The moon will be shrouded in clouds tonight. There will be enough of a glow to walk without tripping, but there will be no light for hunting. This is good and bad. It's mostly bad, but it evens the playing field a little.
Fires are started down in the valley, as the people prepare for the evening meal and singing. There are salmon being smoked by the edge of the camp. Women and children twist hemp fiber into rope. The dogs of the camp slink by in silence hoping for scraps of meat to drop, intentionally or not. They will not let anyone or anything endanger those in the camp.
When the fire dies down to coals, the people will sleep. When the sun and the day animals rise, they will rise also. They will drink from their water sacks and eat some of the soft fruits they have collected.
This is how the day goes. And goes. And will always go.
Or at least how it was supposed to go.
The natural world and the human community in harmony. Perhaps one day day we'll return to it.
ReplyDeleteWhat David said, and I loved the images in here - I could hear the fire crackling and the industry of the world beyond human eyes. And that last line...ooh.
DeleteSomething came out of the forest and nobody saw it and that’s the true start and the end of it.
ReplyDeleteI love this road. The dark unsullied asphalt. The trees alongside. That yellow line. All ambit and remit and scope. Nothing so far has ever felt so pure.
White crescent moon, be sure and be whole and paint the land with silver.
Fear has found a new locale in my gut. For so long, I forgot where I was and I lived for long moments on some waste ground littered with ugly human detritus. I couldn’t recall my ties. Who I knew and who knew me and who I should be meeting. Until I watched a flyer blow past in a lukewarm breath of indifferent wind, an invitation to some protest march that had fallen in old puddles now dried and run over by the heedless and the careless and left stale and stained and abandoned, and then I heard someone call my name, a creaky voice urging itself to speak a litany of unknown unspoken words: ablutant. christomatic. gascavignate. scarlaneal.
Are these my secret names? My kin? Will our rendezvous in a box-store parking lot on some airless and nondescript day in the dusty suburbs of some shunned city in Ohio or Missouri become iconic in some other story, just not mine? Plus, you scold me in ugly phrases and with the harsh scrape and rasp of a crow. Why? Are we not friends or at least comrades in this life? What is happening? Is everything I’ve ever felt and known a mere dream? A stairwell and a platform, a butterfly decal, and passionate pointless quarrels. Life creating its own busybody self. It’s love, surely. Has to be. If it ain’t, we’re gone and left and forever know never no more.
The trailing echo of a half-heard song.
What was that you were saying? Watermelon? Coffee beans? Smokestacks? A small bear clutching a tree and squalling. A gendarme off duty and buying flowers for another. Exhaustion. Gut pain. The song of a troubadour lost in an alley in some arrondissement laughing its sorrow for all, dreaming its tearlike fall, guttural, garrulous, unglamorous. None of us. All of us. Your loss. Nobody’s gain.
Love it. The images, the word choices, those lovely long sentences. Especially the rhythm of the last paragraph. Thank you.
Delete(I wrote this yesterday)
ReplyDeleteHunkered down in his burgundy leather club chair, Lucifer glowered into the crackling fireplace flames and swirled his snifter of brandy, his thoughts darker than usual. A choice would have to be made; there was no avoiding it. His black soul was no longer entirely in the game. He’d tried to keep it to himself, but undoubtedly his entire household had noticed his fatigue, his ennui, his at times utter contempt for those around him. If word got out, bedlam would be the most pleasant word to describe what would happen to the world.
There hadn’t been a Satanic conclave for hundreds of years. Few were alive who had even heard tell of the proceedings, and by design no physical records had been kept.
He leaned back into the soft leather, stroking his pointed beard. The lack of institutional knowledge could play to his advantage. No one would know if he bent a rule or two. Or three. Or all of them. Hell, he could make it up from whole cloth, should it serve him.
And it would serve him. For there was only one candidate he knew of that he’d trust to take on in his place.
-----
The Neo-Classical revival by the Potomac was dark, the only interior light coming from an upstairs room on the west side. Stealing in, Lucifer paused outside that room, hidden in the shadows.
The scrawny, dead-eyed man who served as White House Deputy Chief of Staff was telling his children the fable of the scorpion and the frog. A fitting choice, Lucifer thought, but he doubted the man knew that the tale had come from the Middle East. If he’d known, he might have changed his bedtime story to one of Grimm’s more gruesome selections, or a passage from Ayn Rand.
Odd how the man’s voice did not change from the loud, singsong presentation he used on the job to something more appropriate for a child. At one point the pallid man glanced up, scowling, as if he’d sensed an intruder.
Good, good, Lucifer thought, mentally rubbing his hands together. Game recognizes game. One point in the man’s favor. He wrapped up the story with the final wonderful, awful line—you knew I was a scorpion all along—and bid his children pleasant dreams. Which came out in a deliciously creepy manner.
He gently shut the door, approached Lucifer and invited him downstairs for a drink.
2
Delete“I don’t believe we’ve formally met,” said the man. The living room was done in a utilitarian fashion, with muted colors and furnishings that would have felt at home in certain Berlin bunkers. How giddily evil it must feel, Lucifer thought, to hate the very genetics that comprise your corporeal form. To unleash that conflicted rage upon the world. Yet would the man still feel that energy if he assumed the dark throne?
The thought made him smile. He could make a most worthy successor. “Oh, we’ve surely met,” Lucifer said. “Perhaps you were preoccupied. But I’ve been by your side all along. With your soul in my back pocket, as it were, and all that entails.”
With sloth-like lethargy, the light of recognition came into the man’s dead-shark eyes. Then he went dark again. “I don’t recall ever making a bargain with you.”
Lucifer shrugged, took a sip of the inferior scotch the man had offered, tried not to make a face. “It’s easy enough to capture a man’s soul when it’s been abandoned on the side of the road.”
The eyes narrowed, suddenly mad enough to spit venom. “Get out of my house!”
“Oooh, I’m scared,” Lucifer said, holding up his hands. “What are you gonna do, call out your pathetic MAGA militia? I own most of their souls, as well. A few of them are on my payroll.”
The man looked to be considering his alternatives. “I’ll call…him.” He waved an extended index finger as if he’d just landed on something exceedingly clever. “Yeah. I’ll call him. The big man himself.”
A sulfurous laugh escaped Lucifer’s lips. “Are you joking? That orange buffoon has taken out five second mortgages on that nasty bit of tar in my basement that he calls a soul. Most likely, he’ll push you out a window rather than get on my bad side.”
The deputy chief of staff threw down the last dregs of his terrible scotch, slapped his glass on the table. “Enough,” he shouted. “You’re giving me a headache. Why are you here?”
Lucifer let an uncomfortable black silence ooze between them, and then said, “I’ll get right to the point. Soon I expect there will be a job opening in my realm. Would you be interested in … changing careers?”
The pale dead-eyed man blinked. He looked to be fighting back a grin, like he was face-to-face with an incompetent used car salesman and didn’t want to appear too eager. “I should be offended,” he said, his voice rising to its Congressional committee pitch and volume. “I’m trying to do some good in this country! I’m trying to make America white—I mean, great again! I’m trying to make America for Americans! I’m—”
“Oh, please,” Lucifer said. “You know as well as I do that evil always believes it’s doing good.”
There was more silence as the two men sat across from each other in the cold, dark room. “Would it kill you to put on a light in here?” Satan asked.
“Probably,” the deputy chief of staff said. “Yes, it might.” After another pause, he leaned forward, looked left then right, and lowered his voice. “This…career change. How much does it pay?”
Lucifer fought to keep his face expressionless. “You won’t be disappointed.”
The man grinned in reply.