Hush

Thiago had been hanging around the wrong kind of people for a while now, but these were another kind of wrong all together. A darker kind of wrong. There was something about the way they did things, the way they spoke, that belied something far more sinister and dangerous than drug dealing and gang banging.

Then there were the hints at darker dealings with the odd gypsy types. They weren’t really gypsies, not like they were shown on the television or the movies, but there was something that reminded Thiago of them. Romani, he’d hear one of the older members of the Clavos say. Romani of the outer circles, was what they had said. Whatever they were, whomever they were, they scared the shit out of him.

He had always been a tough kid, or rather, had been considered one. He wasn’t sure about being tough. He was scared most of the time. Scared of his parents, of his dad, mostly. Always beating up his mom and his brothers, and him now and then if he managed to get a hold on him. The kids at school. He really didn’t want to go back to either place, but he braved it every time. At home, he would stand up to his dad, punch back before getting knocked out. At school, it was easier. If he could stand up to a grown-up, he could take on any of the other shits like him. So, he did.

He wasn’t sure about being tough, but he understood fear and fighting against it. He understood that he was brave. But the fear the older members of the Clavos and the Romani they dealt with, well, they scared him to the bone.

And yet, here he was, in the caravan of one of these Romani. He had been brought in by one of the younger ones, a teenage girl that must have been about 16 but he wasn’t really sure. Thiago wasn’t very good at judging anyone’s age. They had taken him in and told him they had work for him, if he was interested, so here he was.

The man who was in the caravan, he looked strange. There was something about him that wasn’t entirely right. He had seen a documentary once about 3D animation and how hard it was to simulate human-like features and movement, facial expressions, and how there was this thing called the Uncanny Valley, the feeling of something alien, of strangeness when someone saw something so close to human yet just a few inches away from being the real thing… That was what Thiago thought of when he saw the fat, wrinkly man behind the big wooden desk in the caravan. There were lamps, the old kind, that used oil and rope. It was so weird.

Kid, you wanna earn money? The sales pitch wasn’t much, Thiago knew, but it was a given that he needed money, so it was a mere formality. You could get yourself a little something by doing us a favor, eh? The fact that the man was almost cartoonish didn’t help the feeling of otherworldliness Thiago was being creeped out by.

Sure. He had said it with a slight tremor, trying to effect nonchalance that was nowhere in the general vicinity relative to him. Not even in the same country.

Two hours later he was in a little storage garage, one of those places you rent to put shit in and never see again because humans are pack rats and hoarders, like his grandma. He was there with a little scrap of paper with some weird words in some language he didn’t understand. He was supposed to say that while trying to imagine some very specific images. They had made him practice for a long while.

He began once he had managed to calm his nervousness at being in a darkened storage room, alone with nothing but a candle, despite all he had experienced so far in his young yet fucked up life.

Nothing.

He tried again, saying the words, thinking the thoughts…

Nothing.

He did it again. Again. Again. Again.

Nothing.

How many times had he tried? Wouldn’t his mother worry? No, not really. Who was he kidding? His mother had enough to worry about with dodging his father’s drunken punches and romantic advances. Little Thiago may as well be a drop of water in the ocean. Lost as soon as you couldn’t see him.

He dropped down on his ass, sitting dejected, the scrap of paper cast aside. He was in absolute darkness but for the candle which would only last that much longer…

Minutes passed and he couldn’t help but repeat the words from the paper. He knew them by heart, now. He had been lost in the repetition thereof when he noticed something had changed in the atmosphere of the storage room. He was not alone.

SSSSSSSSssssssSSSSSSS

He heard a faint sibilance, the intimation of presence and menace.

sssssSSSSSSSSsssssSSSSSSS

Oh shit, he thought. There was something there with him.

sssWe hearssssssssWe comessssssssssssssssWhat does it offersssssssfor our presenssssssssssssssssssssssss

Mr. Leeds

Mr. Leeds was a melancholy sort of fellow. Dapper, certainly; courteous and gallant, of course, but ultimately a tenuously sorrowful man. He dressed out of the current of the times, not paying much heed to what passed for fashion these days, but managed not to seem too terribly anachronistic by staying close to rural areas. It was, after all, safer for the likes of him.

He had been the thirteenth child of one Deborah Leeds back in the 1800’s, the devil child, or so had his mother proclaimed upon learning of her being with child for the thirteenth time. She could not have known how right she was when exclaiming in such a fashion, though surely she had not meant it beyond the joke of having to go through labor and child-rearing yet again at her age.

Mr. Leeds had come into the world in the seemingly usual way, midwife assisting his mother through what was now rote for them both, and out had the babe come. Struck to elicit crying and dry breathing, the newborn Mr. Leeds had come brutally awake and aware to the world he had been born into and something in his nature sprung into action defensively. He transformed before the very eyes of his sweat-soaked mother and the wide-eyed midwife. Wings like those of a bat sprung from his infantile back, his hands drew claws and his feet turned like those of a horse. His face elongated in reptilian fashion and a more horrible wail came therefrom.

The midwife screamed, matching the wail’s pitch, which startled young, drake-like Mr. Leeds, who reacted on instinct dealing the terrified midwife a blow to the throat. His mother’s eyes grew wide as the full moon outside and, though her mouth opened wide and worked as if to vomit sound, nothing audible beyond muffled groans exited through her troubled windpipe.

The midwife was fast bleeding to her death out of the gash in her throat, his mother only stared, and the child-think that was Mr. Leeds leapt out the window, crashing through the wood and glass, to be lost to his family forevermore.

One could understand the moroseness that would build the character of Mr. Leeds, how having left his family was never given a formal name. It was only later that he learned of his family name, by piecing together bits of folklore and street rumor, and subsequently spying on his relatives, those descended over the years from his older brothers and sisters.

It was the XXI century, now, and despite now only recently reached what would be the outward appearance of middle age for a common human being, he was none the wiser about what he really was.

He had learned from the recovered diary of his mother, which he had only come by a few months ago, that she had been unfaithful to her husband, and that the man she had lain with had been Native American. However, after having learned the name of the man, he had only been able to gather strange yet ambiguous information about who and what he was.

Skinwalker, some of those he had contacted has said, thereafter refusing to speak more on the subject, those who didn’t hang up the phone right after he mentioned his possible father’s name. Email correspondence was rarely ever possible with those knowledgable enough about the man who went by the Navajo name Ooljee, which apparently was a female name meaning Moon, and when there was some address that could be reached, no replies were forthcoming.

He was beginning to lose a bit of hope. He had not had much of that, to begin with, but he was having too little success with his inquiries.

He would have to leave the Pine Barrens region of New Jersey, which had been his home since his strange birth, when he had fled the mother he had never truly met, his more animal side taking over his infant consciousness and ensuring his survival in the woods for years, allowing his child-mind to mature, taking the world in as a co-pilot in some vehicle.

He had time, however. Yes. Time. And if what he understood about these Skinwalkers was correct, that man – nay, the thing that might be his father, was still somewhere in the world, living, if living is what a Skinwalker did.

