(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

“You’re turning eighteen, you know. Have you thought of the things you’ve done with your life? Don’t you think it’s time we get you a life?” Recently, I had coffee with a friend. He looked at me from head to foot in mid-conversation, and made this comment. As always, he managed to drive me into deep thought. After much contemplation, I now realize how much I have truly gone through. I also realize the reason for this paper: I want to tell you about my life. I want to prove to you that people like me, who are afflicted with cerebral palsy should not be demeaned, but rather looked up to for how they face the challenges life brings forth.

    I remember that day. I was a baby and my eyes didn’t move. They refused to follow the finger my aunt moved back and forth. I just lay there, unmoving. My family didn’t really give much thought to it until a few months later when I began to be extremely dependent on others when it came to simple things like getting up from a fall. Right then, they knew something was wrong. I was taken to the hospital a few weeks after, and true enough I was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, a condition that caused me to walk on tip-toe and my legs to look like sticks due to weak muscles.

   The hospital became my second home. By the time I was three, I had grown immune to the stale smell of disease and death that greeted patients at hospital entrances. I sat in wheelchairs and was a patient to three different doctors and physical therapists. Physical therapy was, and still is to this day a gruesome routine that I didn’t look forward to. Those sessions lasted for three hours, starting off with cold ultrasound gel being smeared slowly on my thigh muscles, slowly progressing into the limb-twisting that drove me into screams of excruciating pain, and then finally ending with attempts at “walking normally” with steel bars for support. Soon after, the doctors discovered that physical therapy alone was not enough, and recommended orthopedic surgery.

   I underwent seven surgeries in three different countries: the Philippines, Thailand, and Greece. Although these surgeries gave me the opportunity to see the world, they were not at all full of pleasantries. To this day, I remember how each surgery went: being laid on the cold operating table, feeling as though my body was a pincushion as needles were forced into me. I shrieked at the sight of blood and nurses tried to calm me down, talking to me in languages I didn’t understand. Soon, my vision blurred, my eyes shut and I couldn’t open them. A tube made its way down my throat, and soon I was going, going, gone. Hours later, I woke up groggy, and the sleepless nights in the children’s ward started. Tears clouded my eyes as I stared at the ceiling or the walls covered with Disney characters grinning annoyingly at me as I was under the mercy of painkillers that didn’t even seem to work.

    As I got older, I began to question why things were the way they were for me. I began to raise questions why a certain child in my class could do things that I couldn’t. My early years of schooling were the most challenging ones to face. Like me, the other children didn’t realize how it was like to be in the situation I was in. Bullying and name-calling was common in the schools I attended. “Slowpoke” and “snail” are only some of the few names I was called by. Sometimes, children would even go as far as “crazy” and “*******”. They mimicked the way I walked and called my attention, asking me who it was they were pretending to be. Often times, I did what I was told to do at home and stood up for myself, firing back with a witty, sharp remark. Other times, I chose to ignore them instead.

    On the first days of all my Physical Education courses, I’d try to blend in with my classmates hoping that the teacher wouldn’t notice that I was incapable of doing the routines. I tried to get away with it, to no avail. As soon as I got found out, I was tasked to watch everyone else’s belongings, clear up scattered basketballs, or score a game I really had no knowledge of each meeting. I remember how it felt like to be a benchwarmer, while all the others were doing warm-ups or playing sports. I didn’t look at their faces much, instead I closed my eyes and listened as their laughs echoed their enjoyment into the air. That, or I looked down at their feet, watching them jump, listening to the thumps as their shoes hit the ground again. They made it look so easy.

   During dance rehearsals, I’d stare down at my own shoes, dirtied and scratched from constant dragging. I’d feel a sharp, imagined pain in my stick-thin legs, and imagine them moving to the music they’d be dancing to. Gently. Tap. Tap. Tap.

   While I admit that I felt a lot of resentment towards this disability in the past, I now find that there isn’t really much to resent about it. I have grown so much as a person through this disability. It has become part of who I am and how others define me. It is true that I have missed out on a lot of the things teenagers my age have gone through, but how this disability has enabled me to see life actually happen, to discover life’s true essence, and most of all, touch the lives of people I have encountered in the past and those I continue to encounter, makes me feel as though I have not missed out on anything at all.

