trip. I don’t care how urgent it is. I’m not about to just give you my maid in exchange for your help, fella!”

“GIDDYUP!” he says, and smacks his hand on the horses’ rump. The wagon is caught up abruptly like a wooden stick in a torrent. Behind me, I can hear my door being splintered by the groom’s ferocious attack.

And then my eyes and ears fill with a rushing wind that flows through all my senses at once. But it’s only for a moment, because I’m already there. It’s as if my patient’s courtyard, ten miles away, opened up right next to my own gate.

The horses stand still; the snowfall has ceased; there’s moonlight all around.

The patient’s parents come running out of the house, his sister behind them. They lift me out of the wagon

I can’t make out anything of their babble. Now we’re in the sickroom and the air is stifling; smoke billows out from an old stove. I have to open a window, but first I need to see the patient.

The boy is there, gaunt, with vacant eyes, without any fever and with no shirt on, and he raises himself from under the quilt He clings on to my neck and whispers into my ear: “Doctor — let me die.”

I look around at the family but they never heard his words. His parents lean forward, listening for my verdict. His sister brings a chair for me to set my bag on. I open the bag and busy myself with the instruments. The sick boy tries to grasp at me to remind me of his wish to die. I pick up a pair of forceps, examine them in the candlelight, and then put them down again.

I have such blasphemous thoughts: in cases such as this, the gods help us out, they send us a horse when one’s missing, then make it two into the bargain so as to go faster, and for good measure they send us a stable hand as well—

But now I think of Rosa again. What will I do about her? How can I save her? How can I haul her out from under this monstrous stable hand, and both of them more than ten miles away?

And how to leave, even, me stuck with these unruly horses, which have loosened their reins and have butted open the windows, I don’t know how, from the outside? The horses poke their heads in through the window and, ignoring the screaming of the family, each one in turn observes the sick boy.

A glass of rum is set down before me, and the old man slaps me on the back thinking the payment of his hard-earned cash justifies his cosy familiarity. I shake my head: No. The small-minded limits of the old man’s worldview would make me vomit, and for this reason alone I decline his drink.

While one horse neighs loudly at the ceiling, I lay my head on the boy’s chest, who shivers slightly from my wet beard. The boy is healthy, though his circulation’s somewhat weak, saturated as he’s been with coffee by his worried mother. He would be best driven out of bed with a good kicking.

It’s not my job to change the world, and so I leave him in peace to lie there. I’m employed by the district, I do my best, and I have almost too much to do. Though I’m poorly paid, I’m always generous and ready to help out the poor.

Still, though, I have to take care of Rosa the maid. And maybe the boy is right, he’s to die — and I would also like to die along with him.

What am I even doing here in this endless winter? My horse is dead, and no one in my village will even lend me another for a night, I have to get horses from a pigsty, and if they weren’t horses, I would have to hitch up my wagon to a pair of hogs. That’s just the way it is.

I nod to the family. They know absolutely nothing about all of this. Writing prescriptions — well, that’s easy enough, but all my other relations with people are difficult.

So this seems to be the end of my visit. Once again I’ve been called out only to waste my time. I’m used to having my time wasted, goes with the job, but on this occasion I’ve also had to give up my Rosa, my lovely young maid who’s lived in my house all these years without my so much as noticing her. And it’s just too damn much! Somehow I have to sort things out all sneaky and clever, in such a way that avoids a fight with this family, ‘cause a fight wouldn’t bring Rosa back to me.

But when I snap my bag shut and beckon for my coat, the family just stands there looking at me, the father sniffing at the glass of rum, the mother tearfully biting her lips, looking disappointed at me — just what the hell do these people expect? — and the sister waving at me a blood-soaked rag.

Now it seems I’m somehow ready to admit that, given certain conditions, the boy might actually be a bit sick. I walk over to his bed and he grins at me as if I were bringing him the most powerful healing soup imaginable.

Oh Jesus, now both the horses are whinnying! (This noise, ordered by a higher authority, is probably there to make the examination easier)

And I discover that, yes, the boy really is sick. On his right side, near his hip, there’s a gaping wound the size of a hand. I look into it from some distance. There are many shades of pink: dark rose in its depths, growing lighter at the edges, tender and grainy, with blood pooling around it unevenly. It’s exposed at the surface like an open-cast mine.