Note: The fourth of the twelve shorts comes in shoddy prose! What the hell did I just write? Maybe even I don’t know…

 

Through the silent neutrino haze

Into the mind of Aleph’s maze

Out of the center of time and space

Straight to the heart of our incipient race

The mistrals carry it from coldest ice

Sweeping across the wastes so wild

Path sinistral, the road there lies

In the sparkling eyes of the feral child

Uptaken by the wily haste

Of newborn thought, the taste

Of stardust in the tongue

The windy blight that would here fall

The same as did before the call

Of demigods with lances long

For us to heed and lay all down

To salt the earth and raze the ground

In dark, convened the throng

To make it once again His place.

Dog Days

He had spent long enough trying to get it right, turning it over in his hands while scrutinizing it under the intensity of the magnifying glass propped on a mechanical arm and accompanying high intensity light, a necessity for the kind of work Mook earned his keep with.

This particular item was not the average piece of history he would often have to appraise for his callers; grave-robbers and unlicensed archaeologists – weren’t they all the same? – were the brunt of his clientele, but now and then he would get genuine requests from respectable establishments and individuals with private collections who would offer a considerable stipend for his services.

This latter was the case of the fine item he was currently inspecting, a strange metallic object that had been unearthed in Göbekli Tepe and procured by its current owner through means better not discussed. Its origin a mystery, for it did not belong to the place of its discovery, the ancient mysterious city which the Turkish government had sealed off from both the public and any researchers for reasons unknown; no one really thought their national security blanket statement held any water.

The object was most confounding. Mook had pored over its every minuscule detail, every millimeter of craftsmanship, analyzing every little hint at what its makers may have intended and who they were by extrapolation, only to come up with the strangest of notions. It would seem that, if he was reading all the information available to him correctly, the item was of alien origin. That is, it could be either extraterrestrial or extradimensional, but it was certainly not from this Earth, not in its actual state.

For one, there was the composition of the metal. It was rare enough, but there was one element he did not recognize from the lab analysis date that had been provided with the object by the person who commissioned his expertise. Second, there was the attention to detail, which was perhaps impossible even with current day’s laser technology; any such details would have had to have been made with either nanotechnology or something other that worked on a level the neither the human eye nor hand could possibly achieve on their own.

Mook understood little about the object, what its purpose might be. It was a simple circular plate, just about 7 centimeters wide, with the finest little lines of inlaid gold etched into its surface in elaborate designs that would put even the finest Celtic knot-work to shame. There was something odd about the designs, though, a pattern, it seemed, that he could not quite identify but intuitively perceived, and so he kept at it, tracing the myriad lines in hope of devising this pattern and thus find an inch of leeway in the mental knot that the object had put in his mind.

Mook thought about the debate surrounding Göbekli Tepe, about what it meant as an archaeological find, whether it was a temple or an observatory, or something else entirely. The much publicized theories of the late Klaus Schmidt, the German archaeologist who’d lead the team that worked there before it had been shut down, and of the strange theories the man had posited. He kept going back to Giuglio Magli’s proposition of it having been built to worship the Dog Star, Sirius. The Italian archaeoastronomer posited that the various structures marked the rising of the luminous body in different years, and as such held a connection to the religion of the area.

Mook wasn’t sure why he kept thinking of Sirius. He certainly didn’t give credence to the wild fringe speculation that had been thrown about in recent years about ancient little green men… er… grey men, that had somehow visited ancient man and taught them how to tie their shoes. Nevertheless, there was the matter of the object in his hands, its singular design a stark contrast to all that could have logically been fashioned in South Turkey around 10,000 B.C.

He was dumbfounded by this, his mind looking for any path leading away from the implications of the object’s possible origins. The dating analyses carried out at various institutions, according to the dossier he had been provided, said that the results of the tests were inconclusive. The reason for such a deliberation on the subject? The fact that the results indicated an absurd age that predated Homo Sapiens Sapiens by several hundreds of thousands of years. Of course the people reporting the results would state their conclusions as “inconclusive”; who would want to stake their reputations on such a wild find and all that it might entail? No one in their right mind would lend credit to such results, never mind that they had been corroborated by five different and unrelated institutions. In the presence of something so fantastic any expert would doubt their own procedures and be done with it, eager to sweep away that which challenged their long-held systems. Such an artefact should not be possible, it should not exist… and yet it did.

One word popped into Mook’s head: Lokabrenna. It was ancient Scandinavian for Loki’s Torch, or the burning that Loki wrought, and it was the name of Sirius for the Vikings. What a curious thought. He certainly didn’t ponder Scandinavian myth often, but the name had clearly stuck from whenever he had read it – he must have read it – and his mind deft enough to associate it with his current line of thought.

It was late enough, now. Mook knew he shouldn’t be burning the midnight oil quite so often any more, not at his age. 67 isn’t terribly old, but he was no spring chicken, certainly. It was now 2 in the morning and the old aches were in attendance. With some regret and not being able to continue his exploration of the artifact for the day, he put it down, back into its metallic box, built to protect it from anything up to a high speed crash. It was certainly invaluable.

 

***********************************

 

Mook woke up sweating profusely, his clothes damp as if he’d had a particularly generous bout of incontinence. It was still dark, so he couldn’t have been asleep for very long. He fumbled for the digital alarm clock on his bedside table; 3:33 read the digital green numbers.

Burning.

It smelled like something was burning.

He shot out of bed clad in nothing but his sleeping gown, like young man and not a creaky old geezer, the urgency of fire driving his body in uncharacteristic intensity.

He ran into the kitchen, nothing. He looked about the living room where he had just passed on his way to the kitchen, nothing. He checked his workshop, there it was.

The disk was propped on the table, balanced, and the table was burning as if being branded. No actual fire, just intense heat producing smoke.

Before he could question the veracity of what his senses informed him, he took his thick welder’s mitts from the wall where many tools, instruments and accoutrements hung and took the disk, quickly placing it inside its protective case once more and shutting it closed.

What the hell had just happened? He didn’t believe his own recollection of what had just taken place, but it had taken place, hadn’t it?

He only now remembered his soaked night gown, which clung uncomfortably to his think, reedy body. He would have to change now, since the sweat was cooling and at his age pneumonia was likely waiting at the turn of any corner.

Walking back to his room to get a different night gown, he almost failed to notice that there was someone now sitting in his couch in front of the television in his living room. He did a double take with his head and, panicked, ran to his room to retrieve a baseball bat he kept next to his bedside table for precisely such instances when an uninvited guest might turn up, though this would be the first time such a thing actually happened.

He returned to the living room and the man had not moved an in, but rather regarded him with a smile that seemed, after a moment, honest enough, jovial. Mook wasn’t sure what to make of it. He still held the bat aloft, his arms cocked like a batter’s at home plate, ready to deliver a blow at the slightest sign of danger.

