(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

Hella business
Got hella *******
Poppin double bottles
With a couple of mistresses
Stellar mistreatment
Here's the key
Lock em in the cellar
Forever their memory lies
But a troubling mystery

Hysteria erupting
Like waves gushing
From the tip of my *****
My genius is better
I'm the King here's my scepter
Now watch the teeth
You worthless Queen
Or I'll stifle them screams

I **** ******* on trampolines
Motion sickness?
Overdose on Dramamine
Slave to the magnitude
Of my impressive **** munching
Exploring deplorable nether-regions galore;
Can't touch me you got nothing
Broke *******
Grind your brain like morning coffee beans

Shame is a word just outside the boundaries
of my fabulous vocabulary

Oh, am I contrite?
How trifling
Check my charm I'm enlightening
Enigmatic and igniting sporadically like lightning
Magically radical voyaging down
                                                           down
                                                  down the rabbit's hole
Inciting excited riots to light fires spark fuses and chew on live wires
You do not frighten me.
Delivering excruciating asphyxiation to every pwn'd n00b
Is my modus operandi
And this is my magnum opus

I have Tourette's

Conceive these merriments of abhorrent mental abortions
Precisely concise and incisive concocting incoherent comatose monstrosities to flatten your lifelines
Conduct these ensembles of debauchery and narcotics -
I'm fascinating;
Crippling your mind like a lobotomy and tripping the light fantastic through bombarding planes of consciousness
I'm on acid thraxXx'd the **** OUT and faded
Levitating fading and oscillating in time while inflating my ego

But lets be realistic
the caliber of my linguistics is intrinsically aesthetic
but none too altruistic
Untrue!
Be reasonable lest I demand be-headings on grounds of treason
Its not hard for me -
It's profound, the sound of suffering;
I'll swallow your soul
'Tis the season!

Inference for instance -
****-hand upturned to oceans of incessant peasants
Pestering to ****** and fluster your festering ****-hole
Exact my revenge; begin phase mayhem
initiating total brain annihilation
interring bodies posthaste with skilled persistence
And sporting in poor taste
RESISTANCE IS FUTILE

You who peers through eye of the pyramid-
Would you be so kind as to interpret my footprint at face-value?
Do you take me for a fool yet seek prophets reaping profits?
Listen to them sleep, baaah-ing away like flocks of little sheep
My hearts not on my sleeve but I have a trick or two up there;

Now bow before my marvelous flow
As I behold my throne whilst throwing bows and exposing hoes.

don't get me wrong, i believe in competition,
but the neymar conundrum is
slightly bugging me...
    where does actual competition occur,
and where does general inequality begin?
   if you told me that the lie of being
educated was true: i'd laugh it off...
    after all, preceding generations always
valued education as a force for good -
a transition into adept modes of behaviour...
socialism was born from a rift from
the under-appreciation of the so-called
"virtue" of becoming educated...
           evidently only "idiots" gained
the higher economic ground for expressing
the ultimate freedom of "expression"...
   but paying someone one-hundred-and-ninety
pounds, for someone who can kick
a ball is the zenith of western "values"?
  what sort of "competitive" game is being
played out?
a bit like ensuring that mike tyson spars
with a one-handed boxer...
         oh sure... **** me! that's competition!
when will this "idea" of competition spiral
out of control and begin to look ridiculous?
it's, probably, about now...
            footballers' logic would state it
in the most obvious dynamic possible...
                   the individual is worth precisely
what is expected of him:
   the luck of a poker hand... luck!
        in the infinitely random pursuit of
the "individual",
                  there is always the notion of a
shared effort...
             to me, individualism is a fake
construct...
               ask the chinese about an individual...
oh yeah... there was one, a long time ago,
some guy named confucius...
    but these days he's in a sea of a billion
examples...
                i do believe in individualism,
but not when it's over-arching,
spanning 1 - 3 generations,
         it takes centuries, it takes 3+
generations, as it might take to establish
centuries and call them: the victornian era...
but so many "individuals" in a single moment,
where there is no death-debacle, a death-membrane
exclusion parameter? you *******
kidding me?
                 how will people not react to
this injustice of the "competitive" principle?
      so this ****** gets to kick a ball
and gets so much because so many eyes are
peering at him...
   if this isn't post-capitalism, i don't know what it:
capitalism has conquered socialism,
fair enough...
       but it has also showed us a heresy
inherent in itself: within the principle of
competition (which i agree with, given the spartan
dynamic): it has a handicapped person
competing with an ably bodied person -
  the idea of competition has become unfair...
no, not it terms of physical ability,
but in terms of reward!
                      you can't just do
          a humpty-dumpty um? moment...
so why bother schooling kids in the subject
matters of chemistry, history or english,
if some have the ontologia innatus
   (innate nature of being)
   that supports them in excelling in a particular
area of "interest"...
    you know what's actually socialistic
in a capitalistic system? the education system...
education is actually socialistic in capitalism:
it's oppresive!   it doesn't forge
people of skill... it only forges people
   who's sole "skill"? is to pay off debt!
   you're not creating professionals!
                                you're creating debtors!
so why bother:
1. erroding people's memory &
2. + 3. not teaching them a professional
    mechanism, due to bombarding them with
useless theory: airy-fairy *******
  while
        living the lie of reaching 100 mortal
years, and not... not once! not once!
encouraging the stability of future generations
filling those about to retire
                  spots of competence?!
no... this is not capitalism...
          this is capitliasm eating itself...
capitalism was always going to cannibalise itself
given the disappearing outside "threat"
competition...
   it was always going to implode...
                                  it's ouroboros capitalism...
because as of the 1990s... its only competition
is itself...
                      any footballer will tell you:
the neymar conundrum?
    oh, it's there...
                              he's an "individual"
within an advert...
   within a brand?
                but in a football team?
                              he's still only a striker!
i have to say... first the western powers blame
"collectivism", because it's too large to handle...
and then they cherish the idea of
"teams"... team sports, working together...
   at least socialism is a dualism...
   capitalism? nothing but a false serving
dichotomy...
            so this socialistic "grey area"?
                         isn't it bound to capitalism
also? whereby the so-called "individual"
over-shadows the group effort?
                    on the hard-on fans could name
me a few manchester united defenders from 1994 - 1998...
garry pallister? denis irvine?
              such a ****** sort of "individualism"...
who the **** actually came up with the paradox
of shoving individualism up everyone's ***-crack,
while at the same time preaching
                              the "team effort" mantra?

It was the weirdest thing, for a lack of a better term. Some would find it hilarious, I found it confusing. But she used to bring me flowers whenever we got into a fight. At my home, work, the barbershop. You name it.

-“Ottis your girl is here...and she bought you flowers!”

I didn’t know if I liked it, or if I should be giggling like a teenage girl whenever she showed up with fresh-cut daisies or a bouquet of roses at my doorstep. I would hang up the phone on her on some serious mental rage and I would get flowers the next day- “I am sorry baby” she would say, -“I love you!” -Was I THAT sensitive? Did I brought out the mom in her? Have our roles been reversed? Doesn’t she know that all men are just content and happy with the two B's? (Beer and *******) or has the great battle for equality between men and women finally come to an end in the form of a dewy-eyed, raven-haired woman that found it romantic to bring her man flowers? It’s widely known that the quickest way to a man’s heart is through his *****, then his stomach. So, WHAT IN THE HELL IS WRONG WITH THIS WOMAN? I would say to myself while gushing in pretend shock and saying to her “Aww, you shouldn’t have, they’re beautiful!”

She quickly became known among my friends as the Flower Girl. Her answer to all our problems where with flowers. She stands me up: flowers. She forgets to return my calls: flowers. She didn’t like my cooking: flowers. She disappears for a few days: flowers and more flowers. She used to carry my fragile woman-heart in her purse pocket. I unwillingly found myself wearing the skirt in the relationship before I knew it and it had to stop. I had to put my manly pants on, one leg at a time and stop letting them sag to her bidding. But they did smell nice though, and they were pretty, especially those yellowish-orange tulips she bought me that one time with that giant teddy bear with a giant heart-shaped card that read “Ottis” on it. That was nice.

-“Kara, listen to me, I don’t want anymore flowers, I’ve had it, they are nice and all, but I am the one that’s supposed to give you flowers!” -I said firmly and secure in the manliest tone I could mustard. -“But you never give me any” -she retorted with the sweetest, most adoring kind of voice that would make the softest of Care Bears look like ****-out gangsters. Needless to say I felt like a monster, like Charles Manson’s long lost child. I surrendered to her charm and became Silly Putty in her hands once more. But at least the flowers stopped after that day, so did the calls, the dates, the ***, her unparalleled lunacy, until we were nothing more than a memory in a pantheon of many. Last I heard, she went back to Switzerland, suffocating, bombarding and smothering the new poor schmuck she’s dating with, you guessed it, flowers.

Atlantic City, 2007.