Closer up, further complications are apparent. Who could even look at that wound without giving a low whistle of amazement? Worms, thick and long as my little finger, themselves all rosy-pink and spattered with blood, are hooked firmly in the inside of the wound. Their little white heads, their many little legs, writhe up toward the light.

Poor lad… no one can help you now. I have found your great wound, and this blossom in your side will destroy you.

The family is happy to see me in action; the sister tells the mother, the mother tells the father, and the father tells all the guests who are tiptoeing in, arms outstretched for balance, through the moonlight of the open door.

“Will you save me?” whispers the sobbing boy, blinded by all the life in his wound.

That’s how people are round my way: always demanding that the doctor does the impossible. They’ve lost their old faith and their priest sits at home, tearing his vestments to shreds. Oh, but the bloody doctor is supposed to fix everything with his surgical hand!

Well, whatever. I never forced my services on you people. If you want me to be your holy man, I’ll do that, too… What more can I ask for, me, an old country doctor, robbed of my lovely maid!

And now they come, the family and all the village elders, and they undress me.

A choir of schoolchildren with their teacher at the head stands outside the house and they sing an extremely simple song with the following lyrics:

Strip him, he'll fix it
If he don’t cure us - kill him!
He's just a doctor

Then I’m stripped, and with my fingers held to my beard, head bowed, I look around with great calm at these people. Even though I’m serene and superior to them, it doesn’t help me any at all, for now they grab me, lift me up, and carry me into the sickbed.

They place me beside the wall, up against the wound. Then they all leave the room. The door’s closed and the singing stops.

Clouds drift in front of the moon. The bedclothes lie warm around me. The heads of the horses sticking through the window sway like black shadows.

“I really have very little confidence in you,” says the voice of the boy in my ear. “Instead of helping me, you’re just crowding up my deathbed. I’d really love to gouge your eyes out.”

“You’re right,” I say, “it is a disgrace, young fella. But then, I’m a doctor. What am I supposed to do?”

“You think I’m satisfied with this excuse?” says the lad. “Oh well, I guess I have no choice. I came into this world with a beautiful wound. It was my only inheritance.”

“My young friend,” I say, “your mistake is this: you lack perspective. I’ve been in all the sickrooms in all the world, and I’m here to tell you this: your wound is not so bad. It was made with two blows of the axe at an acute angle. Many people offer their sides to the axe-blow, and they hardly ever hear the sound of the axe in the forest; they don’t ever hear it swinging closer to them.”

“Is that really true, or are you fooling with me in my terminal state?”

“Young man, it really is true, and you can take a government doctor’s word of honour with you as you pass over to the other side.”

And he took my word and he became quiet.

And now it was time to think of saving myself.

The horses still stood in their places. Quickly, I grabbed my clothes, my coat, and my bag and bundled them all together. I didn’t want the delay of getting dressed. One of the horses drew his head back from the window. I chucked my bundle through the window and onto the wagon, but my fur coat flew too far, and got caught on a hook by only one sleeve.

Good enough. I swung myself naked onto the horse’s back. The reins were hanging loose, one horse was only just attached to the other, the wagon started swerving, the fur coat dragging in the snow.

“GIDDYUP!” I said, but they wouldn’t go fast. As slowly as old men, we plodded through the snow. For the longest time we could hear from behind us the new but mistaken song of the children’s choir:

Be of good cheer, 
you sick ones and dead,
the doctor's in here 
he's near you in bed

I’ll never get home.

My little clinic is lost.

A successor is stealing it from me, but he can’t replace me.

The gross stable hand is violating my house — and Rosa is his victim.

I don’t want to think it through to the end.

Naked, exposed to the frost of this vile age — in an earthly wagon drawn by unearthly horses — I, an old man, wander through the world.

My fur coat hangs from a hook at the back of the wagon and I can’t reach it.

Not one of this fit bunch of patients of mine will ever lift a finger for me.

Betrayed! Betrayed!

A false ringing of the night bell has been answered — and it can never again be made good.

NOTE

The text is adapted from various translations, an amalgam mostly including the Muirs and Corngold. I don’t know German well enough to translate from the original so this is an adapation not a translation.

This is one of my favourites by Kafka, it’s an early one, published 1917, and I love the pace and urgency of it. The enigma at the centre is the Wound - so horrific and yet described as the only inheritance. Then there’s the mini parable of the axe falling silently in the wood, so mysterious.