Then the strange spoke. “Well met, man. Well met,” his voice was odd, like it wasn’t quite the sound a human windpipe was meant to produce; maybe the man had a deformity or accident which caused his voice to sound like that. “I want to thank you for welcoming me into your hold, friend. I did not mean to startle you too much, albeit it is an unavoidable effect for certain means of travel.”

“Wh- Who are you?” Mook was still shaken, but could still muster the right things to ask. “How did you get in here?”

“My name changes considerably depending on whom you inquire to about me, but for now you may call me Low,” there really was something unnerving about the voice’s quality, like a duality of sound in a spectrum that should be impossible for humans to sound, the way it rang within Mook’s head was almost like being drunk on a particularly heady wine. And the eyes, there was something about them, the iris, the shape of it, and the color was golden with a slightly fiery hue.

“Low,” Mook said, trying the name out without having intended to say it out loud. “How did you get in here and what do you want?” he said, regaining control of his own voice.

“I arrived by way of the curious object you have in your possession, for I was summoned through it. As to what the purpose of my visit is, well, that, like my name, is also fluid, mercurial, and if you wield your words with wit and insight, it may very well be beneficial to you.”

 

Old Habits

Note: It’s a hard habit to break, in my case, the having to live outside my writing, involved in real life. Ergo, my publishing schedules is invariably disrupted. Having briefly gone over this short before publishing, I can’t say it’s a great edit, but at least it’s somewhat legible and that’s good enough for me… hope it’s good enough for you. Now, this is the third, and we’re on the fifth day since I began this challenge, so I owe you guys 2 shorts more, 3 if we count tomorrow’s. I can compromise to post another today, and two more tomorrow, and maybe that way I will actually catch up. Now, in regards to this actual short, the story was inspired by a sad situation in my home country of Costa Rica where many elderly persons are being abandoned with nothing but a note stating their state of unwantedness. It’s terrible and I’m sadly sure that it’s something that takes place the world over. It got me thinking and, as my mind is wont to do, I segued from charitable thoughts to what sort of story might lay behind such terrible abandonment. While i may protray things a certain way in the story, I do earnestly believe abandoning your elders is a terrible thing in general, and you should go hug your elders right the f**k now, be they grandparents, parents, or some other manner of sibling or friend. Seriously. Do it!

 

 

He found himself in the street, ambling aimlessly, disoriented and hungry. He couldn’t quite remember why he was there, what his name was, where he was going, and all he felt was fear taking grip of his heart slowly, its cold hand closing harder until chills ran up and down his spine. A strange sadness grew in him and knotted his throat, tears threatening to flow over the dam of his eyelids.

A young woman, perhaps in her mid-twenties, approached him. She was fair-haired and had blue eyes like sapphires. Her smile was kind and warm, the warmest thing he could recall every seeing. It warmed him just so and gave him a strange sense of hope that almost pushed his tears out in relief.

Her soft voice like honey asked “Are you alright? Are you alone?”

“I don’t know,” he spoke in a voice so tremulous and creaky he nearly started at the surprise of hearing it coming out of him. He was… old? He couldn’t remember that, either. “I don’t know!” he repeated, and this time he did break into tears.

The young woman touched him, took him gently by the arms, handling him as though he might break. How he must look, he wondered, oh, how frail and brittle he must seem for her to treat him thus.

“My name is Amanda,” she said, her smile intensifying radiantly, almost obscenely so. “Come, I will take you somewhere safe where we can see to you and find out what your situation is. Come.”

He let her lead him off… to where? He could not guess.

 

*************************************************

 

The Wilsons had been good to him, to Aiden – that was his name, as he recalled it after a few days in their household.

They were a benevolent, well-to-do family with some means brought about by a long-running family business that spanned a few generations. They were old money.

When he had come upon Amanda, or rather she upon him, he had been wearing tattered clothes that could have easily been worn for months on end. He had been unwashed for some time but had been thankfully parasite and disease free, so it was unlikely that he had been on his own for more than a few weeks. He’d had no actual possessions save for the near-useless clothes he’d been wearing and a small gold pendant, the kind that would hold a pair of small portraits, but would not budge open when pried. It had been a wonder that he had kept it despite being on the streets and at the mercy of the vultures, as it were.

Aside from the few items on him, there was a note, covered in plastic so it would not deteriorate, where scrawled upon it in block letters it read:

DO WITH HIM AS YOU WILL. HE IS NO LONGER WANTED HERE.

He could only imagine what sweet, kind Amanda Wilson might have made of that terrible note, but he was glad she had made no more of it and taken him in. She and her husband, Roderick, had been a blessing on him. And their children, oh, the children! They had been a boon; instrumental to the slow but steady recovery of his memories or what little may remain of them in his addled brain.

Molly, Adrian, Ernest, Ronald, and little Holly; ages 10, 9, 7, 5 and 3; they were the life of the expansive household, the Wilson Estate, and had been Aiden’s companions since he was first brought in on that hazy, sunny day. Having had no living grandparents to speak of on either side of the family due to illness and old age, the children were immediately taken with him, making him their ad hoc grandfather right out of the gate.

He was sure they had been pivotal in his recovery, he clearly remembered being enfeebled and confused, what bits and pieces of memory he could summon from the time he was lost showed nothing of substance or note, but in the few hours after he was introduced to the little ones his brain seized upon their rambunctious energy and moxie as if feeding off of it, drawing health from them by sheer proximity. He had come to love them, he felt, though he wondered, did he have grandchildren of his own, out there in the wide world, where some family related by blood to him carried on, feeling now free of the burden he had represented?

No matter. He was confident all he needed to remember would eventually come back to him, as he had been able to recall so much in the past weeks. His last name – McDiarmid –, bits of his childhood growing up in a small, rural town that had a railroad being built… he was a little unsure about some of the details, as what he saw in his mind seemed to be far older than any age he could possibly be within reason – that was another thing, darnedest really, that he could not remember how old he was! –, and many situations seemed culturally anachronistic… but he chucked it up to his faulty memory.

He felt he was, somehow, happy, truly, finally. He wasn’t sure why he felt that last adjective, “finally”, weighed heavy, pregnant with significance. Another darned, odd thing…

*************************************************

 

Awakenings.

Awakenings are things of wonder, Aiden thought as the sun pierced through the drapes, now drawn so as to allow the sun’s full fulgurous glory into the room. Sometimes beauty, sometimes horror, but always things of wonder, he mused. One has beaten the night, after all, staved off death for one more evening after giving oneself up to the whims and terrors of sleep, bereft of real autonomy and any sense of agency. What a glorious victory we mortals earn every single morning after slumber!

He got up from the bed, his blue, two-piece silk pajamas wrinkled and hanging on his not-so-decrepit frame. His mind was aflame with activity, it was abuzz, it was churning like an ancient engine, digging deep into the recesses of his deepest memory coffers in an attempt to bring back what was hinted at in oneiric reveries during the dark hours of sleep.

