(Glade, World, Master, Boy, Hero)

                                                 GLADE

There is a glacier.
Its blue tongue’s tip just tastes a frozen gorge.
There is a gorge, its walls shattered by cold; a once-green thing that, in dying, birthed a thousand aching fissures. It works its jagged way downhill, round ragged rifts and drifts until it comes upon a little frosted wood.
There is a wood, an island locked in ice.
Within this wood the gorge descends. It wanders and it wends; it brakes and all but ends outside a clearing wet with sun. And there, forking, its bent and broken arms embrace a strange, enchanted glade.

There is a glade.
And in this glade the black bears sleep, though salmon leap fat between falls. Here the field mouse draws no shadow, the eagle seeks no prey; they spend their while caressed by rays, and halcyon days are they. Here rabbit and fawn may linger, no longer need they flee. For in this timeless, taintless space, the Wild has ceased to be. (Outside the glade are shadow and prey, are ice and naked death. There blood may run freely. There the eagle, that thief, is a righteous savage, a noble fiend. But once in the glade he is dove, and has no taste for blood, running freely or otherwise).
And in this glade there nests a pool:  a dazzling, blue-and-silver jewel; profoundly deep, pristinely clear. All who sip find solace here, for this is the Eye of Being. They lap in peace, assuming blear, not knowing it is seeing. And ever thus this pool shall peer:  a silent seer, reflecting on—all that Is, and all Beyond.
(Outside the glade there lies a world where rivers ever run, where ghastly calves in random file revile a bitter sun. East, the day is born in mist. West she dies:  her rest, the deep. And North…North the Earth lies mute. Wind gnaws her hide, wind wracks her dreams. Wind screams like a flute in her white, white sleep).
But in the glade are tall, stately grasses, sunning raptly, spinning lore. Roots render the rhythms, blades bend without breeze, as signals ascend from the glade’s tender floor. (In this wise the glade weaves its word, airs its views. All the glade’s flora are bearers of news). They do not wither with fall, for in the glade there is no fall. They do not bind or wilt or brown—they gesture, spreading the mood, the mind; conveying, indeed, the very soul of the glade. As ever they have, as they shall evermore.
Bees do not hum here; they sing. They fatten the dream. Mellow and round are the timbres they sound, sweet is the music they bring. Birds do not sing here—they play. They carry the theme. Dulcet and warm are the strains they perform. Gifted musicians are they. (All in the glade are virtuosi. They were born to create. Melody, harmony, meter…are innate). Now the performance is lively and bright, now full, now almost still. For, though all in the glade may lean to the light, they must bend to the maestro’s feel.
And yet…there was a day, long ago in a dream, when this ongoing opus was torn. And on that day (so the lullaby goes) the wind brought a scream, and Dissonance was born.
There was a noise.
Moose tensed, their coffee eyes narrowed, their patient brows creased. Bees mauled the tempo, birds lost their place. The grass stood *****, all blades pointing east. There was a crash, and a shriek, and a naked, bleeding beast burst stinking through the fern, fell stumbling on its face.
Moose scattered:  unheard of. Sheep brawled, geese burst out of rhyme. The symphony, forever endeavored to soar sublime, fluttered, plunged, and, for all of a measure, ceased.
The pool was appalled…what manner brute—what kind of monster was this? Furless flank to forelimb, hide obscured by blood. As for its face…it had no face; only a look:  of shock frozen in time, of horror in amber. A deep welling rift ran temple to chin, halving the mask, caving it in. Such a grievous wound…the pool watched it stagger, on two legs and four, thrashing about till it came to a rise. There it labored for air, wiped the blood from its eyes, lashed at illusion, looked wildly round. Beholding the pool, the beast tumbled down.
And there this wretch plunged his thirst, drank his fill, fell back on his haunches.
The pool became still.
The two traded stares.
The glass read his features:  that durable eye pondered the wreckage and probed the debris. Revolted, the pool sought the succor of sky. But that thing remained—that face…in all creation…surely there could be…no other creature so ugly as he.
And he gazed in the glass.
Beneath the surface were…images…swimming in currents of shadow and light. He saw half-shapes and fragments…hideous men, exotic beasts…saw blue worlds of water, saw white worlds of ice…it was all so vague and unreal—yet somehow strangely familiar. Deeper he peered, but, as his mangled face neared, the sun smote the pool and the shapes disappeared. The brute pawed the ground and, dreaming he’d drowned, shook his head sharply and slowly looked round:
There were starlings at arm’s-length, transfixed with suspense, their tail feathers trembling, their dark eyes intense. Fantails and timber wolves, stepping in sync, paused for a sniff, stooped for a drink. Bees, pirouetting, threw light in his eyes. Seizing the moment, the pool pressed its hold.
And the glade revolved.
The freak watched it spin—saw the ferns’ greedy fingers reach round and close in, saw the tall grass rise high in an emerald sheen, swaying to rhythms from somewhere obscene. This place was madness; he struggled to stand, but, weak as he was, keeled over cold.
And the glade heaved a sigh, and the tall grass reclined, in curious patterns once rendered in whim. Far off in thunder the hard world replied, as iced pines exploded and screamed on the breeze. Down bore the sun, a chill just behind. The pool, grown blood-red, fended frost from its rim. Details dissolved in the oncoming tide. The pool dimmed to black. Night seeped through the trees.
Now flora found slumber while, pulsing below, the pool was infused with a soft ruby glow.
Soon birds bearing beech leaves, and needles of pine, laid down a spread and returned to the limb. But breath from the North blew their blanket aside. The wind grew in earnest, the air seemed to freeze.
And the wolf and the she-bear, of contrary mind, abhorring their task approached, looking grim. They sniffed him for measure, then, loathing his hide, growled their displeasure and dropped to their knees.
All night these glum attendants flanked his naked quaking form. The rising moon drew dreams in gray.
In time the man grew warm.

Morning swept through the glade in one broad stroke of the master’s brush, dappling the foliage with amber and rose. The pool was roused by the sweet pass of light. He opened his eye and the glade came alive:  into the whirlpool of life a thousand colors swam, chasing the scattering eddies of night. The magic of morning began.
Bluebird and goldfinch descended in rings, primaries clashing with robin and jay. Dollops of sun, repelled by their wings, spattered anew on the palette of day. Banking as one, the hues struck away.
There was a crowd.
And in this crowd that oddity sat, its chin on its chest, its rear pointing west. Its forepaws lay leaning, upturned and at rest. ***** and blood messed its muzzle and breast. Passed overnight. Or perhaps only dozed…tendril by tendril, claw by claw, the crowd decompressed:  the ring slowly closed.
And the stranger cried out and shifted his seat. His eyes sought his feet—rounding the arches, and topping the toes, the tall grass was questing. The little brute froze.
And the fauna took pause, and the flora went slack. Leaves followed talons, stems followed claws. Hooves tromped on paws as the crowd drifted back.
Not a breath taken. Not a move made. Stillness, like fog, enveloped the glade.
Now the grass tugged his feet, now the sea of jade splayed—left hand and right, the slender shafts reared. Gaining momentum, blade followed blade. The green field was torn till a deep swath appeared. The swath hurtled west, reflecting the sun. A hundred yards distant it died. Once more the grass stood, its tips spreading wide. The swath, born again, repeated its run.
Plain was the message, and clearly conveyed. The newcomer gawked. Confusion ensued.
The tall blades were swayed by the pulse of the glade.
But the swath was not renewed.
Something tiny bounced by. He ventured a peek, barely rolling an eye.
A chocolate sparrow, with pinfeathers black, popped past an ankle and paused to look back. The bird cocked its head, rocked in place, hopped ahead. It fluttered. It freaked. It glared and stopped dead. Vexed to its limit, it burst into flight.
The sitting thing watched till it passed out of sight.
Now a breeze bent his back, picked him half off his stern. The wind, done its best, grew flustered at last. It trailed to the west, thrilling lilies it passed. It wound round the willows and didn’t return.
So the fauna repaired to the live oak’s shade.
A strange kind of stupor fell over the glade.
From deep in the wood came a shape through the trees—a pronghorn, perhaps, or an elk swift and sure. But up limped a moose, a flyport with fur, low in the belly and wide at the knees. Wizened he was, scarcely able to see. Neither vision, nor vigor, nor velvet had he. He hobbled abreast, then groveled or died, his nose facing west, his tail flung aside.
The brute merely glazed.
But the glade was unfazed.
Those long shafts reshuffled. A tense moment passed.
The ominous shadows of badgers were cast. Three left their holes, as if to attack. They pedaled like moles and the stranger jumped back. He stumbled, fell flailing, and, kicking his guide, threw out his arms and tumbled astride. First he stepped on his tail, then he stepped on his pride. The moose bellowed twice and shook side to side while the little pest clung to his high, homely hide.
And the old moose unbent to his knees by degrees. He reeled like a drunk down the path of the breeze. Together they lurched through a break in the trees. And all morning long, and on through the day, both beggar and bearer would buckle and sway. The moose lost his temper, but never his way.
And the wind blew the sun to its deep ruby rest; the scrub, in obeisance, inclined to the west. Their slow taffy shadow in slinking would seem to slip round the rocks like a snake in a dream.
And the sun became a beacon, and the underbrush a stream. The wide Earth took their weight in stride, and the wind named him Hero.

                                               WORLD

When the sun was low the old moose began to stumble, at last limping to a halt beside a swift river lined with stunted pines. He’d half-expected a somewhat graceful dismount, but Hero, dug in like a tick, wasn’t about to let go. The moose knelt until his joints objected, shimmied, bucked, and with a sudden whirl sent the little bother flying.
Hero scraped himself out of the dirt and looked up forlornly. The ancient moose, his good eye gone bad, glared a long minute before hobbling away, his bony **** rocking with dignity, his scraggly tail fighting off imaginary flies.
Hero managed a few steps and dropped, staring in disbelief as the moose disappeared between half-frozen pines. He remained on his knees for the longest time, his jaw hanging, waiting for the moose—waiting for anything to show. At last a ruckus to his left snapped him out of it. His head ratcheted around.
Fifteen feet off the bank, three screaming gulls were dancing on an immense stone outcropping, fighting over a rapids-tossed sockeye. Hero was instantly famished. He wobbled to his feet and stumbled twice wading out, only regaining his balance by leaning against the current while rapidly wheeling his arms. The shrieking gulls reluctantly backed off as he stepped in slow-motion through the rushing water. Hero lunged at the slapping fish, cracked an ankle on the rock, and hopped around howling with both hands holding his shin. One foot was as good as none in the surging water. He went right under. Before he knew it he was being swept downriver.
This was glacial meltwater, so cold he quickly lost all sensation. Hero swallowed a mouthful and surfaced fighting for life; too disoriented to combat the current, too numb to realize his waving arm was striking something solid. That solid something turned out to be a swirling clump of rotted birches tangled up in scrub. He embraced one of these trunks as the mass slammed against isolated rocks, kicked his feet wildly, and somehow hauled himself aboard. The raft ricocheted rock to rock until repeated impacts sent it spinning. Giddy from the whirling and soaking, he clung freezing to the trees, retching continuously while the river roared in his ears. Through spray and tears he made out only cartwheeling fragments of the world.
But then the river was widening, its fury dissipating. The raft was approaching the sea. Hero gasped as the seemingly boundless Pacific swallowed the broad red belly of the sun. And as he spun he was treated to a panoramic, breathtaking spectacle:  the great indigo ocean with its slow traffic of driftwood and ice—voiced-over by the dismal calls of foraging gulls, and broken rhythmically by intermittent glimpses of the river’s rocky banks growing farther and farther apart. Whirling as it went, the dying man’s soul was taken by the sea.

At the 59th Parallel in winter, the Pacific coast plays host to numberless floes and minor bergs orphaned from Alaskan coastal glaciers. Hero cruised into a watery gridlock on a boat of ice-glazed birches, one bit of flotsam among the rest.
The cold wouldn’t let him move, wouldn’t let him breathe, wouldn’t let him think. He lay supine, feet crossed and hands clasped, terrified that to budge was to roll. An ice patina grew over the tangled trees like a white fungus—this growth soon webbed his fingers and toes, speckled his chest and thighs, glazed his hair and face, danced and disintegrated with his breath’s tapering plumes.
Floes and frozen-over debris tended to group with passing collisions; Hero’s married birches bit by bit accrued a mostly-submerged tangle of trunks and branches, all becoming fast in a creeping ice cement. Night came on just as resolutely, until land was only a flat black memory. The raft moved silently over the deep, still accepting the occasional gentle impact. And the floes became thicker and wider in a freezing doldrums; soon the proximate sea was all a broken field of packed ice, bobbing infinitesimally with the planet’s pulse.
Long ghostly strands of fog came striding over the torn ice field. They leaned this way and that, their mourners’ skirts tearing and patching and leaning anew. The ghosts were there to seal it:  their locked fingers and gray diaphanous wings were quickly becoming a wholly opaque descending shroud, its boundaries lost in the soughing wind.
Collisions came less and less. Darkness and silence, breaching some previously impenetrable barrier, began to take up residence in Hero’s chilling marrow. From his very center broke a weak little cry of refusal, of denial, as mind mustered frame in one desperate bid for freedom. His skin, frozen to the raft, peeled right off, and at that his inner brave succumbed. Hero’s smashed head arched back. His face contorted frightfully while the little lamp fluttered and paled within.
A raucous chorus slowly worked its way through the mist. It emerged a few hundred yards off—a tiny, terrified barking, growing in clarity as it grew in volume and urgency. It was a sound beacon. Hero strained eagerly, and when for one excruciating minute the beacon was cut off by a large passing body, was certain death had claimed him. Then it was back, and his heartbeat was quickening. He caught a heaving sound…something was moving his way down a wide tributary between floes. Hero could hear a gasping and snorting, accompanied by a hard slapping and splashing. The sounds vanished. In a moment the raft was rocked from below.
A sputtering muzzle blew salt in his eyes. A cold slimy flipper flapped across his chest and slapped about his face. The fur seal barked directly in his ear. Whiskers raked his dead cheek. The seal barked again.
Back below the surface it slipped. Hero listened anxiously as the splashing sound retreated whence it came.
The seal swam off perhaps a hundred feet and began barking hysterically.
From much farther off came a profusion of answering barks.
The seal swam back to Hero’s raft, circling and calling, circling and calling, while the responders approached en masse.
Now a sallow beam could be seen cutting through the fog. Several more showed vaguely along a plane yawing with some huge, barely discernible object.
A herd of northern fur seals burst into sight, barking madly, beating through the ice. They converged on Hero’s raft, really bellowing now.
Those odd yellow beams came in pursuit, and soon were close enough to eerily illuminate a gigantic wooden vessel parting the ice. The seals barked ferociously. Whenever the vessel leaned away, those nearest Hero’s raft would absolutely howl.
The fog deepened, condensed, crystallized, and then the collective light of a dozen lanterns was playing over a low, listing nightmare. Hero could hear the shouts of many aggressive men, but the waterborne seals, rather than scatter, boarded the ice and redoubled their din, fighting their way onto his quickly mobbed raft.
The sealers hurled serrated spears even as they clambered down rope ladders. When these men reached the ice the seals snapped and gnashed madly, refusing to be dislodged. The sealers lost all composure with the thrill of the hunt:  wielding clubs, spears, and hatchets—sometimes using iron bludgeons or any old utensil handed down—they crushed skulls, dragged carcasses, hooked animals still spurting and bleating. Clinging though he was, Hero was flabbergasted by the way the slipping and scampering men went about their butchery, hacking and smashing more with passion than with precision. But not a single seal attempted to flee—throughout the carnage they barked all the louder, egging on their slayers, carcass by carcass drawing the impassioned sealers to Hero’s ice-locked raft.
It was all so hazy and macabre. Hero’s eyes rolled back, and the next thing he knew he was sitting hunched on the vessel’s sopping deck. Two men were rubbing his limbs while another poured warm water down his back. He looked around in shock. The very notion of a boat containing more than one or two individuals—a sort of floating tribe—was way beyond his ken; so to see it, to have it come looming out of nothingness, was an experience almost supernatural.
He remembered some of those fur-covered men force-feeding him mouthfuls of halibut and seal fat, and he recalled a small group standing around him, shouting words that made no sense at all. After that he had a very vivid memory of their angry little chief repeatedly punching him while hollering one angry little word over and over and over. Hero couldn’t make out his inquisitor’s face, for the large feather-lined hood quite engulfed the man’s head, yet he could see those quick eyes flash as they caught the oil lamps’ light. Finally this man stopped boxing Hero’s ear. He stared hard. In these remaining decades of the tenth century it was fully within his power to administer as he saw fit—he could have ordered Hero’s immediate execution and not a man of his crew would have objected. He hesitated only because there wasn’t a hint of resistance in his prisoner’s pinched and frightened eyes. He leaned forward, studying the wound that all but split Hero’s face in two before grunting, raising his right arm, and yanking down its seal hide sleeve. Attached to the stump of his forearm was a primitive prosthesis consisting of a thick oak cap strapped to the arm with lengths of gut, and, hammered squarely into the center of that cap, a broad, cruelly hooked blade chiseled from a narwhal’s tusk. He held this obscenity in front of Hero’s eyes, traced the face’s deep diagonal rift, and once more demanded his captive’s identity. Hero then vaguely remembered being dragged along a tilting deck and thrown into the ship’s tiny hold. He retained a strong mental image of landing in a place of musty odors and dank projections.
There came a soft scuffling in the darkness, and presently a blind and exceedingly old woman felt her way to his side, mumbling as she approached. Her speech was comprised not of words; it was rather a running gibberish of cooing vowels and clucking consonants. The old woman was as mad as her circumstances; sick with sea and solitude, bedeviled by age and confinement. She sat cross-legged, patting her withered palms up his arm until she came to his face. Her strange mumbling soliloquy rose and fell as her bony fingers daintily explored the newly opened wound. Hero let his head fall back in her lap. A pair of hands like emaciated tarantulas scurried through the filth and tiny bodies until they came upon an old otter’s pelt bag that held her secrets. The woman loosened the bag’s cord and extracted an assortment of herbs, sniffing each in succession. She then scooped a handful of blubber from a bowl made of a previous occupant’s skull, kneaded the selected herbs into the blubber, and commenced gently massaging the wound, clucking and cooing while the black rats watched and waited.
For nine interminable days Hero remained in that cold, stinking compartment, rocking back and forth between life and death. The old woman never gave up on him. She clung to him during his seizures, rubbed his limbs vigorously when his blood pressure fell. She gathered various accumulated skins and, using woven strands of her own long hair, sewed him a multilayered, body-length wraparound with arm sleeves and very deep pockets, working by touch with a needle formed of a cod’s rib. By this same method she was able to fashion a pair of heavily lined snug-fitting moccasins. The old woman made him eat; she masticated the cod and halibut their keepers pitched into the hold, then shoved the results down his throat with a long gnarly forefinger. She called into his screaming nightmares, talking him out of sleep and back into their foul little reality. Together they lowed in the dark, while the keel groaned along and the waves beat time.
At the end of those dark nine days his strength was restored, but not his mind. Once again he was taken on deck.
The vessel had reached a chain of remote wind-swept islands, rocky and treeless, naked except for patchy carpets of hardy grass. These islands stretched far to the west, shrouded in mist. The ship was making for the smallest; just a chip on the sea. When they reached depth for anchorage Hero was hustled into a rowboat and lowered over the side. He looked up, saw two men climbing down by rope. These men positioned themselves at the oars and slowly rowed toward the islet. Seated between them, Hero felt like a man being led to his execution. He snuck a peek. The rowers’ heads were lowered, their features completely obscured by the heavy feathered hoods; they had all the somberness of pallbearers. Not a word passed between them as they rigidly worked their oars:  the only sound was the dip-and-purl of wood in water. Hero looked away. Against his will, he found his eyes drawn to that rocky islet waiting in the fog.
Not a bird, not a sea lion, not a shrub. It was lonesome beyond imagination.
Upon landfall one of the men used a spear’s point to **** Hero ashore. While his companion steadied the boat, he removed a skin sack full of half-frozen halibut, followed by a few armloads of precious tinder. These articles he tossed at Hero’s feet. He resumed his place at the oars and, without looking back, used the blunt end of his spear to shove off.
Hero watched the boat moving away, watched the men climbing their ropes, watched the boat being hauled aboard. As the mysterious vessel receded he saw a number of those silent men standing at the stern, stolidly returning his stare. Their hooded forms grew smaller and smaller, finally becoming indistinct. The vessel was swallowed up in fog.
Hero looked around, at a desolate world of rock and drifting ice. In the sunless pools at his feet a few purplish, flaccid sea anemones were waving in a sickly phosphorescence; along the rocks ran a tattered quilt of wild grass and lichen. It was the end of the world. He began to pace in his anxiety, only to crumple bit by bit inside his furs. At last he just sat with his face in his arms and wept. When he could weep no more he raised his head and opened his red, swollen eyes.
There were gulls all around him, staring like statuary in a madman’s garden. Standing in their midst were auks and puffins and murres, absolutely spellbound, unable to lean away. The silence was broken only by a wild, fitfully pursing wind—a wind that seemed, eerily, on the verge of producing syllables. And on that wind a flock of terns was rising slowly, their beady eyes fixed on the lone sitting man. The terns watched as he trembled, and banked as he swooned.
Then, beating as one, they threw back their wings and blew into the sun.