   As I end this essay, I’d like to leave two challenges. If you happen to afflicted with cerebral palsy or any other disability, I challenge you to be proud and fight. Do not let others look down on you. People will demean you, if you choose to demean yourself. Do not wallow in self-pity. Instead, strive to turn your misfortune around. Touch lives of the people you meet. Inspire.

   On the other hand, if you do not have to struggle with any disability at all, I challenge you even more. Do not take your “normalcy” for granted. Do not look down on people with disabilities; instead aim to broaden your understanding of how it’s like to live life in their shoes. Everyday, realize how lucky you are to have what you have. I ask you the same question my friend asked me in the coffee shop that afternoon: Have you thought of the things you’ve done with your life?

Broaden your mind
Boost your spirits
Fill your world with knowledge
Just rise to the challenge
Continue to learn
Be that sage person
Strive for excellence
In every situation

BRIANO ALLIANO PERFORMS AT JUPITER MOON


hi dudes and welcome to jupiter moon where i will chuck a methane smoothie all over dad

so he can stop treating me like him at home, you see last night dad used the old young dudes

tp say i am not like my mate pat anymore, no, don’t want to be a cool kid to my dad, but i can

clean my house to what i like, and nothing more, buddy, so if you treat me like dad, you must

except i want to be a poor man, because dads way will never work, he should work on betty campbell

here is cruising round with red bull


I see some sorry old soul walking around the town, with a leather jacket on and a red bull in his hand, you see he looks kind if ***** and ****** up in the head he also looks so droopy, too, he should be home in bed, he'll go into JB hifi, if they'll let him in, that is and then he'll notice his red bull can is empty, he didn't know what to do, and everyone is staring at him, he yells out really loud WHAT ARE YA LOOKIN' AT YA ******, and nearly gets into a fight, and he was going completely crazy, yes he was weird, so ran through the mall, saying, I have to get my red bull, I have to get my red bull, I have to get my red bull, it's a f..n matter of life and death, if I don't get a red bull now, I swear I'll **** someone, waddaya think of that, everyone was saying as he passed thinking this man is cool, I think he's a loser cruising around with his red bull
When he got his second can open it up and it squirted everywhere, and unknown to him that half the can was lost in that squirt, so he cruised around with his can saying howdy to the chicks and saying hi dudes to the chaps, and, man he felt so cool, as he went over to JB hifi, yes his red bull can was empty again, and he yelled out ****, this time he was really ****** violent, he knocked over an old lady going to the bank and punched a yeah mate yeah kid,  (nerd) in the gut, and he was like that all the way to the red bull shop, when he got their the red bull was sold out and the store clerk said we have red eye, mother or V, and he said I don't want those, they are woosey drinks, I only drink red bull, because about 1 hour the man was taken by the police, as he was cruising it gives me wings, as I left he saw a kid who bought the last red bull, and he offered him $50 for it, and the kid said, money comes and money goes, but this red bull stays with me forever, and he got violent threatening to **** him as such and the kid said, ok dude, keep ya shirt on, give me $50 for this can and I will give it to you, they exchanged what they had and the kid went to the police station to fill in a statement saying he was threatened by a crazy red bull ******, and in around with the kids red bull, the police took him away the kid identified him as the guy, whi would convert to violence, to be cruising around, oh yeah, yes, man cruising around with his red bull, what a loser

and now here is my next song, called go to bed little shy boy, because i feel like a hooligan with my itchy feet, and i feel like i am getting kidnapped on earth because i am a tad messy, cause dad will never help me, when i do work, i feel like a lady, well, ****** oath i am a
lady to a tease, but i don’t want to get teased though, so i am a man
You see, you are still a little shy boy, and we are still teasing you
So, now you are working, man, come, leave us
And let us muck around, we want to smoke our bongs
As well as drink our bourbons, and drink 100 beers
Yeah we all feel cool, and don't wake up little shy boy
We want the adults to not bother us, cause we are having so much
Fun, we don't want to be adults,and don't want you to worry about us either
You see, all the men, are sitting there, trying to muck with them
Saying tease him, if you want to tease, just teaee him
But at the end of the day, man, we aren't really teasing
We are sitting up all night, being bums and young bludgers
And it's because you are such a ******
We might be making it seemed you are getting teased
But, we really want to leave you alone,,if you leave us alone
Cause, we are drug addicts,,and we want you to respect the fact
That we don't want to work, as long as you think that you aren't a young bludger
Everything will be already, but young bludgers go to bed for work
So mate, just enjoy yourself, and smoke your bongs
And have a good time, doing it
You see, I want to enjoy ourselves doing this
You are now leaving us all on our lonesome
See ya dudes
yeah, i don’t wanna be a cool kid to tease so i say to you, shut up cockbreath, here is my next song