It was strange, this mixture of feelings. He was feverish in his elation, his feeling of euphoria at being on the edge of revelation. It was good, was it not? He wondered, musing at the sense of foreboding and resistance, a growing little seed of dread that began to grow inside him as the knowledge lost to the years loomed ever nearer. Why should he feel reservations at recalling, at recovering all that was he from before his good fortune of having happened upon the Wilsons’ generosity and love?

Suddenly he became aware of his surroundings again; he had made his way downstairs to the ground floor as he was lost in his self-reflective avenues of thought without realizing it, his body taking him on instinct to where he could fully recover. He was at the door to the estate’s backyard.

He opened the wide double doors and stepped out into the glaring sunlight, its warmth maná from the heavens themselves, seeping into his being and reviving that which had been dormant, the memories of his former life flooding back into him.

He could still feel his mind divided; there were two persons in him. There was the Aiden who had been taken in by the Wilsons, stricken with fear and confusion, almost childlike and, in many ways, exactly that; and then there was the Aiden who was awakening now, recovering from the ravages of age that he had managed to fight off and delay through means better left unspoken, un-thought of until they were necessary to harness that which kept him longevous, eternal.

He was two persons at once, for the first time in a very long time, almost since the first time when he had still been young, or rather young for the first time, back when he had first split into the man he had been and the man he would become. The dichotomous debate was beginning anew, although the matter of debate, the question of who of the two was the true Aiden, had long been abandoned in favour of the adage that might makes right; that is, who was the real person was no longer an important subject, it was moot. Nevertheless, the simultaneous duality was a strange pleasure, a rare phenomenon that had been long inexperienced. It was welcome, to the Aiden who was now rising from a slumber long and dangerous.

He looked upon his surroundings while the younger Aiden within shrank slowly, filled with ever-growing dread. What a fine turn of events, the rising one thought, that we have turned up at such a bountiful place. The rising one had sequestered himself in one of the buildings under their name, knowing that the frail nature of their human brain was giving in to the ravages of time and he would soon lose full cognition like many times before over the last three centuries, hoping in a way that he could find a method to fully prevent the decay cycle but failing yet again. On that occasion he had gambled on the generally kind nature of humanity in modern times, as they had grown soft over time thanks to the commodities of technological advance, and would not likely just kill a senile old man walking the streets without a clue to what his current situation was, and scribbled the note to draw pity and, perhaps, a helping hand he could eventually leech some energy from.

When envisioning this plan, he had not hoped for such a wonderfully rich bounty! He had seen it happening in increments; a little energy here, a little energy there, and eventually a payload that would allow him to turn back the effects of time on his mortal frame once again. He had hit the motherload, this time. Oh, what fortunate turn of events!

He recalled the locket pendant and realized he’d still had it with him through it all. He fished it from where it hung around his neck, and deftly opened it by placing his fingers in just the right configuration. Ah, there it was, the old formula, and the little device. All was good with the world again, for him.

He looked out at the large yard, at the green, freshly mowed grass, taking in the scent and rejoicing in it, at the sheer pleasure of being alive and sentient. He turned his attention to the children… what were their names again? Ah, yes, Molly, Adrian, Ernest, Ronald, and little Holly. They sure seemed full of life, did they not? The rising one said to the one subdued within. Had the Aiden waning any eyes, they would have been wide with increasing terror at the realization of what would ensue, the poor children. Having control of the only pair of eyes shared between the Aidens, the rising one simply blinked and squinted at the bright little souls. It had to be done, you see, it was necessary.

As the waning one succumbed to the mechanisms of the shared mind, trapped in schemes of distractions devised by the rising one long ago, the echoes of cries of denial rang within the proverbial halls of that mind. The rising one was now effectively risen. He was dominant, as should be.

Now, it was time to do what must be done.

Stranger Waters

Note: Dear Readers. I apologize for the previous story, which is admittedly bad. Perhaps not in the idea department, but in structure. I feel it could be so much better, but then again that’s the beauty of these shorts. I can mess them up, but I can then expand and improve upon them, non? 😀 In any case, here’s installment numero dos of the 12 shorts of Christmas. Also, apologies for any editing errors in this one… it’s late and I’ve been working my day job and this is way past my bedtime.

Bas was tired and a little drunk, though sadly that particular state was already in wane and the promises of a terrible hangover could already be felt just over the mental horizon; a headache was soon to come.

He had been traveling through Asia for some months, doing some back-and-forth commutes to his homeland of Costa Rica whenever he had procured whatever item his most voluminous employer – quite frankly his only employer for the past year, just about – had commissioned him to find and acquire. Mr. Mikoto kept his pockets full and, more importantly, was working on an issue Bas himself needed assistance with in exchange for Bas’ peculiar set of talents.

“Owari,” said the suited Japanese man that stepped through the threshold of an oldschool-style Japanese house – not an original but rather built to resemble a Tokugawa period palace – opening and closing his fists, stretching his fingers. Jin was not tall or particularly intimidating physically, but his presence and demeanor spoke of boundless capacity for efficient violence. He was his employer-appointed backup, and had saved Bas’ derriere on too many occasions. In fact, he had just done so.

“That was quick,” Bas remarked, though not entirely surprised. Not any longer.

“The Oyabun,” said Jin with a noncommittal shrug of the shoulders. “They don’t choose their men like they did in my time.”

Jin had once been a Yakuza assassin, many decades before, who having fallen from grace once his boss, his Oyabun, had died, had roamed masterless into chaos for some time. He was now under the care and benefaction of Mr. Mikoto, better known as the Tattoo Collector, and Bas’ employer, though that last detail was hardly a claim to fame.

Just fifteen minutes before Bas and Jin had been sitting on the floor of the pagoda drinking amicably with a few goons of the Yakuza, trying to pry some information about one of the many mcguffins Mr. Mikoto wanted. There had been plenty of sake, some whiskey, and more bare-breasted women than he had been witness to in forever. Despite the alcoholic haze and the cigarette miasma, Bas had managed to edge into a certain conversational avenue that started to yield success. The Tattoo Collector wanted a bone, a whale bone, but not just any such item, and like every single one of the items on his whimsical wishlist, this one required more than a little elbow grease.

The two goons Bas had been chatting up began to grow somber as it became clear what he was inquiring after. This was not something to trifle with, and they were not happy about the gaijin’s intrusion when it came down to something so instrinsically Japanese.

As is bound to happen when alcohol flows freely among tough men, any old little prick of discord can set off a chain reaction of macho bullshit, and such had been the case then. Within seconds the two men were standing, their bare, tattoo-laden torsos quivering with anger at Bas, speaking in quick, strong Nihon-Go that Bas simply could not follow but which underlying meaning he instinctively understood; they were going to kill him, or mess him up something fierce at the very least. The naked women, seeing the sudden change in the room’s mood and knowing better than to become collateral damage, quickly made off, which couldn’t possibly help make the remaining goons any less aggravated at whatever the hell had set their two colleagues off against Bas.