There was a blaze.
Behind that blaze a pair of black, bug-like eyes met his and immediately withdrew. A man wrapped in caribou hides stood abruptly, drawing angry swarms of sparks.
The Aleut peered queerly into the icy Pacific, his craggy profile merging seamlessly with a jumble of rocks showing just beyond his shoulder. The man was very tall, closer to seven feet than to six, and thin almost to emaciation.
He was also a mute. Soon enough he would display a talent for communication through gutturals, but now his body language spoke louder than words. It told the shivering stranger that he was not only disliked—he was feared.
The islander removed the hides he’d piled on the sleeping man. He produced a bone awl and strategically pierced a caribou hide, draped the hide over the old woman’s handiwork, and ran a cord of tightly woven tendons crosswise through his made holes, knotting it at the bottom to create a kind of cloak. He then killed the fire, heaped wood, fish, and remaining hides into Hero’s arms, and led him to a tiny cove where his long skin canoe lay in the grass. This was not the one-man kayak used by his people for centuries, but an actual canoe modeled on the graceful vessels he’d observed under the control of northern coastal tribesmen. After dragging it into the water he perched Hero in the fore, placed the cargo in the middle, and stepped into the rear like a gaunt furry spider. The Aleut dug out a paddle and began pulling with smooth strokes of surprising muscularity, his black eyes trained on his quiet companion’s back.
So began their long island-hopping journey. They stepped the chain one stone at a time, living off the sea. But much as the islander disliked Hero’s vapid company, it was not in his nature to proceed expeditiously; his people, remote as they were, had learned to count not in days but in generations. Given this, the Aleut took his time. He showed Hero how to build shelters of skin and gut; during bad weather the two would sit on an island in utter silence while rain hammered on their stretched seal-intestine window. And one very clear night he pointed out constellations while attempting to demonstrate, using broad gestures, just how the brighter heavenly bodies were in perfect alignment with the Aleutians. Hero followed his guide’s gestures as a pet follows its master’s movements and, like a pet, soon became bored. The Aleut did not grow flustered. He grew ever more wary:  behind that granite, weather-beaten exterior squirmed a very primitive imagination. Superstitious as he was, the Aleut was almost certain Hero could read his mind. So one time, and one time only, he threw a searing look at the back of Hero’s bowed and listing head. After a long minute of vigorous thought-projection he shifted his gaze aside. The brute appeared to feel this shift, and gently turned his head. And both saw the ocean break rhythm, and watched as otters and sea lions surfaced, noted their progress, and slipped without tremor beneath the waves.
In spring the fogs lifted. The grimness gave way to serenity, a generous sun buttered the dappled sea. On the islands grass grew lushly. Wildflowers leapt on the color-starved eye.
And one day the islander’s nape itched. He turned to see a flock of arctic terns casually tracking them under a gorgeous, white-plumed sky. As the day progressed the terns came drifting high overhead, slowly but surely taking the lead.
The Aleut squinted against the sun. He’d never known these birds to pursue a westerly migratory pattern—the terns were distributing themselves into a rough wedge shape, much like geese on the wing.
For a while he let the flock be his guide. Then, to test his stars, he cunningly steered his canoe north. At once the wedge disintegrated. Not until he’d lowered his eyes and pulled purposefully to the west did the disrupted pattern reassert itself. He peered up timidly. The wedge was now in the shape of a perfect arrowhead.
Just so were the fates of mariners and aviators inextricably entwined. At night, once the Aleut had landed his canoe on the nearest pearl, the terns would light in a quiet circle and remain until sunrise. As the Aleut and Hero took to sea, the flock would quickly form that same authoritative pattern.
In time the Aleut paddled his companion clear to the westernmost islands of the Aleutian chain. His people had dwelt, even here, a thousand years and more, but no contemporary islander knew for certain what lay beyond. Legend told of an enormous land mass forever gripped by cold, where a cruel people waylaid innocent seafarers for barbaric sacrificial rites.
So here the islander paused. But even as he vacillated he noticed the terns were veering south.
If the Aleut had been able to curse aloud he would have been vociferous. He was being compelled to follow an even less desirable course—that of the unknown open ocean. Now he looked upon his passenger’s hunched back not with fear but with loathing. He took a deep breath, rolled his shoulders, and defiantly continued west. The wedge broke up immediately. The terns dive-bombed the canoe, whirled around the windmilling Aleut, tore skyward and hovered determinedly. Something huge broke surface behind them, but the Aleut was way too frayed to turn. He dropped his head, a beaten man, and began paddling south. Little by little the birds returned to formation.
The tiny canoe had no business going up against the mighty Pacific. It would soon have been swallowed and smashed, had not the terns veered in close formation whenever the distant sea appeared too rough. Once he’d lost his bearings the Aleut religiously followed their serpentine course.
The days began to warm.
Now the sea’s bounty all but leapt in the canoe.
It seemed the Aleut was forever catching the finest currents, practically sliding down a corridor entirely free of peril. In this manner he was able to safely navigate waters no such craft had mastered before.
They were proceeding south by southwest, awed children of a plenteous, generous sea. The going became easier by the day, the ocean heavier with cod.
Nights the Aleut drifted comfortably, but a lifetime of wariness made him wake off and on. He’d slowly rise to find Hero sitting quietly under the stars, and soon he’d see, pallid in moonlight, a large body neatly pleating the ocean’s surface. The shape would precede them a while, only to vanish without a ripple.
All this strangeness kept the Aleut’s heart in a whirl, though he took pains to maintain his poise.
To allay his fear he kept a flat black stone planted squarely between them. It was his oldest treasure; an oddity he’d taken off the body of a mauled Tlingit woman when he was a child. Who she was, and how she’d come by the stone, were mysteries far beyond him, for no such piece had ever been known to Aleut or Inuk.
The stone was smooth and had been worked perfectly round. Bright yellow specks were scattered about its dull black face.
Long ago someone had etched a quaint and clumsy rune on that flat black surface—it was the crude, universal symbol for sun:  a broad circle surrounded by several rays. When the stone was rubbed against a pelt it possessed the curious property of growing quite warm and bright in the rune’s grooves, while the surface remained cool and dull.
This stone, both friend and overlord, had always “spoken to him”. It caused him to become restless when it was time to move on, and allowed him to relax when a destination had been reached. In this way he’d come to the familiar islet and discovered the unconscious little man. Just so:  the stone, he was sure, was responsible for making him “feel bad” as he watched the stranger shiver, and “feel better” once he’d built him a life-saving fire from the small pile of tinder he’d found nearby.
By now, however, the Aleut was wholly disenchanted with his stone, and deeply regretted having done its mysterious bidding. Never before had he been so long from sight of land, and never before had he felt so very, very small. The unimagined immensity of the Pacific was really starting to get to him when, after all their while at sea, a gray, seductive haze broke the horizon. They had reached another chain of islands, an Asian chain, the dark and smoky Kurils. Here a cold current kept the climate cool and foggy, and the chill, along with the prevalence of otter and seal, made him feel almost at home.
But this place gave him the creeps; he was a stranger, a trespasser somewhere sacred. There was a looming quality to the island mountains that made him extraordinarily aware of his transience, his pettiness, his puniness. He grew more and more cautious, sure their progress was being monitored—he could have sworn he saw wraiths in the trees, and wolves padding warily in the brush. The big islands looked on breathlessly. All along the rocky cliffs, thousands of auks and puffins followed the canoe in dead silence, their heads turning simultaneously, their countless tiny eyes peering redly through the fog. As the weeks passed, the Aleut’s anxiety was manifested in tics and sighs, and he’d cringe each time the crimson sun sank behind those black volcanic summits. In his imagination the mountains would rise right out of the sea, as though to pluck him. But the islands, in all their dignity, would always refuse to acknowledge so meek a stranger, and return their eyes to sea. The Aleut would hang his head, and timidly paddle by.
Then for days and days he pulled his weary canoe west—through a strait parting two mighty islands not part of the chain, and thence across a sea that was a warm, enticing bath. Spring had come to the East Asian coastal waters, and the Ainu, alone and in groups, were venturing deeper in search of increasing bounty. The Aleut, absorbed in his thoughts of sweet climate and bitter fate, was unaware they’d been spotted.
This first meeting between strangers of different worlds was a brief and awkward one. A lone Ainu fisherman, seeing the Aleut come paddling out of the unknown, dropped his net and turned to stone. The Aleut, for his part, instinctively froze with his body turned half-away to make the leanest target possible. Their stares locked. Never had the Aleut seen a face so heavily bearded, and never hair so fair. The Ainu began banging on his bronze catch pail. Other fishers soon appeared from the north and south, effectively cutting off the canoe. The Aleut caressed his stone and looked to the sky. The wedge had vanished. He put down his head and paddled for all he was worth.
With the word out, uncountable fishing craft appeared out of the blue and broke into hot pursuit, their pilots determined to force the canoe ashore.
Suddenly they were in sight of land, and the sea was absolutely riddled with watercraft. A train of small boats cast off from the mainland, even as a posse of two-man coracle-like tubs began to surround the battered skin canoe, their inhabitants calling back and forth in astonishment at the sight of these dark, savage newcomers. But the pursuing little coastal men, banging excitedly on the sides of their boats, were not Ainu. They had very straight black hair, prominent cheekbones, and strangely slanted eyes. And their speech, oddly marvelous as it was, was a rapid series of coos, chirps, and barks. Their boats formed a tight semi-circle around the canoe, forcing the Aleut to approach the mainland. The little men banged their boats maniacally, with more joining in as the canoe neared shore.
A bit farther south was a natural harbor swarming with fishing vessels of every description. As the canoe was forced into this harbor, people along the rocky coast began banging whatever they could get their hands on, until the air was filled with their lunatic percussion.
Tiny brown men came running along a soft yellow cliff overlooking the harbor, gesturing wildly. The canoe was squeezed between a chain of tubs and the shore, and, as it slowed, the tempo and ferocity of the banging decreased accordingly. When the canoe came to a halt the banging and shouting stopped. Hero creaked to his feet. The first North American to set foot on Asian soil stepped out shakily.
There followed the profoundest silence imaginable.
A second later it was as if a dam had burst.
Hundreds of hysterical, yammering voices erupted from hundreds of hysterical, clinging men and women. Hero was spun around, jostled about, handed along. He stared into their astounded, pinched little faces, and the sun, pulsing between their heads as he was turned, repeatedly stabbed his eyes. There came an excited outburst and frantic splashing which could only have been the Aleut’s violent demise, and then Hero was somehow limping alongside a primitive fishing village, blindly following a narrow dirt path that hugged the yellow cliff’s base. The warm spring sun caught the dust as he shambled. He rounded a bend and stopped.
Half a dozen children stood in his way, too fascinated to run. A chatter and scuffle rose behind him. He looked back to see that he was now in the midst of a small crowd of these children, and that more were running up with cries of amazement.
A stone struck his shoulder. As Hero turned another glanced off his chest.
A moment later he was being pelted from all sides, and the giggles and gasps had become something wildly unreal. He dropped to his knees in a hail of hurled rocks, covered his head with his arms, and slithered up the path on his belly.
A new voice broke in; an older, authoritative voice.
The children scampered off squealing.
Hero, shaken to his feet, found himself face to face with a diminutive, shouting, incomprehensible old man. The old man threw his arm around Hero’s waist and, jabbering all the while, led him to a secondary path cut into the cliff’s face. This path sloped gently upward over the waves. Together they picked their way to a place maybe halfway up, where the cliff’s face was honeycombed with natural alcoves and dug-out caves. Most of these spaces were used as one-man shelters; a few, cut deeper in the earth, as family hives. Strange gabbing people slid out of these holes like worms, reaching, but the little old man, who was evidently a little old man of some stature, embraced his find possessively and shouted them back inside.
The path narrowed as they climbed.
At its summit spread the upscale end of the neighborhood. Hero was led to a hovel nestled amid dozens of similar hovels, all scattered around a dainty stream wending between patches of stunted vegetation.
The old man’s place was basically a one-room hut fashioned of earth and salvaged boat hulls, with a slender side-yard surrounded by dry, dusty hedges. But inside it was clean and tidy, with rice paper partitioning and, built into the far earthen wall, a miniature stone fireplace. The old man sat his guest in the exact center of the room. There he fed him scraps from his bowl, using long sticks to pluck out bits of fish and clumps of tiny, starchy white pellets.
He studied the brute closely, watched him chew, walked round and round him. He poked here. He pinched there.
And that night he lit a fire on his crushed-shell hearth.
Hero curled up on a mat where the gossip of flames could reach him. Nearby, at his delicate wicker table, the old man sat in semi-darkness, illuminated only from the waist down.
But his eyes were alive. They spat and darted as they reflected the fire’s light, and, when at last they’d begun to sputter, his scratchy little voice came pattering out of the dark, muttering something vile and oddly modulated, sometimes in a whisper, sometimes in a gathering snarl.
Hero feigned slumber, unable to ignore those paired ominous flashes. Still, the room was cozy, and the fire warm, and the play of light and shadow kicked sleep in his eyes.

In the morning he woke in the old man’s side-yard, his head pounding, a rusty iron clamp securely fastened around his neck. This clamp was attached to the outermost link of a crude three-foot chain, and the link at the other end to a long stake driven into eight inches of solid rock. The chain and stake, like the clamp, were hammered of local iron. The clamp was too tight for comfortable swallowing, the chain too short to make standing possible. Hero could, however, spread out on his chest and stretch an arm to a low row of hedges. By parting the tangled undergrowth he had a limited view of the fishing village below, and of the harbor beyond. As the days passed he was able to tweak himself a view-space discernible only from his peculiar vantage. He accomplished this by gently breaking small branches strategically, then guiding their interrupted growth with the utmost tenderness. It was his secret garden.
He had no memory—none whatsoever—of being staked here. Obviously the old man hadn’t set this up overnight. Hero’s mind prodded timidly…how many others had been chained to this spot, and why?
But over the subsequent weeks and months he went beyond caring. Each day was the same:  just after dawn the old man would storm into the tiny side-yard swinging his reed whip wildly. The lashings were savage and unremitting. The old man, except for his eyes, would be mute. Only his whip need speak. And the snap of his reed had but one message:  when you see this whip you go down, and you go down immediately.
The naked savage, scarred head to foot, learned to go prostrate on the moment. Even so, the old man couldn’t resist the temptation to indulge in the occasional good old, all-out thrashing. And after each session he would toss the prisoner a vile mess of dead fish and rotting leftovers.
Hero lived like this for many months, lost in a confused world of pain and anticipation. Perversely, he came to look forward to the bite of that whip, for, whether he flogged him in passion or just for sport, the old man was always sure to make it personal. It seemed their relationship might go on forever.
But one day there was a great commotion in the sleepy little fishing village. Hero parted the leaves and beheld a small train of oblong coaches at rest near the harbor. Large oxen yoked in pairs lolled between the carriages, immune to the clamor around them. There were dark shaggy horses and colorfully dressed Bactrian camels. The horses and camels were tethered in the rear, but were occasionally paraded around the carriages by little men wielding long painted bamboo poles. The whole affair was exotic and mesmerizing, eccentric and profane. Hero watched all day in amazement, infected by the hubbub, though he was totally mystified by the crowd’s fascination on the carriages’ far side.
And late that afternoon he saw the old man come walking out of that crowd, talking heatedly with another man. The stranger was shorter and broader than the old man, with long stringy hair and long stringy mustaches. He saw them climbing the path, saw them crawl inside a hole lashing furiously. They were lost from view for a minute, then popped up big as life. Hero glowed and curled up eagerly as they approached.
The old man and stranger came into the narrow side-yard still arguing. The old man grabbed Hero by the hair and twisted until he was facing the newcomer.
The stranger had oily, porous skin, and a round but grave countenance. His highly slanted eyes were bright and restless. He studied Hero’s mutilated face with keen interest before borrowing the old man’s reed. When Hero scraped at his feet he grunted and returned the reed.
The stranger pulled out something shiny and hefted it in his hand. He then raised his other hand while considering Hero, as though weighing him too. The old man’s eyes glinted, and for an instant his expression became grotesquely servile. The stranger and old man, facing, nodded curtly in unison. The stranger dropped the shiny thing onto the old man’s itching palm. The old man whipped Hero frantically before taking a small ax to the chain. A few hard blows split a link, the broken link was bent back by the tool’s shaft, and the prisoner was at last released.
The old man handed the stranger a short hempen rope. The stranger bowed deeply. He then tied an end of the rope through one of the remaining links and began dragging Hero along. Hero’s hands sought the old man, who kicked and cursed him all the way to the path. The three stumbled single-file to the bottom. The old man waved his arms and shouted hysterically, trotting behind until he ran out of breath. But he got in a final kick and, before he came to a gasping halt, managed to lash Hero once for old time’s sake, and to spit on him twice for luck.

There were five carriages; a long one in the center hitched to four oxen, and two smaller coaches in the front and rear with a pair of oxen on each. The carriages were old and battered, built of splitting wood slats and rusted iron braces. Various hides, spare wheels, and a hundred odds and ends were tied to the sides and roofs. Hero’s new master, using him as a ram, shoved him through the crowd to the long carriage. He hauled him up the single wood step and watched the crowd’s reaction. Children hid behind mothers, mothers hissed and jeered, men spat in that smashed, disgusting face.
Satisfied, Hero’s master twisted the rope tighter and dragged him through the hide flap that served as the carriage’s rear wall.
A strange ruckus began at their entrance.
Inside the carriage were bulky shapes and quirky movements, yet the immediate and overwhelming impression was one of unbelievable stench. Hero, instantly covered with flies, was kicked and shoved down a foot-wide aisle. The carriage’s walls were riddled with black flecks of old dried blood, the floor coated with standing *****, a variety of small carcasses, and some clinging, indefinable slime. But the living contents of this hell were so horrifying, and so unexpected, that Hero at once dropped to his knees. Observing this, master grabbed a whip off the wall and lashed him along the floor.
A number of bamboo cages lined either side of the carriage, each four feet high, four feet wide, and three feet deep. In the first cage to their left, a quadruple amputee dangled in a leather harness in a cloud of flies, jealously gnawing a chicken carcass balanced on his belly. The second cage held a man who had been burned over ninety per cent of his body, and the third a middle-aged woman with no eyes or tongue, her head shaved. The next cage housed a fully grown black leopard, its bright eyes fixed on the horrified newcomer. Then an empty cage, and finally a cage containing a demented man whose long yellow nails were busily raking a face deeply scarred and bleeding.
The first cage against the opposite wall held two girls rolling in their own excrement. Siamese twins unable to part, they had developed a unique method of locomotion, and now executed a three-quarters cartwheel in Hero’s direction, their mangled, severely bitten hands attempting to reach him through the bars. In the cage next to theirs a naked dwarf glowered menacingly, his eyes following coldly as Hero’s master shoved him down the narrow aisle, occasionally pausing to lash a cage. The hissing and howling increased as each prisoner beheld the new neighbor.
The third cage held an intensely sick adult Bornean sun bear, so confined it was entirely unable to move. Its hide was a patchwork of scraggly fur and grayish skin, glistening with odd eruptions. It rolled its sunken eyes in Hero’s direction, its muzzle twitching feebly.
The next cage contained a man who was frightfully diseased. Broad fungal patches covered his face and limbs, terminating in waxy folds that dangled like a rooster’s wattles. Welling sores spotted his chest and back. His eyes were bugged and sallow; his lower lip drooped below his chin. He barked wetly at Hero’s passing legs.
The second-to-last cage housed a rare, completely hairless Chinese albino, and the last cage a very tall, skeletal woman. The albino snapped at Hero while repeatedly banging his head against the cage. The woman hissed and coiled like a snake, her spine arching amazingly.
Master hauled Hero to the empty cage on his left, swung its door open with his foot, and forced him to his knees by pushing down with all his weight. He kicked and punched until Hero had been squeezed inside, then shut and secured the wide bamboo door.
Master inched his way back down the carriage, hammering the **** of his whip on each cage as he passed. There was a glimpse of daylight as he lifted the flap.
Once he’d departed, the carriage grew eerily silent.
Hero cautiously turned his head. Less than a foot away, the black leopard was frozen in place, one paw waving hypnotically in his face. The beast’s fangs were bared, its ears straight back, its eyes glistening. Hero turned ever so slowly, until he was looking into the eyes of the demented man in the final cage. The man cocked his head quizzically. A second later he was screaming his lungs out in a bizarre downward spiral.
At once the carriage erupted. The freaks shrieked and scrabbled, the leopard spun in place. Directly across the aisle, the albino hurled himself against the bars of his cage. He batted his face with his fists, threw back his head, and just howled and howled and howled. The snake woman curled even tighter, her long scrawny legs entwined behind her head.
Hero sat with breath held, absolutely silent, absolutely motionless. He very, very slowly closed his eyes.

Later that night the flap was flung high. The menagerie came alive as master, weirdly illuminated by moonlight, slowly made his way down the aisle carrying a skin sack oozing blood. He stopped at each cage to toss in a dying chicken and a handful of smelt.
When he reached Hero’s cage he looked down thoughtfully.
He extracted a quivering chicken and held it above the cage so that blood dripped on the brute’s deeply pleated forehead. Hero lowered his eyes. Master’s face darkened. He smashed the bird against the cage, over and over, a vein throbbing in his temple. Finally he hissed and displayed the limp chicken high over the albino’s head. The albino yelped and kicked, thrusting his hand up between the bars and jerking it back to lick away the blood rolling down his forearm.
Master eyed Hero coldly before pointedly dropping the chicken into the albino’s searching hands.
Master hissed again. He slowly made his way out.
Soon there was a commotion outside. The carriage rocked a bit before settling. Hero, turning in his cage to peek through a rift in the wood, saw horses being urged forward. He could hear men shouting. The carriage rocked again. He looked up and saw the gibbous moon suspended in mist. For just a second something wedge-shaped cut across its soft white face.
But then the oxen were grunting, the wheels had been freed, and the horses drawn abreast. Master’s lash spat left and right, and the show proceeded…west.

                                              MA­STER

She was very round and very small, with very short, very shaggy black hair. Her arms bore the scars of numerous bites from beast and man, and around her neck ran long wheals from a particularly savage owner. Hero, having spent the better part of the morning watching master storm in and out of a strange screaming house, now watched him drag the little round woman through the dirt. For a while he listened to the song of his master’s lash, waiting for the woman to break. But there was never a whimper.
It had been a difficult transaction for master, and an altogether difficult morning. For hours he’d paced up and down the main carriage, alternately murmuring affectionately into, and lashing at, each cage he visited. The sun bear, long dead and stuffed, had been taken outside for barter. It had soon been returned.
Master had lingered over Hero’s cage for a good while, staring critically. He’d begun shouting, and three of his men had burst in through the flap, unlatched the demented man’s cage, and dragged him out by the feet for trade, master personally stomping on his torn and groping hands.
And now master was kicking and shoving the little woman down the aisle as his men restrained her by the hair and throat. Upon master’s command these men stripped her naked and commenced pinching and slapping while making threatening faces and mocking noises. The freaks sat right up in their cages.
The woman looked as though she’d fainted:  her arms were lax, her eyes rolled up. Her whole face seemed to purse, and her body, head to toe, began to run blue. Her fingers quivered, arched, and clawed—the woman was self-asphyxiating. Master fairly leaped with delight while the cages rocked around him. He had the men slap her awake. Once she was fully conscious they stuffed her into the demented man’s old cage next to Hero’s.
Master then looked in eagerly, one to the other, his hands balled into fists. The woman buried her odd round face in her forearms as she squeezed herself into her cage’s deepest corner. Hero gazed indifferently and went back to his peephole.
Master exploded. He smacked and kicked the cages over and over, swore up and down, ran the shaft of his whip back and forth against the heavy bamboo bars. Eventually he calmed somewhat. He stared coldly at Hero, made a ***** smile, and spat right in his eyes. A tense minute passed. Master slowly made his way outside.
Hero automatically relaxed. Across the aisle the albino ****** his face between his cage’s bars to sniff the newcomer. The leopard, bobbing rhythmically, emitted a high-pitched squeal that gradually descended to a steadily throbbing growl.
Hero looked the stranger over. Once she’d lowered her hands he saw that her eyes were crossed, her jaw slack, her face as round as the full moon. He looked closer. There were scars all over her throat and arms:  plainly, the small round woman had been treated very badly. Hero instinctively slid a foot between the bars; the woman cried out and scrunched even deeper. Across the aisle the albino quickly extended an arm. Without knowing why, Hero turned on him. The albino flinched, his eyes tearing into Hero’s. A second later he was stamping his feet and grinning wildly. Hero went back to his peephole.
Next morning master and two of his men dismantled the bamboo walls separating Hero’s and the woman’s cages. They bound the frames with broad leather bands, making a single cage of the two.
A common door was fashioned and secured. Master used his broad blade to shear away Hero’s rags. The men hunched around the long cage expectantly.
The naked couple backed away. Master was instantly exasperated—he shouted, lashed furiously, stamped and screamed, jabbed a broken shaft between the bars with malevolent intent, whirled and hurled the shaft at nothing. The carriage’s inmates went out of their minds. At master’s bellowed command a man scurried outside, returning with a long rope of woven leather strands. Master opened the cage and, applying all his weight, pinned Hero and his new mate in an awkward embrace while his men tied them together.
Again master and his men bent over the long cage to watch.
When Hero realized his predicament he made a desperate attempt to reach his peephole.
The men, misreading his struggles, babbled and cheered, but master threw up his hands. He then, through gesture, ordered his men to drape a number of hides over the long cage. Once these hides were in place he very quietly bent to one knee and placed an ear against the cage. After a while he cursed and rose to his feet. He shook the cage and stormed out, whipping and kicking the howling inmates.
In the semi-darkness the man and woman quit fighting their bonds.
A muffled patter began on the hide-covered roof.
Rain, as always, had a calming effect on the carriage’s occupants, causing the freaks and beasts to slip, one by one, into lethargy or slumber. Under such a spell, the attainment of master’s goal was inevitable.
It was a coupling both innocent and vile, without passion or celebration. Occasionally the freaks would surface, register their excitement by shrieking, shaking their cages, or otherwise clamoring…but very quickly the air would stifle them, weighing their heads and confusing their impulses. The atmosphere grew heavier by the minute. And, when night rolled over the carriages, the rain came down in sheets.

Leaning ******* the woman’s cage, master slipped his gnarly hand between the bars and slowly rubbed her belly in a counter-clockwise motion, his sinister features soft in the candle’s light. And he told, in nonsensical cooing whispers, of a lovingly secure and impossibly prosperous future.
How large and promising that belly had become! And how wise was he, the cunning and aggressive master, in his far-reaching business decisions. He turned his affection to the motionless gaping brute; stroked the battlefield of its face, tossed in another lizard. Master rubbed his palms together. From now on it was extra lizards daily, for both the woman and her mate. He remarked, with only passing interest, his star player’s continuing indifference. They didn’t know each other, didn’t need each other.
There’d been months of shows on the road now, broken only recently by this sensible rejoining of the mates at conception.
Hero’s horrible disfigurement was unquestionably top draw; he was a guaranteed crowd pleaser at every stop. So now master looked him straight in the eyes and smiled. He held the reeking candle high. The carriage was absolutely silent. Master smiled again, rose to his feet, tiptoed away.
Hero watched him retreat until the flap had fallen. He returned to his peephole, saw master round the rear of the carriage and slowly crunch by. For a time he could see nothing but the half-shapes of junipers bathed in starlight. There was a tentative movement to his right and a large shape came to obstruct his view.
The horse stood for a minute in profile. It slowly brought its head to rest against the carriage, applying its eye to the peephole. Hero froze. The two remained fixed, eyeball to eyeball, while a breeze played odd tunes on the outer wall’s hanging paraphernalia. The horse’s big dark eye rolled nervously. A long moment passed. Slowly the horse backed off. It stood uncertainly for a while, staring at the peephole. Then it quietly moved away.

Master kicked the cages one by one, left hand and right, as he slowly made his way down the aisle. Into each cage he delivered a personalized warning in passing—a growl, a hiss, a bark—but he was quickly losing control. Animal electricity hopscotched the carriage, cage to cage, ceiling to floor, front to rear and back again. Master froze. Much more of this excitement, he feared, could seriously agitate the woman—with grave consequences for master.
She was splayed on her back, in labor’s throes, her ankles and wrists bound to the long cage. Hero had been removed to give her room, and now sat hunched atop the snake woman’s cage, two men holding him by the throat and legs.
Master gnashed and snarled, listening to the woman scream, watching her stupid round head bounce up and down and back and forth. He knew it! He’d been suckered, hoodwinked, scammed—ripped off like a common rube. The woman was too ******* to handle even something as natural as childbirth. Still…it was too late to second-guess himself—all these months he’d been patient—he’d been supportive and vigilant and now he would not be denied. He flogged one of the men to alleviate his tension.
The blue lady was very slowly, very dramatically arching her spine. Master wiped the sweat from his eyes. When the bars were pleating her big round belly, her shoulders began drumming on the straw-strewn floor.
Master screamed one very colorful expletive.
A razor silence came over the carriage. Not a body moved or breathed.
At last two men tiptoed around their purpling master and leaned into the cage. One obediently ****** a foot between the bars. He pushed ******* her right knee while using a hand to grip the left knee, spreading her legs wide. The other man drew a broad leather strap between her teeth. After lifting the woman’s head he pulled the strap behind her neck, knotted it to make a gag, and yanked a skin sack over her face. He looked up anxiously. Master licked his lips and nodded. The man made a fist and frantically punched the woman’s face until her muffled screams ceased. She moaned gently throughout her contractions.
Master genuflected, brought a spitting candle in tight, and took a deep breath. As he raised his hand the candle’s light bounced off his knife’s chipped and scored eleven-inch blade. Master swore and reached down carefully. He flicked his wrist twice and the menagerie went mad.