You once told me how you were captivated with photos, how it fills you with satisfaction capturing a picture perfect portrait of a moment, memory, or even a mere mortal. I almost always never understood this addiction of yours on why and how you’re more than determined to collect snips of your life in a paper inked by dozens and dozens of color to paint a single picture. It is somewhat a kind of a waste but you never thought of it like that.

“What is it with you and photographs?” a question I finally got to ask you after harboring enough courage. Yet you merely answered with a shrug and looked away, away from my prying eyes, away from the echoes of what I just asked you. I was on the verge of giving up on you when you suddenly held my hand tighter than usual. “Because…,” you muttered in between huge gulps of breath. I wrapped my arms around you hoping to shield you from your turmoil. For minutes we sat there, still and not making any sound while I let you hold on to me as if I was your lifeline. Anchored back to the present, you told me, “I’m just scared that’s all.” I waited for you to continue, to go on with what you were saying, but you just did not. I turned to look at you only to find you staring at the far distance, looking lost, gone.

I yanked my hand out of your hold but you were still transfixed far, far away from me, far from this reality. Your stare just did not falter at the slightest even as you told me the words which bugged me for the most of my hours, days, or weeks even. Those times following your passing that is. Yes, you left me. You left me hanging and alone without knowing the reason why you ended your life just like that. I’ve always been blinded by the pretense that you were more that okay amidst it all. Probably it comes with the denial of your loss. But if there’s any consolation, I finally know you aren’t okay at all, now when it’s all a little too later that I should have known.

But now as I lay here, I come to think of the last thing you told me. *“If a picture is worth a thousand words, then as to what worth would a million photographs be?”

As I recall you saying it that night, hours before you pulled the trigger over your head, I assumed it was merely rhetorical. I merely thought you were playing Socrates in order to halt me from bombarding you with any more questions. It kept me up all night staring at the ceiling only to receive a phone call at 3:00 A.M. on how you were rushed to the hospital and how the doctors shook their head in the inability to save you.

Until now, I’m still kept awake not of the distraught on your sudden death but because of that question you took me by surprise. I answered nothing then but I am afraid I do know the answer now. You did not capture those sunrises and the blossoming of flowers out of sheer creativity. Instead, it gave you a glimpse of a new beginning that this life failed to give you. You did not capture the candid smiles of random individuals out of a coincidence but because your heart yearns for this kind of happiness to be instilled deep within you. You did not capture the city lights just for the vivid imagination it fueled your satisfaction. It was the colors which brought light to every impending doom you have yet to undergo. You did not capture the landscapes and skyscrapers out of nothing more than an appreciation of abstract art. Rather, it gave you the leeway to live in a fantasy as the surrealism in these photos fuels your unwavering resolve to escape the trap this reality caged you in.

Darling, you weren’t just collecting photographs out of a hobby, out of a custom. And now, I know why you told me you were scared that time I asked you about this obsession of yours. *You were scared to find out that your life is a meaningless pit, like a hollow chasm with nothing but a void. In search of yourself, you found fragments of ‘you’ in these ink-stained scraps of print. It was how you defined your existence: in shots of images of the existence of others. Some might not understand, but you are brave and brilliant to this all. Brave for facing all your demons alone, no matter how I would have wanted to save you from your distress, and brilliant for discovering that our lives are merely a collection of lives complementing each other.

So, darling, maybe this is the end of the line for you, the brink of your voyage to obtain a million photographs. And to answer your question, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then a million photographs would be worth a life. These million photographs are all you. These photographs are what make you whole, flawlessly complete. You will realize you always were as opposed to what the world let you believe in. And then maybe, just maybe, as you finally lay to rest, far-off from the tragedy this realm of this cruel dimension, you can be finally be at peace and eventually manage to realize that you lived not just a portfolio of photographs but a masterpiece.


*(k.p.)

Vernarth says: "Give me some milk, and I will be the son of Zeus, perhaps as a means in everything and not a whole of which I never thought...!"

Wonthelimar from the Boedromion brought the arrows that Zefian brought, they brought the sleeping bodies of winter to the lap of the spring Boedromion, crossing the lines from spring to winter in the cycle that went directly to the Mercurial Ambrosia of the Cinnabar. Were they discreet detached arrows that he had thrown into the sky and did not return? but if in the rooms, and in the animalism stages that made the duty of rejoicing at the ****** of the Telesterion.  Wonthelimar being once more re-looted, before starting the works of the temple of the Megaron Áullos Kósmos, he returns to the cavern of Chauvet Wonthelimar. It distanced itself from the contravention of Apollo and Artemis towards an olive tree, originating in the arrows of Zefian, to mark the new cardinal points of the zenith, starting with the first two arrows that are placed in the bowstring, each one belonging to trajectories from north to south and the other two that were again violated with the arc of the stormy East, to launch the arrows from east-west with limits of southern magnetism. He carried in his belongings "The Iberian Rings", which would be the migration to the cardinals and points where the Megaron of Vernarth would be exactly, arguing that the phalanges of Zefian would be ordered in Syntropia and organic chaos in Patmos, Pythagorean proportions would be made, in essences of numbers that idly advanced in the temporal steps of Wonthelimar that mobile became of religious arrows and of the Mercurial Ambrosia of the Cinnabar, to help him with the most insightful points of the Constellation of Capricornus.  Zefian's tendency was one of evident delight after the bowstring being pulled, for phantasmagoric existence; presuming that where they fell would be the beginning of the storms that would originate the Állos Kósmos Megarón, for late courts imposed from a cosmos, which was directed by committing itself to its will and from a doubtful Vestal god advocating to associate with hospitable Canephores, such as Vestal Virgins of Roman bilocation, and quantum parapsychology of the dreaded in-between-tale alive that boils back in the arrows that had not yet fallen, and did not know their whereabouts. Like plates or serial hosts that were evoked from where the origin of the Universe was broken, to open towards the Duoverso contravened organic, vigorous and in anti-scorch to the divine celestial origin as a parameter of *****-ovule, rather in eonic instances in the fireplace of Hestia, running in eternities to vast volumes of light-years.

From the medrones that grow in the Nyons massifs, the Seven Ibic Rings were established.

Ibic 1: "The first was from the initiation of Wonthelimar and brought purity, for all who needed him and were visiting in the dark, and then he would find the light when he left the cave alive if he was accepted."
Ibic 2:” He was guided by Vlad Strigoi in the priesthood center on his shelves with the Chiroptera, and in excess of the mercurial ambrosia for the purpose of energizing the Tsambika Cinnabar.  Having all the protocol of Transylvania and eternity with the waters of Antiphon Benedicts”.
Ibic 3: "From the Eygues, the waters evaporated for healings of the tormented initiatory processes of raising the four Arrows of Zefian, to indicate the zenith of the Megaron."
Ibic 4: “This ring was from the antlers of Wonthelimar, here they wore the oikos or threads of Gold from Orphi, for the Himation and investiture to anoint the body of Vernarth, bringing the aerial atmospheres of the Alps and Ida as a complement to Mycenae- Aldaine ”.
Ibic 5: "This piece of metal speaks of the fifth plasmic element that would contract the universe and the Hyperdisis galaxy, to elevate it to Vernarth's neurological and Duoversal hyper brain twinned to the Mashiach."
Ibic 6: "It is the sixth piece of crowns of Kafersesuh, bringing the pollinations of the Lepidoptera, for the central stage of the investiture under the gloom of Hellenika and Theoskepasti."
Ibic 7: “It is the grave voice of the Cinnabar and the Antiphon Benedictus, together with the Lenten fast of all the hoarse voices, which inquire about the true phoneme and photon of divine mass light, to build the Áullos Kósmos. From here the purification will go up in synchrony through the final growth medron, up to the millimeter shoulder of the square meters assembly, which will illustrate the Megaron´s Acrotera  "

Ellipsis - Parapsychological Regression Marielle Quentinnais year of the Lord 1617

Wonthelimar was transmigrating to Chauvet, but the Pontias wind carried him from Nyons to Avignon, encountering filigree by Raymond Bragasse; a Former Dominican priest of Cathar descent. He always drenched himself in the estuaries of the Rhone, which came from the Saint Gotthard massif; being master and lord of dreams and of the breaking curses of the despicable administrators of the house of God, and of the Antipopes in Avignon.
Wonthelimar heard voices from some parapets babbling in the parapsychological regression of Vetnarth, on August 4, 1617, when Klauss Ritkke was found cleaning the main stained glass window; he heard heated dialogues between a Friar and a Gentleman, who was once an assistant to the clergy. Klauss could come closer and hear his conversation more clearly, until Friar Andrés, muttering, demanded indulgence from Raymond Bragasse, one or the other.

Raymond Bragasse Says: “My lord Wonthelimar; what grace has brought us together here in the middle of the Pontias, between hopes and reforms!”

Wonthelimar responds: "Your flight is a spell of the grace of André Panguiette, who will find us again. How many times with hope I fought to reform you Raymond... Oh Virga ac Diadema  sed Diabolus...!! Oh, ****** the devil smiled...!!

