You better be here when we need you, but don't talk too loud or act too interested. Don't express concern or expect us to share it. We're just trying to get from point A to point B without encountering too much resistance. Look, thinking is hard. Questions lead to more questions, and who the fuck wants that?
Or talk loud and carry no stick at all. What we don't need are folks who want change. Change is hard. It takes work, and it gets messy. We don't like messes unless they're the kind that put you in your place. Storms. Fires. Civil unrest. All gravy. Equality? That shit requires compromised capitalism. How you gonna stay wet without that sweet trickle down.
Don't look at all the old folks dying. Don't worry about the colored folks. We are a country chosen by providence. This is the purity of the American, white, race. Ask not what the confederacy can do for you! Do not let them have their wombs! They will breed weakness into the great, Christian homeland. They are like Jews. The great masses of the people will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one! The victor will never be asked if he told the truth! Blood and soil!
Blood and SOIL!
Geez, Mader. Be careful who you're channeling, dude. You scared me there for a minute!
ReplyDeleteI’m hanging on by a thread, but I ain’t dead,
DeleteNot yet, not yet
Just sitting on this sense of dread rolling round
In my head, beating a drum that’s not so different yet loud enough to drown out that small voice that keeps on insisting I’m supposed to have a choice in what’s going down.
Leaving me to run and float and fight, looking for some peace somewhere in all the anxiety, the free-form piety, the preachers and the teachers
Pointing fingers all around and around and around
Till we all fall down
We all fall down.
The autumn winds are howling; bad moon is on the rise
Taking candy from the babies, burning witches at the stake, and everyone’s feeling the same
Lost in the conviction that truth’s just another fiction and even if it isn’t
It was all just a mistake.
And the Jack ‘o lanterns grin as we go on sinning, too far gone for compromise.
I’m floating in the velvet dark, studying the stars
Looking for a sigil to point my way
There’s surely change a-gonna come,
Only this time it’s wearing face masks and carrying a gun
But only a fool thinks change happens in a day.
Born in on the screams of labor, blood running in the street, the hard eyed glares of what used to be neighbors or even your friends, it rattles all your skeletons, ambushes your plans and makes you wish most for some place to rest.
But freedom is fought for, change never comes cheap, the future doesn’t happen in a day. It’s the hurt before the healing and only if you’re lucky can you hang on to any meaning in the end.
My flesh ain’t that willing, but my soul is strong, so I conjure my magic and wait for the dawn of a new day, that new way that promises me the unknown. I hope it comes before I go,
I’d hate to miss it, in the end.
This has some promise, but I'm stuck.
ReplyDelete_________________________
In this glade, I will say this aloud: a glade should be joyous—the word glad is already inside it—but my story makes it burdensome. You might think of a goldspun place amid greenery, shafts of sunlight splayed through schismed foliage, and that’s what a glade should be. Here it’s a lighter smear on a dun ocher place, a trifling sigh in a requiem.
Since I speak to no one, my name matters not, yet I’ll say it regardless: Antigone. Yes, I laugh at that too; I’m not a fucking idiot. Punchlines, even of the cosmic kind, are mostly unmissable to me; my executioner’s humour rarely deserts me.
Funny, I could spin this out into something that takes eons to tell, and though I feel no urgency, I nonetheless want to return to that childhood moment from which this cosmos of me bloomed like the darkest flower. I had just been molested by my uncle, and like cut refracted glass my future beckoned: deny it and discover the pedestrian way of lukewarm mud; tell and be exhibited; find some other untold road in an unknown land.
My life chose for me.
There was the day I found the chalice, a showy name for a plain brown ceramic pot lying by a roadside. Brianna shaped to pick it up, but I stopped her, and in a pure selfish way there is nothing I regret more than that… even though in my best moments I’m thankful I saved my greatest friend the torment I’ve since endured. I grabbed the vessel and rubbed it and on an impulse wished to live forever. There. Nothing more than that. No puff of smoke, no summoned entity, no sage or sibyl. Yet a breeze fell flat and silent, and I felt something shift in my core, that sensation you get when you sense a bone is broken well before the pain arrives—a deep unsettling maddening tingle. I was twenty years old.
Naw David Antrobus, you're not stuck, just twist the myth. She doesn't kill herself, becomes immortal but goes around revenge killing others until she realizes the only way she can actually die is to forgive? Or she goes on to explain she is the grandmama of the Greek vampires, or turns out she teams up with some other obscure Greek god who wants his immortality back and she makes him a deal... for myself, I always found the fatalism/ inevitable, unalterable resignation of a lot of those mythological characters ripe for timely comedic intervention...
ReplyDeleteHa, I like. It's funny, though; I have an ending partway mapped out in my head (and it's bleak as hell), but I don't know how to get there without it turning from flash fiction into a short story. In other words, I have the beginning and probably the ending, but the middle is proving to be elusive.
DeleteNo worries, I hear time passes quickly when you're immortal
DeleteIt began in September, although it could have been July. There had been glimmerings I’d been dismissing for months.