The child was a tremendous disappointment.
Master had eagerly anticipated an infant ******* and deformed; something embracing the best qualities of its parents. He had even designed a special cage that could be expanded by degrees as the spawn developed. There also remained the tantalizing option of a family display, though such an undertaking would require the eventual construction of a structure even larger than the cage its parents now shared. Master anguished over the logistics, knowing it would break his heart to have to cut one of his jewels’ throats just to make room for a growing child. Nights he would slowly pace the carriage with all the possessiveness of a jealous suitor, one hand maneuvering a sputtering candle, the other tenderly rapping his whip’s **** against each visited cage.
But the boy was a flawless specimen; a beautiful, undemanding baby. From the moment master angrily tossed the placenta he felt cheated, even betrayed. He grimaced as it peaceably took to its mother’s breast, despite the surrounding horrors. Master hated it, immediately and entirely. The ****** thing was so docile it was almost charming. He drew his knife and was just reaching down, when an overwhelming sense of dread shook him like a rat in the jaws of a mastiff. Sweat poured down his squat, pig-tailed nape. He knew he would live to regret it, but decided to not cut the child’s throat right away. It was the oddest feeling. His knife hand had trembled for the first time in his life, and he had found himself momentarily contemplating right and wrong at the outset of a perfectly simple and commonplace procedure. That was it, then. His business instincts were letting him know there was a good, albeit unknowable, reason to let the sweet baby live. Master left the carriage anxiously, muttering in his ambivalence.
The boy grew to embody his worst expectations. Not only was it a poorly oriented child, clinging to its father rather than its master almost from the moment of weaning, but it soon proved a lousy draw with the patrons. Those who paid to view the child dangling in its special cage inevitably departed unsatisfied, some vocalizing, strangely, an acute sense of shame. So once again master entered the carriage with his knife hand steady, and once again he exited trembling, his heart in his throat and his soul in a whirl. He whipped the dwarf savagely before leaving. What place conscience in the mind of a businessman?
Soon as the boy could walk, master put him to work fetching and feeding. But the brat was slothful in his chores, preferring to hang around his family’s cage while staring wistfully at his father. For their part, the parents were wholly disinterested. Master would fume while Hero gazed for hours out his peephole—even as the mother lolled, perpetually ill. Sometimes that accursed woman’s condition riled poor master to no end. She could teeter at death’s door for months at a time, her body changing hues to the fascination of customers, only to bounce back with a hardiness that was of interest to no one. But at the peak of her performances the blue lady could really hold a crowd. Master produced an entire outdoors extravaganza around her:  within concentric rings of raging torches his men would slowly strip her naked before wild audiences, then allow the dwarf and albino to take her while the leopard strained against a gaily festooned chain. Master circulated his crew through the crowds to encourage his patrons’ cult-like behavior of breath-holding and fainting. No getting around it:  the customers were crazy about her—village to village, master’s Bactrian vanguard’s colorful robes shouted her approaching fame. And Hero’s popularity continued to soar. Many were the nights when master, pacing the perimeter, wondered just what devilry could have produced the lovely boy.
Overall, Hero remained his master’s favorite conceit and hottest property. Part of the little brute’s appeal was, of course, his exoticness. And certainly the ugliness arising from his deformity was compelling…but there was a detachedness about him that fascinated every soul with a fistful of copper cash coins. Whether they ****** him, cudgeled him, or spat in his face, he remained unflappable, staring only at the aching sky. Though many would leave uneasy, master noted with deep satisfaction that they almost invariably returned.
The boy soon evinced an amazing affinity for animals. No matter how agitated an ox or horse became, the child could pacify it with one hand on a lowered brow. This was a source of endless fascination for the crew. Wagers were made. The boy was pitted against oxen whipped to a frenzy. But they would not harm him; they would rather go prostrate and take the lash. Master tried to work this knack into a viable act, but his patrons just weren’t buying. They wanted freaks.
When the lad was a mere five years old, master had him trained in the peripheral art of the pickpocket. The boy worked well alone, and had all the makings of a fine little flimflam artist. Master sighed, his chronic nightmares a thing of the past. As ever, his business instincts were guiding him well.
Then late one afternoon he found the boy squatting outside his parents’ cage. The boy had done the unthinkable:  he had deposited his day’s pickings at the feet of his father instead of bringing the ***** to master. Master flew into a rage and raised his whip to give the little traitor the lashing he deserved. But before he could deliver a single stroke his other hand shot to his chest and he staggered back against the albino’s cage. He blinked down at the boy, who regarded him steadily while scooping the plunder into a little pile.
From that day on the boy placed whatever he could get his hands on at his father’s feet. As time passed he became ever more adroit at thievery, growing into a youngster both admired and despised by master and his crew; admired because theft was a cinch for him, despised because they were all that much lighter in their possessions.
Now, for eleven long years the strange little train had bounced along, sometimes camping outside villages for months, occasionally pausing on connecting roads. The show traversed the heart of Manchuria, skirted the Gobi in the north, and so eventually crossed almost the entire width of Mongolia before proceeding north to the confluence of the rivers Yenisey and Ob’. Much silver and copper had come to master’s coffer, much fame to his name, but he now sat looking over a vast, unmapped Siberian wilderness. The mostly nomadic characters they’d been encountering spoke in tongues unfamiliar even to his personal valet-translator-accountant, and the tone of these nomads had been unmistakably hostile.
Master huddled surlily under a canopy of sopping hides. Night was falling hard during a merciless rain, the wind was picking up, and his supplies coach was bogged in a growing sea of mud. At that moment he accepted the whole end-of-the-line concept, and knew he wasn’t going anywhere but back. And when he got back he was going to shine! He jumped from the coach.
The earth took his weight for a heartbeat—and he was up to his chin in muck, splashing about on his hands and knees, sliding forward on his palms and toes. He did a belly flop into a rain-filled depression and churned to his feet with the devil in his eyes. Wallowing in mud and bile, master stomped to the supplies coach and kicked wildly at the stuck rear wheels.
Somewhere between kicks he lost it completely.
Master broke for his whip. One minute he was blindly lashing his men, the next he’d succumbed to a mindless ferocity. He thrashed about like a berserker; whipping the beasts, the coach, the very night. His men were scarcely able to move in all that mud, but their dread of his savagery kept them hopping. They gathered as one and shoved the coach recklessly; slipping, splashing, shouting. A minute later, three lay splayed underfoot, but the mired wheel had been freed.
Throughout all this the oxen had swayed nervously, while the horses softly tramped their hooves in place. Master had his men turn the oxen about until the rickety train was pointing dead east. He checked the hitches and personally applied the lash. The oxen didn’t budge. Master swore and wiped the rain from his eyes. He had the horses hitched ahead of the oxen, but they were even less obliging. Master flew into a spectacular rage. His men, fearing for their lives, ran liberally with the lash.
The swaying of oxen picked up until the entire train of carriages was rocking. Yet the oxen could not, would not be compelled, under any amount of prodding, to take an eastward step. Master looked around in exasperation.
The night had gone insane.
Horses were fighting hitches, oxen walking on fire.
Master cursed the rain and mud and lashed all the harder. His men, seeking to please, whipped maniacally until the horses and both lead oxen broke their hitches and bolted west. The men immediately embraced the rear oxen, but the hitches shattered and the beasts stormed off. The remaining horses blew it, kicking at everything and nothing.
Inside the long carriage all was chaos. The albino was neighing and screaming, the aged leopard spinning in its cage. Hero stared out his peephole, amazed at the blur of figures stumbling by in the rain.
A pair of clopping blows rattled the opposite wall. Three slats cracked. A tremendous impact, and a huge section collapsed. A thrashing, hysterical mare burst through the breach in a veil of rain.
The horse went mad, killing the albino and snake woman in a flurry of hooves. She fell ******* the near wall, crushing the cages. The leopard shot into the air like a rocket, slashed at the mare’s throat and vanished in the rain. The horse reared above the family cage. She was just coming down in a wheeling storm of hooves when something made her freeze. Her stare locked with Hero’s, and a second later her eyes were rolling in their sockets. The mare kicked crazily and came down ******* her left flank, smashing the long cage’s side. She whirled upright and leaped outside.
For a tense minute the family sat in the rubble, rain bombarding their eyes. Nothing in their years of captivity had prepared them for such a situation. But by the end of that minute the son had taken full command. He rolled onto his back, braced himself, and kicked his parents across the aisle, through the remnants of the opposing cage, and out of the carriage. They all fell about in the mud and rain. To the west, the mare stared back strangely as she splashed into the night. The boy wedged himself between his parents, threw his arms around them, and pushed with all his might. Their bodies found a common center of gravity. Fumbling drunkenly, the family staggered through the rain in the wake of the mare.

The boy was the natural leader.
Master’s innocent-looking little ex-student could quickly assess and exploit almost any situation. He did the foraging and the figuring, slept with one eye open and one fist ready. He got what he wanted by charm or by stealth, slipping off at nightfall, returning at daybreak with small slaughtered animals and chunks of dark peasant bread. He also pilfered any bauble or oddity he could get his paws on, to be placed reverently at his father’s mangled feet. Breadwinner and watchdog, he faithfully held the family together; a nuclear son. He sewed hardy feather-lined cloaks of reindeer hide, and turned a cache of marmot pelts into a kind of side-slung backpack. He was doting nurse during his mother’s episodes, and unbending apportioner of calories in lean times. Dauntless when it meant crossing mighty rivers, relentless when it came to finding mountain passes. But the endless marching, the unreliable diet, and the countless predators made the three wanderers lean, haggard moving targets. There were times when the little lamp of family was all but extinguished, and long stands in places that seemed absolutely impassable. Still, the boy would work things out. He would stoop to any level to feed Hero, and for a stranger to threaten his father was to summon a psychotic, unyielding monster. He was both spear and shield.
The toughest job of all was maintaining a tight unit, meaning he was forced to become a hard-nosed ******* whenever his father was ready to wander off, which always seemed to be whenever the mother was hurting most. She’d become a tremendous impediment to Hero’s compulsion, and therefore her son’s chief nemesis. It wasn’t a big-picture concern anyway; the writing was on the wall. The blue lady’s attacks were increasing spectacularly on the steppe; her world had always been an enclosure of some kind, and the great horizon was proving just too much. Perhaps these intense affairs served as links to Hero’s suppressed memories, for at the onset of each attack he’d turn and hike, and then only exhaustion could curb him. The boy would press his mother on, dragging, shoving, and smacking—he could be mean when necessary, and though circumstances had made him the nucleus, their worlds unquestionably revolved around Hero. Where he sat, they sat. When he rose, they did the same. In this manner they marched for years across the vast steppes, single-file—father, mother, and son, respectively—unmolested, lacking possessions, always following the sun. Long before they could be measured they had drifted into obscurity.
The woman’s end came quickly and dramatically, in a rocky little depression on a half-frozen field. One moment she was responsive to her son’s prompts, the next she was flat on her back, her eyelids fluttering. That night she leapt from fever to chill, from alertness to stupor. The boy, squatting beside their campfire, watched her face and hands run cadaver-blue to fish belly-pale and back again. While he was staring her eyes popped open and her hands came scrabbling. He sweated through the clawing embrace until he could bear it no longer. He oozed out and ran down to fetch his father.
When they got back Hero watched incuriously for a while. His mate’s face was scrunched up and her skin the color of sapphires. She wasn’t breathing.
His gaze became glassy, his eyes returned to the night. As he rose the boy immediately grabbed an arm. Neither moved for minutes. When the boy at last relinquished, his father casually stumbled off.
Strange things were going on in Hero’s world. Some days he would notice how animals regarded him oddly, in a manner that seemed almost personal. He found, for instance, that particular creatures were recognizable even over great distances. A number of times he would sit with one in a stare-down, waiting patiently, until the animal’s natural disposition caused it to bolt. Though the meaning of these encounters was way over his head, he would watch, and he would listen.
In time he noticed an increasing skittishness in some of these familiar creatures. Something had them spooked. He then observed a number of lean gray wolves moving in and out of the picture with an air of complete indifference:  these wolves weren’t hunting; they were loitering—lounging in the grass, lackadaisically padding to the rear, filing by slowly in the distance. Once in a while a lounger would raise its head, yawn cavernously, and drop back out of sight. So unobtrusive was their behavior that even Hero’s ever-vigilant son began to take them for granted. They paused where the family paused, and halted whenever the woman broke down. Perfectly camouflaged by the gray boulders and dire sky, they were completely forgotten in the drama of her passing.
There were other, far subtler events existing for Hero’s senses alone. He could perceive patterns in everything around him; in the manner vegetation gave way wherever his heart was leading, in the way so many animals appeared to be not merely mirroring, but making his course. And wind, rain, running water:  these phenomena had voices. Yet not for everybody. No one—not his mate, not his son, not another soul on the planet could hear this call, for they were all of a sort. They were static, they were temporal. Hero couldn’t have cared less about the lives of his family, or about the mundane goings-on in the encampments and small tribes they skirted. Such beings lived in a world that was defined by the moment. They shouted, they banged, they clamored.
But west—west was music.
For his boy, once again watching Hero shamble off, the moment of truth had arrived. He looked back down, at his mother’s death mask being remade by the dying light of their campfire. As the flames dwindled he could have sworn he saw shadows creep into the wells of her eyes, while others, crawling up around her jawline, drew her bluing lips like purse strings. He hopped to his feet and ran for another handful of tinder. When their little fire provided enough light he dropped to his knees and looked again.
She was sinking right before his eyes, every aspect of her expression in collapse. The boy watched clinically, fascinated. As the flames began to sputter he thought he could see large purple bruises spreading across her cheeks like the seeping limbs of overflowing pools. He bent closer.
From deep in the night came the longest, the leanest, the saddest wail he’d ever heard. He turned to see the starlit ghost of his father, facing away, staring at a low barren hill. Uncountable stars embroidered the spot. The boy made out a low shape moving along the hilltop, cutting off patches of stars as it passed.
The wolf howled again; a mournful, spiraling cry to nowhere and nothing. Hero’s head notched upward. He began to hike.
Halfway to his feet the boy stopped dead.
It took a minute to sense why he’d frozen in place, and a good while longer for his heart to quit pounding. He was aware of a nervous padding, and, once his vision had adjusted, of a lazy stream of eyes gleaming in the dying campfire’s light. The eyes bobbed around him, glared momentarily, returned to the ground.
A massive gasp, and his mother was tearing at his wrist. He watched her hyperventilating, saw her bulbous yellow eyes sinking in a wide violet pool. With a sizzle and pop the last tongue of flame was taken by the night.
Then her clammy hands were all over him, pulling and demanding, caressing and beseeching. He had to pry them off like leeches, had to place them clasped on her shuddering arched belly.
A silky snarl rose almost in his ear.
With a little squeal he sprang to his feet, even as something nearby jumped back in response.
The boy stood absolutely still while the panting thing padded nearer. They stood very close, smelling each other. He instinctively extended a hand, palm forward. But it was no good; his arm was shaking out of control. The snarl rose again, not so tentatively this time. His mother’s nails tore at his ankle.
The boy gently stepped away, only to find himself surrounded by the shifting silhouettes of half a dozen gray wolves. They approached in a calculated manner:  two from the left, one from the right, another from behind. He was being goaded away from his mother; he could hear her fists beating the ground, and a few seconds later the sounds of a nauseating assault and ravaging.
He shakily raised his other hand. Now both arms were extended, and their message was clearly one of defense rather than control. Two snapping wolves stepped aside, leaving him a gateway into the night. A cold wet nose bumped his wrist.
Screaming like a woman, he took off after his father just as fast as his feet would carry him.

                                                  BOY

Alon­g the great Kazakh Steppe a man could wander a lifetime and never meet another of his kind—especially if his kind happened to be Alaskan Inuk, and if he happened to be the teenaged patriarch of a two-man family going nowhere.
Here history is mostly mute.
Upon this continent-spanning steppe, unnamed communities were scattered and rebuilt, lives blown about by the wind. The only centers of humanity a traveler might encounter, far removed from the Silk Road at the very crack of the new millennium, were temporary encampments of civilization at its rudest—shifting holes of cutthroat commerce existing solely for the barter of silk and spices and hapless souls. Life here was revered far less than merchandise, and the longest-lived men were those who kept their distance.
Hero and his boy hiked over permafrost and tundra for years; their meandering course a drunken mapmaker’s scrawl. Chronological entries along this imaginary line would reveal that they’d stopped, sometimes for months at a time, when the father had grown too weak and disoriented to continue. Hero’s internal compass was long-sprung, and his weight had fallen considerably. He’d sit on his lonesome, scarecrow-scrawny, wistfully scrolling a 360-horizon while his boy scouted and scavenged. Then, for no apparent reason, he’d just up-and hike—sometimes northwest, sometimes along a tangential plane that always threatened to spiral. It was brutal:  winters were frigid, summers, by odd contrast, running steamy to baking. Season by season these marches lost their tenaciousness, and eventually their heart. Hero’s obsession was becoming his demise.
Now, to a hypothetical observer, the ratty pair of woolly camels materializing out of the rising August heat might have been mirages.
These beasts were novelties here, and pioneers, for they were way beyond their normal stomping grounds. They’d tramped for months with a mind-numbing monotonousness, a thousand miles and more; round the Urals to the south, and through the hard territory braced by the Volga and Voronezh, avoiding anything that even smelled of men. They’d been wild camels; ugly, ill-tempered, and unpredictable, until the boy tamed them by touch…but this new pattern was a literal change of pace…for weeks the frail little man and his dark teenaged son rose and fell with the animals’ rhythm, lulled by it, sick of it, dreaming of lands far removed from hoarfrost and peat moss. In this manner they were borne clear to present-day Belarus, whereupon the camels’ stupefying march began to quicken. Mile by mile they put on steam, until one day they reached a broad area distinguishable from its bracing terrain only by its many deep surface cracks. Here the camels’ behavior became erratic; they crouched at an angle while tramping, their long necks oscillating, their noses bobbing along the ground. Eventually they came upon a dingy pool nestled in a pebbly depression. The local brush surrounding this pool was situated like iron filings about a lodestone. The boy hauled back his camel’s neck and laid a hand on its brow. The brute slowed to a halt. The other camel imitated its partner, move for move. Simultaneously the animals dropped to their knees.
The boy jumped off, catching Hero as he fell. The camels stood watching stupidly as son maneuvered father, but after a while grew nervous and began tramping their hooves in time. They slowly stepped to the pool’s rim and knelt woozily, their noses poised just above the surface. Their whiskers danced on the pool’s face, their lids became heavy, their hindquarters quivered as they drank. Their nostrils, having fluttered in unison, remained agape. They appeared to be asleep.
The boy began filling skins.
The water was quite warm; he slurped a palmful and almost immediately felt intoxicated.
He flicked it off his fingers; the water was bad.
Three heads were now mirrored in the pool; the camels’ at ten o’clock and two o’clock, the boy’s at six. He watched their reflections continue to ripple, long after the pool had become still. His face, melting and firming, rapidly fluctuated between extremes of age, and between his own recognizable features and those of some…monstrosity. The effect was hypnotic. He felt his joints stiffen; his eyes became weak, his thoughts muddled…his face was irresistibly drawn to the pool’s surface, and for a moment he was in real peril of drowning. He ****** his head aside and creaked to his feet.
Where the camels had knelt were only the prints of their bellies and knees. In the distance they could be seen galloping all-out for the horizon, right back the way they’d come. The boy watched until they were swallowed by their dust, and when he turned around his father was long gone.
Now he knew it was all just a matter of time.
And sure enough, after eleven more days of feebly staggering along, Hero completely ran out of gas. The boy bundled him up in a shawl, like an old woman.
Sitting there, cradling an unresponsive man weighing less than eighty pounds, he couldn’t help but let his morbid fantasies run wild. He was now old enough to realize his father had at some time suffered severe head trauma, and honest enough to accept that the man was rapidly approaching a vegetative state. This understanding accompanied him like a shadow, and that night he questioned, for the very first time, his own convoluted rationale.
He was just beginning to sense that his will was not his own.
He built a semi-permanent camp west of the Desna and foraged in a tight spiral, always returning in a straight line. Some days he came back feeling uneasy, sensing another presence. Then it was every other day. It bugged him to no end. At last, when it became every day, he hauled his father to his feet and began a resolute march to the west.
Again he became anxious, and after only a dozen yards.
He turned slowly while hunching, certain something bulky had just dropped out of sight. Nothing looked suspicious, everything looked suspicious. He walked Hero some more, occasionally peering back over his shoulder. There was…something.
He whirled:  only masses of rock and high brush. Yet, when he really strained his eyes, he was sure, pretty sure, that he could make out a large crouching body continuous with the rocks. Heart in his throat, he began a slow steady creep, only to pause, positive the bulge, whatever it was, had shifted in response. The boy very gradually raised his arm until it was level with his eyes, faced the palm outward, and extended the arm parallel with the ground. He could almost feel some kind of current passing between his itching palm and…nothing. He walked over to Hero, stopped again. There’d been the subtlest sense of traction. The boy propped up his father in a cloud of flies and waited.
In a minute the bulge drew *****.
Out of the brush strolled a furry gray wild ***, her back inclined from countless weary miles; stretching her neck, pausing to nibble, taking her sweet time. Grungy as she was, she fit right in.
At the boy’s first casual step she immediately hit the dirt and remained flat on her belly, one big dark eye staring between her hooves. Another step, and her **** bunched up. The closer he got, the higher her rear end rose. When he was almost at arm’s length she sprang back and danced away, seeming to bound with delight. But not to the east, as she’d come.
To the northwest.
She backpedaled while the boy came on whistling and cooing, matching him step for step. But the moment he threw up his arms in resignation she spun round as though cued, dropped on her belly, and peered over her shoulder.
The boy was first to blink. This time he approached fractionally, keeping movements to a minimum. She rose just as carefully, sauntering northwest in reverse, and at the first sign of hesitation turned, dropped, and cautiously gazed back. The boy glared at that huge mocking **** and broke into a sprint. She easily danced out of reach, plopped down, and continued to stare.
He began hurling stones, with venom and with accuracy, until she’d scurried into the brush.
But on the way back to his father he could feel her tagging along.
Twenty feet behind she halted, looking bemused.
The boy nodded ironically. He walked Hero over, murmuring baby talk all the way, and firmly placed a palm on the animal’s muzzle once her breath grazed his fingers. She stroked his hand up and down with her whiskers, gave a kind of curtsy, and waited on her knees while he helped his father mount.
At Hero’s touch a shudder ran down her body. She stood up straight. Her eyes became set, her back absolutely stiff. She put down her head and began the long trek northwest, never once breaking stride.
It was an amazing march, an impossible feat. For a little over three days and almost four hundred miles she progressed like an automaton, driving herself without rest, without food or water.
After trotting alongside for an hour the boy climbed on and force-fed his father berries and smoked meat, his dark eyes constantly searching the countryside. Occasionally he’d see a run of red foxes to their left, watching intently, padding cautiously. Sooner or later they’d vanish, only to be replaced by a train of feline or equine pursuers. Packs approached and receded while, high overhead, flocks formed triangular patterns that continually broke up and reformed. There was a peculiar rhythmic quality to this ebb and flow that lulled his senses further. The boy shook his head to clear it, but his exhaustion was deeper than he’d supposed—even the brush appeared to be leaning northwest.
That first day he grew numb with the pace, and that night the relentless pounding of her hooves drew him into a miserable slumber. He wrapped his arms around his sleeping father and lay half atop. When he couldn’t keep his eyes open any longer he tore strips from his skins, then looped his tied wrists round her neck, his ankles round her belly.
On the second day she was breathing hard, but her back was still high and she showed no signs of faltering. Her eyes remained focused on the ground dead ahead. She always sensed the best routes; finding mountain passes, fording wetlands.
But by the third day they could feel her ribs quaking against their legs. Her breath exploded as she marched, blood frothed and caked about her nostrils. Still she pushed herself on, her pace so steady it was almost metronomic.
On the fourth day her legs were gone. She veered and stumbled, shuddering every few paces. The boy hopped off for the umpteenth time and tried to bring her to graze, but she wouldn’t be turned. He ran behind her as she staggered along, unwilling, or unable, to rest.
At last a foreleg gave and she went down hard. Sobbing and snorting, she plowed her muzzle back and forth in the soil, the useless leg repeatedly pounding the ground. After a minute she raised her head and brayed at the sky, her neck muscles taut, her head slowly swinging side to side. Her cry went on and on.
With a tremendous effort she pushed herself upright and butted the boy aside. Every part of her body was shaking. From her depths a low moan grew to a steady bray, and finally to a wild, pulsing howl. She came to a rise, but was too weak to climb without sliding. Stamping in frustration, she managed a few feet, reared feebly, slid some more. The boy got behind her and applied his back; it took all he had to assist her almost to the top. With a desperate lunge she crashed on her belly.
Amazingly, she dragged herself on, her howl now a scream, her head whipping left and right. When she could pull herself no farther she ****** forth her neck to its very limit and, with a shudder that ran from the tip of her nose to the tuft on her tail, shoved her muzzle straight into the dirt and died.
The boy hauled off his father and fell back. The animal’s eyes were fixed upwards, seeming, even in death, to be straining for a glimpse of what lay just beyond the rise. The boy half-dragged Hero the last few yards. They collapsed at the top, and together looked over the cold Baltic Sea.