He wasn’t quite sure what happened, but he thought he could recall a fist flying toward him, unnoticed by his drunken conscious mind, but well perceived by his subconscious, the part of him that was the wolf. The wolf in him had caught the fist and unceremoniously broken the issuer’s arm at the elbow with an effortless thrust from his other hand. He didn’t really know what he had done, but the damage had been caused and all he really understood was that it was time to exit stage right.

Jin had already begun doing his thing by the time the now-broken-armed goon’s fist had flown, and so the scene was one of apparent mayhem to Bas as he exited the scene. Cowardly many may think him, but he knew how to pick his battles, and he sure wasn’t about to stand and get in the way of a far more effective killer than him, that being Jin.

“Got the info?” he asked Jin.

“Un,” he grunted, meaning yes. “Don’t know what good you are, if I have to get the info like this every time,” he was joking, of course, but Bas couldn’t help but feel the sting of truth behind the jocular barb. He really hadn’t been that efficient at his job as of late, but then again, he still had the upper hand in certain areas over Jin despite the fact that they hadn’t come in handy lately. Also, what the hell was up with the jokes? That was Bas’ thing, the cracking of the whip of sarcasm and the jab of hazing. He did admit the man’s accent had watered down since he first met him. He figured the man must have been real quiet before getting paired up with him.

“Ha. Ha. Ha. Enjoy that smug smirk, see if I tell you there’s poison in your food next time someone slips you something.” There had been only one time Bas had returned the favor for the many times Jin has saved his ass, a bad episode in Hong Kong a couple of months prior.

*************************************************************************

Par for the course, Bas thought to himself. Just more of the same with the Weirdness. Here he was, alone in a small fishing boat off of the coast of Okino Island in the Shimane prefecture, waiting for something out of a sailor’s nightmare so he could get the job done, while trying not to be noticed by the thousands of water Yokai – spirits, basically, though that’s hardly an approximation to what it really means, Yokai – that inhabited the sea of Japan.

There was something to say about the Japanese and their culture, the rich folklore full of things that go bump in the night. It likely was one of the reasons why the Japanese people were so apparently stoic in the face of hardship, having been bred of cultural fear, a tiny island nation surrounded by fearsome oceanic forces, at the mercy and whim of things beyond their comprehension. This sure was no land of Totoro, despite what any Miyazaki film might try to tell movie-going audiences.

He was there to collect a bone from a Bake-Kujira, a ghost whale, one of the rarest types of Yokai in Japan. Legends about it were few and far between, since this was a spirit creature aloof and rarely sighted near the coast, but what was known was that it was a violent, aggressive creature that did not suffer mortal onlookers lightly.

Bas was prepared. That is, he was as prepared as he could possibly be to tackled the feat of wresting the bone of a cetacean spirit creature that was anywhere from 15 to 20 meters, like a baleen whale, all bones, no flesh, with a penchant for killing sailors.

It was a moonless night but the sky was clear, star-studded, breathtaking. For a moment here and there, in the loneliness of the small wooden boat, he would forget his self-inflicted predicament and lose himself to the majesty of the universe around and beyond him. Then little things that go bump in the night would bring him back to the there-and-then. Meh, he thought, at least he wasn’t getting molested by the Kappa, the pervs. He chuckled at his own shitty joke.

He had been warned about one particular sea Yokai specifically, something that would look like a rogue wave, a wave alone with no actual swell, the Umibouzu, or Sea Monks. Despite the endearing name, there was nothing monk-like about these Yokai. They were likely named thus because they resembled a monk’s shaven head, but black and slick, with eyes that pierce the darkness of the ocean.

Umibouzu were attracted to light, and fire, because they despised it, so Bas’ boat had no light at all. Despite this precaution, he was already seeing the nasty, gigantic creatures rising above the surface, looking out hatefully at the stars, lights they could not snuff out. He remained calm and focused despite noticing one of the terrible things no more than 10 meters away. He stifled a shudder at the idea of just how big the creature might be underneath the subfuscous surface.

A few more minutes passed and he was now, thankfully, deeper out into the open sea. He had three tools; a harpoon made out of the bone of a whale that had been posthumously named under Buddhist tradition during the Great Tenpo Famine of 1837 – the aptly named “Bone of The Great Whale Scholar of the Universe who Brings Health”, the aforementioned Scholar yadda yadda being the posthumous Buddhist title bestowed upon the deceased aquatic mammal is its beached corpse fed a starving village –, the tooth of a Megalodon said to have been blessed by some Buddhist saint, and a small glass jar filled with dirt from the shore.

The first item was to attack the Bake-Kujira, the mystical weapon said to be tailor made for such creatures. The second another aid in attacking such a yokai as sharks in Japanese mythology have some bond with humans since they, well, eat humans. It is considered taboo to eat shark as it is tantamount to cannibalism. Aside from that, the ancient Megalodon used to swallow whales whole and the tooth, being jacked up with all the mystical steroids you could possibly want, should make old boney Moby Dick that much more vulnerable. Finally, the third item should keep Bas grounded, anchored to this his reality, his dimension, as the fearsome creature he hunted was reputed to transition between dimensions, likely not being native to this one.

Bas was losing hope that the night would prove fruitful, having spent hours out and having no luck, until he noticed a glow out of the corner of his eye. Bioluminescence, he immediately thought, and then he recalled the stories of the ghost whale’s entourage of bizarre, glowing fish and birds. He turned his head in the direction of the glow and was met with close to 50 meters of glittering schools of fish that had features unlike any fish he had seen before. Some had faces that could pass for human, some had legs like those of deer, others tentacled and excreting luminous, rainbow-like ink. The sky was filled with gulls of silver and gold, their cries so familiar yet somehow alien, a subfrequency marking their voices as something not from this earth. And amid the panoply of strange animals, the crowning jewel of the menagerie; the Bake-Kujira.

It was larger than he had expected, whatever its actual size was. It was large and he felt his bowels threaten with loosening. But he also felt wonder at the magnificent spirit creature he saw before him. It was a thalassic marvel, a being that may as well be the god of whales, an oceanic proto-deity that predated hominids. The wolf in Bas felt cowed by the majestic image before it, the presence of a true force of nature.

Minutes passed in silence as Bas could do nothing but stare, awed at the seemingly ligament-less bones held in place by a gelatinous transparency, a tenuous tissue hardly noticeable by the human eye, a living ossuary swimming beneath the surface of an otherwise dark sea.

Then he remembered the task at hand.

He braced himself , realizing in the space of seconds that this was likely the last time he drew breath freely, that he might never be reunitied with the daughter he lost what seemed now like so long ago, that he would probably not survive his task but the price was just right for him to risk it all…

… and so he lauched himself out of the boat, diving into the cold, dark waters, holding the bone-fashioned harpoon in one hand, the megashark tooth strapped to his wet suit, the miniature jar of soil hanging underneath the suit and around his waist.