Raymond replies: “It is a major question to live if in something I have failed, take me to the sulfurous emanations of Hell. But my faith lies moldy at the bottom of the sea, a sacred myth of my truth..., and of my beloved Marielle...! There are fifteen thousand demons that possess my body... fifteen thousand demons for attacking the sacred mystery of the Holy Rosary...! Marielle was my light, my Edenic Eve, an admirable land. Now, she is my spell, my stubbornness or my constant sharp bleeding, without knowing where it has to pass...? I still remember that night, that gloomy night, renouncing my final vows of faith and the consecration of my soul. I broke my ties and ecclesiastical chores, all for Marielle, a noble descendant of the Quentinnais. I would never believe such regret in my destiny. I did love her, but her misfortune knew me. When I approached the edge of her house that night, I entered through the kitchen window. All were asleep, except for the albiceleste reflection of the last death throes of the deadly round of Quentinnais Mansion. I was thinking of rescuing her and saving something from those cheeks kissed by me, but her heart disease dried up his heart and her lungs. It is still possible to recall the last roses that I brought into her hands, they danced with her along with the hymn and the old dirge of the sleight of hand made by the monk, along with the cartomancy plays settling the minute of taking her into darkness, with her beautiful bare feet. What a pain, I could not rescue her from her, and death was dispossessing her! Her parents hated the mere fact of having her heart ruled by an impious priest, so I turned to the pagan and dark gods, to heal Marielle, and her heart to transplant it for mine. Since that day, I continue to burn in a polysatanic hell, to take out the little breath of goodness, and seize the transparent liquids that plague her existence and her serene metallic Diadem..."

Friar André Panguiette upon learning that his great friend possessed by the Devil would fall into some endemic evil infection...; Evil endemic to his love, he crossed himself when he saw that he became a horrible being. The jumbled leaves in the garden were transformed into Bible sheets torn from their bindings and fillings, the wrinkled ***** Saints slid down their columns, the sky proclaimed hemorrhages and the wind oozed foul gases, which in the firmament sprouted in clots of clots on the Papal House of Avignon. Fray Andrés, threw the rosary on the neck of the possessed person, and asked the Demons who were they most afraid of...? The demons answered this question, screaming and falling vertically down the central nave... they went down and flew!

Wonthelimar induces: “From that moment, you and Marielle would cross their gazes closely and love each other. In the following minutes of Pentecost, the two of them went alone to sit on the bench on the banks of the blessed wind that caressed their profiles, as if plotting to unite one with the other. Raymond effusively kissed her; he drew her to him, believing he sensed an eventual and sacrilegious separation from her. This is how it happened when François Quentinnais surprised them...:

François Quentinnais: With this example, you have provoked my anger Marielle...! Hundreds of men like me would react like this when they saw my daughter in the arms of whom until recently, she was hugging God!

Marielle: Father, I beg you for mercy, Raymond of precept sent a letter renouncing his vows!

When the soul of Marielle was entrusted, Raymond escaped seconds before shattered, he did not tolerate the nonexistence of Marielle; vegetating rotten grass of the estuary, emerald swallowed by fire. In a purely inorganic state, Raymond walked away from the mansion, walked through the leaden mountains, and on the cruise he walked through the walnut trees in whose scarlet pods the intense cold of the esplanade howled. The almond trees cracked a baritone muezzin, which one day he wanted to go there, but could never reach the east. His beard reddened, his nails were like ram's horns, and his also reddish hair at the ends of it had black tulips. His clothes turned gray just like his eyebrows, and his breath smelled of nurse sewers of the black plague, the dry flow of his voice announced monosyllables, thus he purged his pain from town to town, from house to house, everyone quarreled with him, and then they were exasperated by kicking him out. Until in June 1617, caravans of people started from the southern town of Avignon, escaping the flames of angry soldiers of the crusades. The fleeting townspeople carried on their banners the inscription... INRI. On the other side, they carried the cross and a colorful coat of arms that in the lower corner said Siccidemy. Then, there Raymond opened his bruised eyes, unable to contain the recovered memory of him, between gunshots, screams, sobs, and screams, the hundreds of steps that were heard around him, led him to tear and save his life. In an instant of stillness, he found himself surrounded by people until one of them took him into his arms to hydrate his mouth. We are Albigensian, and you... Who are you?

Raymond replied: “I fled in search of a miracle that could save a beloved being. I used to call myself Raymond, now I don't know what name to go by. I fled, but I had to face the situation, even having acted behind the back of the Church”. An Albigensian says: “The clergy have also believed that our sect has acted behind the back of the Church. However, his powers and his government have registered absolutism within Christendom”. Another Albigensian says; “We seek the establishment of ancient Christianity, we deny the existence of purgatory, the importance of rituals, clerical organizations and the possession of goods by the clergy. And for this reason, we have been expelled from our lands, from our homes, our children have paid for the Sacred Inquisition, in the hands of those who one day... baptized with blessed water”.

It was on June 18, 1617, the Albigensian fugitives were besieged in Montlimar. The Argentine crosses gleamed like dogs eager to bite the enemy. The open-minded Albigensians gathered together with Luzbel, who floated on a calypsigenic cloud. Raymond and the others piled up essences in the fuels to start the pact, after this event François Quentinnais answered negatively, and strongly took her daughter by her hand, pulling her sharply to the float. The horses slip their hooves before the sloping pastures carpeted by tiny Calypso flowers; the mayoral pressed his thin lips, also raising his shoulders, so as not to hear the despotic cries of Monsieur François. As for Reverend Raymond, he could be seen crying silently, accompanied by late halos of the luminosity of the final and sad day. Sorrows and regrets dislodged his bones that underwent violent arthrosis, populating his body in a sedentary lifestyle and irritation. I myself say Wonthelimar, I am the one who carries Marielle's love in me, I am your Raymond. Remember that night that...: "When the monk retired to pray, you stormed the bedroom, and uttered Marielle..., Marielle:," wake up, in vain I fear to leave without your divine voice. Marielle, what do you have...? I don't think your father's impure will blind your eyes to not see me, or he ripped your sweet voice to not name me...? ".

The Albigenses resigned to the spell, their adherents had largely been reduced, only ten or twelve remained. That later they fled from Montelimar escaping to the west, crossing the enchanted Rhone. The Siccidemy troops mutilated the last demonized Albigensians; nothing would help for their lives, everyone would bleed except the group that fled with Raymond. For several days they wandered the Cevennes plateau, provisioned themselves in Montpellier, and arrived in Carcassonne on July 20, 1617. Little could they remain here, since the congregation of Santo Domingo, without distinction, attacked the population decimated by the crusaders? What a regrettable exodus for Raymond with his black flock fleeing from where his feet laid hope! Twenty-two days of bitter flight, and everywhere the crosses, until Raymond decides to separate and go back to Avignon. He takes a  sailboat off the shores of Narbonne in the middle of a stormy gray day, in his bitter journey he dreams of being born again and having Bethlehem as a lineage, on July 23 of the same year, he lands in the waters of Marseille. When he was discharged from the port, he undertook a light journey to Avignon, near Arles, thousands of fellow citizens started from the hosts of King Godfred of Bouillon, the nobles cooperated by revealing the mobs that gathered in the city, the Hussites, and the Waldensians; Iconoclast heretics, fighting fierce battles. The crusaders took the offensive and tried to prevent them from burning their sacred images, which had already been torn to pieces throughout Gaul. Raymond, distant, helped the most serious, he was afraid of being confused by one of them, it was better to hide in the Cathedral of Arles. Upon entering, he felt a dizzy ***** that shone timidly in the hands of his performer... it was a little girl who, when looking at him, named him Dionysus..., demi-god, save us! Raymond fell into a daze, and falling into a dream that told him of barbaric actions, with masked fellow citizens lying neutral in their gestures, and suddenly angels revealed to him that they were looting the pantheons of Avignon, to burn the rosaries of the saints. Bereaved in their graves, some Albigenses exhumed the bodies of relatives related to the Clergy.

Raymond was sweating his hands and forehead, he struggled to get to the Quentinnais mausoleum, straining his precognition, he crossed the interdepartmental courtyard, he continued to haunt the packed pyramidal cypress trees and suddenly a lion-faced him dealing with a snake; with the symbolic image of the Quentinnais. He saw the slab desecrated, on whose horizon his Beloved Marielle slept. His skin prickled... it was the Iconoclasts avenging their own, with strong breaths he squeezed his hand, wanting to wake up... so it happened, he got up pushing the crowds that were holding him back, but his strength was growing. He rode a roan steed, in three bridles that he gave him he flew towards Avignon; his mount seemed to be a hot air balloon that flew with great dynamism. Raymond in his own painful station would moan his hand, his eyes; his legs creaked like the legs of the Pegasus that carried him fast.

Ellipsis Second Sequence Mausoleum Quentinnais

Finally, he arrives in the second parapsychological sequence, noting that Avignon was in ashes, takes the reins and immediately goes to the Quentinnais mausoleum, upon arrival, he appreciates several Albigenses committing crimes, dismounts, and runs screaming towards the defilers; he faced them with stakes, some demonized had to cut their throats, arriving in time to defend the remains of Marielle. For long hours he was with her alone, thinking about what to do, Raymond knew that he could not revive her, so he had no more redress than to invoke Luzbel, who this time revealed her true and evil personality as ruler of the evil spirits.