I am a man and other men are teasing me with the kids
This is driving me crazy, I told them that I am a man
And I don't stand for this kind of juvenile behaviour
You see the kids didn't listen to that, they just laughed
And for a while each man kept on trying to be mature adults
Which we all know they're not, said for the kids to leave me alone
And then said, he isn't a target for teasing
But then after 3 days, the men said, what the flaming ****
We are going to tease this ****** yuppie
Yes, we'll tease them with the kids
The kids would teaee and when you go to the men
The men will teaee them too. They will act like all other Australians
And tease you as well, yes and they will ****** find it ****** fun
You are suffering cause you haven't got many friends

And the kids are laughing, while the ******* men say
You are a fucken big old softie,and you are now with no friends
Then you get a knife and try to stab him
And after that you punch him in the back
And then you draw out your knife and threaten to slit his throat
If he doesn't stop fucken teasing him
But they go, I am teasing you, and that's the only way I am being



You see when I go out of my bedroom after having a night of ***
The kids ate teasing me, left right and centre
And I try to handle it, but it's so ****** hard for me to do
Because they are saying things like, I am going to bash you up
And giving me a pineapple drink which was ****** wee
close to you
So if the kiddies are teasing you, and you turn to me, to get me to muck with you
I will say, I ain't mucking with you, mate, neh
I am just teas---ase---ing you with the kiddies, you aren't like us, cause when we tease you
Mate, you can't handle it, and then you say, you are spastic, and dumb as well. And I will punch you with this metal part of my leather glove, to show you who can't fucken handle teasing, you **** of the earth, fucken man
Then you go to your room, and they don't talk to you anymore
Because they are treating you like a target to tease
And that drives me crazy. And i yelled out
I AM SICK AND TIRED OF BEING THE MAN WHO IS GETTI NG TEASED BY MEN AND THE KIDS,  LEAVE ME THE **** ALONE
And they did, I am now a free spirit, no one can successfully taste me, never


yeah, i don’t wanna get teased by the men and kids, so i will be a hooligan oops, i am a cool person

you see, i am a polite man, hey, what did you say, you are protecting me with your hey, so i want dad to fly off, ok

have found a polite way to

I have found a polite way to say I love you even if I don't really mean it
I have found a polite way to tell you to ******* when you constantly bug me at my place of work, and that is treat him like an employee and then sack him, that'll work
I have found a polite way to tell someone that their weird without making them get upset
I have found a polite way to say to a right wing party that their policies stink by saying, you guys are a bunch of total perfectionists, who care nothing for the little guys
I have found a polite way to tell someone that they aren't the right sort of friend for me by saying, please mate, I need to broaden my horizons, so can you leave my perfect world buddy
I have found a polite way to tell my boss that I am resigning and that is I really don't want this place of employment, it's not really my cup of tea
I have found a polite way tell someone in a bar to stop bugging me by asking them nicely to please leave me alone and if that doesn't work then leave the bar saying if people aren't going to be nice to me here, I ain't going to come here
I have found a polite way to call someone a young bludger by telling them that they are as lazy as you were when you were their age
I find polite ways to say anything because I value my
Life too much to be hurt people's feelings, I am really cool, man

ya see i hear voices of people saying i have no real problems, but i wanna be famous, and i want to move to adelaide, but i don’t get positive feedback