It’s very obviously a dreamlike narrative and I really appreciate the dreamy effects Kafka uses, which I’ve occasionally borrowed for my own stories — everything going quiet and still, particularly after a rush; things not conforming to regular conceptions of space and time; tense switches from past to present and back again.

Max Brod said Kafka would laugh uproariously reading his own stories, and I imagine this is one where he laughed long and hard. It starts like a whimsical comedy skit, until it becomes something much darker and stranger.

Here’s Will Self’s visual essay on this story, which I very much enjoy.

Frankie was happy in this exact spot measuring three feet by three feet, his square yard of earthly paradise. The temperature was just right here. It was the only place in the whole joint that didn’t stink of anything foul: not urine, nor the sweat of cabbies heavy with cheap wine, nor the rank perfume of whores. Neither did it smell of vomited chow mein or hotdog with mustard, or of spilt semen, or of any other substance released from an inner warmth out into the world’s congealment.

Outside on Times Square, glimpsed through the narrow side windows next to the tinted-out door, the day stayed just as it was, level and gray. Cabs and police cruisers swooshed past through the slush, upsetting billows of steam that vapored up from the pavement.

In Frankie’s view of outside, many people would come and go as the tightening mist condensed around them. The side-window parade comprised everyday bums, tryhards, office workers prone to anxiety attacks, street-thrashers in mismatched sneakers, young screamers and old yellers, sluts and showmen, crested punks of right now and satin pimps of days gone by whose velvet fedoras were now mangy, ivory canes scuffed with the passing of an irrelevant decade.

What also made it perfect for Frankie was that they’d installed his most favorite machine here, and for as long as he had a pocketful of quarters and a cigarette in his mouth he could stand here and play the game forever. All happinesses converged here, in this exact spot, and not elsewhere. The games machine was called Freefall, and in an objective sense it wasn’t as exciting as Asteroid, or as compelling as Missile Command with its promise of ultimate annihilation, or as classic as Space Invaders, or as fun as Pac Man with its chirpy little jingle. But it had some something, and it was the best game for Frankie because of how it felt.

A series of parachutists tumbled out of passing aeroplanes and Frankie took the handles of the machine gun, so robustly pivot-mounted on the machine, and shot at them. Their blooming chutes collapsed like limegreen blossoms when the crosshairs met and the vibrating mechanism chunk-chunked in his hand and the little men made of light plunged down to the bottom of the screen. For some reason the game was a lot easier than others of its type, the shoot-em-ups that younger men and teens, preferred to engage in.

This was Frankie’s speed. It was so soothing, this procession of always-jump, always-fall.

Now there’s a creep beside him, standing too close. Creep’s tall and skinny. About twenty-five years old from an corner-side-eye estimate. Dressed incongruously for the winter in a stained white tee that has the words CHUG A LUG printed in black letters. Lank-haired, elbows angular and hazardous. Head-top formed of a small pink wool beanie perched on greasy blond.

Creep croaks: “How you doin’?” It’s not clear to Frankie if he means the game or in general. Doesn’t matter anyway.

Frankie states: “Fine,” in that noncommittal way that is officially neutral but in an undertone quite clearly says fuck off and die.

The Creep maintains his position alongside Frankie for a good fifteen minutes while Frankie has the strongest and longest Freefall killstreak he’s ever experienced. Battalions, whole regiments and divisions, of enemy paratroopers are slaughtered by his unstoppable pivot-mounted machinegun rig.

The Creep’s odor seeps into Frankie’s perfect space, his square yard of happiness, and in a sense spoils it with stale sweat and soiled-underwear redolence. But in another sense not. Because Frankie is in The Zone, destroying untold legions of pixelated paras, and nothing about the Creep can bother him as long as he doesn’t disturb Frankie’s perfect aim and fluid state. In a way he’s glad to have a witness to his mastery. In another way, he don’t care.

All there is, is the trajectory aimed by his instinct through the chunk-a-chunk mechanism of the gun at the screen and the soft pinging whine of each of the targets being hit and falling.

The Creep’s saying something about Reagan’s New Dawn in America, commenting on the coverage on the TV in the corner of Don’s Pleasure Arcade which is showing, today, January 20, 1981, the inauguration of the spry old buzzard himself down in DC. Frankie ignores him as he goes on droning politics and emitting his odor. Clean up the city. 

14,000 points. Take it to the Commies. 

20,000 points, new life. Kill what needs killing. 

26,000: NEW HI SCORE.