Raymond: Dear Luzbel, millions of Canaanites looked up at the altitude representing you; today I will do the same from here and beyond the solid roof of the mausoleum! Bring Marielle to life, come and twist her cheeks, since without her! I have had to live all this to protect myself from suffering. Since Pentecost, he hadn't been physically close to her. Now I need her... well, I lynched her...! Beelzebub making him believe that she was Luzbel, ordered him to extract her heart!

Beelzebub: “In Montlimar, I saw volcano crests arrive in such failure of my envoys. But it will not be repeated, and for it to be so, I entrust you to take out the heart of your beloved and tear the eyes from her that saw your gaze. Then open your chest with this dagger, I will draw your blood and heart, to moisten the heart of your Marielle. And finally, I ask you to bring a lip to me to enchant her lips in lilies. "

Raymond: “opinion accepted... that's the way I'll do it!
Being dominated by the spell, Raymond abided by every step dictated by the supposed that Luzbel lived difficult moments since he was a good day, but so many thousands of years of living in darkness, and in the midst of punishment that violently changed his mind. Justo Raymond carried the body in his arms so that the ritual would culminate. Luzbel snatched his beloved from him and with laughter he vanished.

Beelzebub says Mortal fool! Don't you see that I am Beelzebub; chief of the evil spirits and the guide of the Albigenses, Hussites, and Waldensians? Never invoke me in the Mausoleums, here betrayal triumphs. Now a Quentinnais will be my image on earth, giving her the doubt of doing well for many centuries.

Beelzebub took his beloved away, leaving the rosary wrapped in soft tulle next to the scapular in his hands. Raymond cringed in pain, and in an act of madness scratched his face. Poor Raymond, he told himself...!  That in himself he found no reason to live. He left the mausoleum at dawn looking around every corner in case he saw Marielle lost in his sight since recently. He was exhausted; he remained after the confession that was delayed too much because the events that took place in the Pantheon, in a way pretended to be the events that Raymond inexhaustibly narrated. And in a way, he feared for his life at that time unknown, by the mouth of some hidden place they documented his bitter inability to do well, and that he would fall under Raymond's curse. At this moment, Raymond lay lying on the banks of the Pantheon, from that day on, he did not know about the days, he only existed at night and he did not socialize with anyone, his madness sowed hatred for everything sacred and infernal, he dealt with the Holy Rosary found a magical find, until one day a new one reached her ears; she was referring to some crusaders who had intervened in Jerusalem when it was invaded by Saladin. A certain Frederick Barbarossa was drowned in Sicily by..., "Wonthelimar", who with the Diadem of a woman Seized the island of Iconium. This was the other new one that enlivened his spirit. This greatly surprised the worn Raymond, suspecting that the kidnapper of his beloved might be in cahoots. And as the news continued to hear her, it was said that her sacred beliefs allowed her to continue undercover, in order to continue for a long time, even in the other attacked city that would be Nice. He signed to the limit, for centuries that will serve us in future generations…, suffocating the iconoclasts.

The poppies moved from north to south through the Provencal regions. The oceanic eastern Gods Makara's in tumultuous pyramidal ships descended legions and escorts, to aid Raymond's farewell at Nice. At twelve o'clock at night, the prophetic edict of the Lord would be fulfilled, here the last words of that chimerical episode were received, and he feared that until then a first descendant of Raymond; he became a statue in ignitions of the reborn underworld. The Diadem will be transport and refuge, as for Wonthelimar he said doubtfully…; I think he is nothing more than the deviant Beelzebub, who with optical retractable eyes, in Montlimar disguised the initial in double V..., Wonthelimar, but I was wrong! Wonthelimar already transmigrated to Raymond, staying on the banks of a stream, with nausea he regurgitated his underlying spirit state from the lyrical crust. His mouth unsheathed the most diverse and heterogeneous chronolites; Parasitized dust in pieces of temporary stone, flowing in disciples, quarantine fragments, in marriages by sinuous water. Raymond slapped his thighs in anticipation of throwing up there. His blatant, incisive alienation took over his will, with inherent crickets singing to her in isolation from him, shining his conscience, and residing in the grace of the Holy Grail. The conquest of the earthly system amputated the Andromeda Amygdale; Constellation-illusion and spouse of Perseus, who is mysterious vehicles of the solvent Grail, kept him tied to Raymond. Deafening roars erupted from the earth pits, and the mass of the mountain hung above the trees, pseudo purple and violet rays bombarding sarcophagi all over Nice.

Wonthelimar: “Since this day I have been boiling in a polysatanic hell! The Ibex picked me up from the surroundings of the Pantheon and the Quentinnai mansion, where I have never been a human again, only an Ibex in the Chauvet cavern. Thanks to the herds of goats that adopted me that I have been able to bear their pain by taking refuge in the darkness of all times, which never transpires in the past, present, and future? Now I have come in this re-location, to reorder Vernarth's parapsychology, which you are too, and who has never been able to overcome the pains of love, even beyond pale death! "

From that moment, the shadow of Heracles is seen among them, encouraging them to be part of the gods, and of the feasts of the beautiful Ankles of Heba. Thus the words redecorated them both amid the thick fog, in Avignon. Afterward, Wonthelimar left and left Raymond to continue in Marielle's darkness to the end of the world. The blister day and the scorching night, thought one of the other in constant profit, for the good of finding them in the Kalijoron..., the well of the divine light of Eleusis, for those who rest in naive peace in the face of cunning, and the decorum of the gentle dialogues in the comedies of the exceptions, after crossing the Nile, with tributers collecting the faults of the gods, or else with horrific screams that would make them prey to an imaginary Gorgon.

Wonthelimar was now going after the “Íbics Ring”, which were left in the Chauvet cavern, by some Iberian tribes of the early Neolithic age, who were on their way out desecrated the cavern with ****** in the orbit of the Ortho Heliacal. From here, in the last goal, they reach the darkness where the vampire bats were terrified to see them with their eyes in mercurial ambrosia, which enveloped them with the gums in each one as they approached in the sound of night hunger arrests, next to the betrothal death brought by the darkness of the Strigoi, in lost wanderings of their wills following the search for the panescalm sheds, which carried human chiropterans for the regions of Transylvania, subjected to distinctions and exactions of Climate Changes. From here the bronze spear Dorus of Vernarth would go to the right hand of Wonthelimar, to shield him, and to put celery-foot feet on the ineffable Kanti steed, with certain renown of Eacid of Achilles stirring up hops and low bottoms of the mineral aquifer at the base of the den. In a quick figurative gesture of Achilles, Wonthelimar passes his right hand over his nose, noticing that lights trickled from the Auriga and the Automedon that came by order of Drestnia to provide aid to him, and to rescue the Iberian Ring Eagles, to transport them to the cove of the Mound of the Profitis Ilias.

In the eternity of the noise, Vlad Strigoi is in solidarity with him and gives him lightly from the bottom of the final flow of the bilges of his panescalm, condensing air of Gaseous Gold, in Pan-Hellenic regions, and in the Valdaine regions sixty-seven kilometers from that mountain area very close to Avignon. The infected zones of physical virtue were divided into micro-regions that were compressed before Wonthelimar merged into micro space within the cavern, to abandon the burning furnaces that came alongside his interpersonal goodness, in the metaphysical transfer of darkness, and of the wicked gentlemen drawing him towards the Parasha or Parashot of the Torah, so as not to be attracted as a human to ******-emotional implications or manipulations, who will snoop in growing voices in the voids of the cavern, and in the failing anxieties of the pompous and ancient effigy tarred from Hades. Wonthelimar limps superlatively with some nervous leave, but eager to apprehend the Ibic Rings. After the Benedictus antiphons were seen coming out of his chest, they were iridescent in magenta and mordoré for those who are ibex, always hiding under the goat epidermis, sponsoring happiness practices, one and the other after their vicissitudes in a cyclical mystery classroom. On the plains, you can only see haze and the experimental change when leaving everything in the hands of those who die without rainwater and bagel, in the most absolute solitude, amidst rocks that will never and never be reconverted, less into mid-plains giving terrifying compliments on flower baskets that stink of wandering Wonthelimar clones… not being!

Wonthelimar with Kanti, they emigrate from the cavern of Chauvet in their reminiscences, standing out from the voids and invocations of Raymond in unfinished by filling space in the hearts of both. Heading southeast towards Patmos with the Ibic Rings on his bracelets, wrapped in Vernarth's Himathion for his investiture!

The dark winter sky was draped with stars whose dainty shimmer
mimicked the sprinkle of snow
caught up in the crisp winter breeze.

The white flakes winked as they came to rest upon a silent sheet of ice,
accumulating on the sleek surface until abruptly–

a clatter of loud and excited voices interrupted.
Skates slashed and
                            sticks crashed onto the cold, hard ice.
A black puck cascaded haphazardly across the rink, bombarding the once settled snow.
Chunks of ice catapulted recklessly,  
the smell of sweat rose relentlessly into the wind.