ReplyDeleteThe bedroom on the western side had always been uncomfortable, a place I hated to stay. Its window faced onto the open field, the one with the oak, its shutters impossible to secure. A good wind would always set them banging, their heavy wood scarring the rendering of the wall, but it was the wind that put the chills into my heart. I consider myself a man of science, hating to succumb to superstition thinking. It just shows how much of the animal remains inside the best of us.
I’d been upstairs earlier that night, closing the windows. It had rained that day, the curtains becoming damp, the dark patches on the walls growing larger. But a house such as ours needs air, even when it’s cold, the chill the windows invited in being the price we paid not to suffer the gloom which wound up into the house from the cellar.
On this day, I’d felt uncomfortable from before dawn, the aches in my back manifesting themselves as a corset of stubborn muscles, my body stiffened up like a log of wood. I’d rolled rather than stumbled from my bed, then drunk tea listlessly in the kitchen for more than an hour. I’d known then that there was something wrong, I guess. As I’ve already said, I’m a man who prefers to reason before making a pronouncement. I’ve been well educated; I’m not a savage from Indonesia. And yet, I felt a degree of foreboding. The linoleum felt damp underfoot, its edges curled up away from the skirting boards. The glass in the windows of the scullery were dark, even though the sun should have been well risen by then, and it was only by stirring myself and walking away the house I found a smattering of light, filtered through the massing clouds. But, looking back at the house, I knew it.
There was something evil there. Something malevolent. Something that was conscious, lying in wait for me to return.
Of course, I had to challenge it. The house was nothing special, but it was my home, the place I kept everything I owned. Running through the doorway, I slammed the door to my rear, hearing it echoing through the walls. I kept a shotgun with cartridges in my personal room and practiced with it regularly. Another minute and I had it, loaded with four shot, with another box and a half in reserve slung in a pouch around my neck, banging against my side as I raced up the stairs. Another minute after that and I was on the second floor, pounding against the bedroom door. It was stuck again, as it always seemed to be. Whatever it was I would be facing; it would know I was here.
The door swung slowly open, stopping halfway. There was a rug bunched up behind it, preventing it opening fully. The light in the room was tinged a hazy blue, with a sound like paper tearing coming through the opening toward me. I felt dread then, even though I knew I shouldn’t.
DeleteThe room I stepped into wasn’t the one I’d seen before. There was no jumble of boxes and scrunched up clothes, no miscellany of household appliances. Instead, the room was bare, its ceiling out of sight. There was a chandelier fashioned from icicles and walls sheeted with ice. There was an entity in the middle of the hall, a yawning void, frosted with thick rime and a kaleidoscope of flashing facets.
It was a reflex. I hardly knew what happened. I raised my gun and I fired, emptying both barrels. One moment there was an eye, a mouth, a presence which registered my presence.
Icicles showered around me, falling like stilettos. I was pierced through my upper right arm as I ran. The door seemed so far away, a dim red light, sensed rather than seen, but I ran without thinking, needing to escape. I fled down the corridor, dropping my gun as I went. I hardly noticed the stairs; I must have run down three flights, skidding across the landings as I turned. I ran along the hallway, shooting through the doorway into the light.
I was out again, and I was safe. And I would never go back in again.
-
The sale of the house was difficult, even though I sold it for a fraction of its value. I recovered my most precious keepsakes, engaging a house clearance specialist to remove the things I wanted. I would never return there again: I knew it would sense me and pull me back in.
I’m still a man of science…but I’ve become superstitious.
Loved this, Mark! Especially since I've been (gulp) house shopping?
DeleteThe door swung slowly open, stopping halfway. There was a rug bunched up behind it, preventing it opening fully. The light in the room was tinged a hazy blue, with a sound like paper tearing coming through the opening toward me. I felt dread then, even though I knew I shouldn’t.
ReplyDeleteThe room I stepped into wasn’t the one I’d seen before. There was no jumble of boxes and scrunched up clothes, no miscellany of household appliances. Instead, the room was bare, its ceiling out of sight. There was a chandelier fashioned from icicles and walls sheeted with ice. There was an entity in the middle of the hall, a yawning void, frosted with thick rime and a kaleidoscope of flashing facets.
It was a reflex. I hardly knew what happened. I raised my gun and I fired, emptying both barrels. One moment there was an eye, a mouth, a presence which registered my presence.
Icicles showered around me, falling like stilettos. I was pierced through my upper right arm as I ran. The door seemed so far away, a dim red light, sensed rather than seen, but I ran without thinking, needing to escape. I fled down the corridor, dropping my gun as I went. I hardly noticed the stairs; I must have run down three flights, skidding across the landings as I turned. I ran along the hallway, shooting through the doorway into the light.
I was out again, and I was safe. And I would never go back in again.
-
The sale of the house was difficult, even though I sold it for a fraction of its value. I recovered my most precious keepsakes, engaging a house clearance specialist to remove the things I wanted. I would never return there again: I knew it would sense me and pull me back in.
I’m still a man of science…but I’ve become superstitious.
Can you delete for me please, Dan? I'm having problems - I posted part two in the wrong place and can't delete it myself. :)
ReplyDelete