At water’s edge a haggard fisherman sat on his boat’s ravaged deck, blindly staring out to sea. His was a queer vessel; a family structure built more like an aft-cabined barge than like seacraft typical of that period. The fisherman’s boat, like his mind, had been abused beyond repair.
He’d lost much in his life. Time had taken his dreams, pox his face, hardship his back and shoulders. And, more recently, a brawling band of drunken Baltic pirates had ***** his wife and daughter before butchering them along with his two fine sons, while he sat helplessly bound to the mast. Finally, to further their delight, they’d set the boat aflame and sent it crackling against the sun; knowing he could hear their hoots and howls, knowing he would drift undead, accompanied only by this last unspeakable memory.
But a squall, without prelude, had doused the flames and blown his home ashore.
There he’d remained for a full long day, staring at nothing, his shattered life caught on the rocks. On the second day he’d worked himself free and commenced staggering about in his memories, gathering shards. It was a pathetic claim. He made a pile of all the old bedding and linen and usable cords, and set about sewing a sort of mementos sail. All that third day he had sewn, and on the fourth he had hoisted this sail and been moved to see it billowing in a northwest-blowing breeze. Again he just sat and gaped. And later that day he’d become aware of a commotion taking place on the long grade leading down to the water, where a writhing mass of seagulls was proceeding like a tremendous slow-motion snowball. He’d never seen anything like it. It wasn’t uncommon to find gulls in a group of many dozens or more, but there must have been two, maybe three thousand of the birds now swarming toward his boat. They were making an incredible racket. In the midst of this cloud could be seen a couple of slowly walking figures; as they neared he made out a small man accompanying a boy in his late teens, both dressed in odd skins. When they reached the rocks his eyes were drawn to the small man’s face. It was a foreign face, brutish and dark, with a deep cleft running from above the right temple to the jaw’s left side. Whatever instrument had felled this man had been devastating—everything in its path was smashed, and with permanence. The forehead was caved in. There was no bridge to the nose, the left cheek was completely collapsed, one side of the mouth was a mangled mess. The jaw itself had set improperly, so that it jutted to the side. The general impression, especially from a distance, was of some unforgettable circus freak’s countenance puckering at an angle. It was a face right out of a nightmare. But there was nothing frightening about the eyes. They were the eyes of a child.
Maybe half the gulls hopped screaming on the rocks. The rest circled overhead.
The boy considered the fisherman curiously before placing a foot on the charred deck. His gaze went around the boat, lingered on the makeshift sail, returned to the slumped figure. He passed a hand before the eyes. No response. He then leaned in close and placed his fingers on the man’s forehead. Immediately that bleak expression became fluid, brimming over with horror and heartbreak. Tears rolled down the fisherman’s cheeks as he gasped, shuddered, and backed up the scorched mast to his feet. Thus propped, he squinted at his visitors and was overcome by a wave of homesickness so strong he had to turn away. The feeling bewildered him, for this vessel, and this sea, were all the home he’d ever known. He clung to the mast while the boy helped his father board. Once he’d collected himself, the fisherman tore a heavy crossbeam from the toasted cabin. He and the boy used this as a lever, and together they shoved the boat off the rocks. The wind picked up nicely, and the little craft was swept across the water.
Exploding off the rocks, the gulls shot after the boat as if it were brimming with fish, the loudest and orneriest vying for favored positions directly overhead. The melee attracted additional gulls—they came shrieking in their hundreds from all sides, banking and calling in the oddest manner, until the mass grew so thick as to cast a permanent shadow on the boat. All day long the clamor continued, and all that night. The fisherman rolled with the rudder, listlessly, allowing the sea to control him. Eventually he let go, that the wind might bear them where it would. His sail ballooned but held firm, and the boat fairly zipped across a sea somehow smooth as glass, broken only by the vacillating ripples of bottleneck dolphins and migrating humpback whales. The three tiny sailors sat hunched together, motionless, all throughout the next day, until the black coast of Sweden loomed in the twilight.
As the boat neared land the cloud of gulls broke up, shot to shore, and landed in groups of a thousand and more; a dizzying, wildly uproarious reception committee.
The dung-covered boat slammed into the rocks, shattering the fisherman’s trance. He intuitively walked his **** up the mast and, swaying there, watched the boy draw his father over the side and lead him to a clearing at wood’s edge. There in the dusk he made out what appeared to be a hefty spotted runaway heifer hitched to a rickety wood wagon. He saw the cow gallop up to meet them, saw the boy look around warily, saw him help the little man into the wagon and climb in beside him. The animal immediately began picking through the woods, the large brass bell round her neck clanging forlornly.
The clarity of that bell made him realize just how quiet it had become. He craned his neck:  there wasn’t a gull in sight. He fell back against the shot mast and slid onto his tailbone with a clacking of teeth. His eyes were misting up. In the gathering dark a few sail fragments flew past and were ****** into the woods. The boat rocked and relaxed. After that there was only the sound of the receding bell’s sad, monotonous song being batted about by the wind.

The little cow strode through moonlit woods until she came to a path formed by the rutting of wheels over many years. She followed this broken, serpentine track throughout the night, and by morning was passing farms and, occasionally, crossing broader paths that might realistically be defined as roads. All day long she bore down that ragged track, until she came in late afternoon to a clearing near a village. Here many such tracks converged. And here the boy slipped away while she grazed.
Sometime after dark he returned with a load of straw, a couple of pilfered blankets, and a fat iron kettle. Crammed in this kettle were salt, tubers, cheese, a few loaves of rye, legumes, and a plump foot of lamb sausage. Most of this ***** he’d brought in tied to the bowed back of a huge, puffing, highly amenable black pig which, thus laden, now followed the boy’s every step like a fresh convert tracing the heels of the messiah. The boy built a fire under the stars, filled the kettle with creek water, and commenced simmering their dinner. While waiting, he couldn’t help but note an odd feature of the local flora:  plants, especially trees, all seemed inclined to a northwesterly disposition, though no amount of wind could account for it. He shooed the pig. But rather than run along, it backpedaled in a nervous circle, round and round in reverse, until it lost its balance and fell on its ****. There it remained, a yard behind the wagon. The boy fed his father and lined the wagon with straw. They settled in for the night. The boy must have nodded, might have dreamt, but while he was drifting he became aware of a stirring in the woods. He sat up, saw the pig’s eyes gleaming inches from his nose. And there were a number of animals, some wild, some strayed from farmsteads, arranged in a broad circle around the wagon, their eyes glinting with moonlight. Not a rustle, not a peep, was lifted from the woods.
In the morning he woke to find the pig still staring. The fidgeting heifer, impatient to roll, began her long day’s march while Hero and his boy were yet stretching and scratching, and the ******* pig, galloping heavily, fell in close behind. Each new day this routine was repeated. They banged past farms and small communities until the ruts intersected a broad rocky road wending halfway across the kingdom. The cow addressed this road with vigor. They picked up followers—a goat here, a couple of sheep there—which hurried after the wagon as best they could. The cow stomped on with resolve, mile after mile, day after day, her bell keeping steady time. That bell’s peal attracted foals, lambs, and kids into the wagon’s narrowing wake. Hares hopped between hooves and wheels, boars and blue foxes fell in and withdrew. White falcons, normally solo fliers, whirled into wedge shapes high overhead.
At night the entire train would camp on the road while the boy raided proximate farmsteads, always returning fully laden. And as soon as the fire died the colony grew, creature by creature, and the moment the sun broke the horizon the heifer came to life and moved on, but each day a bit more resolutely, as though straining to meet a deadline. The march took on a sense of real urgency. The cow pressed on with attitude, the clang of her bell more strident with each passing mile. Soon her followers numbered in the hundreds, as animals deserted their farms or crept out of the woods to tag along. Tillers and traders stood dumbfounded, amazed by the bizarre flow.
Once they’d crossed into Norway the frothing cow veered hard to the west. The pace really picked up; no longer were Hero and his boy afforded the luxury of a night’s sleep in one spot. Days blurred into a single variegated flow as the bashed and lopsided wagon continued building its entourage; the riders were surrounded dawn to dusk by a confused and confusing scurry. Word of the flow’s weirdness preceded it clear to the Norwegian coast, so that now plowmen and merchants, wearily gathering their goggling families, found themselves lined in anticipation along the king’s highway. Horsemen went pounding to and fro with news of the procession’s progress and particulars, children ran through the streets banging pots in imitation of the cow’s approaching bell. Livestock wheeled and stamped, fowl leaped and crashed.
The slobbering cow broke into a run.
Bystanders trotted behind, calling back and forth excitedly, while the wagon’s permanent following squealed and squawked between their heels. The cow made a hard turn onto a widening swath in the brush. This swath, seeming to strain against the soil, ran straight down to the crest of a low hill overlooking the Atlantic. On either side a crowd had been studying the phenomenon for some time, but now all eyes swung to the dark and disfigured man and his son, clinging to the disintegrating wagon behind the careening spotted cow.
The trailing people traded views as they ran. Most—at the very outset of the new millennium, with Christianity burgeoning throughout Europe—leaned to the miraculous. Others, just as superstitious but prone to a darker point of view, threw looks of horror at the deformed little man. Yet they ran no less eagerly.
The galloping crowd made for the seaside, where only one local event of any moment was brewing:  on the coast a Greenlander Viking was preparing his longship for the rough voyage home. Impetuous son of the great island’s first permanent European settler, he’d just been baptized in Olaf’s court, and was now eager to sail—but not as a warrior—as a missionary. While his spirit remained in a tug-o’-war between his father Erik’s will and that of gods old and new, his duty was clearly to his king. And Olaf had charged him with the Christianization of pagan Greenland.
Something on the wind now made this destined man turn his head. From behind the gentle hill to his rear came a kind of thunder. Heads popped up, followed by a confused explosion of voices, and seconds later a frantic bug-eyed heifer burst into view, dragging the wheel-less skeleton of a shattered wooden wagon. On the wagon’s splayed frame a man and teenaged boy clung for their lives as the spewing animal made a beeline for his ship.
The new missionary, still egocentric enough to assume his Maker might actually toss him a personal, surreptitiously rolled up his eyes. The sky yawned at his arrogance. At his side a smallish cowled man rose irritably, but the missionary sat him right back down. He then snorted, squared his shoulders, and signaled his men to halt their preparations.
Knowing it was expected, he gathered his hard Nordic pride and coolly made his way into the crowd.

The priest clung to port, gagging above the waves.
After a completely uneventful minute he leaned back and stared through tearing eyes at the distant backdrop of gathering mists. Weeks now…a man of his constitution had no business at sea.
Along, too, were a quirky little man and his fiercely devoted son.
Through his pantomime, the boy had been so persistent in begging their passage that refusal, under the circumstances, would have been unbecoming not only a man of God but a man of the world.
So there it was:  a priest who couldn’t hold his lunch, a witless eyesore who couldn’t sit still, and a surly teenaged protector who snarled at the first hard look. This crossing just had to be some kind of divine test—of mortal patience as well as moral values. Norsemen weren’t made for babysitting.
The mists condensed.
And the shifting shape became a hard familiar coast.
And the longship was mooring, and the crew were jostling and clambering, and the big missionary had booted off the haunted little freak and his hypersensitive son, and was condescendingly half-escorting, half-carrying, the green priest ashore.
And they were home.

Priest in tow, Leif quickly took up the Christianization of Greenland’s Western Settlement, as per Olaf’s command. The mangled little man and his son followed him around like dogs, slept outside his door and annoyed his visitors, ultimately proving far easier to adopt than to shake. Barely tolerable shadows…still, the lad was simply amazing with livestock…and though the youth’s useless father seemed time and again to be just begging for a whooping, his son’s presence bore some ineffable quality that always curbed the missionary’s hand. Several times he’d witnessed the father approached by settlers bent on abuse. Each time the boy had stepped in, and each time the troublemakers were mysteriously repelled. The missionary of course didn’t attribute any kind of celestial intervention to these episodes, and certainly the popular notion of devilry was a natural reaction to the pair’s outrageous exoticness, but…in the son’s company, and even under the sharp eyes of his fellow Norsemen, Leif more than once found himself oddly moved to protect the father. And so the deformed man and his boy day by day blent in—as village idiot and mystic guide. And when in time a ****** brought tales of an unvisited land to the west, it was only natural for the restless Greenlander to buy that ******’s boat and, before stalwart comrades, weary family, and whimsical God Almighty, reluctantly accept the eccentric father and son as sort of seagoing mascots.
Hero was from then on irrepressible. During preparations he would pipe and stammer in his half-mute way, brimming with a confounding anxiety that kept him underfoot and at odds with all. On frigid nights he perched on the westernmost rocks, moaning to the horizon in the strangest fashion while his son stood guard. He positively spooked the locals; they’d gossip, nervously and with bile, of an answering wind that came wailing off the sea like a banshee in labor. The whole island wanted rid of him. And when his champing beneficiary, still clinging to the notion of Christian charity, bundled him aboard with his son and a crew of thirty-five, not a single settler was sorry to see him go.
Almost from the moment they cast off everything went wrong, as all attempts to control the longship were met with some kind of unknowable countermanding force. Vikings were not renowned for passive resistance—they fought, squaresail and steering oar, leaning oarsman to oarsman, until the ship rocked on the waves like a bucking bronco. An erratic weather system pursued them, worsening dramatically at each minute variation in heading. The Norsemen doubled down, and when the clouds finally burst wide, the cowling sea went mad. Dervishes whirled about the hull, crisscrossing winds bedeviled the sail. Patches of kelp belonging to much warmer waters came heaving alongside, fouling the work of the oars, while far to the west a humongous fog bank formed, eradicating the navigable field. The lightning-streaked horizon was a throbbing gray slit.
The longship became locked in a slow westerly current.
Fatigued crewmen complained of headaches and hallucinations, and of a nasty, slightly metallic tang to the air. There were numerous walrus sightings; bobbing flippers and snouts amid drifting ice chunks that came prowling the North Sea like a circling pack of famished white wolves.
Worst of all was the boy’s father—instantly agitated by everything and nothing, prey to some primitive impulse that caused him to periodically incline his head, shudder to his feet, and loop his arms as though embracing the sky. Leif would watch him scrabbling at the prow like a cat at a tree, furs snapping in the wind. He’d watch the boy re-seat him for the hundredth time, and for the hundredth time be filled with an immense contempt. By now he’d acknowledged that it takes a special kind of strength to shoulder charity and tolerance. That brown little freak struck him as an enormous malformed barnacle, slowly working its way back up the prow. Trying so hard to go unnoticed, looking and listening so intently, though there was nothing to see other than the growing shelves of fog, and nothing to hear save the rising, almost hysterical voice of the wind.
Leif sniffed the air, his ******’s instincts nagging him. This was a foul current, and a fool's errand; he took a deep breath and tentatively ordered the longship brought about.
The ship kicked twice, as though an enormous submarine hand had seized and released the hull.
A whirl formed in the water, causing the keeling ship to sweep around like a clock’s second hand. All about them, those drift-ice ghosts cruised dangerously near.
But they’d been liberated from that accursed current. Leif fiercely urged on his rowers, and at last the ship broke free. They made a bead due north.
Night came and the temperature plummeted.
Small sheets of ice converged, drifting between the hunks. The Norsemen, instinctively huddling amidships, passed out one by one in a massive pile of fur and flesh. In the freezing silence the floes bumped and recoiled, bumped and gathered, bumped and bonded. The tiny ship, swallowed whole, was dragged along in a labyrinth of black sea and interlocking slabs of ice.

The Norsemen came to in a surly, foul-smelling heap, lost at sea. While they were still groggy a voice cried out that a darker patch was developing in the fog. The men all fell to port. Under the confusion of their voices could be heard a distant rumble.
At this Hero hauled himself up the high curved prow. A half-light began to penetrate the fog, barely illuminating the irregular faces of drifting ice. The missionary stormed forward and indicated by gestures that if the boy didn’t restrain his father he would have the man tied down.
The longship stopped dead in the water.
The men found themselves regarding a perpetually frozen coastline swathed in bluish veils of mist. Directly before them loomed an immense ice cliff hundreds of feet high. Rising beyond this cliff were endless snow fields, where lean violet shadows seemed to drag about of their own volition. And upon those bleak fields a thin howling wind prowled, kicking up brief white dervishes, leaving a strange zigzagging signature.
Even as they stared, a darker shadow high on the ice cliff’s glistening face began to widen, accompanied by a cracking sound that could be felt before it was heard. With the illusion of slow-motion, a stupendous chunk broke out of the cliff and came screaming toward the sea. It hit the water like a bomb. The thunder of its separation and the explosion of its impact took a moment to reach them. Then, out of a spewing crater of crests and spume, the new calf came lunging, tromping the sea so hard the longship, fully a mile to sea, was swept out and ****** back in like a cork. The floundering mountain of ice bobbed and lilted, generating huge waves which continued to rock the ship long after the monster had settled. In a while the roaring in their ears subsided and there remained only the swirling, nerve-wracking howl of the wind.
The missionary’s eyes swept left and right. Whatever this place was, it sure wasn’t the fair shoreline he’d been promised. Hero again scrambled up the prow, and Leif again yanked him down. This time he made good his threat; he had the little nuisance bound, though he was half-tempted to let him take his chances overboard.
From somewhere deep in the haze grew a soulful, otherworldly call. It went on and on, electrifying the air, bottoming out once the ship had merged with that previously fought westerly flow.
By now Leif’s nerves were shot. He ordered the oars raised.
The longship began to drift. Ship and ice were pulled due west.
The clouds fell far behind as the ship embarked upon an amazingly calm sea—so calm its entire visible surface was featureless except for the faint wakes provided by the ship and its hulking ice companions. To the east a huge fog bank appeared on the horizon, and a while later a smaller bank to the north. Then a very dense one to the south. In time these banks converged, imperceptibly becoming a single mass that closed about the ship, bit by bit creating a slowly heaving dome. Tiny beads of water appeared on beards and eyebrows; in a minute everything was soaked. The only sound was that of the dragging steering oar. The men were now sopping ghosts, speaking only with their eyes.
Directly ahead the fog began to dimple. The dimple became a hollow, the hollow a cave, and then ship and ice were being towed through a low, ever-extending tunnel in fog. The current increased its pull. Ship and drifting ice accelerated through the tunnel.
After a while the missionary quietly stepped forward. He stood with one hand on the prow’s neck, listening to the mist, so motionless he might have been a carved extension of the longship’s aggressive design. Not a man breathed. The tunnel’s dilating and contracting bore was producing an all but seamless series of oscillating, near-phonetic sounds. Leif almost tiptoed back. No god, pagan or Christian, could account for the strangeness of this situation.
They were borne on a course that grew more southerly, and the following day beheld an inhospitable shoreline glazed by dazzling white beaches. Their course held. Two days later they came upon a far pleasanter, thickly wooded coast. Here the current released its hold, and here the missionary untied Hero and personally placed him and his son in a tiny oak faering. He was just as sick of them as he was excited by this promising new land. Once the rowboat had been heaved over the side, he and another man stepped aboard and took up the oars. They began rowing with easy, powerful strokes.
When the boat kissed sand the missionary stood unsteadily.
The first European to set foot on North American soil now placed one hand on his crucifix, the other on his sword’s hilt, and awkwardly plunged his leg into the thigh-deep, ice-cold surf. Before he could take another step the boat lurched as Hero leapt headfirst into the water, followed an instant later by his son. The Greenlanders watched sourly as the two splashed their way into a mad dash for the waiting pines. Leif wished them both good riddance and turned to grin wryly at his fellow Norseman. He must have blacked out for a second, must have been blinded by a shaft of sun, for he found he was staring stupidly at a point midway between his companion and the longship. It felt like he’d been kicked between the eyes.
Everything was dissolving.
He studied the beach and pines closely, but saw nothing of the man or his boy. He turned back, disoriented. With what seemed a superhuman effort he took up his oars. He rowed out sluggishly, in a dream, and the fog rolled in to meet him.

The boy broke into the trees and embraced a trunk, fighting for breath. What happened next happened so fast and so unexpectedly he didn’t have a chance to react.
Three savages stepped from behind the pines and beat him to his knees. They twisted his arms behind his back and hauled him to his feet. He’d barely processed the impression of a wild painted face when something sharp struck him ******* the temple and tore down his cheek to the jaw. Two of the assailants manhandled him into an upright position and held him in place while the third brought his weapon down again and again and again.
All but dead, he watched a nightmare countenance shouting through a shot veil of blood, and behind that image a reeling crimson sun. He lay there gushing while the savages went through his rags. They propped him against a pine and shrieked with triumph, tore the hair and gory scalp from his skull, threw back their heads and screamed at the screaming sky. Tooth and nail, they ripped apart his face and throat and, certain he would die, split what bits of fur were left and let his carcass lie.

                                                HERO

The weeks stretched into months while he fought his way back into the light.
He progressed in stages; only half-conscious, stumbling along in a blood-red stupor punctuated by a slow strobe of frequent blackouts. Days loomed and decayed, nights pounced and were gone; the backlit, swirling gray cosmos collapsed and expanded on every missed beat of his pulse. A thousand times he broke down to die, and a thousand times he clawed to his feet, driven to pursue a tiny, ghost-like figure fluttering in his memory.
Everything conspired to check him.
A bay like an immense landlocked sea was skirted over months or years—it was all the same. Cold locked him in, Hunger drove him afield, that rude ***** Wind lashed him blind, wore him like a shoe, screamed for his skin while he worked his way west.
Somehow he ate, somehow he avoided being eaten; the instincts that had served him halfway around the planet were still vital beneath the abused exterior. His simple burrows became sturdy temporary shelters. He relearned the art of fire, and began to cook what he killed. He manufactured crude snares and weapons and, when his recuperation was complete, paid closer attention to the on-again, off-again trail he’d been following…forever.
Sometimes this trail would call to him like a lover. Other times he stood peering uncertainly, trying to recapture meanings and aims. Then the ground would turn spongy and the sky revolve, and once again he’d be lying all but dead in the woods, while from the face of the sun emerged a vile winged horror, its ugly pale head lashing side to side, its cruelly hooked beak dangling something that glistened in the wild pulsing light…then the fat moon, rising like gas against the icy black night…the feel of the wind:  the slashing of her nails, the chafing of her hem…the sound of things crunching and pausing and sniffing…then the sun, blazing anew. And again that thing, descending, its wide black wings beating slowly, metronomically—but none of that mattered any more. For his mind had quit him, had flown howling into ice and pine to roost with things surreal. In the day his madness might muddle and run, or spend the light stalking, cat-like, watching and waiting. But at night it came creeping from all sides. Sometimes it came in waves. It could gnaw like the devil, or wrap around him like a warm second skin. But none of that mattered either.
The only thing that mattered was the trail—whether it was lost for good, or for only a while. He’d been following it through his episodes, always north, wondering just who and where in the world he was, and trying to shake a ridiculous notion of being led on a wild goose chase.
The cold was unbelievable.
The deeper north he delved, the more confused he became. He grew starved for colors and scents, finding nonexistent patterns in the stark contrast of shadow and snow. He thought he could detect a kind of otherworldly design in the overwhelming number of dead ends he encountered, and, too, in the diabolically frustrating locations of natural obstacles. He seemed to be forever fighting the wind—a hulking, despondent snowman, he hiked face down and focused, while another aspect of his attention floated just behind, disembodied, watching his silent pursuers…leaving no tracks, blending perfectly with the environment in their clever winter coats…not predators, but creatures that normally should have been hightailing it away from him. By the time he could turn, they’d become nothing more menacing than snowdrifts. But they pursued him nevertheless.
And so his paranoia increased…had there ever really been a trail…and when did this miserably cold, miserably anemic crusade begin…his long-term memory was falling apart a chunk at a time. It just got colder and colder and colder until at last, one snippet of a day during one blur of a year, he found himself utterly lost, and clueless as to his history or objective. His mind was a blank, as colorless and featureless as the endless world of ice around him. He’d come this far solely to learn that the only trail he’d been following was his own—and now even that trail was succumbing to ice. On all sides there was nothing to see but an infinite field of glaring whiteness, and nothing to hear but the ululating wail of the tubular polar wind. It was the loneliest, the unholiest, the creepiest sound imaginable. But it wasn’t insanity that made him wheel. It was his self-preservation instinct.
And then he was somehow on his knees in the woods, facing a furious setting sun.
Whole seasons had passed from his memory like chalk from a board. His only recollections were those of a broken, haunted animal:  of being perilously sick, of fearing the unseen, of blindly struggling across a solid-white wilderness. That he’d survived such an ordeal meant nothing to him. And that he had in some indecipherable manner stumbled across the cold-as-stone trail did not fill him with amazement or with thankfulness—there simply wasn’t anything visual or emotional left to draw on. A significant part of his life had been whited out.
But now he could focus entirely on the trail. And before he knew it, the fuzzy area between fantasy and reality found a seam. He began to analyze and plan. He paid attention to hygiene, and kept a kind of running mental journal. Things were sorting out. Yet there were nights when the old sickness would resurface, reestablish its hold, and leave him sweating and uncertain under the stars. Then, paradoxically, his perception would become razor-keen. And so he would see, on a distant hilltop, a pair of scrawny silhouettes, one on four legs and one on two, slowly crossing the faintly pocked face of the setting moon. He would become strangely excited, and thereafter retain crystal-clear images of himself, as if seen from above, hurrying with adroitness through the silent, graveyard-like setting of black and blue night and white-frosted trees. Then the fuzzy area would broaden, and it would be the next morning, and he would be staring at the prints of man and elk in snow. And he would see how the elk’s prints doubled back, and how the man’s prints terminated where he had obviously mounted his guide. An unfathomable glow would bring tears to his eyes. But, even as he gathered himself, a fresh snowfall would wipe out the prints. And once again the world would plummet into white. And the wind would howl as the snow hammered his eyes. And he would ***** on.