Furious and frozen wisps of breathe were choked,
as bitter cold filled eager lungs.
The ruthless weather, however, could scarcely graze the laughing dimples on rosy cheeks.

But just as hastily the clatter was silenced,
the commotion halted.

Footprints crunched softly away, their noise secretly swept away
by the sprinkle of snow
caught up in the crisp winter breeze.

The loving puddle in the gutter off market street-- the one that fills with dirt and **** and damp newspaper, plastic soda cup, strange indecipherable Chinese pamphlets with bleeding characters. She smiles at the sun and renders its visions on her face, and with great tension attempts to demonstrate her willingness, her blushing consent to being totally subsumed by its whims. Of course she trembles at the diurnal stampede of feet, but is not afraid-- for she too speaks in eternity. She has evaporated before-- she has kissed the incessant sky over Marrakesh in the soft morning and dreams of the sparkling mountainsides in the night, when she is divided by callous rubber tires or cast below by competing distant rains. Yet she has always found her way back home; Nestled in the subtle indentation of road besides the brickway near Battery.

"Dewdrop, let me cleanse
in your brief
sweet waters . . .
These dark hands of life"

It was one of the waning days of winter, in the blurred haze of rains, when we left the coast and began our journey home. As she drove, I watched the pebbled streaks roll across the window into great vertical streams, to be cast off indistinct along the stationary road. Upon all our sides, Even the black-toothed mountain tops lost their grandiose summits into the fog. Off the road, next to the sagging remains of a gas station, a man sat beneath the naked fist of an old willow tree. He, with a teal umbrella, twirled the nylon circle so that the collecting sheen of water spun and spiraled centrifugal out into the bombarding camaraderie of fellow drops. The damp fields sat empty of life behind him, casting into evanescent black oceans of dirt. As we hurried past, I turned back-- and following him with my own watering eyes, I watched for as long as I could--until he too faded silently into the mist.

Rabbit tracks in the snow
padded foot, here we go:

Found beside a lake,
far away for you to seek.

Festivities of the fastidious,
i was all but oblivious.

Promising frostiness,
the air, alit and aglow.

Bombarding me
quietly
with parallelism,
banging noiselessly
off the fire
of the morning sunshine.

Mollified, the world
stirs in its lack of commotion.

Meek blunders of the fortnight,
i wish to forego.

My star,
faded from the sky.
You are
what brings me high.
I will
be with you,
upon
the epoch of
tomorrow’s
morn, come nigh.

I, fluoride - sanity theft
Winding toy soldiers
to march the path toward furtive glory
While spurting the tune of war
to the end of their very last breaths

Harbinger of certain death
Peek from behind the curtain
Witness the brain mining
From inside your skull
eyeballs explode, deftly blinding
Defining images which pervade
Overwhelming emotions stowed
Once turned to stone
mental harm, tractor combines harvest FarmVille tards by the barnload

Certainly,
The eye of Horus and ISIS see all
scorching and seizing nations, arm in arm
All for one, none for all

Bombarding bravado
Clasp the trap
Lapse in conscious
All tapped out
Drowning in tap water
Until all comes tumbling down like Niagara Falls, dauntless

Like Satan's hands expanding
advance upon the homeland
Then race trickling downward
Total assest forfeiture
(***** buried in sand)
Faces hidden, ashamed

Orchestrate the line in frame
Shape my frame of mind
Until my thoughtscape escapes
To peer through one eye
Met to widespread acclaim

Descending into the mind of Chaos,
His stables gates
burst forth with beasts of fable, insatiable and rampant
Triumphant, turn the tables
Arch-Angels blare your trumpets

Tell Famine get off his high horse
And rear his ugly head
So we can really show that *****
Mother Earth what for;
**** that ***** until nothing's left

Effectively wrecked
From careening trains of wretched gang-bangs
Now she'*****
& the caged bird that longs to be free, is inevitably
**dismembered to pieces by the felines that be

Trapped within this heat there’s an
Ocean of thoughts defeating me.

Suicide has come and gone even death
Is confused. I am awake yet the whole
Of ikasi is half-asleep.

Conflict between races: black, white, yellow,
I mix these colors and get red for bloodshed
Bombarding my mind as I choose my artillery:
Butcher’s knife or bread knife? Mxm **** it, I opt to
Load my machine gun as I take no prisoners.

I live only by one rule “spare not the feelings of those
Who have none.”

As my stu-stu-stu-stuttering riffle goes “tat’ i cover lova,”
They blaze to bushes with rampaging speed and seeing as my weight
Constitutes a majority of ten, I choose to be democratic and side with its
Vote, by not running but instead sending a hail of bullets.



Voetsek, Voetsek and Voetsek I say!!

As dusk breaks into dawn I am shattered into reality as prison introduces me to myself. I started shaking like the last shivering leaf on a dying tree and came to realize:  The person whom I slaughtered was not only my neighbor, but was also my brother and if I have to suffer for my brother whom they call ikwerekere to survive, then I say “give me pain till I die!”.

vast vivid wilderness
analyze politicians mind
hypocrites world dies in lies
moral devolution,hiding in white
lose of mind,gravity inside
zero nothing, sometime
1 is a separate thing
a velvet plaything
breathing in the fumes
lobotomized muse

trying to do what is right
don't forget, never forget
to start walking in the grey
memories they slowly fade
from this harsh reality
exist inside, resist tide
inside you'll see it die
justify your wicked mind

the eyes torture tantalize
3 rings, out in time
bombarding mind
find it not linear time
time line separate thing
velvet plaything
treated like lobotomized dogs
vast vivid life of pain
wires forced into my brain

trying to do what is right
don't forget, never forget
to start walking in the grey
memories they slowly fade
from this harsh reality
exist inside, resist tide
inside you'll see it die
justify your wicked mind

there is a great yearning to draw closer to my God
yet theres been so much bombarding me constantly that i turn to instead of You
meaningless, everything, all these things are meaningless
not one is more worthy of my time than You
i let these thoughts sink in, penetrate me to the bone and depths of my soul
but it doesn't seem to make a difference
i am drowning in my own ocean that i have jumped into at my will
Grace, i am so undeserving
you're there, you care
but how could you give a forty-third, or maybe two hundred and-seventh chance to a lonely, desolate girl so desperately trying to repent and release from the sins of her life
for these wounds remain deep and i know the error of my ways
but i can't let go of the world thats pulling me in
down, down into the pit, the smooth rolling path to darkness
and i succumb
"Delight in Giving! do not Give grudgingly or out of necessity, but out of the joy of your heart and the love of God manifested in you, and what you give out, you will recieve back the same measure!"
the simplest words, the hardest actions to carry out.
i act in anger and callousness to the ones i love most.
i just harshly the ones i don't know at all and the ones closest to me.
do i ever go without judging anyone?
i love so deeply when i do love, and now it seems to lead to my demise
i love the ones who are wrong for me
the ones who have dragged me to this empty state


haven't i heard the words before? haven't i been taught the way out?
haven't i grown up in the house of my Father where all my life's guidelines were laid before me with lovingkindness and vision for the future?
when will i learn?

i feel like you're so far away and i'm here stuck in this wretched state of mind and spirit.

the narrow road seems to small for me to enter
or maybe its because im trying to squeeze the bags of ******* i'm carrying through it at the same time.

the act of letting go

help loose the vices, help cure my diseases
this seems too much, i fail unceasingly
there seems to be no hope for me
although i know you're on my mind all the time
i continue to hear words of wisdom from others, even though they're not directed at me
all i need are signs
all i need is to know you're going to get me through this
i'm holding you to it
you can't let go, it will be the end of me.

sin is the anchor holding me down

isn't there an easier way out than this?

this must be why you said, "few will find it."
well i'm going to press in
and i'll find that gate to the smallest path
the quiet way that the world looks over and never notices
and when i do i hope you help me through
all i want is to see your kingdom
many are called but few are chosen
i was chosen before i was born,
but as ive learned,
birthrights can be sold. for meaningless treasures.

tell me i haven't made the deal, tell me my soul is still recorded in your book
i need life after this
i need joy and unspeakable relief and love for eternity, not unfathomable pain and torment and blasphemy forever

tell me it's not too late

clean me up, show me how to live

take me out of this dreadful ocean of apathy and despair
the willingnses to let go is something i need now more than ever


my heart feels far from yours
take notice of my feeble hands
hold them, hold me close, lead the way, carry me Grace, across the ocean of doubt and despair.

i'm asking for your forgiveness
for my lack of faithfulness

i'm asking
for your
forgiveness

such a lack of faithfulness

rock bottom feels too apathetic
where do i go

only you know the thoughts in my head and can speak to me the perfect words i need to hear
work your glorious ways and show me i'm not alone
tell me there's something after this trial
what is this trial anyways?
am i complaining about something that's not there?
or should i be concerned?
to regret, or not regret?
choices have lead me to this point, but what if certain things i've done i wish i could take back?
is it wrong?

you know me inside out
now please, take these prayers from a lonely, apathetic, graceless girl,
who needs love, who wants love, who wants to show compassion and hope and joy and giving and mercy wherever needed.
the spirit must manifest in me at some point.
in due time
you circle the sky and wait for the greatest moment to set in

i hardly know the thoughts in my own head
i hope some are Yours

thank you for paying attention

when i feel no one else does.

when i feel like no one cares,
you look down on me and smile.

all i need
is a little

perserverance

...But at night

My head is a radio tower

The thoughts and information bouncing off the walls of my mind

Front to back

Voices from different frequencies

Endlessly bombarding me.