The mythical whale felt his presence the moment he entered the water, and it’s light was noticeable even in the murk of the water. He oriented himself so as to receive the enormous beast and braced himself for impact with the harpoon held at an angle so that it might cause damage and somehow spare him some of the brunt of the hit.

One second.

Two seconds.

Three.

The impact knocked the air he had been holding right out of him, his ribs ached and burned and his head was on fire. He felt the drag of the sea water as the baleen monstrosity pushed him along. He realized he was still holding on to the harpoon, that it had not struck the creature as he had hoped, but he still had it, and that was a most welcome outcome.

He tried to get his bearings and get a notion of his position relative to the creature’s body, and then used the tell-tale map of the skeletal creature’s anatomy to find where the eyes would be. He fought against the inertia keeping him glued to the creature’s head, raised the harpoon, and scored a glancing hit, missing his mark by a few centimeters. He would have cursed but he was already out of oxygen and his body was threatening with shutting down, so he mustered the last of his taxed muscles’ strength and tried again for the eye socket. This time he found his mark.

Blinding light was the last thing he saw before he passed out, bleeding light, right out of the creature’s wound, which for a moment was as clear as day, not a translucent film of tissue but a perfectly pigmented sheet bleeding white light with rivulets of oily color. Then darkness.

He woke up with a start, a hoarse, deep breath, heart pounding. It was a miracle that he hadn’t drowned! He looked about and he was still surrounded by the bioluminescent school of bizarre fish, the sparkling birds still flew overhead, and now there was a carcass of a still-majestic creature floating nearby.

Bas couldn’t help but feel a sense of dismay at the sight of the thing now dead by his own hands. He had killed a wonder, and it would not return. Was this the only one? He did not know. He really hadn’t thought about it before, but now it was all he could think about. He thought he could almost cry, but the tears wouldn’t come despite the tight knot in his throat. It was done. No used crying over spilled salt, was it? Yeah. He could not take it back, whatever it was that he had done.

He swam slowly toward the floating carcass, his muscles still taxed terribly by the scant seconds of oxygen deprivation. He hope he hadn’t sustained any brain damage. It hadn’t been long enough for that, had it? That was something he would have to contend with later. For now, all that mattered was retrieving the bone and getting back to the boat, assuming he could find it, before any of the other lovely yokai that inhabited the waters came to see what the commotion was all about.

He tore open the translucent flesh with the Magalodon tooth, the tissue giving way and the blubber underneath, somehow not transparent at all, yielding bones. They were large. They were heavy.

Bas moved in and up onto the carcass which floated a little above the surface so as to cut into the dorsal area of the creature where the vertebrae would be. He figured it would likely be the least heavy of the bones in its bone structure.

Once done, he swam about 30 meters and found his boat, luckily aided by the luminous fish’s incidental presence. As he rowed back to shore,, which took him a considerable amount of time, he couldn’t help but muse over the fact that the Japanese were so intrinsically tied to whales as a culture, and the sea.

They had been long condemned for whaling in a time in history when this was forbidden, yet they continued under the guise of scientific research when everybody knew it was bullshit. But their country, their coasts, littered with whale shrines and the evidence of whale cults, show a strange symbiotic relationship with the noble creatures on many different levels. Whales have long been a staple of the Japanese pantheon, often equated as avatars of the god Ebisu – the god of plenty –, and yet they are killed wholesale for no good reason. It didn’t escape Bas that he had done one such killing himself, though he justified his own trespass against nature as the means to an end. An end that trumped all moral causes and all ethics. His daughter.

He would deliver this bone and, he thought, it was high time he called in his payment, the real one, from the Tattoo Collector. It was most definitely time.

Weltanschauung

Note: This is the first of the 12 Stories of Christmas I’ve challenged myself with. Check back tomorrow for another.

 

A man stood on the threshold of Ur’s abode; it was Genar, his tall, lanky frame made him appear alien to most people who regarded him, the extreme slenderness of his limbs often provoking revulsion and a nigh unbearable need to look away. To Ur, however, his visage was welcome, always.

Ur was a taxidermist of sorts, one belonging to a very particular specialization of the craft that focused on the taxidermist’s own body rather than that of deceased fauna. A very rare school now lost to the annals of history, what little evidence is left of the existence of this current lies with Ur, the last of the master craftsmen of the Hidden Ways, and a few scattered notes and diagrams that may be come by through no easy means.

It is a time of last things, thinks Ur to himself not for the first time in the past months. Many ancient, nearly timeless things have drawn to a close, leaving but a vestigial representation of their former ubiquity, the glory of halcyon days faded, corroded. A time of last things, things that will not come again, things that have been but will be no more, things – peoples, gods, religions, cults, universes – expiring and giving their ghost up to the origin, the Eye.

Ur, thus, was the last of an order which name is not spoken, nor written, but expressed with symbols of a script system that twists like snakes before the gaze that falls upon it and it communicates the essence of its meaning directly to the mind of the beholder.

Genar was paying a visit to Ur in order to watch and stand as a witness to the last work of the craftsman, who was working on the culminating opus of his life, and which would soon end as such. Ur enjoyed the company, even if Genar always asked, despite invariably getting a negative reply every time, about becoming Ur’s apprentice.

Ur could not even allow himself to consider the request, though he was sure Genar, if applied, would make a fine taxidermist himself. It was the nature of his final work itself that precluded the possibility of bringing someone new into the craft. Ur had to complete the work and simultaneously ensure that no other such craftsmen would remain thereafter. It was pivotal to enduring the success of a great many future endeavors.

Taxidermy, a Greek term that translates to arrangement of skin. The craft is relatively common in its most basic application, but Ur’s specialty is focused on the taxidermist working on their own body through the years and using it to tell stories of sorts. In Ur’s particular case, for his final work he was to give the enigmatic tools for some cosmological puzzle he did not even understand himself, but he understood what tools he was tasked with providing for the one that would come in time.

Ur toiled away under the curious, hungry gaze of Genar, sometimes for days on end without rest, carefully altering the nature of his corpus – which had previously displayed a great many different works – so as to change its architecture into a pattern that would communicate the necessary information to the one foretold. There was a certain amount of prescience in the craftsmen, some minor oracular abilities, that were tied directly to the work of the soon-to-be-extinct taxidermists.

Transmogrification by way of taxidermy is a painstaking process, one that requires a high threshold for pain, utmost control of biological process of the body, and a steady hand to ensure the best result. The craftsman has to convert sinew and bone into an architecture that mirrors the cosmos in a way, to portray a vision and awareness of the universe at large that needs to be conveyed with great eloquence into a language of dead-yet-preserved tissue.

Much like the current of the times, today would be the last of the work, the day Ur finished the crowning opus out of all his opera and simultaneously ceased to be. He was settled into place, as he had been for weeks already, allowing his living portions of body to slowly become inert, working on his own organs, removing, rearranging, trans-substantiating.