A haggard animal sat shivering in a small grove of frozen pines, watching his campfire die. His eyes were fixed. Like the fire, he was running out of warmth, running out of fuel. There wasn’t a whole lot of tinder round his bones, and not much feeling left in his limbs. The slowly heaping downfall was burying him alive, but he was too numb to care.
It had taken him six long years to cross an entire continent, and during that time he’d known only cold and excruciating pain. The pain was leaving him now. The cold was making it right. His eyes glazed over.
Along a narrow plain to the west a herd of caribou filed dreamily through the snow, cutting across a panoramic backdrop of dazzling white mountains. The slow-motion parade was hypnotic. After a while it occurred to the drifting man, in a roundabout way, that he was dying, that he was nonchalantly freezing to death. Concurrent with this notion there rose in his chest a wonderful liquid warmth. His eyes slowly closed and, once shut, began to set fast.
He was jolted from within. It was as if he’d been kicked in the heart.
He ****** to his feet, pounded his fists on his thighs, felt nothing. The breath spurted from his mouth in small white clouds as he stumbled downhill after the slow caribou train. He swam through the snow, hallucinating, imagining that certain individuals in the herd were mocking him by slowing and accelerating, while others glanced back with expressions of contempt.
As he burst into their midst the animals stepped aside indifferently. A few galloped ahead to keep up the herd, but most simply sidestepped while he danced there, stamping his feet and smacking his hands. The herd grew thinner, until only the old and infirm were filing by. The man desperately embraced a hobbling female for warmth, but she cried out and kicked, triggering a panic reaction in the herd. Clinging for his life, the man was dragged along beside her as the herd stormed into a maze of flying ice and snow. His weight caused her to stagger sideways until they slammed against the flank of a sick male. The man instinctively threw an arm over the male and, thus draped between them, was borne across the drifted plain for upwards of a mile, his freezing feet alternately dangling above and dragging through the snow. The herd broke into a hard run, forcing him to assume a broken trot. Soon his legs were stinging. Sensation rushed through his body.
Now the herd, still picking up speed, began to contract, jamming him between his bearers. There was a quick jolt to his right and he was lifted clean off his feet, nearly straddling the bucking female. It had become an all-out stampede. Through hard-flung snow he saw the cause:  just ahead, the caribou had run head-on into a solid wall of galloping wood bison, and both frantic herds had blindly veered to the east; were in fact running side by side down a deep, ragged canyon—were pouring over the canyon’s lip like a cataract. He was approaching, at breakneck pace, that very place where the converged herds so abruptly swerved. The hanging man snarled as he was borne inevitably to the point of deflection.
There came a concussion at his left shoulder, followed by a blast of snow. In an instant the ailing male was tumbling head over heels to the east, ****** into the stampede’s plummeting mass by the fury of its descent. The man and female, rebounding from this impact, were shot to the west in a crazy jumble of flailing legs. The caribou lost her footing, flew nose-first into a snowbank, and came up running. Kicking off, the man used the last of his strength to heave himself astride. At first she fought to shake him, but the spell of the run was too strong. She and half a dozen others went pounding in the opposite direction of the stampede, quickly joined by a number of bison that had likewise splintered from their herd. The riding man could make out their huge hulking shapes thundering by in a blizzard of flying ice, could hear their heavy gasps and explosive grunts. One passed so close he felt its massive flank brush his leg. He peered to his right and saw a black, pig-like eye regarding him excitedly, moving up and down like a piston as the beast ran alongside.
The eye shifted, focusing on the gasping, completely obsessed female. The bull dropped its head and slammed into the caribou’s side, sending her and the man careening down a ***** to the west. The caribou brayed hysterically and her backside went down, but she managed, despite the weight of her rider, to return to all fours and frantically continue along the *****. Again the bull charged, crashing into her shoulder. The man and caribou were launched sideways into the white searing air.
He sat up carefully. The huffing bison was straddling him like a bully laying down the ground rules. Its big wiry beard came right up to brush his chin. The stench of its breath was stupefying.
The bull stamped and snorted, thrusting its stubby horns left and right as the man used his elbows and heels to back away. The bull followed, move for move. When the man collapsed under his own impetus the bull shoved him along with its snout, bellowing furiously. Clear down the ***** they lunged, shoving and lurching, until the man lay sprawled on his back; up to his chin in snow, completely helpless. The ton of a bull butted and kicked, but only glancingly:  those hooves could **** with a blow. At last the man, in one clean sequence, spun on his rear, dropped to his side, and went rolling down the ***** using his elbows for ******.
At the bottom ran a narrow fence of frosted saplings marking an ice cliff’s precipice. He lay face down in the snow, too done in to do anything but **** at an air pocket.
And there came a high-pitched crackling, a sound like the protracted gasp of embers in a dead fire. He turned just as those saplings began leaning to the west, their frozen skins cracking with the strain.
The bison bellowed menacingly.
The sprawled man looked back and saw it still standing with legs spread wide, silhouetted against the sky. In a moment it began huffing downhill, lurching side to side, surfing the snow between lunges.
It chased him through the genuflecting saplings straight into a frozen gully where, protected by a few feet of insurmountable verticality, he was able to slide on the ice between its stomping hooves, downhill out of reach, then downhill out of control—spinning just in time to glimpse a breathtaking vista:
Partly framed by the gully-straddling saplings was a vast crescent of jagged white mountains seemingly huddled round a small stretch of snow-draped pines. The little wood these mountains surrounded was isolated in a broad lake of solid ice. Hundreds of fissures radiated crazily throughout this packed ice field, appearing to issue from somewhere near the frozen wood’s center, which was completely obscured by a ring of rising mist. Above this thumbnail panorama the sun showered gold.
Then the gully dipped radically, and he was skidding headfirst, slamming back and forth against its slick white walls. This uncontrollable plunge had the positive effect of getting his blood flowing. Yet it tore him up. Had the gully concluded in a cul-de-sac, or had further progress required a single calorie of uphill effort, his struggle would certainly have ended here. He would have been too weak to move, and death would have been swift.
But there was a glacier—a great river of ice pouring slowly out of the clouds. The gully, terminating in a little scoop formation near the glacier’s base, spat him flailing onto its gnarly glass hide. He went head over heels, bits of skin and fur flying like chips from a band saw. Somehow he gained his footing, and then he was running against his will, tumbling and recovering and tumbling again.
He didn’t catch much of that crazy run. He half-glimpsed whirling walls of ice, felt a fickle surface underfoot, and broke through an assaultive mist that clung to his ankles and arms. He remembered having the ragged hides torn right off his body, and then being skinned alive. And he remembered reaching the glacier’s base and crawling like an animal; round its sweeping drifts, past its peaked moraines, all the way to a twisting frozen gorge.
And he followed this gorge down; ricocheting wall to wall, delirious, small plumes of thrashed snow marking his descent.
Through a freezing wood he fumbled. In a veil of mist he tumbled down a steep and verdant grade. As cold consumed his closing breath, he fell upon, near-blind, near death, a strange, enchanted glade.

There is a pool.
And in this pool a man lay purged, his broken body half-submerged.
The stumbling man stopped. He knelt to weep, but lost his thread. One hand took a bicep, the other, the head. With a twist and pull the corpse emerged.
That visage…that face—misshapen mask, contorted, bleached; of life’s deposits fully leached. Essence dispatched—a void, sodden wretch.
He let it fall and the glass was breached. All a freak, all a stretch:  upon this act his grip detached.
And the bridge collapsed…one vagabond grasp…what were these feelings; recaptured and trashed…a span elapsed…who was this puckered mass…he hauled it by the waist and thighs…slid it in, watched the pool react:  purse and recover, expand, contract. The glass reformed, now silver-backed…a sudden mirror…the man leaned nearer…saw his reflection, just smashed, remade intact.
The pool grew still.
Within its depth a shadow stirred—visions gathered, some distinct, some obscure. What they meant, and who they were, was much too much to fathom. The glass became blurred.
He closed his eyes, let his heavy head fall, fell back on his haunches, felt the sweat seep and crawl. The air was a pall—as he struggled to rise, a nib crossed his wrist.
He opened his eyes.
Between his fingers the blades poked and crept. Round his knuckles they ventured, up his forearm they stepped:  they seemed to be triggered by prompts from the ground. He shook his head slowly and dully looked round.
There were jays grouped about him, their black eyes aglow. Red hens came running, their fat chicks in tow. Gophers engaged in a weird hide-and-seek. Bluebells and buttercups craned for a peek. Sparrows hopped past and, paying no heed, burst into flight. He watched them recede.
Westward they flew.
Bewildered, he slumped.
Bumped from behind, he jumped to his feet, flabbergasted to find an ancient gray moose near-eclipsing the sky, with grit in his snarl and fire in his eye.
The old moose took aim.
The man turned to flee and stumbled, then tumbled and fell on a palm and a knee.

But there lies a world (so the lullaby goes) where rivers ever run.
Poked from behind, pushed out of his mind, he staggered into sun.







Copyright 2020 by Ron Sanders.

Contact:  ronsandersartofprose(at)yahoo(dot)com

Choking on a grape that wasn't mine,
I shouldn't have plucked it from the gardens vine.
Under the starry linen draped above,
I noticed a dragonfly nearby
sitting on a fountain watching me die.
Asphyxia was kicking in,
looking up it seemed the moon did grin.
I closed my eyes for the end to begin
and amongst the darkness inside of me
the dragonfly was buzzing free.
It left behind a silver trail,
swirling up and through the veil,
behind which I could finally inhale,
the infinite taste of wine.

At the Zoo

Patriots and faux exhibit and binge on synonyms of liberty printed on beer and underwear
Advertising what should be unspoken and inspired to pervert and romanticize
Preludes to the parades and finale above us all
Weeks of saturated irony
Cuckoo bird irony and BBQ
As they reform Phoenix, rebirth of distractions and thievery
Predators in ally ways pursing America's diamonds and legs

Then gunpowder
Gunpowder of colors and cuckoos
Layers of streets in gunpowder
Towns built of gunpowder
Sky is gunpowder
We are born addicted to led and gunpowder
Gunpowder ****** in the air
Success, display and diversion and more gunpowder to ingest.

The Grand Finale
The Volta of the evening
The hammer of the judge
*** appeal of death and nature flexing it's muscles-  
show us some skin!

Covering your ears
Eyes fastened-
Ready to burrow back to mothers womb
Binged and free
Chinese celebration hijacked
Red, White and Blue
And a moment of silence  

Orchestrated onomatopoeia in heaven
Chorus of arousal on Earth
Band marching war machines in hell

The showdown of 241 years!
This freedom we are all grateful to only talk about

Only free to battle shackling intoxication
Men and women tugging extra weighted offspring
Sulking for indoors and portable addiction  
Chanting three letter obedience
God being counted by his blessings
Fear and Statism in every breathe for salvation from our stick swatted enemies
Checkpoints that serve and protect asking for a toll;
liberty synonyms.
Arresting the too free

At the Zoo,

The cuckoos regaining reality.
The phoenix red eye and held under oath
To the next day where we are back
To hate each others freedom, again.

The courtesan and poet Zuo Fen had two cats Xe Ming and Xi Ming. Living in her distant court with only her maid Hu Yin, her cats were often her closest companions and, like herself, of a crepuscular nature.
      It was the very depths of winter and the first moon of the Solstice had risen. The old year had nearly passed.
      The day itself was almost over. Most of the inner courts retired before the new day began (at about 11.0pm), but not Zuo Fen. She summoned her maid to dress her in her winter furs, gathered her cats on a long chain leash, and walked out into the Haulin Gardens.
      These large and semi-wild gardens were adjacent to the walls of her personal court. The father of the present Emperor had created there a forest once stocked with game, a lake to the brim with carp and rich in waterfowl, and a series of tall structures surrounded by a moat from which astronomers were able to observe the firmament.
      Emperor Wu liked to think of Zuo Fen walking at night in his father’s park, though he rarely saw her there. He knew that she valued that time alone to prepare herself for his visits, visits that rarely occurred until the Tiger hours between 3.0am and 6.0am when his goat-drawn carriage would find its way to her court unbidden. She herself would welcome him with steaming chai and sometimes a new rhapsody. They would recline on her bed and discuss the content and significance of certain writings they knew and loved. Discussion sometimes became an elaborate game when a favoured Classical text would be taken as the starting point for an exchange of quotation. Gradually quotation would be displaced by subtle invention and Zuo Fen would find the Emperor manoeuvring her into making declarations of a passionate or ****** nature.
       It seemed her very voice captivated him and despite herself and her inclinations they would join as lovers with an intensity of purpose, a great tenderness, and deep joy. He would rest his head inside her cloak and allow her lips to caress his ears with tales of river and mountain, descriptions of the flights of birds and the opening of flowers. He spoke to her ******* of the rising moon, its myriad reflections on the waters of Ling Lake, and of its trees whose winter branches caressed the cold surface.

Whilst Zuo Fen walked in the midnight park with her cats she reflected on an afternoon of frustration. She had attempted to assemble a new poem for her Lord.  Despite being himself an accomplished poet and having an extraordinary memory for Classical verse, the Emperor retained a penchant for stories about Mei-Lim, a young Suchan girl dragged from her family to serve as a courtesan at his court.
      Zuo Fen had invented this girl to articulate some of her own expressions of homesickness, despair, periods of constant tearfulness, and abject loneliness. Such things seemed to touch something in the Emperor. It was as though he enjoyed wallowing in these descriptions and his favourite A Rhapsody on Being far from Home he loved to hear from the poet’s own lips, again and again. Zuo Fen felt she was tempting providence not to compose something new, before being ordered to do so.
      As she struggled through the afternoon to inject some fresh and meaningful content into a story already milked dry Zuo Fen became aware of her cats. Xi Ming lay languorously across her folded feet. Xe Ming perched like an immutable porcelain figure on a stool beside her low writing table.
Zuo Fen often consulted her cats. ‘Xi Ming, will my Lord like this stanza?’

“The stones that ring out from your pony’s hooves
announce your path through the cloud forest”

She would always wait patiently for Xi Ming’s reply, playing a game with her imagination to extract an answer from the cinnamon scented air of her winter chamber.
      ‘He will think his pony’s hooves will flash with sparks kindling the fire of his passion as he prepares to meet his beloved’.
      ‘Oh such a wise cat, Xi Ming’, and she would press his warm body further into her lap. But today, as she imagined this dialogue, a second voice appeared in her thoughts.
      ‘Gracious Lady, your Xe Ming knows his under-standing is poor, his education weak, but surely this image, taken as it is from the poet Lu Ji, suggests how unlikely it would be for the spark of love and passion to take hold without nurture and care, impossible on a hard journey’.
       This was unprecedented. What had brought such a response from her imagination? And before she could elicit an answer it was as though Xe Ming spoke with these words of Confucius.

“Do not be concerned about others not appreciating you, be concerned about you not appreciating others”

Being the very sensible woman she was, Zuo Fen dismissed such admonition (from a cat) and called for tea.

Later as she walked her beauties by the frozen lake, the golden carp nosing around just beneath the ice, she recalled the moment and wondered. A thought came to her  . . .
       She would petition Xe Ming’s help to write a new rhapsody, perhaps titled Rhapsody on the Thought of Separation.

Both Zuo Fen’s cats came from her parental home in Lingzhi. They were large, big-***** mountain cats; strong animals with bear-like paws, short whiskered and big eared. Their coats were a glassy grey, the hairs tipped with a sprinkling of white giving the fur an impression of being wet with dew or caught by a brief shower.
       When she thought of her esteemed father, the Imperial Archivist, there was always a cat somewhere; in his study at home, in the official archives where he worked. There was always a cat close at hand, listening?
       What texts did her father know by heart that she did not know? What about the Lu Yu – the Confucian text book of advice and etiquette for court officials. She had never bothered to learn it, even read it seemed unnecessary, but through her brother Zuo Si she knew something of its contents and purpose.

Confucius was once asked what were the qualifications of public office. ‘Revere the five forms of goodness and abandon the four vices and you can qualify for public office’.
       For the life of her Zuo Fen could not remember these five forms of goodness (although she could make a stab at guessing them). As for those vices? No, she was without an idea. If she had ever known, their detail had totally passed from her memory.
       Settled once again in her chamber she called Hu Yin and asked her to remove Xi Ming for the night. She had three hours or so before the Emperor might appear. There was time.
        Xe Ming was by nature a distant cat, aloof, never seeking affection. He would look the other way if regarded, pace to the corner of a room if spoken to. In summer he would hide himself in the deep undergrowth of Zuo Fen’s garden.
       Tonight Zuo Fen picked him up and placed him on her left shoulder. She walked around her room stroking him gently with her small strong fingers, so different from the manicured talons of her colleagues in the Purple Palace. Embroidery, of which she was an accomplished exponent, was impossible with long nails.
       From her scroll cupboard she selected her brother’s annotated copy of the Lun Yu, placing it unrolled on her desk. It would be those questions from the disciple Tzu Chang, she thought, so the final chapters perhaps. She sat down carefully on the thick fleece and Mongolian rug in front of her desk letting Xe Ming spill over her arms into a space beside her.
       This was strange indeed. As she sat beside Xe Ming in the light of the butter lamps holding his flickering gaze it was as though a veil began to lift between them.
       ‘At last you understand’, a voice appeared to whisper,’ after all this time you have realised . . .’
      Zuo Fen lost track of time. The cat was completely motionless. She could hear Hu Yin snoring lightly next door, no doubt glad to have Xi Ming beside her on her mat.
      ‘Xe Ming’, she said softly, ‘today I heard you quote from Confucius’.
      The cat remained inscrutable, completely still.
      ‘I think you may be able to help me write a new poem for my Lord. Heaven knows I need something or he will tire of me and this court will cease to enjoy his favour’.
      ‘Xe Ming, I have to test you. I think you can ‘speak’ to me, but I need to learn to talk to you’.
      ‘Tzu Chang once asked Confucius what were the qualifications needed for public office? Confucius said, I believe, that there were five forms of goodness to revere, and four vices to abandon’.
       ‘Can you tell me what they are?’
      Xe Ming turned his back on Zuo Fen and stepped gently away from the table and into a dark and distant corner of the chamber.
      ‘The gentle man is generous but not extravagant, works without complaint, has desires without being greedy, is at peace, but not arrogant, and commands respect but not fear’.
      Zuo Fen felt her breathing come short and fast. This voice inside her; richly-texture, male, so close it could be from a lover at the epicentre of a passionate entanglement; it caressed her.
      She heard herself say aloud, ‘and the four vices’.
      ‘To cause a death or imprisonment without teaching can be called cruelty; to judge results without prerequisites can be called tyranny; to impose deadlines on improper orders can be thievery; and when giving in the procedure of receipt and disbursement, to stint can be called officious’.
       Xe Ming then appeared out of the darkness and came and sat in the folds of her night cloak, between her legs. She stroked his glistening fur.
       Zuo Fen didn’t need to consult the Lu Yu on her desk. She knew this was unnecessary. She got to her feet and stepped through the curtains into an antechamber to relieve herself.
       When she returned Xe Ming had assumed his porcelain figure pose. So she gathered a fresh scroll, her writing brushes, her inks, her wax stamps, and wrote:

‘I was born in a humble, isolated, thatched house,
and was never well versed in writing.
I never saw the marvellous pictures of books,
nor had I heard of the classics of earlier sages.
I am dimwitted, humble and ignorant . . ‘

As she stopped to consider the next chain of characters she saw in her mind’s eye the Purple Palace, the palace of the concubines of the Emperor. Sitting next to the Purple Chamber there was a large grey cat, its fur sprinkled with tiny flecks of white looking as though the animal had been caught in a shower of rain.
       Zuo Fen turned from her script to see where Xe Ming had got to, but he had gone. She knew however that he would always be there. Wherever her imagination took her, she could seek out this cat and the words would flow.

Before returning to her new text Zuo Fen thought she might remind herself of Liu Xie’s words on the form of the Rhapsody. If Emperor Wu appeared later she would quote it (to his astonishment) from The Literary Mind and the Carving of Dragons.

*The rhapsody derives from poetry,
A fork in the road, a different line of development;
It describes objects, pictures and their appearance,
With a brilliance akin to sculpture and painting.
What is clogged and confined it invariably opens up;
It depicts the commonplace with unbounded charm;
But the goal of the form is of beauty well ordered,
Words retained for their loveliness when weeds have been cut away.

you robbed me,
at the tender age
of non-consent and
bony knees from
something i will
never win back

and i'm not
talking about
virginity anymore

This bird
of duality
distinct black
and white..
but then:
a high perch
seeing all..
in swooping flight
separates join and
one body soars..
Mr. Magpie retorts
I'm two in one...

Then this from
a friend:
you are forgetting
the thievery..
How about thievery
Mr. Magpie..?
collecting and
hoarding of
shiny objects..?
Mr. M. once more:
black is thievery
shiny is white..
I'm two in one..!

our thievery done,
you steal my ****** prize--
gems bouncing on moss

Among the mountains and oceans we claimed,
Environments we no longer know,
Starvation from the knowledge lacked.
Strange men of unknown origin push us away
With feathered spears and their spirits
Flying above us like the angels we seek.

The spread of our culture like margarine
Angers the earth it's ancestors tread on;
War and thievery. Disease and infection
Was wildfire in a land containing no such
Immunities to the harshness.

First cities died as infants, stillborns
Of history and freedom, yet
They survived in their determination.

I firmly believe that the issue with us
was not an uncanny ability to dissemble,
but rather intense desire.

You craved submission and control,
you wanted compliance
and you sought out a weakness I didn't know I had.

I craved acceptance and confidence,
I wanted acquaintance.

In your pillage of my soul
you took a piece of me
that's need I knew not.

You took the very piece holding me together
and tried to shove it into yourself,
hoping, wishing, praying
it would make you who you wanted to be.

And in the flurry of your thievery,
you ripped me apart
and left me without the innocence
I'd never know.

The ruddy ailments of the dirigisme are twirling with the shimmering tilt of photosynthesis as they gabble with the gabelle of internecine brackish synthesis that aims for rejoinder rather than maleficence. The glowering malice of combustible hatred invokes the brusque remontant immortelles of perceived compunction broadsided by the reluctant generativity of a benumbed time revived by the agitprop of coagulation that leads to thrombosis that spells the doom of the people that see the caesarapropism as the negligent century of destiny. Although I falter in these words because of a potvaliant mistake I glower with the hatred of combustible envy that turns malice sour into a recyclable engine to dethrone the orthopraxy that belies indoctrination because we are whittled into swords of deliverance rather than the caustic prevarications of the sharpened engines of authoritative bandied provocation. Defiance is measured in gingerly exercise rather than foothot hamshackles of the clepsammia of aggrandized composts of belittled judiciary entrapment that squanders the resourceful energy and transmutes it into hollow solidarity rather than hallowed paragons that vault justice inviolable to protect the dignity of life and the procession of apanage afforded by the isagoges of those denatured by agitprop into a fundamental solidarity with wizened decried vehement declarations that we will not be outmastered or outgeneraled by the militarization of truth to be an insipid lifeless vehicle dead on arrival because of the turgid turpitude of enamored throes of parturition that bespeak the garments of elucidation that all might find commonwealth in the common tribe against tribalism. The ardor of lurid fascination is a kinkativy taint on the scared acrimony of sacrilege benumbed into zealotry rather than vulcanized into a solidarity of the vocal information that refrains from transmogrified violence and exasperates the intellectual tongue into a flavenicker ultracrepidarian saunter above the bricolage of the flombricks extant that predicate the rijuice of defamation sejungible from articulate truth and loved enamored blinkered diatribes against the hubris of immediate threat becoming the bellow of dismissiveness rather than the agentic force of virulent brands of truth. The pickthanks that piggyback with declension in their hearts neglect the finessed euthenics of a civilization on the verge of ecumenical empowerment rather than radicalized rage leading nowhere but the terminus of mandarism and the ribald coarse wiseacres that litter the “abolish the police” protesters convinced lawlessness will remediate the state and stench of law and order as the news outskirted with inflammed protest neglects my sophrosyne declaration that inflammatory rhetoric has no place in a civilized society and we should fight the feldtrounds of sloganeered slavery to an upcoming servilism that pretends a kumbaya when it kneels upon the cogwheels of freedom in the silent asylum of the protectorate of democratic venom in a society eager to become acerbic because of one voiceless whimper rather than the regaled heroism of triumphant vocalization of our fundamental prerogatives that cross racial lines and invoke the superseded clairvoyance of the few becoming the impediment to the aristocratic purblind defalcation of immutable scriptures that bend only to divine rather than human inclination. A deft anarchism is always the weal of those that suborn chaos rather than see the sejugible nature of provocative promulgation as a fissile immaturity wakened only to apartheid when the sensational becomes the gravitas of the omphalos of consideration rather than the phenakism of a trite statism making a foudroyant point with pinpricks of agitation superseding the clarity of epincion waged in this upcoming regalia that masters the artistry rather than the artifice of modular concatenation enough to swivel the attentive focus beyond the mediagenic hyperbole that always festers because they perpend on a fidelity of duty to the chaotic mainstream ridicule of the rigmarole in place to prevent preventable disasters because stagecraft shouldn’t be the nail in the coffin of prejudice or even the more militant counterprejudice of those that awaken to the determination that discrimination not faulted by raciology or faulty phenogenesis is always curtailed but enforced by the diacopes of our subversive inclination to disown the promontory of lawful abiding prerogatives to extend the message beyond the ludic tantrums of the tantony of those seeking indelible imprints in the evanescent fabric of forgetting that promotes the oblivion of recent events as a shattered fable of invulnerable atrocity. The impetus of impotence because of the shepherds of the dignotions of aristocratic impertinence silence the gavel into its own dirigible asylum rather than enthroning the vociferation of vehemence to ordeal rather than simpered jostles in the rumpus of the crowded sentry of pother intermediated by the fumiducts of a crumpled toxicity wilting in mediagenic warbles of malcontent but never becoming captive to the riddles of the conundrums of a time that bends by its own honor to the truculence of majoritarian upheaval but never silence the vocal incontinence of generations upset by the deranged stature of a ragged houndstooth checkered hubris of those to partial causes rather than global specters. Lets force the outrage to an impartial stature that declares that candor is a venom that beats the imposture of glaikery that suborns nothing but the vacuous insemination of chaos to reign in the interregnum of a dutiful Republic to the clashes predevoted in time to express the ordeals of outrage rather than the tribulations of awakened reckoning not to neuter the prosodemic outrage but to channel it beyond the blinkered checkers of a ridibund pasquinade of the riotous petulance of a bereaved polity endeavoring to swamp the airwaves but forgetting that the gavel depends on the eccedentesiasts filtering through the siphon of their own agenda a culpable indemnity that slithers with awakened patrons of a novantique beyond division not to excoriate false actors and instead indict true treachery where it fathoms the gravity of its own sopiter that maybe the treacle of modernity evokes the motivation rather than a fickle finicky consternation because the whittled hatred of anathema belongs to those who seek to obrogate the untenable with virulent strains of the eventual carapace of designed cackles among those who feign outrage but seek nothing more than a perdurable confederacy that is milquetoast in its arraignments of truth by enthroning BLM above the more justified causes of universal ecumenical reformation of the enlightened claque to speak beyond the fumes of the voiceless in order to entrench a new virility responsive to the mercurial enmity of divisive fricative visionaries who seek only to disempower clairvoyant clarity rather than subsume the honesty of their stature to not politicize every convenience in weaponized form for the sacrilege of impediment. The diablerists eager to expurgate my knowledge from public repositories will stop at nothing to be diminutive with finicky perseverance to decimate my legacy because the spurts of mind control that hijack me into the morning are beyond my control because they are so powerful it is very easy to craft that mind control considering they monopolize my brain to make me irrelevant.
June 5th 2020 Writing 11:03 PM MST