Never stopping

Never ending.

.
.
.
.


And for the first time in my life

.
.
.


I find myself begging for a place

.
.
.

Where I don't get cell service.

I watched adrift on a putrid plank
That had saved me once before
‘Twas the elusive Pride of the Pacific
Constructed in ‘74

Her bronze bells and mighty foghorn
Commanded all to make way
And the tides knelt beside her feet
To congregate as they say:

“Tis pitiful, such punishment
Bestown upon the Ancient Blue
Our vengeance creeps forth each day
And will drown this peace askew.

Their corpulence, disgusting
As they carouse all day and night
Limiting themselves to their marvels”
Alas! A human they spied in sight!

“The humans have rejected you
From their blissful celebration
Now let us stir up trouble
For complete annihilation!”

With swift currents bombarding,
The passengers fled with haste
And in one implacable calamity,
The ship was left to waste

The bronze bells won’t resound
With the ship flipped on its hull
The foghorn’s left to drown
As beauty is left to null.

I sobbed adrift a putrid plank
Never abandoned from the start
“Such horrors would go unnoticed
If humanity had the heart!”

Do not tell me that you have time to prove yourself!
You have one day...
If that.
A mere time frame of 86,400 seconds is quite demanding to build an entire social status if you'd ask me.
A single glance from a student who's deemed themself higher than the others can determine the next four years of your life.
Don't tell me that we all have equal opportunities!
"Equal opportunities" is a term we use to make ourselves feel self-righteous while simultaneously destroying others, uncaringly.
I've seen specs of dust given more attention than the human life.
I've seen students overlooked as if they weren't even standing there...
As if they were thin air.
We vacuum dust, because we don't want it there.
Do you give them the same effort?
Don't tell me that we all live in the same world!
We see Earth through confident and bold eyes,
but I've seen others who see Earth through torn eyes.
Have you ever had your entire view distorted and stretched before cascading down into a irrecognizable blob of vision before escaping you, only to repeat the process?
I haven't, but I have seen others do so.
How? Why?
I've seen kids eyes glazed with tears day after day,
So much so that the tears violently escape with every chance they get to separate themselves because separation is their only substitution for acceptance!
They don't live, they merely drag themselves through life.
But life's a brutal ride for them.
You chain them to the back of a car and take off, smiling, subconsciously realizing what you're doing, but you refuse to admit it because you're a "good person".
They're not treated like the rest, they're an object, not a life...
Not a friend.
The extent of their connections are only the jagged rocks that you dig into them, their emotional scars growing larger, gaping so wide to swallow the world...
But the world's already swallowed them.
Their emotions are created by pills and drugs and counselors and parents who just don't understand.
Teachers try to teach, but the children learn only of cruelty and not of knowledge.
Don't tell me that they're not strong enough to face our world!
Persecution is simply the evasion of your own persecution.
But your persecution doesn't exist, not when you're armed greater than any military force on the planet.
You're armed with the rocks and missiles of emotion.
So brutal to take a life... but that's called their own suicide...
Then the blame's on them, not you...
I've seen spirits built, but I've also seen hearts shattered like a pane of glass tossed angrily off the Empire State Building by a single word.
No.
Ugly.
Stupid.
I've seen boys act like men, their actions larger than their capabilities.
I've seen them make executive decisions, but not about themselves.
Oh no, they wouldn't dare.
They condemn others potential.
So much so that their target believes it.
After all, hiding behind invisible scars isn't quite a good camouflage.
I've seen four mere letters **** lives.
...WHEN THREE CAN BRING THEM BACK!!!
Don't tell me that they need to build confidence!
...when you're the one who took it away.
Their building is limited to walls, not to keep others out, but to close the scars.
You don't see their effort.
Invisible scars aren't quite a spectacular sight.
I've seen glazed-eyed, broken-hearted, emotionally bruised, invisibly scarred kids say "I'm fine".
Each day.
To avoid further attacks.
The attacks bombarding them in their dreams!
While you float off into your escape land, they live with the shadow of death peering over them.
The pleas every night, accompanied by the all-too-familiar scent of tears fill the room, as their souls scream the constant longing for happiness.
But with invisible scars, come muted voices...
I've seen the attacks of others break a kid down so far that they cease to say a word or accept friendships.
Don't tell me that they're anti-social!
And don't tell me that they're fine!
I've seen kids walk with a drooped walk and eyes at the ground, because when their eyes meet another students, memories will flash.
Memories that they can't face.
Memories that people have created.
We're all guilty in some degree or another.
That's they irony.
Memories that were created...
By us.

To perpetually please the vanity of a has-been
They’ve invented the ministry of leftover ideas
With leftover civil servants
Writing leftover policies
Based on leftover ideas
Ideals from the past
Become today’s secondhand *******
Presented as pillars
Of a bright and better future
When what we really get
Is the obsolete creating the obnoxious
A shady cabinet
With the allure of a shadow cabinet
With invisible MP’s
Serving an irritating Prime Minister
A tax-avoiding ****
Who enthusiastically supports
The ideas of last century
Bombarding every ministry
Into the ministry of leftover ideas

a cloudburst, penetrated our world
with thrusts as deep as the eye of our
storm, coasting over us in heaved
passion; unleashed with each
dip and sway

bombarding...

our core in showered felicity; tasting
euphoria's longing, titillated to the tips
of our toes; saturating her soft spots,
her rain and I were one curled, pelvis
to hip

sliding in out as hands caressed in rhythm,
wanting to taste her rain once again;
cultivating in her delicacy, nibbling tautness;
remembering moments our lips said hi

besieging me...

as her raindrops seeped, causing our
steam to rise, each drop in hunger;
I'd delve deeper into oblivion,losing
myself in raged deluges of her

rain's cloudburst...

Shall I take my life away
Strip the essence of disgust
From a beautiful aroma of life
Shall I envy no longer
The tears that seem foreign
To vacant hollow depths
Soulless windowpanes that echo
The pain of a thousand voices
Yet I seem to struggle
With these tornado winds
Ripping through my heart
Desecrating the holy lands
That once flourished with Love and Innocence
Now Godforsaken
Shot down in the middle of night
Crashing burning into hallowed grounds
Aerial assault bombarding
Leaving ruins and corpses
Thirsty for the spillage of my blood
Carving rivers into my wrist
Breaking dams in my veins
Letting the ****** tsunami rage
Drowning myself in its depth
Godforsaken
Now I shall die
Simply because I'm pathetic
Always thinking I can save the world
With six lines or outstretched arms
All I'm doing is setting it up
For its inevitable failure

Your hands stole the starlight
To paint my body  
In vivid hues of heaven
Unrestrained rapture
Soars like a firework
Exploding out into darkness
Bombarding colours
Fragmenting sensation
Cool night air  
Delicately wanders
Fanning my flaming skin
Stroking my fascination
The heady scent of desire
Infusing earthly compulsion
Thrusting towards celestial pleasures
In an effort to enter nirvana
Soft folds seek firm flesh
Ripening under your touch
Ready to burst with sweet ambrosia
Flowing through your fingers
Demanding in quest
Your skyrocket
Burns through my atmosphere
Leaving trails of stardust that
Quiver along my body
As you cradle me in hushed epilogue
And I descend .....
Back to a garden
Bathed in moonlight

(C) Pixievic

Sensations revolve around me
All are causing me to react
Some are foreign, some friendly
One is too familiar for any tact

As this world of many feelings
Revolves steadily about my head
One is perpetually bombarding
It's those simple words you once said

You remember those fateful words
That generate nothing but sorrow
I can hear them echoing now
As if you uttered them not so long ago

But it wasn't that long for me
For I never will move on from this
I'm trapped in that broken moment
My mind forever set amiss

So I will sit in a mournful world
Reliving those words that undo
That forever ring in my mind's ear
"I just don't think I can trust you..."

Their heads bent low, they slept
Through wind, rain and hail.
Ice bombarding their delicate petal
Sheilded like a fragile veil.
But this veil is tough and robust
Red poppies dot the sky line
Like true grit like a magnificent statue
*****, long standing and very fine.
Across ploughed earth on the horizon
Across vale, parks and the hedge row
On dry sand on the beaches
and on the British lawn that we mow.
They wave their orange heads
we're here and nowhere we shall go
Because we are here to stay; the Poppy
Scatter their seeds and we shall sow.