Over the recent days Ur’s craftsmanship had begun to take intelligible shape out of the apparent haphazard chaos that had preceded it, a form which even one who was not versed in the interpretation of the taxidermists’ designs would appreciate as a fine thing, a product of skillful, dedicated labor. Ur had modeled his body into a thing that, while retaining a semblance of the human form, anthropomorphic, was now a cosmogonic mosaic of former organs arrayed in a spiraling fashion that closed and narrowed into what was arguably the center of Ur’s body, a nautilus representing the real nature of the Universe or rather Multiverse for it is, in truth, multitudinous.

Genar watched on, and Ur could feel his beaming gaze, perpetually filled with amazement and wonder at what Ur produced. He had always found it childlike. There was no more blood left in his body, his life artificially maintained by arcane mechanisms, and the time drew near for even those artifices to cease their labor. He was done, now, and he could only exit the mortal coil with hope that it would be enough and that the one foretold would find his remains. In that, he trusted Genar to go forward with the final preparations and arrangements after his expiration. He really did wish he could have passed his knowledge on to Genar; he would have made a fine craftsman. Genar would have to settle for stewardship of the taxidermist’s legacy.

Time had been long in the place where Ur had once lived and plied his singular trade, and time has a curious way of distorting even the most well-meaning of hearts and gestures, to both the benefit or detriment of those involved, oftentimes independently from their intentions or actions.

And so it was that the body of Ur was sold by a debased Genar, who in his lonely stewardship had become plagued by a disease of the soul, one that gnawed away at his sense of duty and morality, and eventually his sanity as well. The taxidermist’s legacy traded off for scraps of the very craft secrets that had procured Ur’s final state.

What future Ur had envisioned and endeavored to honor was now jeopardized – lost, perhaps – and Genar? His bizarrely shaped body had transformed from what it once had been in those better days when Ur still lived into something only vaguely related to humanity in some primitive, and atavistic animality that was relegated to the dreams of small children who in their innocence were less shielded from humanity’s ancestral memories. Genar had toyed with the tools and what little remained of Ur’s ancient trade, effectively becoming a perversion of that lost craftsmanship, an abomination, a base affront at nature itself.

The one foretold by Ur had yet to arrive, and if they ever did, they would have to contend with Genar’s terrible, gnarled form and his even more twisted mind. They would not find Ur’s body there, no. What will become of the future Ur saw once, we might never truly know.

Them’s the Breaks

It’s a funny world, this one. Things humans subject themselves to under the guise of civilization, strife born of the terrible prevalence of ego and desire, the subscription to concepts and norms set to perpetrate the status quo that keeps the mighty on top and the commoner down in the mud. Great injustices start with small ones, quite often, and that is one of the many tragedies of this world. So many injustices start out cruelly only to become blessings in disguise… but then, well, what does anyone know about anything at all?

***********************************************************************

There was something wrong, Jonas knew. For years he’d felt this oppressive sense that all he ever did would fall to pieces. His life up until his fifties offered no evidence to counter this assessment of his own accomplishments, or lack thereof. He was washed up, a failed architect who at one point in his life had been poised to make something truly great of himself. Projects of magnitudes colossal lined up, sudden connections to influential circles, visions of abundance and wealth… they had all come to nothing.

He would often blame himself, for who else was there to blame? God? Ha! No, it was nothing from fanciful fabrications of the human collective – he would think often; nothing but his own folly. He had been foolish often, and had committed the same mistakes over and over, as if he couldn’t help it. He often wondered what was wrong with him, what made him be that way, why, when it came to defining moments, he always made the wrong choice.

But now there was this, this… this new piece of the puzzle, one that had never before been considered in seriousness…

His fourth wife was next to him, Clara, mother of his three youngest daughters. They were there with him, as well, in the living room of their home of twenty years. With were his children from the previous three marriages, three more daughters, one for each failed partnership. The only one that was missing was his firstborn child, his only son, Robert.

It was fine, however, he was busy with his own family, his own failed marriage, his daughter, his job… he was very diligent and had to take care of a lot of things and couldn’t make it, but it was not necessary for him to be there.

The parish priest sat at a tall chair opposite the large sofa where Jonas, his wife and his progeny sat. It was time to begin the cleansing. Another woman, a purported witch, was next to the priest. She held a felt pouch within which was rock salt, spices, and another component which she had been rather taciturn about discussing.

No matter, Jonas thought, there was a time to question and a time to follow blindly. This was the latter.

It had come to his attention, and that of his immediate family, that he had acquired, through his years of philandering and terrible decisions, a curse. An erstwhile lover, jilted, bitter, had threatened him once, wanting him to divorce from his then first wife. He had, like many men before him and since him, held onto his marriage and deflected his mistress’ please to marry her by saying, falsely, that his wife would not accede to a divorce no matter how much he asked. This created a long episode of harassment against his then-wife on behalf of his mistress. He had been a coward, he knew, but he didn’t help one woman or the other.

Somehow, despite the duress in those days, his wife eventually was with child, that which would become his son Robert. At the news of this, his mistress had gone positively berserk, the threats escalating to a maddening degree, eventually forcing Jonas to act and cut her off. But his mistress would not leave without the last word, and she said she would curse him and his descendants. His lineage would come to dust, it would be nothing, and all his efforts and creations would also come to nothing.

He had lent this no ear, no mind, as would any reasonable person. But the years had been unkind in great part with Jonas and his children. Perhaps, it really was a curse. He knew he himself deserved it, certainly, but not his children.

In church just a few days earlier he had become distraught, racked with paroxysmal convulsions that would not relent. This was the culmination of a long period of depression, of finding no avail or succor in anything or anyone. He had been looking down a dark tunnel with no light at either end, and that apparent attack during mass had been the beginning of an end.

The priest that presided over the parish was an old, knowledgeable and experienced missionary who at one time dealt with the darker, more hushed subjects that the Holy See was expected to contend with, despite the efforts to change the public’s perception of it as an organization. He had immediately recognized the forces at work, or so he had told Jonas.

And that was why they were here: To rid Jonas, and in turn his children, of the undue consequences of his own folly.

***********************************************************************

Robert was tired. He was only thirty years old, but he felt a hundred at heart. He was jovial, often enough, and a kind person, but he felt a terrifying vacuous darkness inside. He often wondered, for good reason, if he might be a bad person.

He was, after all, his father’s son, wasn’t he?

He had not been the level of philanderer his pops had once been, but his evils lay somewhere darker, at times. These were not known to most, and he had certain impulses that could irrevocably change his life and that of those close to him beyond any point of redemption.

And now there was this thing, with his pops, the witchery, the church… he didn’t know what to make of it. This was not what he had ever considered to be the cause of his misfortunes… no, he had always blamed himself, and maybe his father and mother, naturally, but mostly himself.

At night, for the past twenty years or so, he would always lie there in bed, unable to summon the sandman, unable to turn off his mind. He would review his motivations, his wrong turns, and rights-turned-sour, and wonder at the horrible person that was his innermost soul. He was astounded, always, at how corrupt he could be, and how his corruption could spread despite his honest efforts at being a good person. But then, he would also question his own honesty, his own desire to be good… how could he possibly be sure? Did he really know himself? Could he, ever?