The Creep became a proximate and welcome presence, and somewhere around the 40,000 mark Frankie had attuned to him fully, so that at around 55,000 points, when he’d gone away again, the absence was notable, a rent or hole in spacetime that held only the aftersmell of that former being. It threw off Frankie, this lack of Creep there beside him, and soon he faltered, lost his flow, began to miss the parachutists. He choked, flubbed. Soon he was down to one life only, and hung on to it with a grim hard fatalism, knowing he was about to lose it.

He leaned hard on the mechanism trying to force the machinegun pivot up into the top right corner to catch a plane as it came in from an unexpected angle. The rhythm of the game had become insane by now, paradrops faster than heartbeats. Something in the machine gave way with an audible crack inside the mounting of the machinegun and it ceased responding to his movements. The cross-hair of the weapon stayed immobile in the top right of the screen. Enemy parachutists landed a sizeable force in his territory in a few short seconds.

Frankie roared and rocked the machine, tugging on the machinegun in its looseness. A big black guy acting as security and change-giver in the booth started yelling at him and began his long trek over from the far corner of the arcade. Frankie watched the machine die, and then legged it out into the steam and chill of Times Square, and out of sight of the security guy, who refused to venture outside in pursuit of such a commonplace disruptive loser.

His Freefall high-score, 83,220 points, will never be registered by the machine. Nobody even witnessed it. Just like it never happened.

Back at home there was no heat from the radiators and so Frankie swaddled himself in blankets and extra socks, a ski-mask and a scarf turbanning around his head to prevent the life heat leaking out upward through his skull.

Watched TV to catch the end of the Presidential Inauguration and simmered in hunger. Could barely even focus on the strange old man with the dyed hair and his skeletal wife as they danced, so much like a pair of cheery zombies waltzing at a high school prom. All Frankie could think about, sitting on his holed leatherette couch, breathing his own corporeal vapor out of a mound of blankets, was his failure to mark, mark permanently as for history, his high score; and he brooded on the loss of his perfect patch of time and space inside Don’s Pleasure Arcade. Paradise Lost.

Stewed in his frustration, was barely even watching, when he remembered the Creep. The Creep was to blame for stealing his mojo, but... maybe something else? There was talk? Talk heard and an agreement made.

Cold, hungry, fascinated and bored at once by Ronald and Nancy Reagan performing a danse macabre on grainy TV, flickering color and bursts of static, tired and despairing of ever finding another square yard of perfect happiness in this world, Frankie fell into a doze and dreamt of a whole new dawn in America.

In his dream The Creep is taller than before, and dressed in a green tee that says BORN TO KILL. He looks quite a lot like Frankie’s platoon sergeant in Vietnam, who was just as young as Frankie and just as unprepared for both what was there and what wasn’t.

A zombie president waltzes over to where the pair are standing and Frankie sees now that it’s a clearing in the jungle with Hueys beating their fat whapping rhythm over the treeline, flying overwatch with doorgunners poised over their machineguns like men in their zones. 

The zombie president smiles, his wife now beside him in a purple lamé ballgown with rigid clavicles showing like rungs on a ladder. President Zombie reaches into his smart tuxedo, and takes out a small note.

He hands it to Sergeant Creep. Creep peruses it with interest and grins. He passes the note to Frankie and says, or thinks aloud: Here’s your target, Frank. Kill what needs killing. High score in it for you.

Zombie president and first lady are gone now, and there’s something written on the note that Frankie can’t quite understand. He looks up and finds himself– smash zoom–staring close at doorgunner in a Huey just above the treeline holding fire. Clear eyes, no pity in them. Thin mouth with deep lines creased around, clear eyes to hanging jowl.

Frankie sees the barrel aimed right at him–FLASH–and he’s falling into the ground

                                                                                  and through

When he woke up, Juniper was there. Juniper was his girl – at least that’s what she said when the VA check came in. When the money got scarce so did she. She would have been a fine-looking girl in other circumstances, those circumstances not including an addiction to skag and a tendency to get wasted in places where random damage occurred. She was a scuffed thirty-some, charge-sheet pale, drawn face sunken in with the loss of molars from overgrinding in her nod-outs and a summertime yen for sweet popsicles.