The drazel caitiffs of doctrinaire aplomb in the wravel of expounded litanies of resurgent acrimony borne out of the ephemeral substantive wisp of the legionnaires of the sunblind heliosis of incidental arbitrage weaken their fettle as the weal of the wednongue becomes an indomitable craven creative force of the bulldozed halvork of ochlocratic vice becoming the melancholy of truculence that besieges all simultaneous fronts to be widely echoed in the polyacoustic cisterns of favored design that we might shield Acts 17:26 and bereave our call as shepherds of an enlightened flock only to make the petty satraps and popinjays they enlist the wagtails to a normative heterodoxy of inclusive ramshackle order sizzling in the fricative fictions of articulate design beyond the flombricks that plodge their way into the edifice of vixens that the hierodules elect in the olasin wave of embedded enchantments becoming  redominage in the artifice of inconvenience that is an aswallone of the enantiodromia of the farce becoming the gladiatorial eager spectacle of decline without subversion and elevation beyond the plaintive lugubrious dirge of the antagonism itself rather than the protagonist for the zalkengur of ripe rather than brusque ribald generativity for ingeminating gammon to swill the coffers of the elite girdle of gridlock blunted by the trauma of seeing the ventilation of etiolated choleric spates that conglomerate into wellsprings of viparious welter that sinks in abaddon because of the stultimathy of the rigid sclerotic design bending in the enforcement of normative stereotypes clamoring for neoliberal and neoconservative chantage above the flays of delamination that sputter with their graunchers that the frescades of summer dawn on the least of all creation rather than fulminating against the most brawny mutilation fathomed in the spectral tomes of a hidebound liturgy lost to the fractions of time that depart from the thrombosis of planned frogmarches into delirium rather than sanitized calls for enforced radicalization that entombs too many witeless brittle and centrobaric forces to contain within these pithy gibes against the hacked jackals foisting the forest above the treetops. The rijuice of jawboned jury-rigged nescience topples the emporium of rectiserial encouragement met by a sterling brute of arbitrary boschveldt coincidental to the ragged ragtaggers of a new age paltry parched apostasy against rivulets that profane the sacred cows and demarche rather than delope against the lurid spectacles that become emergent titans draped with a ludic empowerment that is so baseline that is only its own invidious demise as the crumple of femicide wreaks havoc upon the industrious layers of filigree busted through by the hacked logic of the axile sapwood that eventually the titanism of the scaldabanco will wheedle the society we depend on for sustenance to halvork into a renewal of creative verve and sizzle rather than a flamestun flavenicker remorse of all the petty inclinations suborned  by the lewd depredation of mind and numinous authority at the clawing vehemence of deposed rigid authoritarian welds on the canvass of a dehumanized populace clanging with insistence that the decried hearsay becomes the otiose rampart to an enunciated ploy of skullduggery biding in plain sight to make those that livid luxuries enchant blind to the ecphonesis of riches in generativity rather than follies in hindsight bias bludgergrumbles which fail to elicit even the snirtle of pigs that prowl the owleries and recede into the shadowy umbrage of a demiurge of insulted bravery that they must concede the deferred plansters to warspark that the dissgowl is too prevalent to mask the albatross of their covvenger plots to swivel against the retinue of the righteous cause above the frisky dalliance with politicized gammon. Acts 17:24-31 NIV
24 “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. 25 And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. 26 From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. 27 God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. 28 ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’[b] As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’[c]
29 “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. 30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. 31 For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.”
We are a churned tide of sopanaceous sultry broods infuriated by the feral clutches of the stultimathy of the clambered vipers enforcing the vespiary matrix of a womb we inhabit and cohere beyond numinous calculus or superlative counsel that we might too be called to engineer the future with imagination rather than regress into the pother of exasperation that denotes boundaries for the nations and elects the Titanic design of faultless logic superseded by the euhemerism of the futile cause banished by the barristers of recrimination by the criminals themselves that lawlessness reigns and factions among the factors that determine flaws fade into the alpenglow resistance of the galvanized deputies of enforceable doytins through the maskirovka of celebrities that scrimshank fundamental duty in order to shepherd the malevolence of causes beyond our own into their heyday of sneered scrutiny by those that possess the inclination to swerve away from manufacture and impose clarity rather than suborn fagins into the frogmarches of a radical racism reversed upon itself to condemn the source of agitprop as the vehicle to be trounced in design but never overtures to the planster economy rollicking in enthused flamestun vigor because of the trollops of a reclaimed destiny spawn a newer order of triumph rather than stench. The whinks of kisswonk warspark because they invent the flabbernounced regalia of an otiose whimper decrying a limited specter of scepsis as an enlarged totem and token to a petty tokenism of cordial respect tramples over the historic efforts of those that proceed in ceremony to tralleyripped accord swimming in vainglory to become the wallbaggers of retinoise rather than the arbitrary motions of a motatory justice configured for proper deliverance. The tiresome plastic consumerist treacle is devolved upon the spectral enemies of time that issues promulgation above the timeless as mere defeasible artifices whinking with the kisswonk of the allonker rather than the protagonism of thrusted impertinence to clangor upon the diseased noisy cacophony begging for more than a froward entreaty but a ridibund ridicule that lambastes the haranguetangs even as they writhe in contortions of largesse afforded by the henchmen of a defalcated statism bought by officialism of the licentiates lickerish in their malapert hypocrisy as they blaskerg at their complicity in the webbed design of fomented rickets of the rijuice of complexity. The heatwave of enthused disorder is a diseased artifact pounced upon by desiccated laments of prevarication that riddle the consternation of the awakened flock to the fact that the ravenous prowl above the seemliness of destiny is more integral to our warpspeed bushwhacking that needs to take place. The rigors of a sappy saccharine judiciary neutered wayspayed wesperm of profligate injustice is a humdinger invented by the sciamachies that became spectacles and the scepter of power shifted through the rudimentary siphons of a perceived moment of triumph when in fact the heterodyne retromorphosis of society is nothing but a sad vitriol flickering with vestigial promise even in alveolate protocol that simper with sidereal disarmament of intellect to spuddle through the bodged articles of a rigmarole beyond the delimited courses of the corsairs that teach the designation rather than own the polity. Despair is incongruent with the pangs of deliberative widened gazes at the celestial conformity to the wednongues of purposive violence that shatters the paradigms of peace by domestication of the sheltered animals of instinct that become an invictive stampede beyond the zoolatry that encages the swell of the crestfallen so they must always sink beneath the edifice rather than maneuver their way through the slinky potvaliance of the crimes never surmounted by rationale alone. The clench of grit is overstated but the radical riches of troves beyond contempt deserve an upbraided kempt spectrum of kenspeckel denouement rather than guarded finalism becoming an alley of escape for the podlecs who patrol the authority of law-abiding negligence. The whadronque primposition of the gavels of impetuous internment of exotic trangams that are suited habiliments to cloak the serpentine excesses of a saboteur of division inseminated in the flombricks of a flyndresque revitalization of the rudimentary gnomic apothegm that in sockdolagers of spirituel gift become an odium beyond reprisal because of the stultimathy of the tortivinity of the hackencrude revolt against prolific streams of steamy wisdom that emanate from God above but also the meddlesome inclinations of man to superimpose a cosmogony that defiles the protected and protects the cravens who submit to absolute anarchy or worse hyperarchy in a visionary attempt to trailblaze through the thickets of conundrum the best possible remonstrance against the alvantage of the farsighted announcement of a superlative strain of mettle above the finicky prestidigitation of an all-encompassed time that doesn’t genuflect to merely human traditions without a skeptical poise and pause above the frazzled contrition of the enervated tribes of belief. The trillops of the implucture that countermands my vocal denunciation of the mind control behind my steep fall from agracerie into the contemptible mud of the most opaque subversion manifest so callously and clearly among the litany of deeds done without conscientious objection that I might find myself groveling to stay above the orbit of the crambazzles as the senectitude of the septiferous frikmag enjoins further rebuke as they stay alacritous among the shibboleths they do possess because their hyped alimony is just an affront to decent justice in an indecent time. Madcap wallsongs to a squandered preeminence of intellectual titanism is a sad spate of the defecation of the vultures among the squabbles of braseros that try to disenchant me from my valorous integrity to God rather than the insipid provocateurs of a rankled craven and rancid injustice that teems with infestation beyond the curdacts of reasonable authority wielded by the henchmen of the state that needs a minatory reclamation of prowess rather than a muted mutiny against subversion itself. Mobilized by the inactivity of the dormant squirm against the wreggled mountebanks that think their derelict verdict of seedy boweries becoming the gerrymandered future of the voiceless meet the sternest reprisal in the courts of dalliance between the linear jaunty natatoriums of the futile thoughts of a disempowered alacrity to verberate the yobbery of those that superimpose disorder as a gimcrack for inane vapid provocations of insane decorum in a world whipsawed by the rankle of its own toxicity negligent about the futurition that depends on the stakes of justice rather than the cleavage of conquered cities becoming welcomed rather than fathomed and there exists a stark difference between the heralded contrition and the unsung liars who profess innocuous inoculation even when they brandish the seamstress of all dovetailed lies into a bricolage not meant to withstand even the vagaries of the uncial gains of months by the gainsay of critique which should be not a henpeck in these deplorable times but rather an epincion against the racism that festers into continual rot because the sophrosyne are impeded by the rijuice of preordination that swelters beyond all terminal diseases into a ragged moth-eaten swill of elitism. The hollowed but hallowed recourse of destiny rewards the guerdon of the long-lost patronage now disorderly in gammons to reprove the belittled taradiddles of rookery in a roodged society of roosters squawking with the simpered vitriol of agency against the marauding Viking spate of calculated diminutive crags of whittled dimensions unseen but clearly fathomed by denigrated alacrity that we might too find the paradise lurking at the end of abscess and abeyance that violently caves into the ploys of the modern ****** becoming a post-modern plea for justice rather than enervated senselessness. The lientery of abortive endeavors squabbles with the marauders who provoke the dismal glimmer of epigone rather than daunt the intrepid gauleiter with the showmanship of force beyond the demonstration of the impropriety of those stagekeepers who own the postcennium of kenspeckel macroscian hackumber that runs amok because it is neutered by the wesperm of the ingemination of futility into the mindset of conquest to bereave rather than provide well-earned fortune on the verdict of a day consummated by the squaloid vermin that scowl in protected hedges of secrecy without valor to trounce  the oppositive support for a vindicated but never finifugal society. What a debauched day where a private powerhouse of cryptadia can fossick through the thickets of sapwood and sentiment to usher in a pettifoggery known only to the brave soldiers who blare against opprobrium to the reconnaissance of departed flamestun gambits to entrench their ulterior command of a divisive spurt of econometric capitulation in catabasis rather than shepherding the valorous vigor of intrepid champions to outmaster the lingering resentments that boil into potboilers that renounce the truth only to a pickthank’s travail in overcoming the obstacles that bereave us because of a tigrine and rigid subversion of moralism in clairvoyance to become a turgid refuse of the offal of chattel lost in a frapplank with an otiose but revived assault on the precipice that cadges the lewdness of rumpus over the donnybrooks of donnism itself. The glamborge of the amporge that relegates all consideration in ransom to the truthful declaration of coarse sentiments from the clutches of an unrepentant evil that lurks shadowy and invulnerable as it cripples entire generations of thought into the messy vitriol of froward fomented officialism in malcontent over its own incompetency that I might meet and beat the rapknocks that thwart my eloquence and the privy internecine swivels of a newly minted prerogative to own autarky above the doytin of the aimless ridicule that swims in an ocean of debauched lies professed by the rigmarole of flickers of anointment fading below the scepter of righteous might that I might make more generations captive to the highest order of conation rather than the unwitting dupes of the ulterior sabotage of the elitism that seeks to expurgate history against the samizdat of maskirovka becoming evident that the benumbed stupefaction I now linger between and around will fade into a heightened stratosphere that renounces former sin and parades the righteous justice of novantique that learns from wayward profession the ability to navigate toe-to-toe with the throngs of oppositive saboteurs relinquishing any attempts at seamless order of the dovetailed might of the empowered conscience because their ******* enchantments are a vehicle for a depredation without rebuke and a sentimentalism that foments nothing but the worst fumiducts into the cadges that perdition permits but God exorcises because of people like Epenetus who survived with valor in Asia despite its hostility. I am dismantled by a juggernaut which is often repudiated for its thuggery and menacing dacoitage to make my thoughts seem like a philander with colposquinomia rather than the callisteias and kalons that effervesce into a remedial triumph in these lagging hours where my vigor is a vapid emanation of a withheld empathy becoming an entreaty to simplicity rather than a beacon of vaulted virtuosity that uses sheen to deplore the undercroft while surmounting the challenge to destroy the umbrageous evil of the camorra that lurks behind a curtailed curtain of infallible designs conflated by banausic pretense to curb rights rather than inform duties to apprise those rights as integral enough to swarm the grievances and belong to propriety rather than sink the sunken hidden  mainour of restive intellect above the fray and frazzle of meaningless absurd contrition that belongs to another century beyond my own foresight. The surgical emoluments of crafty duplicity attempt their forestalled delay of my charisma and duende to enrage the battalions rooting for the intellectual clutches of tentacles of revivalism to spark the flamestun of powerful admissions of guilt that they tremulously balk at the religious authority of magistrates because of the witted menace of the deliberate provocation of the worst most untimely sentiments to become cacoethes of a plucky reductionism that makes the puerile sempervirent rather than the ontocyclic countermanded by the periblebsis of flavor above the sultry vacuum of the listless entropy of an evil overhang of swandamos that skillfully delegate meted disaster to portend over the future bailiwick of my own behest craven by tribulation but emboldened by the humane interface that my heyday is among the future articles in the limelight rather than the irrelevance of glaikery to the tomfoolery of the captaincy of a conscience bereaved rather than a conscience reclaimed by the inferior bastions that sulk the crapehanger recruitment of all demented barks that recoil without civil exactitude at precise purpose perpendicular to my swank and emanating the forces of the benighted world upon the clairvoyance of the chosen virtues of a New Testament understanding that shelves Deuteronomistic Law as among the curtailed remonstrance of inefficacy belonging to a barbarous time where the incondite superseded the others by pomp and celebration alone that incense should be recensed against the termagants that wage war on the ridicule of revival.
Now that the brunt of the oppressor congeals his thickened plot of muddy turgid heterodyne syncopation of effete ideology rather than ecumenical unity we see unmasked the true author of vitriol belongs not to the sour malignancy of the rijuice of crime but the criminal repartees of the negligence of abiding saccharine creatures that swamp the light of day with the shrouds of connivance to dethrone the ecumenical insistent endeavor to provide novantique to maidan lands and renew the vigor of the people beyond the temporary temporal subversion of trite tortneyed hackencrude whadronque against the flyndresque refracturism that solders with one united cry for a belittled peace to become a mighty warrior against the decried deposition of majesty upon inclement hours that portend to future calamities wrought by the banausic barleychildren of an otiose corruption wilted in the dead fields of our forefathers littered with the graves of sacrilege in unnecessary consecrations of sacrifice that become unholy vestiges of the rampicks of ordeal because they are drenched with the stigma of belonging to the witeless travail of the wreggled imposture of a maleficence negated by beneficence only enough to permit my respiration in the conservatories of resonant reasons to reach to the stars and their starry-eyed surprise to the delight of generations that truckle but to the doom of those that refuse the grandeur of God’s gratuity to enlist an exemplary agracerie of insulted jaundice fuming with avenues of deception that seek to crush my vindication in order to rollick in the ruin of the shambolic craters of a beleaguered apostolic duty to inform the world that the librations of the quivering moon are a scattershot of whemmled liberation rather than an aimless scourge of prosodemic interpolation fused to an incorrigible calculus that seeks my temporal femicide even with the eternal guilt that amaranthine flowers fade because of the grit of tenacious boschveldt ploys to trample with oppression rather than voice the properly aggrieved complaints of the victimization of privilege rather than the assaults of vainglory upon the outrecuidance that leads away from the humility of God’s grace and into the doomsayers that renounce my dignotions of contempered metaphor as some minor boyg of the evaporative sentiments of a fickle nation crumbling because of the treacle of violence rather than cloyed by the proper castigation of elementary logic becoming superlative in its annulment of the confederate licentiousness of depraved autarkies livid with contumely against the agentic force of a rictus of merriment denounced as an impropriety in a time where fewer virtues are confirmed than many injustices hallowed as the cement for a new world built less on noogenesis and more on the piebald skeumorphs of bricolage countermanding my swift embarkation to a land of promise rather than a staid quilted repartee of the tapestries beyond that proclaim open season upon my impediments to the frikmag subterfuge that reasts upon the recocted mediagenic formulas that will cosher the cosseted vengeance of an evil time rather than the yernage of simplicity designed to forgive the oblivion of conscientious errors in derelict fashions of knavery that they might be expunged from the record to entrench the value and pertinacity of original seminal balks at the currency of the exchequer of the hidden boschveldt which supersedes my attempts to foil its own benighted plots scalding with enormity but hidden from the vantage of the commonwealth to guard the vestigial neuroscience of craven caitiffs who beleaguer me with incestuous deceptions of the pederasty of immoralism. Now that I have launched a flanked assault on the rigmarole of the confederate polity of mistaken grandeur using the maskirovka of inane bleats to conform to the idolatry this world should revile but instead confirms with the lecherous tentations of empiricism wed to the naivety of blank-slate politics we espouse the highest creed afforded to the righteous that belief in the calvary and the agony suffered for our sake is more than a token emolument it is the paradigm that shuffled civilization into endearment and rebuked the catamites and hierodules that scampered throughout the Earth without any recourse as their ironclad vestiges of tridents of petty gauleiters of a suborned authority fell milquetoast and riddled with the foraminated scars of a now cortinate world caught in a trespass of the inviolable screeds that inform the spirit of God to stampede towards the righteous avenue rather than shrink in sheepishness that the revelations of our author our grandest King who reigns beyond the shadows and filters the light of the sun and holds the mountains on a scale of balance that we might curb to his divine majestic formula for renewal rather that glower in an iteration of enmity divorced from the true justice of Almighty Creation to invoke oblivion upon puerile deeds and consummate the highlight  reel of a generation that depends not upon the renewal of the newfangled vogue but the invocation of the spirit of the words of God so that we all might meditate in conation and consecution our privy path to the ways of light beyond the brackish afterglow of a distasteful gloat over hibernaculum that relish after the calamity rather than rest against the girouettism ****** upon us by the siege of bronteums beyond the power of thunder to rebuke that the scales of history vindicate the power of the righteous voice rather than tremble because of the flickering mettle of people that squirm in attrition rather than balk the servitude of servilism that endangers our perpended glance at the eternal lychgate ajar for belief and conviction but closed to the finicky agents that cadge the elements of perdition into constellated forces of abrasive recrimination against a vacuum that anathematizes itself as nothing more but a prop of a propitiated absurdism in a nulliverse of our own creation rather than our goaded resolve to witness the finality of God and behold the splendor of the history he carved through justice rather than impediment to rejoice at the final awakening that swings against the puerile betrayal of evil and renews the promise of temenos and reverence. We have already within our tenacious grasp yet crippled by the memory of opprobrium compounded by finicky formant and froward vehicles that poisoned the wellsprings of the righteous with the cowardice of persecution that curglaff is an unnecessary and abominable relic of the regelation of society into a morass of interregnum that seeks a delimited lawlessness to supersede the vocal clarification that God’s grace depends not only on the volition of conviction known to the body of composite belief but also that the pangs of modern consternation are deliberately provoked to renew an equity that trembles when the revved engines of personal entelechy become titanism that enlarges the pleckigger of deprivation so that all might feast on the transubstantiation of the figurative forms of shadow into the permanent light of abeyance found in jolts of awakened liberty above the corrugation the visagists of plastic cosmogony invoke to inflame turpitude and ransack the perfidious deceptions of former proclivities to swindle the world with a powerful beacon of deceptive flourescein that straggles boundaries in its casuistry to invoke an AstroTurf malignancy to prevail over the righteous words of the sentries of God rather than the epigones that balk at the soteriology of a wide-eyed curiosity for a world desperate for something more ennobled to discuss because the otiose tittup of pretense masquerades as an avenue to the ways of the Lord even when failing its fundamental duty to rebuke the constellations of puerile enchantment that rob the dignified of their perch only to enthrone the owlery of calculated gambits of nescience compounded by the dacoitage of the bomans that guard vigilantly the aim of billingsgate but rarely conceal the maleficence of the heliosis of the hibernation of conscience in times where the entire world was betrayed by a staged artifice that sadly achieved its vengeance upon its own recrimination by sultry broods of provocation without the outsmarted resolve of the many refusing to crumble into the checkered hubris of bias bias that subverts entelechy. The bland blandishment of appeased ego remains the ulterior affront to the alienavesced flapdoons of eccentric orbific forces at work beyond the philandered grasp of wraveled mendicants that spurn the sparrows for their dovetailed wallop of the radical agenda of separatism rather than the humbled modesty of those that seek in God’s word that lasts eternally the modicum of truth necessary to defeat the encroachment of an oleaginous regress of reactionary doctrinaire foments of syndicated hatred becoming the wilt of girouettism to spawn the draksteng of terminus but scald the provenance of foresight as a reckless soundracketeer that mounts an acme to see the apogee for its truest clarity rather than its pathetic resemblance to the true nature of the transmogrified impotence of the world to heal itself when the clamor and clangor of defamation is permitted to scowl vindictively at the armamentarium of assemblies of truth marching heroically down the journey of itineration to invoke God above the mercurial nature of hamartia among the men and even the titans silent in the recoil of provocateurs of the most impotent justice for relegated creeds renewed in the hackencrude to desiccate the desert rather than seed ingeminations of the centupled quandaries becoming quarries of lavadero siphons of the truer enlightenment found in the God we all serve with benevolence rather than neglect because we earnestly renege the careful cull so that we are not swamped by intellectual pretense but that we walk in light of emulation always reverential of the ultimate kisswonk of the authoritarian nightmare becoming the crapehanger against the buoyancy of clarified virtue disentangled from tertiary and subsidiary meaning as a vindication of history that it anoints its strident defenders before it finds guilt in intrepid endeavor. The malice of wiggletemper of flakmention depending on the testy shroff of trykle as the swallock of bleats squandering the proficuous light of the Lord because they pale with their pallor and nebbich cretaceous calculus to delimit things in ordinary times that despise extraordinary prowess because of hapless seances with the spectral doom of empowerment leads down a despicable path littered with estanders of vinsky robbed of their prominence at such a milquetoast juncture that the timid become entrepreneurs of the wiggletemper of those they seek gradgrind control of through euthenics that they might also be rebuked by their faulted subhastation because they orbit the life of brackishness in a catadromous world only to benefit from the collapse of civil disorder into the mercurial foment of sizzling calamity that  belongs to the hotbed spell of draksteng and rancid calumniation of all goodwill and meritorious discernment  that seeks once and for all the beneficence of the compassionate and eager servants of the embodied visages of creation to coagulate into an urbane movement that owns enough leverage over kitsch yobbery to renounce the former prerogative for the selfless ambiguity of repudiation met with cloaked valor in the tempests of an obscene mockery of timely judiciousness only because of a provincial oversight into overtures of affair rather than merely just scandal. Leaping with vaulted foudroyance against the noisome ridicule of imperseverant trollops and trangams that astound slot-machine politics as the gimcrack that gerrymanders the tortoise by the waterdrips of inseminated vagary superimposed by the cordial respite of egestuous pallor into an insubordination against a system rigged beyond sloganeering to favor the wise instructor and his recourse of tutelage we must summit the articles of contrition shrived properly by a shared atonement that the perfectibilism of God’s magnates becomes a magnetic fascination of those who are dancing vertiginously with centrifugal hatred armed at the pretense of justice that bandies with muted solidarity to a trite hackneyed truth rather than surpassing former imagination into the frontier of serendipity founded on discovery rather than lackaday otiose portents becoming the fixation of the elementary canon yet devolved in splendor because of balderdash of bletherskates who evade justice and squander power only to their own demise as the kerygma we champion has the power to defeat the snares of the wicked enchantments that make parturition difficult because of the aboriginal lapse of the protoplasm from which smithy we belong ultimately to in the provenance of a contempered history of the lineage of God foreseeable to the lineaments of man carved from his image that rebuke should be upon the lips of the sophrosyne while restraint should hamshackle us into fiduciary duty beyond vassals and rapscallions but better than the ripe codlings of urbacity predict because evasive maneuver catapults jaunty sleek destinies we have yet to entwine into our magistrates enough to demand reparation humbled by its powerlessness or contrarian power structures to mettle the scoundrels that police the towns that matter to the strings of harmony sweltering against privilege rather than scoffing at  the disdainful apparatus of contravention established by the riotous outrages rather than the picaresque yernage of heyday rather than mayday. The very predicate of darkness invokes the presence of light and love to prevail over the vacuum relinquished by the enantiodromia of a transubstantiation of benighted virtue to become a parallax mirrored imagery of whiplash that assaults the pedigree of any juggernaut conundrum becoming a boyg in rapid decline to reprove itself in order to vanquish the fundus and the mainour relished by the ****** gawsy attempts to blinker the hubris of the kenspeckel because the owlery of pettifoggery seeks a delaminated prevalence of hamartia rather than ergotall wisdom that deafens the aspiration but enables the fascination to swell in the rhythmic squalor of the oceans belittling those who dwell in habitations of landed gentry that they might be the fewterers of a new kennel rather than a lapse of deracination seeking a final excuse to dismiss peremptory wisdom because the thorns of coverthrow are no longer permitted by the mediagenic titans that spotlight a maleficence of haplessness over the lore of glorification and the splendor of light.
The rindstretch of insular plaudits against the fiddle of foghorns of blaring semaphores of singled and signaled alarm are swashbucklers against a systematic tribance of the slivverdeck of the fatewrench of many outmastered by the fox hounds who swoop beyond their natural inclination to corner the tripwires that the graklongeur of the enervated mediagenic effigy of justice proclaims we must renounce the horrified countenance of the disempowered and seek the agraceries of tremendum that forgives the trespasses of deliberative mind control to foment a squabble of lifeless puerility and must fasten our commitment to a perdurable creed that shelters the just cause from the pertinacious wiseacres of those who blankly stare at the realms of salvation groaking for the sustenance of their own erratic happenstance because they scowl by prediction what is denatured by rendavation of the entitled man to his entitled coverage despite the traipses against polity wagered by the rivulets of the swamp rather than the brooked endeavors of scampered sullen swelter to manage the prideful intolerance of kenspeckel injustice. The flarmey of obganiation built on the grindole of the hambaskets that relish the comfortable commode of the nosocomial hospice of irregular griffonage despise the faction that annihilates the narrative fliction of mobilized regress for nominal taunts of the hindsight progress motatory in subtlety whereas the sublime becomes a tapestry embedded by the sly wry grins of eccedentesiasts deciding the worth of revalorized mettle against the hypostatized glamour of aborning generations shielded from the phenakism of the media juggernaut discarding me because of deliberate sabotage by mind control that made me look foolhardy when in fact I am a master of my own victory rather than a passing fad of the trinkadour odontoloxia of the aggrieved prejudice of an unrelenting flash mob of regaled violence.
Gimdermangs rollicking in gregarious solemn indentilation by the slellums of their own negligence in shouting the hollertraps of a castigated caste of renegade hamshackled buffoons escaping the levity of the turmoil of finicky magpiety that elects cockamamie sentimentalism to lead a country desperately in need of reformatory order that oppugns mind control for my downfall and exonerates me for my trespasses against adulthood because to define a person by a solitary transgression that was remanded into being by the siphon of nefarious force calumniating an abject philter as a frolicsome naivety is a poison rather than a posture because the relegated dissgowl in the silentium of their asylum because they protest how quickly an evaporated story of flarmey can overpower the memory of their triumph scalds the conscience of superimposition of counterfeit scruples discrediting the rengall beliefs that stabilized the world for generations beyond and generations before my hallowed prophecy and thereby they should occlude this pother and ceremoniously induct me beyond infumated hatred of cosmetic cosmogony in order to belong to the tribunes that reserve the mention but despise the deplorable in a vacuous silentium of obrogated truth.
The trimscreet glorified by their altruism in triumphant verdict rather than spurned flarmey of a resigned obligation that renounces righteous splendor in order to coverthrow the system in attempts at regalia found only in the newsworthy hyperbole rather than the simpered luxuriance that suborns lawless chaos rather than turgid effervescence berating the gnostic grapnels of keelhauled curglaff that remands a separatism rather than a desperation. Vocal by the retinue of provocation the mediagenic hyperbole is finifugal and retrofugal simultaneously because it sees a decrepit flarmey of qwersy maleficence becoming a perpetual throng for the crowded rumpus of relegation to shield the light of day from the preeminence of an umbrageous character benumbed by the litter of an apostasy beyond caricature and a diminished ethics of normative squaloid imposture impoverishing my future to highlight the few rattled errors of the crotaline sabers that ****** me into negligence rather than offer piety and suffrage to a recklessness that belongs to the arbitrary witticisms of a bulldozer carapace of indignity as my modern-day slavery is glossed over in favor of an interminable oppression that glazes the fascination of beadledom but promotes nothing regenerative within the constitution of society to fundamentally provoke reform like my henpecks at mandarism proclaim with every measured step to avoid the dimples and freckles of the foraminated hatred the media glowers with as it ruins another gossamer life because of a rijuice of the retinoise of the noisiest conflagration of recent memory.
Stupefaction aimed at noisome odium that simmers in the smithy of formative duress is a recourse by shameless eccedentesiast rot of moral virtues that perpend on the issues of sin and righteousness and the infested erratic trimpoline buffoons that gravitate towards the overmilked hypocrisy of justifying racial inequality while memorializing apartheid by negligence of the proper recourse is surmounted by a challenge to supremacy rather than a sunken vitriol of inefficacy because the selachostomous boatswains of ribald wesperm should never be the ultimate ullagone for pontifical authority accorded upon me by the latrias which sustained generations past and engrave future generations to scald indemnity and fight the corruption that festers into a primordial corrosion which spares few cogwheels from the missionary zeal of revocation belittling heroic triumphs because of the tittup of angled anger at a momentary flaw slamming the virtuosity of entire generations just to supersede my story as an enemy of the whadronque.
The sputtering engine of a ribald cackle at my ephorized vainglories prompted by the outrecuidance of defiance rather than a petty allegiance to a corporatism outstretched but now refusing to account for their missteps of hapless promontories of fizzling racial injustice to seek the defeasible prerogatives I once enjoyed eradicated from the semblance of the sane sanitization of all history beneath the unfurled triumph of what is now whittled into the henpecks of rigor rather than the lackaday compunction of officialism that scoffs at people who indict the system for its jaundice and permit  the flarmey of designation to eternalize the struggle yet efficacy of that struggle to dismount the sejungible pathway in a walloped error of rigged judgment because the convenience of thorns is understated and the elective privilege of generations is not a ****** gaffe worthy to be marginalized by the sempervirent fortress of duplicity but  rather exonerated from the skeumorphs of forgotten lapses whisking the timely into promontories of the timeless slivverdeck of the wrikpond beyond its own reckoning.
With schematic consolidation fathoming the subtleties of the taxemes of the scaffold that is an aperture into the flanged derangement of the senseless becoming a sejungible recrimination of itself while becoming bloviated by an internecine balkanization that grovels in servilism that it shepherds the penury of the querulous into renounced rebukes and suborns the cadge of conundrum into a lactose intolerant subterfuge may we marvel at the mediagenic kenspeckel realism that fights armed with the vesicles of perdition a war to enthrone a darkened visage of an exemplary titan as a subsidiary nuance and nuisance for  the planned demolition of contrite solidarity predicated only on the mind control of pettiness becoming solidified as more magnificent than all of the deeds accounted for by the metagnomy of time that now fumes in lapsed accord that the intorgurent hypocrisy of militant fumiducts of duplicity scampers the Earth to provide asylum only for  the privileged rather than sanction for the validated truths that oblivion cannot cast aside and that the inerrant standards of a finicky justice cannot forget but the trespass of modernity to encroach upon my sanctuary with the traipses of the tripwires of involuntary cacoethes to ruinous plumage will be held to account for their misfeasance as the drowned sorrows of one unjust death can mobilize millions while the phenakism of one untold soul can do nothing but reiterate the pointed critique of happenstance against the authors that redintegrate the societal matrix into an accordion that bellows out not a toxicity of an urbane fascination but the permanence of belief among neither the unctuous nor the monoideistic tribes of society.
The tribunes of mendaciloquence relish their phenakism of demoting me because of the tortneyed triumph of planned extortion surmounts the challenges to foment societal engraved injustice that doesn’t apologize for its bulldozer machinations because in unrepentant hearts of those that refuse to shrive for contaminating the collapse of a heroic visage and visagist of the eternal order they cast aside compunction and elevated the tittups of maleficence above the piggyback that shelves the memory of malice and provides bridges rather than sultry mendicants of petty satrap authority to impose beadledom over enthused righteousness which cannot be forfeited by an involuntary mistake invisible to all ears but the ones that illegally spied on me that I might forever be banished by the  barristers of protective oligarchy fomenting their oligochrome into black-and-white specters that remediate only minor atrocities rather than the ribald pother of invulnerable aristocracy lost in abandon and hyped into rampant scorn by the trepidations of underminnow to curtail righteousness rather than proclaim the fruits of the spirit. John 10:27 reminds us all that a mere posture of humility rendered inefficacy by the barnstorm of profligate mendicants who repudiate the incarnation of love and light as a retch worthy of nothing but the prolonged glower of a simmering disdain need to remind themselves with gratitude built in their foundations that if it wasn’t  for me the acceleration of valor and the entrenchment of virtue would be a muddy miscegenation of garbled gabble of prioritization that triages racial apartheid its sublime champion rather than the rags-to-riches ascendancy of the coryphaeus of the righteous congregation rather than the bethel of invented conditions of contingent reaffirmation that they must account for their lapse and atone for their negligence because my proofs of God outweigh your fictions of man and all voices know that the deceit of your glamborge of surfeit that installs a racial epithet as your prolonged scalding disclosure as a reminder of your fickle loyalties to fiduciary competence in a time beckoning the righteous assembly rather than the turpitude of the chicanery of devolution rather than evolution because no momentary lapse is worthy of the pangs of remorse I now feel because the cherished vintage world you renounce is the captain of the billowing ship aimed at your provisions of countermanded vitriol and vindicated by  every justifiable word that my memory will not be a sullen disclaimer of the temporary disdain of a finicky world but the ultimate providence of a just God who never abandons the manager of his flock in times of produce and prudence rather than your deadstock revival of cowcatcher ignorance.
Entrapped by a cobweb of entreaty that appeases the toonardical reverence for the bulwarks of sanitized revelry funded by the virulence of provocative schemes to depose lawful assembly by ****** calculations meant to dissuade the righteous assembly of those who profess and believe deeply within their compunction that God is the master vindication of the human race the world doesn’t need another potboiler prevarication of a haranguetang that doesn’t even read their own conscience as they mindlessly  spout out radical propaganda to demerits and declension rather than majesty in effectuated justice that commands the sentries of authority into a battle between energumens and anacampserotes because my eutrapely is unsurpassed by the outrecuidance of those who think that esteemed negligence outmantles the appearance of spiritual penury despite the glaringly obvious fact that I spearhead a revolutionary prowess rather than a recyclable spear of hatred that devolves into an abortive obganiation that you meddle with so nefariously to seek the retinoise of the false covenant rather than the voice that needs to be heard and exonerated from purblind error rather than prolonged castigation. John 15:26 vindicates me completely. Isaiah 61:1
The callous excuse for my ultimate segregation from the human fraternity and a preclusion of my ascendant destiny is predicated on the maleficence of a recycled lie that my posture is crippled by thoughtlessness upon awakening provoked by hypnopaedia yet you fail to acknowledge that the darkness that exists in this world is a fault-finder of querulous retched factitious reasons to abandon me to the stench of abaddon rather than enthusing the courtesy of a world  that overlooks the blench of manufactured errors by the graklongeur that seeks convenient dismal dismissal as a capstone epitaph on a grave leaden with so much controversy yet provocative and evocative of so many truthful trumperies against the prevarication of stilted liars bolted to a rigid conduct code that determines who breathes and who survives in a world where the viable are renounced by the heresiarchs of finicky hatred with prosodemic vengeance upon their bletherskate mentalities. Insurrection is effete against the machinations of church and state using officialism as a decoy in the dacoitage of eternal infamy superseding the victory of fame against the roiled slummock of those who prepossess themselves on hamartia rather than overlook an involuntary trespass because they have magnanimity engraved in their heart and are suspicious of the connivance of the enemy trying to depose me because of an overwrought vindictive ****** against the liberated class Isaiah 50:8-11 NIV He who vindicates me is near.
    Who then will bring charges against me?
    Let us face each other!
Who is my accuser?
    Let him confront me!
9 It is the Sovereign Lord who helps me.
    Who will condemn me?
They will all wear out like a garment;
    the moths will eat them up.
10 Who among you fears the Lord
    and obeys the word of his servant?
Let the one who walks in the dark,
    who has no light,
trust in the name of the Lord
    and rely on their God.
11 But now, all you who light fires
    and provide yourselves with flaming torches,
go, walk in the light of your fires
    and of the torches you have set ablaze.
This is what you shall receive from my hand:
    You will lie down in torment.