He had done regrettable things… to people… to persons who had at some point confided in him. He had taken liberties with affections, with trust, and for that he was now alone. He had chosen to be alone, knowing that he was, in some integral part of his being, broken. He forsook building a new family – he had bungled that one up, already, once – and donned the mantle of solitude… solitude with the sometimes bitter drink of loneliness.

All that was left to him was his daughter. That he hadn’t fucked that up, that was his miracle. She still looked at him with eyes of love, like he was the hero that could never possibly fall. That was all the light in the world, and it was all the light Robert needed. If only he could find a way to have more time to spend with her…

In the end, that’s all life is… regrets and struggle, struggle and regrets, and a few ephemeral moments of respite.

Who knows, maybe this cleansing or whatever it is they were doing at his pops’ place would yield something good for him, too.

**********************************************************************

The cleansing had been frightful. Jonas had felt his heart nearly give up on him and the toll the ritual had taken on his body had been dear. But he was now free.

He felt liberated, light, like a feather floating idly in the wind. He was, for the first time he could remember in decades, happy, at peace.

He hugged his wife and children, all his daughters, and was keenly aware that Robert’s absence was all that wasn’t right at that moment. No matter, his son, his pride – had he told him he was proud of him despite it all? – would eventually come.

He thanked the old priest, who was sporting a lukewarm smile, and shook his hand. He went to the witch-woman, who had been a boon in the ritual, and embraced her. Her look, however, the expression on her face, was sad. This puzzled him for a moment, but he wasn’t ready to dwell on it. He was hungry, famished! He would cook for his family. They were all together! This, he mused, was a good day.

**********************************************************************

Robert had been driving, going down the lane to the parking lot of his workplace, when the heart attack struck. By the time his car crashed against the wall of the building he was already dead. In a freak explosion his remains were burned to ashes. It was merciful that he wasn’t there to feel the fire destroy his body.

**********************************************************************

No matter what we do, in this life, in our dreams, in our hearts, we will all be dust. It’s quite pointless, to follow these accepted norms, this social contract, this net to keep us all down and docile.

And our mistakes, how do they take form? Do they become tulpas somewhere in our psyche? Do they become egregorial manifestations in the physical plane?

The sins of the father. The sins of the son.

Three-in-a-Day and Tweeting Away

Can A.M. Coverston (i.e. Me) write and publish three – that’s right, THREE – short stories in one day? We are about to find out!

On top of that, a Tweet Novella is launching today as well. I will write a few lines every day for a year and see where that takes me. Improv? Kind of. Crazy? You bet!

You can follow me on Twitter @brokenclavicle

Let’s see where this idiotic idea takes us!

Ratty Tidings

It’s strange that a city rat should be out and about in the daylight, moving with impunity, unharmed and unimpeded on the sun-scorched concrete. It’s strange that it should parade itself in front of its natural predators with nary a thought paid to the tenets of self-preservation. Stranger even, the fact that it boldly dashed without any mind given to any form of temporary cover, caution thrown to the wind in a most uncharacteristic manner for a creature known for its craftiness at the art of survival.

Certain parasites and diseases may cause creatures to act in such a manner; toxoplasmosis, for example, would account for this particular rodent’s lack of fear in the face of the panoply of feral felines that populate the city sprawl, but such is not the case. The rat is not drawn to cat feces, so that hypothesis is thrown right out the proverbial window.

Under the glaring sun and the summer heat, this intrepid rodent – perhaps smarter than given credit by the humans who deludedly think themselves the apex species of the planet, like they know what crawls beneath the foundations of their settlements, ha! – made its way into a building of rather inconspicuous nature amongst this forest of giant concrete trees, finding its nimble way up to one of the uppermost floors where, it was told by something that now resides within its body along with it, the rat is to perform a little task.

Strange that a rat should scurry, not dragging its long tail, but rather with it curved and poised, tip suspended just above its head, as if it were being protected, coddled even. Odd that it should make the rat resemble a scorpion ready to attack with its stinger. Bizarre, that it should appear as though the tail were some rider, mounted on some invisible saddle, leading the rodent on.

The tail, this rat reasoned, was its friend, for it had led it to many a bounty of food, and it had brought many females’ attentions to it for mating. In short, the tail was its advantage over its fellow rodents, so wherever the tail instructed it to go, it went, and whatever the tail wanted done, it would do.

The tail whispered things into its mind when it slumbered, in as far as a mouth-less appendage might be said to “whisper” at all, planting seeds of ideas and ambitions far beyond the biological maxims of its species. The tail watered those seeds with concepts like “king” and “domination”, it fertilized them with visions of skies of strange configurations and rodents covering the land like a blanket.

So into the building and into the floor where many metallic machinery and electric wires –the rat really liked electric wires, perhaps the tail would let it feast – it went in search of strange looking objects which image had been implanted into its mind’s eye by the tail. The rat was to make slight, almost imperceptible changes to the objects, each of which had a symbol etched upon them.

It found the objects laid out across a metallic floor strewn with mounds of dirt placed in what appeared to it to be deliberate; the rat, since the tail began to communicate with it, had begun to develop its mind in ways it had never before, such that it now recognized concepts like geometry in ways abstract rather than just practical. The dirt piles smelled of different places, each evocative of vegetation and fauna unlike that found around the city sprawl. Some smelled of things even the rat’s ancestral brain could not reconcile with memory, a few smelled of things it was glad it could not remember even through its ancestral well.

Upon each dirt-mound rested one of the objects, and at each one the rat gnawed carefully the modification to the respective symbol on the object as instructed by the tail. It had to be careful not to make a mistake as there was no way to correct any errors; once etched out meaning, the symbol could only be further warped, or so the tail had communicated to the rat.

When the rat had questioned the tail about this plan – having now learned to question beyond the binary concepts of deadly and beneficial to the continuity of its existence – the appendage had replied with the concept of “glory”, but a pair of other concepts seemed to have seeped through unintentionally in the psychic communiqué, those of “return” and “madness”. Neither concepts were very clear to the rat, but it sensed something amiss. It did not pay it mind, though, as it understood very well that it stood to reap benefits from the whole of those concepts.

Once done with the task of the tail, the rat scurried its way down and out of the building, with no human the wiser. A block away from the building it came upon a large tabby cat, its face scarred from years of warring with other strays and animals of other various veneers. The feline hunched, making itself flat upon the pavement as if preparing to pounce upon the rodent, but at the last moment, as its muscles fired to make its move, it modified its course with a loud meow and it bounded off, away from its would-be-prey.

The rat had paid it no attention, bold as before thanks to the tail. The tail had paid the predator no attention either. It need not be bothered by such affairs. The cat, in turn, kept trying to outrun the stench that had come from the rat. The stink would not relent, it clung to its nose and would not let go. Minutes later and kilometers away it flung itself from a city bridge and into the river, so that watery death and darkness would mercifully take the maddening smell away.