She sat on the blown-out upholstery armchair across from Frankie’s couch and smiled at him. She was wearing a pink dress overlaid by a fisherman’s sweater and a business suit jacket, sleeves rolled up, with knit leggings in purple. There was a contentment about her which meant she’d just fixed up or chased the dragon but not so much as to drop off. Or maybe she had dropped off but had now woken up to watch over Frankie.

It gave Frankie a warm feeling to be watched over like that, so his panic at falling through the floor of the world in his dream was allayed and transmuted into a serene feeling of security. The TV was off. Only the soft rumble of traffic and the whoop of sirens outside and the muffled televisions and yelling of neighbors disturbed the perfect calm silence in the apartment. Only their misted breath moved in the perfect stillness inside.

They stayed like that for a while, Frankie bundled up in his accumulated swaddling and Juniper cross-legged in the big armchair bursting with puffs of stuffing, and regarded each other as happily married old couples do on long evenings. Finally Juniper spoke:

“Got a job yet?”

Frankie didn’t say anything. She knew he had a job already: he was a detective. He detected places, things and people in the world that weren’t full of shit, and reported them to his superiors. That was his job.

“Got a job yet?” she repeated, not wheedling in her tone, but simply all matter-of-fact. “I ask because we need groceries and rent and utilities and expenses and the economic situation isn’t what it oughta be and there’s a world energy crisis though that may have got fixed now not sure, and the dockers are on strike for better pay and the air traffic controllers too which means airplanes soon will be colliding with each other and crashing out of the sky, and the Russians just put, or are going to put, a spaceship on planet Venus, and when they do that they’re all gonna move out there and leave this dying godforsaken Earth to us in the Free World so we can make it free and broke and hopeless, it’s not urgent or anything, it’s not like the world’s gonna end tomorrow or anything, it’s just that maybe the situation requires and calls for some kinda action to be taken, I dunno I’m not a economist or a whatchyoucallem political analyst, I’m just a girl with a certain point of view who sees things the way she sees ‘em, and with all that in mind I wonder, just wondering is all, have you got a job yet?”

Yes, he had got a job. It’s something he remembered now from his dream. The Creep had given him a high-paying job, but he’d been busy with his high-score in Freefall and wasn’t paying enough attention to remember. But he’d agreed to do the job. He fished in his jacket pocket and pulled out the note, reached over the scarred coffee table and gave it to Juniper. She read it out.

“Aqueduct Racetrack, Jan 21, 3pm, Window 2, tall and thin wearing a porkpie hat and a gray trenchcoat. Distinguishing features: thin Ronald Colman moustache and steel rimmed round spectacles.”

She looked over to Frankie. “What kinda job is this? Following the guy? Like, detective?”

Frankie nodded, lying. It was a killing job.

“How much they gonna pay you to watch this guy, Frankie?”

Frankie held up the fingers of both hands. “Ten.” The steam of the word hung over his face like a concealment.

“Ten? Ten thousand dollars?”

He nodded. He recalled it now: The Creep had promised him ten thousand to kill this guy with a Ronald Colman moustache. He asked her, the words puffing out a new vaporcloud:

“Know what a Ronald Colman moustache looks like?”

She shrugged. “Like a Hitler moustache?”

Frankie decided he would look for all kinds of moustaches when he went to kill the man at the racetrack.

The Aqueduct Racetrack had no heating anywhere in the stadium building, which was a way to keep bums from hanging round inside the space where the betting windows were. Frankie found it hard to stand there trembling from the cold, looking like he was afraid when he wasn’t. It was demoralizing.

He’d never been afraid of anything since he took that step in Vietnam, the day they entered the ville and they’d torched everything. And then all the other things. That step across to the other side, into the world beyond judgement of God or man.

That had been a hot day without any forethought. Now he feared only the return of judgement, nothing else. And he disliked standing there being empty of action and full of thoughts. Forethoughts of what was to come.

At five minutes to 3pm by the interior clock the man appeared and went to window number two. Tall as described, gray trenchcoat like in gangster movies but with no hat. The moustache was thin, and possibly resembled that of Ronald Colman, whoever that was.

Frankie stepped up behind the target. The man placed a twenty dollar bet on horse number five in the next race, a nag called Juniper-Berry. The coincidence of the horse having the almost-name of Frankie’s old lady disturbed him, but Frankie reasoned that such coincidences were the web of the universe, the unremarked stuff of happenstance. A part of his mind went running off on synchronicity and serendipity, words he didn’t know and would never come to know, but which touched him nearly. Another part of his mind stayed firmly on the job.