Let go of those old fears
That have somehow battled through the trenches of time
You've fought gruesome wars at night
For so many kaleidoscope years
Laying awake with the noise outside your pane
As the only tune to your madness
The civilian lives lost
The once-spirited homes burned to rubble
All to conquer the infantry of bombarding thoughts
That have emerged victorious for ages at the first light of the sun
A daring blow must be delivered to such malice
The respirating breath of triumph
Must grace the muggy walls of your lungs  
That sunrise must burn the awakening
Of all your ambitions and conquests
And you can rise from your slumber just nigh of death
As a warrior who will flatten what monstrous fights now may come
And when the moon shows his face
And the stars light his eternal shadow
You can step out into the wild
Adorned in the fruits of your courage
Let go of those old fears
That have somehow battled through the trenches of time

Quaint 'heart-shaped' design home that is 'rent-to-own' by owner
Due to recent storms, much needed repairs are required
Attached is a detailed list of the damages, that if you so choose
the owner will lower the price if you decided to move in sooner

The roof was initially damaged as lightning suddenly struck
blindsided by her sudden change of attitude
The windows were then busted in as the winds picked up
bombarding me with questions on false premise
Not soon after, the rains poured in, leaving the carpets a-muck
words that soak into the skin, leaving me miserable
And as the rains came down, so started the hail against the cruck
pounding relentlessly as the mind started cracking
While the walls were being soaked the wallpaper began to free
revealing the internal problems to those who knew
Then, with a final gust, it knocked down the steadfast tree
crashing through the walls, exposing myself to you
And as the calmness set in, it was clear the damage done to me
set a smile upon her face as she traveled away

If you assist the owner in the repair of this 'Heart-house', he may allow you to step in
and provide input on how you think this heart should heal with you in it.
Immediate response is required. Call the number attached for more info if you desire.

Why should i be
You're not even mine.
Or are we just waiting
for that moment in time?
The jealousy kicks in
when you're with others
When you're around him.
i feel the rage begin.
one moment he passes
He sways you away
My oxygen in this toxic atmosphere
I die
Bombarding you with his sweet strong words,
I cannot help but break inside
this is a curse
Let me tell you this,
I may not be as poetic as he is
In his vocabulary
I cannot compete.
Im desperately trying
To find the right words, words that fit.
I hope you can see, my queen, my elite.
i dont want to lose you
Im afraid i might lose you
My territorial side weakens
What am i compared to him?
I'm just a hopeless romantic.
Sometimes i wonder
The cause of all this
Is that im falling for the most unexpected; the most dangerous love
And the worst part is
i cannot stop.

i'll just say what it is, quiet frankly a beautiful
elaboration - for maxims are shake-shocks -
i'd call all proverbs or maxims Blitzkrieg annals -
well, something of that sort, once said:
a flash of genius, but then years of squabbling,
before someone emerges with what the maxim
requires: an elaboration - one of plain, simple
understanding - but of course, after the elaboration,
someone must second the elaborated understanding,
and put the genie back into the lamp,
and oddly enough, write a poem - the twist is,
the secondant must too elaborate on the elaboration,
as way to deviate and start a new subject matter.
this has been the case with what i picked up
a few minutes ago, Kierkegaard's Christian discourses,
the care of lowliness: do not worry about what
you will wear - the pagans seek all these things.
i for one know this to be very true -
once in a while i travel into London for opera and
ballet - i put on my standard outfit for the
occasion - so i basically do not look like a ***:
brown trousers, navy jacket, navy shoes,
light purple shirt - a typical grey area in a crowd -
and already upon stepping into the crowd,
that vast sea, i feel like i just temped into an
ant-mound, a colony of itchiness - in fact i used
to wear clothes in variation - no... well, let's just
say i'd get airs of contempt walking down
the golden-plated streets of civilisation -
where enough chewing gum patches create a horde
of concrete dalmatians -
but that's beside the point, that passage is ingenious
in its simplicity, Kierkegaard is a rarity in
philosophy, he writes like a novelist, there's an
actual narration in his works - he can almost
remind me of Rousseau (rue sow, said) -
i don't the concrete ideas (both are completely different)
i just me stylistically - Kierkegaard as such
is uncomplicated to have a firm footing in systematisation -
like i once said: systematisation is not
so much dishonesty, as a military approach to
language: a strict (limited) competence of language
(vocabulary) - and the incessant Holtwitzer* /
Howitzer style of bombarding a key concept, revising it,
coming at it from a different angle - but refining
certain concepts, instilled with what i already mentioned:
a strict competence of language / systematisation:
limiting the vocabulary; Kierkegaard epitomises the
Heraclitus river - it flows and flows - never minding
the whirlpool of the anti-claustrophobic fathers:
who's works are just that: all of them comfortable fitting
into a suitcase. ah crap, digression over,
mind you, it's not easy finding google whacks - it takes
a decent imagination to misspell a word to get the billions
reduced to 1: apparently there's a website dedicated to
them... well, that's a 2nd in my diary.
anyway (hopefully for the last time) - the comparison
of the bird and the lowly man, the two are unlike each other,
one has it easy, the other has a beginning in which
he sets out to be a lowly man, or to not be of such
disposition... the bird already is, what it is, so
the bird has it easy - the man faces a hardship of
the optical illusion, kindly provided by Vogue et al.:
he composites this with the bird's ontology as
pure animate - singing for its own delight,
the bird's death by impatience should it ponder itself
as being a bird, rather than as being-in-itself -
so there's the bird, pure animate presiding over its
ontology and not allowing hesitation or anything...
where am i getting at?
                                       the javelin throw,
the discuss throw, the baseball throw, gymnastics -
and Noah's ark: and the philosophical concepts
went up to the ark, two by two of their respective pairing:
existence & essence, subjectivity & objectivity,
good & evil... and of course animate & inanimate (objects),
for this is crucial for me... there's no thought
attached to the above stated activities, there is man's
respective animal-like representation - intuition and
gamblers luck remain in the head,
no boxer in a boxing ring can actually be said to be thinking,
too many chemical reactions are taking place,
and these athletes are not exactly chemically minded to
talk about the next more... that's the animate side
of man's ontology - the bird on the wheat shaft singing -
pure and simple... which brings me to consider
the following object that i have in my hand (head,
but never mind, i took it out and it's in my hand now) -
the inanimate nature of man... the buildings around us,
the garden fences... thought was derived from
us having the shadow duality with being animate,
we have instilled in us an inanimate nature,
from which thought is derived from - along with all
that comes with it: telescopes, hammers, autism,
solipsism (self-conscious autism), syringes, l.s.d.;
i set out to find out how we conceived thinking in
the first place - apart from the cliche duality contained
within: good v. evil or beyond that... well, beyond
that there's this... i could find no reason to imply that
man has only one nature in this pair going up to
Noah's ark... this stretches into the common misunderstanding
in the western world in the realm of medicine,
or as i like to call it: the Cartesian dark ages...
whereby a mental health issue is treated on the basis
that we are only animate beings, which, to my understanding
translates as: you have a puppet inside yer 'ed
and one of your strings snapped, mate... that's
what i don't understand... why is it that western medicine
conceived this idea that our nature is only animate,
and that we have to have a respective dynamic in
our mind to comply with the body's animate nature?
this is where the inanimate nature of our inner
life comes in, where thinking is derived from -
otherwise there would be no ****** good reason to
sit under a ***(h)i tree like a plonker for days,
would there? hey! probe all those words in the Asian
languages - dhal! probe! buddha! probe! probe them
all, wake up the h in each and every single word,
then start probing the y and the w in European languages!
boom! out pops a variation of n.e.w.s. of
Jewish mysticism.

Ever so welcome beads of rain dance against my face as I run. Faster and faster, until I no longer hear your footsteps.
I look back for you through the trees.
My eyes darting frantically amongst the green wonderland of leaves.
I stop and remove the drenched hair slapped against my check.
Trying to calm my breath, I listen.
All I hear are heavy rain drops bombarding the earth.
Then, "C           
                R            S
                    ­A           N
                       C           A
                          K           P"
The thunder yells and we both scream.
Out you fly... eyes wide with excitement.
Together we rip through the trees as the wind and warm run carries us.
I feel your eyes upon me.
I already know what you're thinking.
I extend my arm as you grab my hands.
We share a stare,
I see a reflection of the adrenaline rush.
Giggling innocently we run as fast as our feet can carry us.
Our arms extended,
Our shirts rustling in the wind,
We are one with mother nature.
We are her daughters,
She binds us.
You will always be my sister.