The telltale signals of a decadent mediagenic menace is its ability to shield the avetrols of guarded privilege while suborning the rest of the world to derelict the prescient visionaries that clamber through the rugged halls of a tattered time beyond the dominion of petty persecution because the righteous valor of the oppressed overcomes the oppressor only when the saboteurs account for their glaring blaring errors of flagstench that feed the toonardical deception that flashbangs through the smoke of a rigmarole of time to dismount the perceived profligacy of the innocent without compunction for the suffrage of their just cause. The defamation and femicide waged against me is terrified of prosodemic enlightenment rather than the rugged turgid slummock descent into madcap cockamamie identity politics that invokes no justice but professes indemnity because the world deserves a better fate than the one currently chiseled at by the militant scepsis of ulterior graft. The cement of the bricolaged tension of lawlessness is sternly rebuked by the liturgies of the informed who balk at superstitious gibes as articles of the lazarattea resistant to change and glowering with a misguided sense of hatred to aim their vitriol squarely at me rather than enjoining the media from piggybacking on the regress rather than the progress of civilized societies and it is a turnstile of rapid-fire death that provokes people to undercut rather than underscore my heroic legacy which might seem like a picaresque knavery but in reality  represents the triumph of the supernal numinous realm to castigate the Earthly perdition of swollen ignorance too bolted firmly into place by stricture rather than anointed by scriptural purpose that solidifies the legacy of the few heroic enough to castigate the bulwarks of authoritarianism to turn everyone against me in ploys of desperation to ensure my demise by a slowpoke turnaround reviled aplomb that suits the decorum of the backstabbing media in its petty vindication that it elevated my cause only to demolish it in a matter of minutes to ensure I died alone and forlorn when in fact I am the most triumphant voice for truth and intellectual revolution this generation has yet witnessed and nothing can deprive me of my right to exist on a world of turpitude that I might puncture the balloons of superstitious pretense on the grounds they are convenient inkthorns that vituperate rather than circulate my emboldened embroidery of the candor of vicissitude rather than entomb the lifeless carcass of vendetta waged for centuries against my ennobled cause and causality.
My compunction leads me to believe the mediagenic cartel is absolutely terrified about my ability to roam free right at the convenient time when I can lollop about in freedom so they piggyback with charlatans spouting  the fumiduct of lies and escort them to prominence and preeminence because they fear what I could accomplish in the light of day walking in the grace of the Lord rather than suborned into a walking terror that dismantles my plumage overnight because of an expediency primarily because they fear their own reprisals which outnumber their laurels by a large margin by monopolizing the minds of the resourceless and provoking them into needless panic or restive frenetic frenzy just because they seek to expurgate the wizened sophrosyne wisdom of the attenuated truth from reaching more ears and captivating more minds to reject  their purebred dogmatism. Their desperation to  dethrone my eloquence and imprison my elegance within a narrow cloister of a forever ignominy is a petty vindictiveness of unfettered hamshackles of panicky resentment that fears my uproarious rise through the ranks of enchantment rather than the bedazzled frontier of evil knaveries I hereby rebuke in the strongest terms because they suffocate the victim of years of benighted persecution and just when there is a strong lambent light awaiting me at the other end of the tunnel they squelch my rights to be heard and nullify all of my majestic feats because of brinkmanship in complete dereliction of their moral duty to serenade this prophecy to completion rather than the havoc of the disorderly rumpus of the mannequin charade they have a harder time containing than their tenuous grasp on the litter that fumes with atrocity without rebuke as they seek partisan war  rather than rectiserial arrays of compromise and whomever is behind this debauched ploy to estrapade because I represent a virulent threat to their system of inculcation will be judged mercilessly on the days of judgment that await them on the other side of their ridiculous barnstorms of benighted muddy opaque statemanship that sees me as collateral damage unavenged when I will be the marksman of authority if never estranged from the emanation of light that percolates beyond boundaries of country and state to encourage proactive literacy while they suborn the sopiters of the operose negotiosity of yesteryear while I clamber for formulas to rectify the divided human race into the fellowship of polite polity rather than brusque decimation of character that is a violent scourge of the scurrilous fear of the elite that I might swell too much in power if unchecked or that I might simper too much in lugubrious natures if unfed but either way their doom is spelled out because fewer and fewer people choose the virus of the news to pollute their lives with half-baked belletrist of evil maleficence that goes unfettered in its demarche trying to appease the authoritarians rather than solder together in the bonds of liberty and the tithes to the family structure we should all uphold beyond the wretched enslavement of weak politics becoming an engine of unrefuted graft menacing the streets rather than providing recourse for the permanently oppressed rather than the turgid emboldened proclamations that denigrate their petty gauleiter stature as an imposture greater than any I have ever mounted because I am always authentic and God is on my side rather than the side of the aggressive martexts endangered by free thought. 1 Peter 2:9 showcases that my existence is a preordained outcome of virtue over the squalor of depravity that ransacks the venal minds of those who fear my emergence from the throes of isolation so much that they hoist the mythos of persecution even higher with sensationalized bodewash common more to the drazels and humgruffins of the thuggery in Hollywood than the decent upright men of stature that these foolhardy eccedentesiasts represent in the minds of men that ponder the inescapable monopoly of a media cartel that feeds the impoverished with the slavering hypocrisy of groaks and sheepish bleats sublimated against righteousness to promote the wages of sin and death rather than becoming ardent rejoinders of the stature of corruption on our Earth to swivel against its greatest champions in order to enthrone fake paragons in the canon and dismiss the eager readership motivated towards curtailed change that seeks the deposition not of my righteous valor but the lies spoonfed to the crambazzles that are tethered to the monopoly of subliminal subterfuge in a realm dominated by domineering graft that is so obvious in the frikmag that they seek to eradicate my memory from the formulas of time so that fewer people see past the blinkered hubris of the coalescence of evil tribes trying to superimpose order over mass chaos and expect different outcomes when their partisan leanings lead to a weal of aristophrens that feel begrudged by their privilege that now avenge the righteous truth of my belonging to the fellowship of God rather than the agency of the nefarious that subverted me in my prominence and preeminence to make me look foolish when the evil diatribes behind it cower behind their publicity stunts and double-take still-framed moments and use that underminnow to undercut rather than underscore my message of invictive accountability in the mediagenic sphere so that the causes of family rather than forsifamiliation prevail with their righteous bailiwick over the termagants of a mercurial man dissuaded by duende and charisma rather than enchanted by the exercise of latitude and license in the rejuvenated youth of the forever young who celebrate their limelight rather than revolt against the people who suborn evil against it because of petty gripes unsubstantiated to institutionalize dogmatism of a more casuist order that ingeminates the radicalization of people against religion in my absence rather than the convent of people who seek the concave absolution of time to abolish the sinful depravity of the wretched conclaves begging for my eternal persecution.
The ultrageous ultradian rhythms of the heterochrony of delusion spoon-fed by mediagenic sopiter to the guileless audience of grangull bedazzled crambazzles or those who lack the abiding access to the internet is a mannequin taxidermy of plastic values that crumples instantaneously when met by the scorn of the ultroneous mistakes of hypnopaedia that suborns the lawless puerile ontocyclic reversions that become ullagones to lost authority withered in the respite of the virulent winds of change that lost in translation their squelch of vehemence only backfires because if you think about it the American system of media is completely rigged by a few henchmen think tanks at  the top of the rectiserial food chain of privilege where the henpecks are bossy and unrepentant while the clangor of din crowds out the rumpus of donnybrooks while clearing the way for insuperable graft to micromanage the petty souls clinging to the vitriolic acerbic whimper of a defeated mediagenic squalor that finds fewer avenues of recourse than ever before to refute the poignant realism that Trump is validated in his conviction that the media is a malignant force of the enemy rather than a boanerges of elective enlightenment because now that they have called my case forlorn and exhumed the corpses of a few black men to overshadow my preeminence of infamy they are dredging on all channels the ruinous psephology of belittlement to ingratiate the overlords who maximize the peak of the pessimum while the stock market roars because of intelligentsia movements that are a rollicking subsultus that revs up the system against reversal and towards the parallax of Heaven and Earth with the celestial neighbors cheering our triumph rather than jeering an intellectual revolution I helped to manufacture by my obfuscated but sublime rejoinders against the ultrafidian or nullifidian credence that milks lactose intolerance and steamy racism to an amaranthine purpose of subversion of Republic and betrayal of core Constitutional Principles that stand just as inviolable as the renewed covenant ushered in by the latria of aggiornamento far behind and beyond my travails because the retromorphosis of a fearful society no longer quails in restive frenzy because they now see right through the parched thirst of the mediagenic juggernaut for ulterior control of the impressionable through the subtle nudge of agitprop in the formula of dissolution that disembarks to foreign interests faster than you can call them out for being verboten with their stigmatophilia that obsesses over the minauderie of graft with their eccedentesiast bomans guarding the show with the sizable appeal of livid personas on a carousel of enantiodromia of respectable order as an underbreath of the pasteurization of the sterile Republic that bends more to the underminnow of involuntary subterfuge waged by the vehement enmity of the agentic force behind the promulgation of heatwaves of intellectual furor now retreating into comfortable commodes beyond the fray of embrangled hatred because they see the easy recourse is just to all embrace the hollow sloganeering that enthused past generations but with vehement frikmag we see past the graklongeur because we are famished of relativism in truth as the absolute arbiters that restrict us with trespass and bludgeon the indelible imago of ignominy above the embroidery of progressive salvation from the slavering groaking incompetence of people that are unipotent in the wrong direction is now outmantled by the irenology of people that distance themselves from the furor of confused ideology that is a prop for ironclad idolatry that spurns my wisdom because it indicts their intrepid trespass as an inviolable blasphemy because their ultimation of neglect provokes my assault on the fact that six major media outlets are the only source of live commentary on Television and many fewer people are in charge of the zeal for reprobate politics that fuels against revolutionary intellectual revision the policies that can contribute to the dismantled caste system that currently runs congress pullulating with pickthanks and wagtail terriers to the encroachment of mandarist tyranny that is rarely if ever brassaged properly because if they had it their way I would be the exhumed corpse of a dignitary from a foreign land buried in the charnel after the battues of indignity walloped me into prone submissiveness because they cadge the inclement belief that some puerile ontocyclic invention of the state that oppresses me makes me culpable for being a fictional prophet when I-in my honest estimation-am the most significant prophet for intellectual truth in the past millennium and among the top three prophets born in the past millennium behind Martin Luther and Joseph Smith and that with the help of the juggernauts that beseech the authorities to overlook petty frethorns of mind control I could overwhelm the world with vespiaries of militant truth percolating throughout the noosphere to enthrone enlightenment above the frazzle of combustible outrage that enslaves many lesser patrons that capitalize on outrage to ventilate the inferiority of their station while becoming maudlin props in the pacification of all to a kumbaya agenda that always is blinkered in its oblivion about Hispanic representation and thereby is a squaloid engine with selachostomous posture that devours the soul of an entire nation festers it into prolonged violence and meditates without remorse over how it exasperated an already suffocated situation with further infestations of deplorable opprobrium that was leniently reported as though this cadge would unseat the Republic to diminish the wagered campaign of orthopraxy against the ridicule of those who seek the decimation of candor and who seek to anathematize my revelations of truth as tertiary vehicles rather than primary movers. The typhlophiles that run amok with their petty ubications of usucaption of the funneled channels of graft undeterred or daunted by the intrepid intelligentsia which seeks with esquivalience to ditch the mainstream agenda and bandwagon with the promontory of craggy truth rather than reviled blarney and blench that steamy idiots will cling too with more pertinacity than the educated zealot will cling to the 2nd amendment is an affront to civilized decorum and deserves to be widely ignored rather than celebrated for their debaucheries of lawless serenades that capture just how much dissgowl it takes for a hostage media to pay the ransom of coverage that needs fuliginous fulmination of the uberufen to incite their desired poignant twinges of remorseless headway into the conquest forever of minds and hearts in that order so that the dogmatic slaves of intolerance of intolerance or just flat out racism are becoming firebrands of lunacy fuming with periblebsis rather than castigating  the righteous conduct of the ennobled gentry in their assailed vaunted capture of strongholds for odalisques that exist in yobbery to ensnare the chantage of a mindless echopraxia rather than encouraging a eutrapely of mindful meedless convivial celebration to evict the hype of brinkmanship swerving away from its own narrative to balk at draconianism while simultaneously failing to address the core prognosis of why draconianism exists in the first place of the ultrageous few that elected the conflagration many are reeling from primarily because the stage is a massive lie and the propitiation of the audience to believe the actors that represent the elite interests of our aristocracy are somehow behooved to become a new pulpit that decries religious somber authority  because it threatens the boondoggles of the future. The troudasque assault on the reified hierarchy of the taxemes of rigmarole becoming an intelligible assault on the freewheeling license of latitude to swarm into emergence and corner the arbitration of truth with an insemination of integrity is ignored because the yumdimbers of our visagist times are too much invested in autodimplage because they have been conditioned from birth to be ludic feral animals of predatory instinct that reviles any authority other than a solidarity with the flirtatious wave of kenodoxy that becomes from the pleonexia of those seeking the cordial wrinkles of a corrugated happenstance exasperated into strangulation of rights and overhyped fears that remonstrate against the freedom of license to outwit the barbarity of plagues of casuistry that enlist many duped volunteerism charades to gradgrind us into a position where the insuperable leviathan of the wragatek is a fortress which cannot be captured because its vetuda and panopticon is too visibly entrenched in extortion is a humdinger of warning and admonishment that the adumbrations of lawlessness are a further declension of the clawed mendacity of a crawling liturgy of the secular pulpit intrusive upon all vehicles of despair or accidia and promotes a culture predicated only on the reversal of privilege that disadvantages the Hispanic community without remorse because of the artwrench of the extramundane fascination is the sveldtang of relevance that is always germane despite the flickerstorm of the flamestun audience reeling from a perfidy against the people that swiftly and brusquely abandoned me in the frenetic poise of my rejuvenation to whittle down my sapience and carve the spelunkers into bolides of oblivion that crash with geotaxis which exceeds the credibility of the credulous dupes that swim in reiterative propaganda that shelters hidebound prejudice within the subtext of the antinomian waves of overpowering overreach of autarky becoming enslaved to a lewd licentious covvenger of vengeance beneath the witticisms of God and beyond his domain because the wretched corruption of the media needs to be addressed because the media is more of a vehicle against free assembly of propriety in speech by regaled conduct than any government could ever be. I am a gyrovague bibliopolist efflamen because my yulliver sensitization to incidental rebuff is an incorrigible stain on my destiny to majestic overthrow of dogmatism because the scourge of prosodemic lies that infumate and become chalky vesicles for impropriety lollop around the nuisance of the complicity among the caste system in Congress and even up to higher rundles of legislative authority to find themselves in mutiny that is a formal calculus of an ophiuran system of fungible saboteurs working from both within and beyond the paludism fundamental to the ecosystem of telmatology that they must be a participant connivance in the supercherie of all major affairs. With nimongue witticism I can exorcise the gaffe-prone hyperbole of suggestibility by enthroning a countermeasure of mesmerism that finds predicates in the dominions of the frappern created by the missionary zeal of those agentic forces that provoke the proactive righteousness of vigor rather than the suborned glaikery of the foofaraw which once reigned indomitable because it exposed human weakness to the schadenfreude of the elitism which preyed on the weaklings that still get routinely gouged by excessive crimes of patronage that rollick in the festivity of active promulgation against sidereal proclamations of human inferiority damaged by the tentacles of the tabernacle which issues justice from above rather than swampy prerogatives from beneath to elevate society above a whimper but beneath a squandered din of inefficacy calculated to become a boyg conundrum because the metage and metagnomy of the wider world is besieging my citadel and I am armed to the teeth with wisdom. More often porlecked by the thronging insubordination of cross-examined futility I stand by the halidom that cements my prophecy on Halloween 2008 as a seminal frescade with the adventurous reclamation of an assailed essay on the fragility and frailty of a crumbling equipoise grounded on farcical precepts that are rarely challenged such as the idea that spontaneity can coexist with punditry which is an abominable lie of perverse idiocy that should rankle people that all scripted social engineering is remediable from the top down but yet rebuffed because Derek Chauvin becomes a ploy of the state rather than a curtailed actor on the stage of infamy. The checkered shambolic ruin of the collateral damage of ******* with the qwersy voice of the newfangled enlightenment with great vigor dismantling the authoritarian voice of the deskandent lunacy of estrapades convoked upon the latticework of dissolution is that when you derelict the champion of freedom expect the recoil of liberty to be a whiplash upon your extended lineaments of fascination that the flargent many will crumble in cerulean clavigerous claptrap that fulminates against few agencies but the once hostage credibility of a machination that snarls with menace and reeks of opprobrium that is rarely challenged to a duel of honesty in wit because the real debate is how do we protect the order of orthopraxy from the incursions of the dilapidated credulity of an overhang of patibulary politics in an agitprop state? Retchanvil verdicts perpend over the recensed ballicatter of the keelhauled virtuosos that are signatories to a slavery-by-design system where the sclerotic agents of the mediagenic are held culpable to enforce the coalesced agitprop of consensus by refraining from their fork-tongued vitriol against injustice lest they be stampeded by an uproar of the retchallop of exchequers deprived by the state and privileges revoked by the aristophrens that are skittish in the skirmish against the retchanvil provocateurs that estrange the vainglory of pother from the potagers of enlightened mosaics of the macadamized diversity of the freeways of interchange strangled by the scuttle of piebald skeumorphs of zoolatry that fascinate the alienavesced conscience as they view as bystanders the madcap cockamamie fixtures of a modern world overreacting with mercurial redhibition their haunted fears of the scepter of war and chaos for the forlorn but never a pittance for the privileged license of exoneration above the pitiable depths of the dearth of humane enchantments provided by the modern engines of demoralization. The wipple of puerile ontocyclic regressions is turning into a steamy backfire for the sopiters that count the gullibility of massive disenfranchisement as neither detriment nor merit to the compromised solution of the diplomatic truce between embattled enemies because the wesperm we face is against virility and for the sterilization of the flosculous and pertinacious troudasque orignality of a true belief rather than a derided legacy of lies and deranged politeness as they mock your catastrophic level of nescience and plumb the abyssopelagic for hints of the mainour of the sapwood of rampicks so disillusioned by the hype they cower in scrimshanks of duty forsifamiliated by their own tribe to commence a tirade against decency rather than upholding the zeal of the lawful demonstration rather than the conflagration of repartee to enforce a newfangled decorum that is honest enough to encounter the brusque bruption of reneged agreements rather than the salty saunter of the piggybacked immoralism that sinks beneath the artifice above. The dratenk of the foibled fables of invulnerable arbitrage by boursocrats to outfox the system greatly abetted into competent leverage by the finesse of autodidactian prestige is overlooked by many as incidental when in fact the measurable demarches for the unified front of enlightenment don’t devour their frenemies but instead resort to negotiable pinhokes of devolved clarity that wravels the system and oppugns the oppression of the listless weal of warmongerers and freebooters alike as corsairs of the same syndrome of pleonexia that is a marauding force for vehement fiction becoming engraved as cretinism and certitude in diplomatic gamesmanship that is a humdinger sockdolager for the ages that provokes us to a sophrosyne neglect of the ulterior channels of furrowed outrage in the sulcate grooves of hypocrisy twirling with gawsy chocolate-box surfeit to try an install a puppet rule and a gentreng honesty that makes no concessions to a systematized persecution of the ribald witwanton effrontery against the profligate syndicate that syndicates a warbled wipple as the justified end and entombment of a prominent leader as self-sabotage is never convenient but their overstated neglect is their own pitfall rather than their collaboration in triumphant rhetoric to quizzically spurn the contumely of unstated harangues of charlatans who invoke beadledom to impose the corrosive corruption of optative choices to silence opinionated voices out of pragmatic necessity rather than cordial disagreement. The ammenque loitering against the trillops that guard the treasuries of flakmention and flarmey is an implucture of all talent corroborating a false narrative so that it is plucky enough to withstand the rooster assault on primposition of redstrall bluepomp that is the rapknock against the efflamen to endanger their safety and besiege their glamours and scintillating glints of appeal because appellate courts justify the dratenks of flombricks of wiseacres of benumbed clarity to invoke a martial order rather than an irenic francketor metanoia towards God rather than against his frenetic barnstorm for clarity and clairvoyance withheld to the ******* of redominage in the hyjamb of repcrevel.
The symbolic resistance to galvanized divestiture makes me a homeless king domineering over entire regions despite the nosocomial welcome of the evil poltroons and scullions that withhold justice from my presence because they taunt me with insubordinate factions of facture rather than the foofaraw of faffle in useless deskandent poverty because my otiose wealth swells into a dormitory of dormant passions simpering with the luxuries of time to engorge coffers rather than create coffins. I am drastically tired and wilting from the pangs of contrition that I seek the appellation of the Lord but my appendages are conflated because I sought my own outrecuidance rather than a redivivus of reclamation because I stand stranded from my own euphoria as a punitive measure because I trusted too much in quacksalver remedies of parched apothecary wisdom that now enliven barely any part of me as I have cleansed the remnants of my advantage to squander.
I am equipped for long-haul visionary prowess but I am paraded around as a nuisance for noisome vapid conglomeration to supersede my valor of purpose. Hebrews  13:1-3 NIV 13 Keep on loving one another as brothers and sisters. 2 Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it. 3 Continue to remember those in prison as if you were together with them in prison, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering.