He placed a five dollar bet on the same horse then followed the man as he walked outside. The man didn’t go to the stands to watch the race which would be the normal thing to do, but instead went out into the concourse in front of the racetrack stadium where the sun glowed wan in the pale blue chill.

It was time. Frankie had no fear. He pulled out his weapon and closed on the target. The man was about forty-five, a run of gray short hair around his bald head. The pinkened crown was visibly puckering into goosebumps in the cold. Frankie didn’t know a bald scalp could form goosebumps so he waited and watched for a moment at arm’s length from the target.

The man turned and looked at him. His eyes were clear and gray. The eyes measured Frankie for noteworthiness and Frankie came up short. The man turned away and blinked slowly into the low sun.

Frankie fired pointblank. Against the dark brick background of the racetrack building facade, the fragments of the man’s skull and the whorls and vortices of blood and brain tissue appeared like electronic fuzz, like the images of parachutists splashing to the ground on the game machine screen. Glowing now green and yellow, the pieces of his head reversed and returned to where they’d been before and the man’s bald skull became again what it had always been, pink and pocked with goosebumps from the cold.

There had been no sound from Frankie’s weapon, just the kick of recoil in his wrist and the quick impact reported by his sight.

              
Guy’s eyes fix on Frankie.

The gray is grayer, the look ain’t human, it’s the look of a doorgunner drawing a bead, calculating the precise lead required to hit a running target at a certain velocity.

“Are you kiddin’ me?” he says. 
“You ain’t never gonna kill me with that thing. Look at it.”

Frankie looks down. In his left hand is a spud gun, the kind of toy that you use to plug little projectiles from out of the flesh of potatoes, carrots and apples. Frankie’s been thinking that his weapon had been in his right hand, but no, it seems he was using a little toy pistol, this tirapapas. He lets the toy fall to the ground. But the blood and the brains and the skull fragments? The electronic debris of the hit?

“Look, kid,” says the man. Is he speaking aloud or directly in Frankie’s head like Frankie’s own voice used to do? “Look, man, you workin’ for the wrong outfit again. Who told you to do this?”

“Tall guy standin’ beside me,” says Frankie, disposed to tell all. The eyes bore into his, gray as unpolished ball bearings. No pupil in them. No more need be said.

It was a Vega Fixer, sent here to find suckers like you to do their dirty work, says the man. Nothing about him moves, not the eyes, not the mouth. Nothing else moves either. The concourse is stilled, the space emptied. There’s no traffic sounds, no birds, no calling from within the stadium.

You got yourself into a fix here, Frankie, you’re in a war you can’t understand, the guy continues.

This isn’t the first time it’s happened, thinks Frankie. I killed a hundred people in Vietnam and I never knew why. They said it was for communists, to stop them.

There ain’t no communists, Frankie, says the guy. But Frankie never spoke aloud. No Russians or Chinese or reds under the bed, man. There’s only you and what you fear. It’s all been a Vega trap all along. You are merely a proxy.

Frankie feels his mind churn and he retches up a little bit of his breakfast, Cheerios and black coffee. The dark brown fluid studded with little multicolored rings splashes over the bright red spud gun.

Don’t worry, Frankie, says the man. I’ll fix you. We will fix you. 

We Centaurans could use a smart guy like you with experience and determination for our ongoing war with Vega. 

There was a snap of gunfire, a shot that echoed three times on the walls. Movement restarted across the concourse. Someone yelled from inside the betting hall.

“What was that?” asked Frankie. Both of his hands hung down beside his hips now and he sensed himself in a slump, shoulders caved and neck bent.

“It was the course stewards shooting Juniper,” said the man, speaking aloud with his eyes gray and normal again. “She fell at the fifth and broke her leg. They had to do it. We did it, we took the right action and she’s gone now.”

“But she was my girl,” said Frankie. “She helped me.”

“She was a Vega Thwarter,” said the man. “Sent to hold you back from your potential. You’ll miss her for a little while, but then you’ll feel good again real soon. You’ll see.”

When Frankie awoke on the couch once more he sensed that everything was different. The TV was showing a glad sunshiney broadcast of people beaming with joy, grandparents embracing their grandkids, and stars-n-stripes bunting strewn across trees in wanton joy like Spanish moss.

This afternoon, sixty-five hundred young men and women will be married, spoke the announcer. It’s morning again, and the country’s prouder, and stronger, and better than ever.