Eli Bevier woke that morning at the crack of dawn, in the most distant state. The bed in which he slept wasn't of much comfort as he was used to his own bed. Eli was at a Military Hospital in Paris, he was discharged due to severe injuries he sustained in France during World War II, where he would spend the next six months recuperating. Though he tried to find comfort there, nothing really distracted his mind from thoughts of the army and what was happening in the world. Towards the end of his stay, he would often go on strolls to the nearby shops and offices to mingle and see what was of interest.
However, the one thing that kept a smile on his face was one of the nurses he had met while at the hospital. He thought she was elegant, funny, and charming as she had a way with her words. She was really kind and always tried to strike up a conversation as much as she could with him but was always sort of busy and they were never formally introduced. They did however write letters to each other, as he had in future relationships, she had told him that her grandparent’s farm was in the same city as Eli’s parent’s house. He loved that because he knew he could have a chance to wait for her and they could continue and meet once they both are sent home.
This never happened though as he later received word that the hospital in which the nurse was stationed in was hit by an enemy fire and bombed. He hated never knowing what could have been with the nurse. The hurt was so true but he knew life went on and as so he should too. When he would go back and recall this memory in later years, he would often feel bad at the situation but always remembered what his father had once said to him as a child, “There is never any use in crying over spilled milk.”

One evening he was walking past an old style shop, in which he saw the most extremely magnificent camera. At that time Camera’s were just beginning to dawn upon the world and develop into a greater extent. The shop keeper’s daughter, Margaret Wilkins, noticed him right away and worked up the courage to come over and talk to him. He on the other hand was oblivious to the fact that she had noticed him due largely in part to him being marveled by the camera and the items in the store. When he turned and saw Margaret approaching him, he felt a feeling.
That feeling we have all felt at one point or another. Stirring up inside as if you were some sort of melting ***, You know the feel. When you see a most beautiful and wonderful girl and you know that within you lies a special place in which only she can reside and your heart skips a beat. He didn't know what this feeling was, but one thing he was certain of was that he liked it. He knew that he had to think of something quick but his mind went blank and could not produce the slightest idea. “Hello there Welcome, May I help you in any way?” said Margaret.
But Eli just gazed at her as he tried to get a word out of his mouth but ended up getting lost in her gorgeous eyes. Again she asked “Is everything okay, sir? Do you need any assistance?” at which point Eli came to from his trance-like state and looking at the camera he was holding said “I apologize for being a goof just now, It’s just that you have such a wonderful eyes, I can only wonder as to the type of person you are, great I’m sure. Anyway, I’m Eli. Eli Bevier. I’m really interested in these items you have for sale. “Especially this camera.” he stated as Margaret walked over to his table and overlooked the camera, “It’s quite alright and thank you for the delightful compliment. Yes, as you can see we stock a fine selection of old world items and antiques. I myself fancy photography.” To which he replied “Is that a fact? You’re kidding! It’s apparent that we share at least that in common! Do you own any yourself?” he said as Margaret took the item over to the register and rang up the price.
“A couple, there’s this one that I have always wanted to get but haven’t gotten the chance, It was called the ‘Columbia Optical Co, Pecto 1’ it’s a neat little contraption. It’s really nifty it’s got a great lens and it’s just the perfect size for me”. “Thank you, you seem very kind, I hope to see you again sometime. I have an idea! May I have your address so I can maybe write to you? I might be stationed at different places so I might not get many chances to come back here.” He stated as he collected his things. “Why, thank you. You’re so kind yourself. Yes, that would be quite alright.” She wrote down her address and handed it to Eli. “Well I guess this is my cue. Bonsoir Mademoiselle!” he said and hurried along back to the hospital for he knew it was getting late and it would close its doors soon.
Two nights later, on the evening of the ninth of may, News had reached the hospital which said Eli was discharged and was going to be sent home immediately to which he took kindly to the news as he personally felt he wasn't ready for all that war going on. He had caught a flight back home to California early the next morning and was home by the end of that week. He was overcome with emotions when he returned to his life. His parents were proud of his achievements and for his service. Over the next few weeks, Eli did nothing but devote a majority of his time in job seeking, at first he didn't seem to have much luck as it was a time of despair for his country. The economy was barely beginning to make a recovery from the devastation and the wide-scale impact that the stock crash had left. He managed through it all by always remembering to write and send Margaret letters and cards. He enjoyed their talk’s, they would send poems as well. He soon found himself missing the woman so much, since she lived in France, he often contemplated re-joining the service. All the while the war still bombarding cites across the ocean and the globe itself, civilians were dying at a much more rapid pace as well as soldiers and enemy troops. Day and night the soldiers were on guard as many attacks would come without warning.  Back home, not finding much luck with work, he decided to pursue the army once again. He was accepted to serve again, and was sent to Spain for a brief period of time, after which he made his way back to Paris in an elaborate effort to track down the old style nostalgia shop and see Margaret. It was tough but Eli managed to find her and they met up on more than a few occasions, he had rented out a flat in the nearby neighborhood. The next few months, they met up and talked, and went out and just spent time talking among each other. By this time it was 1944 and the war was just about done. The young couple had made plans to stay in France and marrying, raise a family. He loved the idea. He couldn't wait to get out of the war and begin a new with the woman he loved. And as fairy tales go, they stayed put and eventually settled down having two children and owning various business and even a farm. He loved the decision he made and the person he chose to love, he couldn't have had it any other way.

The president says that we should be happy?
He brought us to the brink of war
And then he lied about the reasons.
Of course, we have seen that before.

Lies, lies, again and again…
He thinks he can legitimize
His actions by bombarding us
With lies, lies, and even more lies.

Fifteen thousand four hundred
False claims from the lying pro.
But you have to keep in mind
That that was more than a month ago!

Now he's lying about Iran.
He says he has a better feel
For how to apply maximum pressure--
Better than the nuclear deal.

Abandoning the agreement that
Was working clearly made no sense.
Trump prefers to provoke Iran.
Diplomacy is a better defense.

Diplomacy means "weakness" to Trump.
He would rather pound his chest
And act as though he knows what he's doing.
Tell me: is the man possessed?

Lies, lies, again and again…
How can anyone not despise
A leader who defames our country
With lies, lies, and even more lies.

-by Bob B (1-9-20)

The discs have been
thrown in the air

and arrange themselves
and repeat themselves

bombarding this score
into a dozen or more
equally unsatisfying cremations

A glimpse of a temple
gave several new designs
for which I never intended
to borrow:

and the whipped up dirt
and broken reels of tape

have multiplied
and piled themselves
upon a stake

When awake,
I grab the shards
of horizon -
or try, anyway.

Sometimes I feel caught,
in a thunder storm of self hate,
Or a Monsoon of sadness.
A lightning storm of self pity.
And the storm never passes, I have built my world in the eye of the tornado.
It’s like being bit by mosquitoes who **** out your joy,
and when you scratch the bites for sweet relief,
you get punished with red welts to remind you of your guilt.
There is nothing more satisfying than self absorption,
nothing more frightening than mental distortion,
nothing quite so lonesome than the company of your mortality,
because there is no barricade to protect you from
the bombarding thoughts of your self worth.

You see...
I’ve been reminded how cold I am, after being abandoned by a warm hug.
And I’ve been forced to swallow lies,
picking them up like crumbs, off the floor,
because I’m starving for affection.
And I’ve been put my soul in solitary confinement,
so long,
the light coming from the outline of the door,
makes it want to cry.
Wondernig, “How could light want to mingle with the darkness in my mind.”

But, to the contrary,  none of these things have made me want to give up.
None of these things have actually broken me .
No.

The simple idea, that I think I can’t handle life, is what scares me.
Because I’ve got an infant looking up to me,
and she’s following my footsteps, tripping on the same ******* roots that I stumbled upon,
It makes me wonder if stumbling was even worth it, when I can't tell her to watch her step.

I only want to protect others. I think it's what I'm here for.
Because Maybe my brokenness can heal the world.
and I can’t do that,
when I’m busy digging my own grave
How can I shake off the shackles embedded into my heart.

There’s still so much hope left.
I’m dying to live.
I’m trying to give.

But, still,  nothing stops me from lying, when I tell you I’m fine.
It’s been raining for two decades now,
and I haven’t learned to dance.
I hope I remember,
tomorrow Always comes.
Because your tomorrow makes my today.

Go Ahead, Ask Me

I was walking down the street just the other day,
when this gentleman stopped me right dead in my tracks.
he said he was wondering if he could inquire  
how the world got this way?
I told him this was quite a complicated question.
There were so many factors involved, it was impossible.
Let me grab my straw hat and dancing cane.  

Darfishy! Some music please. Maybe some razz matazz piano.
1 2 3 4

If you wanna know what times it is,
go ahead and ask me.
If you needed to know what day it was,
I would most surely reply.
Are you curious about stocks and bonds,
you may certainly inquire.
but the condition of this world,
please don't ask me why.

If you wanna know who sang that song,
go ahead and ask me.
If you want directions to the moon,
I'll point it out for you.
If you need to know the atomic weight,
of a cosmic ray bombarding .
But the conditions of this world,
nary one single clue have I.
So please don't ask me why.

Things just seemed to be more simple in the past,
but we had to make a change, we knew it wouldn't last.

If you wanna know the confetior',
go ahead and ask me.
I'll most glady sing it for you,
you just pick the key.
Where to find a grocery store,
on South highway 98.
just how the world got this way,
I'm totally cluless.
But go ahead and ask me why    
yes go ahead, ask me.

Gomer LePoet...