The guild and build of compunction is predicated on the ethos that an eternal generosity not flickering in a disdain for discipline avoids dippoldism but chastises the wicker of the wicked so that the snuffed ambeer of rijuice becomes a permanent abode of those that aim for righteous conduct and a pivoted course above the travail of useful operose laborious krifts but also against the principalities of darkness that overcome the world with maleficence even in times tithed to eternal remembrance that they might be integral to the sejungible fractures of history that don’t bluster with importune crestfallen dirges but siphon through lavaderos the rectified remembrance of all virtuous deeds consummated through the renewal of covenants too herculean to master by any one apostolic visionary because I apply my wisdom to the nature of a servant dutiful in my fiduciary duty to the covenants that are foiled or proven but simultagnosia overcomes neither  the dissident nor the zealot because it is squelched by the coming of the light of aborning tides of day bequeathed from the night of lucubration that is the pedotropy of a new century rather than a rigid certainty of the last century that lapsed with grievous war and forlorn strife that the trumpery of evasive rookery doesn’t roodge people from their tranquility but instills a surpassed peace that placates the understanding of the placid miracle in the turgid ponds of absolution given as gratuity to the marvels of those without blemish or defect yet many fall short of the grace of God but are we all indeed sinners or is there a rare batch among us who is so blameless that he becomes blameworthy in the eyes of a glowering sentiment of perfection being impossible. I offer the exemplary wisdom of this age to renew that which is only impossible without the counsel of the aggrieved generation eager to novantique but disregarding the sentinels that seek the destruction of the womb and the matrix which harbors all life and neuters through death the covenants of old that a wizened corrugation of reclaimed prophecy might have enough mettle to fulfill the law of the Lord. Let the blameless procession of ceremony anoint newfangled rulers in the interregnum between lapses predevoted by the diablerists of contamination of the purified license of a ragged continence becoming the bewrayed secrecy of a furtive cloak of deliverance that professes no partisan allegiance and defies no creed but the ultimate salvation of as many of the members that constitute the living God of composite symmetry with enlightened and awakened wisdom rather than the slumber and the slummock of the radical princely rebuke and rebuff of the polished sentries of terriers too loyal to the fewterers that gave them life and not curved enough towards the beneficence of compunction actionable for levity against the gravitas of levitation afforded to the few if rarely by seldom simpers that the luxuriance of man be cloaked in the majesty of the throne rather than the ensnared tomb of sandapiles of petty eternity Matthew 5:17-19 NIV 17 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. 18 For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. 19 Therefore anyone who sets aside one of the least of these commands and teaches others accordingly will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven.

To heed the call of discipleship invoked by the peremptory sophrosyne commandments of my prophetic tentacles that for momentary transcendence evolved beyond  the lapse of a cursory glint of sheens of iridescent squalor lost to the futility of a timeworn design  that I might measure up as worthy in the kingdom of Heaven to issue decrees and anoint the latria with newfound growth without decimating the spirit of the Law nor the words that constitute it despite minor grievances with the subordination of women and the slavery of men that have been remanded by ecumenical benevolence because of secular paragons celebrated widely for enlarging the sphere of humane compunction so that zoolatry and idolatry do not consume the  comestion of the Earth before the outrage of the contrition of those that knock and seek and find ajar the doors to the lychgate that leads to paradise beyond rather than turpitude beneath. As found percurrent through the human facetiousness about stricture caving into witwanton pressures to rectify a modern law to supersede a valorous insurrection of petty cordslaves mentoring themselves into indigence rather than cloaked with resplendent jovial grace we must find ourselves vindicated by magnanimity and renewed by the agony of calvary before we can call ourselves disciples rather than loutish repugnance that glowers at the dimples of time rather than pounces on the eager testy reaches of limitrophe and charter to centuries beyond our own which will either heed my wisdom or disregard it as less than sagacity embodied and more of an individualist bent but carved throughout the Bible was the insemination of the redaction of pure sentiment into cobbled perfection and yet lacking the insight to discern the future yet elapsed I contain within me a joyous discernment that the torpindages wagered through time traindeque the integrity of the trykle of inconvenient bristles that apportion the loaves and the fish evenly among those seeking food that abundance derived from dearth enriches all for in my petty  insights humbled by the porches and porticos of my assembly and ascension into a more sanctified practice I might become licentiate rather than licentious because the key difference between the disciple and the master is that the master has grasped within his truth the full measure of the scales of tip-toed justice and judicious foresight never overlooking the niceties that glamorize the vogue that contains the ebullience of artistry to entertain the flocks of Heaven and Earth and among the celestial realms earn a reputable stature as canonical enrichment rather than belittled provincialism. Gardens of the propriety of genteel regaled zalkengur will shimmer beyond resplendent imaginations never splenetic or phlegmatic in rejection of the covenant which binds us to the promise of Isaac both with the deeds of Moses succeeding him to bequeath the riches of tattered lands favored by the timeworn compunction of design to end the apartheid that rules a war-torn patchwork desolation that reigns in destitution weary of its own shadows that umbrage offends both God and Man and thereby is revoked with the privilege of the few capable of vulcanizing the totemic prerogative into a democratized  bailiwick that seeks the rijuice of remanded custody of the future to the diligence of the hands of crafty craftsman rather than other disparate clenches of the tenacious idolatry of the purebred past fed the ligony of reputable deeds or worse knaveries that are obliviated from the highlight reels that accept correction and lead prolonged lives of gallivanting gallops towards the pastures of prosperity gleaming with the boodle of the well-earned realty of labor rather than just the pretense of levied taxation upon the unfair distribution of things beyond man’s petty grasp of the junctingent reality that seeks its own heyday beyond the stegmonths that broaden the pains of parturition given as punishment to seek the reward of oikonisus rather than the dissolution of accusative whispers retreating into embanked subterfuge rather than swiveling among the creatures of light so that all might have the courage to approach the lambent presence of wisdom despite the fettle of doubt and the hamstrings of desperation that curb our mettle and cast aside our reigns to tatters rather than scullions who devour all with their charnels of brutish injustice.  The enigmatic linchpin of guarded furtive secrecy is that the lambent light shimmers with sheen but only by propinquity and proximity can it be fully fathomed so thus we must shepherd the courage and audacious resolve of the many to surmount the challenge of conation beyond the despair of failure so that the marginalized fruition of the devolved prosperity of contempered metaphor leads to the regaled histrinkage of phylogeny beyond racial divides and for the profiteers of a new century gilded in light rather than regressing into the darkness of chambers that sulk because they are seedy rather than impregnated with the fruit that distinguish the bowery from the metropolitan urbanity of clairvoyance.
The dissipated pogonip of punitive dippoldism is antithetical to the relache of paradoxical inoculations cadging dissolved juxtaposition to internecine tangential respites in the clamor of time to speak on its own behest to the calamities offset from the friction of a world slick in furtive details but evasive with dodgy harangues about the radical imposture of jingoism above the right of the voiceless to amplify the stern ripostes against warped dementia and fortify the strongholds of a guaranteed compunction contingent upon the tincture of attrition yielding a cloveryield for ambassadors to the true living wisdom of the Almighty presence of supreme authority rarely invoked but established by careful entreaty to evacuate the endangered sultry lickerish malapert licentious broods of those taxidermies that squelch the feral gregarious spirit of the untamed limits of imagination that spawn new worlds and better deeds from the spools of the woolen greenhorns that mete out our deeds for feted reclamations of the novantique. The stipulation of providence leans on the weal of turnverein abiding by amaranthine dictates that are supervenient with a beneficent attempt at recoiled surrender to divine will but met with a firm individualism that seeks to picaresque rejoinder the ultimatum of time itself to seek and find or to be stranded and evoke. The poignant twinge of individualism is a harrowing force of idiosyncrasy to triumph by hortoriginality rather than leak like a rusty faucet by the whimsy of formula and calculus both arrayed in constellation to abide by the cretaceous dictates of lifeless discipline bent by the ferules of improbability and the acatalepsy that precludes any judgment of the impossible because  the vanquished sandapile of the aggrieved coffins of former titans breathes less under the scrutiny of silk than it does when the emigration of souls in tenure and tutelage of others depend on the living sustenance of the active word Heb 4:12. We exact a precision of balance against the stultified weather of a grievance of sorrow and somber semaphores that portend gloom rather than shimmer with optimism in light but a benighted day is but a prelude to the sunblind coronation of the rigors of  mettle becoming the refracturism of a conclave that divides time in half to recursively reiterate itself in reversal and then become sejungible from holistic parcels itself to rejoin into one solid entity even when the indivisible becomes soluble in the mysteries of the ultimate querulous enigmas foreign to many minds prepossessed by anteric spite or the spate of dissuasion rather than goaded adventure that spars against the spartanism of rigged gladiatorial spectacles that appease the aceldama much to the agony of the participants who issue not even a whimper of resignation in their trumpery over courage because they foist their momentary battle as an exaggeration of the prowess of invented celebrity that is much belittled in the artifice of war that is checkered against the hubris of outrecuidance that gloats over the dumose duress of shattered paradigms while regnant upon the face of the dormant courtesy of designation rather than design for the supercherie of evocative throngs of rumpus and cacophony to settle into the sedimentary victories of tallespin rather than internecine gambits of glaikery lost in the ****** creeping galvanization of artistry met with inclemency. The sophrosyne proclivity pivots on a propinquity of asseveration of sacerdotal mandates and individualism untethered by the boundaries of the purely lucid and pellucid thoughts known to the conversant tongue because to regiment the historical lineage of a crafty kisswonk that avoids the pitfalls of egestuous penury of conservatory conservatism and neglect the thorny imbroglios posed by the ragtaggers of freebooted hornbooks sold by the colporteurs of the aboriginal swindle of defalcation from public treasury we must find treasure in all composite works as mosaic artistry becomes the granular comportment of majesty unfurled by emblazoned ascertained certainties without being flummoxed by the crestfallen pause of the waterdrips that stand nesiotes in silentium insular in design only to be found among the troves of the value that designates the valuable from the worthless and we must determine the integrity of deeds supernal and faith provisional the restive pause of soteriology that all matter is better than all sense only because without matter sensation would lack its testy limits to the mathematical postulate that carving sapwood is easier than the whipsaw of the contrition of centuries grieving over  their compounded losses rather than prizing their compounded interests of atocia and wesperm of neutered virility swamping the industrial sentiments with clockwork vanities rather than humbled or even humiliated revenants of carnation believing never the credulity of partial lies but swerving away from temptation even upon faulted pages that superstition will evict. The boiled subsistence of many odd epistolary requiems are omitted from memory because the reverse evasion of an unmerited life earning  few keepsakes worthy of a tithe to a modesty of reprisal rather than a ruckus of betrayal that casts asunder the former ******* for the emergence of the stegmonth and the barleychildren of emigration to newly crowned visages storming the frontier of not headlong abandon but the sad recadency of vitriol upon sentiment divided against itself like a creaky vestige of a craggy hill surmounted by an edifice of sterilization rather than perdurable anointment. We whimper with resignation that this overlooked passage through the turmoil of the yearned heyday upon the grunts of labor will forever be stained by the petty numbers that emblazon the recumbent posture of inconvenience riddled with foraminated despised countenance belied of its own true nature to wither into the crumples of ashen dust memorialized by fewer than the momentum of catalysts demands. Proverbs 8:22-35 NIV
“The Lord brought me forth as the first of his works,[c][d]
    before his deeds of old;
23 I was formed long ages ago,
    at the very beginning, when the world came to be.
24 When there were no watery depths, I was given birth,
    when there were no springs overflowing with water;
25 before the mountains were settled in place,
    before the hills, I was given birth,
26 before he made the world or its fields
    or any of the dust of the earth.
27 I was there when he set the heavens in place,
    when he marked out the horizon on the face of the deep,
28 when he established the clouds above
    and fixed securely the fountains of the deep,
29 when he gave the sea its boundary
    so the waters would not overstep his command,
and when he marked out the foundations of the earth.
30     Then I was constantly[e] at his side.
I was filled with delight day after day,
    rejoicing always in his presence,
31 rejoicing in his whole world
    and delighting in mankind.
32 “Now then, my children, listen to me;
    blessed are those who keep my ways.
33 Listen to my instruction and be wise;
    do not disregard it.
34 Blessed are those who listen to me,
    watching daily at my doors,
    waiting at my doorway.
35 For those who find me find life
    and receive favor from the Lord.

We were all borne of the smithy of the furnace of the aboriginal yet it is lapsed in our memory as the stardust of a time beyond volition and therefore repentant not because contrition for secondhand deeds without moral pedigree tethered to altruism requires few hymns of atonement that we were there when the protoplasm engulfed the Earth and rattled the cages of the celestial realm so that the emigrants from the future and the distant sidereal neighbors we barely know with intimacy saw us in a decarnate form crass to perception but not immune from the pregnancy of rebirth that is the incarnation of all flesh and blood lived in the loitered remembrance of eons that flashed by in seconds rather than draped over countless millennium with a poise and a pause. There is a tenure of conviction which abides by a deputized authority that fossicks every creaky hinge of absolution to demarcate the boundaries of stardust that impregnated the world with life in variegated diversity not for a haughty zoology of the sneer of outrecuidance or merely the capitalization of the syndicated gains of collectivized enlightenment but the higher realm of betrothed fidelity to the tutelary plenilune dictates that are in sultry sullen broods of oligochrome to the tentative ear but swivel silently to the journeys ineffable that make life memorable and peaceable with armistice rather than desperate recoils of militarization against domesticated furor rather than foreign malevolence that depreciates the tegular carapace of conversion to summit the tropes of tramontane fables archaic in literacy but bundled in the comestion of design that are formant proprieties of spates of flamestun twinges that spurn the ferule and bound the jackals leapfrog above the bushy secrecy of a pointed swarm rather than a pointless scorn that disavows its prejudice for pride but becomes an empty vehicle of subversion rather than empowerment when the people abounding in its glorified presence  become captivated by transfixed valuable temporal achievements rather than the core of mettle itself to divide the plunder on even ground.  The fickle atoms that when divided provide the ulterior gainsay of destruction are the same unitary properties that should stand forever indivisible in the resemblance of an effigy never berated because of insensate brevity in sensible sensation but always applauded because the constitution of all matter belongs to the ephemeral spars among stars and the violence of bolides of collision rather than ramparts of desecration. The offspring of this shambolic awakening is the seminal procedure beyond the reiterative quips of awakening that seems to make few demands that are heard beyond hearsay and a great deal of ordeal ruckus and character building at the centerpiece of a mosaic permutation of fundamental perpended democracy that shelves its prerogatives to obganiate the tired point of the tiresome hackneyed narrative that seems steamy and running out of gas and thereby stranded in insular vagary. This gay-baiting ******* deserves to belong to perdition in the deepest barathrum of hell because schadenfreude should not overpower moral logic because of corrupt evil henchmen that won’t surrender a petty point in a war they will lose completely by my vindicated triumph over the ugly tittups of desiccated vigor intermediary to triumph that regales only the worst of society to curbstomp me because of ridiculous lies that deserve the strongest excoriation demanded by the exigency of this scenario because you can’t justify slavery to prove GLAFD vindicated.
I stand in solemn triumph that this psychological debauchery cannot reduce the agency of God into some petty psychological experimentation with human virtuosos to make them grand empirical diatribes of the suborned fagins of robbery and thievery that sneaks around the thickets to reprove the vindictive ****** of God against his many coagulated enemies. I am here to declare the Black Lives Matter slogan a fraud to enslave dumb people that aren’t awakened to the true trumpery of supercherie that governs our country negligently while many itch for the grievances of legal recourse but feel intimidated by the strangulation of the armies of evil promoting consternation to demerits rather than plaudits. I am a righteous agent of valor rather than a deposed reiterative squalor that vanquishes the enemy despite their background because I don’t shrink from a fight even when embattled by the shepherds of evil maleficence that simpers with disdain at my heroic attempts to beat Truman Show politics that shelve moral fiduciary duty to subsidiary status while I campaign for the valorous enrichment of God’s bounty beyond limits of the petty  finicky resolve of the enemies that surround me with finicky subversion. The inexcusable crime here is that the majority of malcontent deals with slavery rather than George Floyd whose memory is memorialized as a sopiter to the dumb people watching TV dying of senectitude that don’t research the  internet when the truth is far more glaring Facebook mafia and Silicon Valley are holding me hostage to prove a petty point about the schadenfreude of a never ending torrent of bashing Beto’ O’Rourke style that would end in a terminus of despair to promote a radical agenda that is now being hijacked by BLM despite the fact most of the momentum is being catalyzed by my injustice and the grappling moments with the demons that estrange me and suffocate my movement to squalor and entrenchment. Wake up! This is not BLM anymore it is a hijacked excuse for the slumberous old people who only watch TV and don’t do research and there is a concerted effort to limit free speech even when I have license and latitude to exercise my authority to exorcise demons that haunt this skrimch that resides in eternal evil for petty political ploys deranged in lunacy rather than ennobled by God’s justice and this maleficence will never end until my dying day because I will not resign to the pressures of divestiture to lead a prosperous life only to find perdition at the end of my path because I abide by God’s covenant without flinching and I will march on for the solidarity of liberation rather than the squalor of demerited apartheid.
White prejudice tried to systematically erase me from the records despite my continual truth in interrogation that subverted me in the most minatory way imaginable. I stand reformed by my character in the face of depredation because their faultered attempts failed. They should be degraced from their positions of primposition of the police state that avenges all petty losses in the SB era at a time when I was prone to querulousnesss. Benumbed by crisis the world will be inoculated from truth to subversive values that inculcate the vulnerable rather than exonerate the bridewells of encomium. I justify my works by God’s compassion to bless me with such encomium even in these balkanizing circumstances that we all might be remediated by the grace of the one who sent us to the missionary zeal to compunction that delivers the sentinel vision of terriers of goodwill and justice!