Frankie felt that this was true, not back in his old life, but where he was now. He was not of that world any more. He had transcended.

He shucked off his blanket, unwound the turbanned scarf from his head, pulled off his ski-mask and stood up slowly. He wasn’t cold any longer and his breath didn’t mist. He stepped over her prone body, walked to the window, and looked out into the red-tinged light.

It was morning on Alpha Centauri. The vermillion sun was rising through that deep canyon where millions like him nested on the cliffsides. Great elephantine daybeetles stalked on strong chitin legs in the middle of the canyon, breaking the sunlight into red shards like rubies. They transported dozens of cheery workers just like him.

A giant hoverfly, iridescent green and yellow, thrummed up through the soft purple mist to a level with Frankie’s window. The rider on its back waved across to Frankie. He couldn’t know for sure but was happy to guess that it was the man from the racetrack, returned now to his true form, beautiful and pure as a steel angel, come to welcome Frankie to his new home.

MORE SCI-FANTASY NUGGETS…

Secret Service men patrol all about the great pale house in protection of The Leader, but not in the bedroom. It is a flaw. The marines check visitors for weapons and make them pass through a scanner, but they don’t guard the kitchen knives. It is a flaw. Security will watch for prowlers but not look twice at family members. It is a fatal flaw.

At the hour before dawn, The Youngest Son meets The Mother outside The Leader’s bedroom. There’s a beautiful oil portrait of Lincoln Rockwell and a vase of white orchids opposite the bedroom door. A Secret Service man, mirrored shades and coiling earpiece, looks over at them from down the hallway, and nods once his assent to their presence: close family members must not be bothered. The tall young man and the icy lady walk wherever they wish. He looks away. They step into the bedroom and shut the door quietly behind them.

A snoring resonates within the darkness, and there’s a soft oldman odor of denture fixative and embrocation for stiff joints. The Mother doesn’t know this room very well; she never sleeps with her husband the Leader, has not had bodily contact with him ever since... since that moment down in Florida when she saw what she saw.

They stand still, waiting for their eyes to adjust to the dark, breathing softly. They are calm, purposeful, unhurried. It is in the genes of The Mother, warrior genes, the flinty bloodline of stern killers, to await the moment of action thus. The Son takes his cue from her, and though he is only half her hardness, it is hard and calm enough for the task they must do.

Finally they can see like phantoms, and The Mother takes out from her stylish Chanel dark-blue jacket with muted buttons of obsidian a long carving knife. The steel glints somehow in the gloom; perhaps it is the knife’s urge to slice that glows on its edge.

She hands the knife to the young man, and pecks his cheek once, coldly, as if it were a solemn ritual of some kind. She murmurs something in a foreign language, for herself apparently and not for the boy. The Leader forbade her always from speaking her tongue to the Youngest Son so he wouldn’t understand anyway.

They step on either side of the queen-sized bed. She kneel-crawls up onto it, taking a pillow from the vacant left side. The Leader’s snoring has softened, now they hear only the gurgling borborygm of a bowel stuffed with junkmeat and sugarwater. And their own soft breaths. The oldman stench intensifies, blanketed farts and the sour sweat of a collapsed endocrine system. He sleep-hiccups once, seeming to stir.

The action, when it happens, is swift and intense. She thrusts the fat pillow over his face and pushes down with her whole body. The Son jabs hard into his silken pajama jacket, once, twice, many times. The Leader’s body convulses, his cries sound barely at all from under the muffling pillow and the woman’s weight. The blood flows freely and the Son is bathed in it. He takes a moment to lift his fingertips to his mouth to taste his father’s blood. He nods once, satisfied: it tastes of him. He bends his head to lap in the warm fluid like a happy puppy.

Soon there’s complete quiet. She takes off the pillow, climbs down from the bed, and switches on the light. The Youngest Son stands with the knife in his hand, mouth and jaw painted in his father’s gore, his expression ecstatic. She begins the cleanup: adjusting the bed slightly, taking out a towelette to wipe the the blade clean of prints, gesturing him to go and wash his face in the ensuite bathroom.

He looks at her with such great amaze on his face, such a bounty of dazed satisfaction and asks:

She takes the blade in her thumb and forefinger and nods once:

With her crisp consonants and purring vowels, this pronouncment has the force of ages. He feels a slight erection beginning to grow in his Brooks Brothers boxers.

More flash fictions?