so i feel like getting drunk and vomiting like this song

You see I love to have a few beers, or chocolate, and chips, oh yeah
This was what I really enjoy when I go to a pub at night
You see I live next door to this nightclub, called the hungry ****** horse
And I ain't cursing because I want to, man, that s what it's called
I met a man named Roger Killbert, who I had *** with and having a few
But the beers weren't doing good for Roger, they made him really sick
You see he was getting drunk and vomiting, yes, he was really sick
I don't share children with him, so why did I stay with him
You see he lost his family in the recent fires, and this is the first time he went out
And Roger was getting a sickly taste in his mouth, oh yeah
And it made him *****, he was sick,
You see it was just vomiting, so I didn't bother to take him to hospital
But I changed my mind, when te blood came out, it was really bad
So I took him to the hospital, and the hospital said he fine
But I know in my fucken ****** heart, that he was sick
Then he vomited blood, and the nurse said
To Roger to go to the waiting room
Because this isn't too important, but we do know that it was
And I said, why don't you get your *** in gear
And help my fucken friend, and from that moment
They labelled me a stubborn girl, yes I hated that a lot
And I said, yes, I'm stubborn, but I care for him, and have you got
Someone you care about, you hear about doctors like you
And I am more than just a stubborn woman
If you don't look after my friend, or at least try
I will soo your pants right off
He fucken had the nerve to say on what grounds
I am trying, to be my job, follow work protocol
Yes, I am doing fine, I earn a lot of money
And I deserve every cent, then I said you deserve squat
But I don't really care, when we left, yes I sooed his pants off
And since that ****** day, this doctor never learnt his lesson
We were moved to another hospital
You see he is getting drunk and vomiting, and he was very sick
And we are enjoying spending his money we got out of the doctor
Yes I feel ****** good

you can get your earth bodies to look at aaron clayton or aaa youtube TV, to hear everything performed by me

here is my next song


now, i will tell you where my cool kid is, at the mall mucking around
you see I go to the mall, being with young people
And I have so much fun, making young people mistakes
Like drinking all night and passing by McDonald's
For a McFeast and fries and coke
I will look like a junk food hooligan
And yes I will look so cool to the young
But I wish it was as simple as that
I want to have some fun
So I saw my two friends Eddie and Daniel
And we mucked around having fun
But it wasn't really what I wanted, man
So I told them both to *******
For 3 years after they purposely ran into me
And call me Woosey, and um, they will put the smoke in their ear
And eat McDonalds while I will try to be an adult
And every adult decision I make, they said Woosey, Woosey, Woosey
And then I got up and said you kids make me sick
But I couldn't say that, and they called me Woosey, because I was
Too Woosey to be a man, that opens up to his problems
But I felt like trying my hand trying to intimidate them
And make them leave me alone, it drives me crazy
All I want to be is a normal young dude, you know
Playing around making mistakes as well as being cool
But I have **** like you two teasing me as if your friendship is a fucken lie
You look like greedy pigs when you eat your McDonald's
And you are a ******* when you bang your head against the tapes
Yeah, dude, you look like a Woosey to me, mate
I am just doing the kind of things that Patrick did
Because what he likes to do, is similar to what I like to do
I like hard rock music, but I ain't a little young dude
Who is to scared to escape the tease
You guys are two little Wooseys, and I will say you are Wooseys
Mainly because you eat little young food like maccas
And you stick the cigarette in your hair, like a ******
I am a cool young dude, cool young dudes do art, and don't look lost
I'm not lost, I am so radical dudes, let's party
I am now on the healing process, because Daniel is the only Woosey
And that's the truth, you see


you see, how many of you guys have been called a woosey, you see i believe in loving life and here is my next song

i still wanna be young, what is wrong with that
Yes, mate, I am happy and I feel cool
I feel my body is getting younger and I want to break the adult rule
Mind you, there is nothing wrong with growing up, and being wise, so to speak
But really that's too formal, man, doing that will just send you weak
You need to do things that are exciting
Like go on an aero plane, like to Thailand or Vietnam, or even the mighty USA
You should go on long rail journeys too, yes that's a bit of a buzz
You can either choose having a sleeper, living the lap of luxury
Or roughing it up on the single ride seat
You can also grab a hot meal on the train
And you can eat it in the dining car
And you can eat it up, real fast, so you aren't away from the seat too long
I also like a bus trip, like to Batemans bay or beyond
And a trip to Sydney. Melbourne, Brisbane, Hervey bay, gold coast, and fantastic Adelaide
I go into a club and if I hear music I will either tap my foot or dance to it
Depending on the mood of the place
I also like to stay in a Hotel, and watch a bit of ****** Rupertvision
Some shows are good, and thouroughly entertained me so much
But not enough to make me give to that rich *****
I sometimes like a good trip in the country, where I climb mountains
Or just look at the views from lookouts and even the wild life
And mind you, you can have a ball in the country, cause you have no main worries
No worries at all, sonny Jim
Then you can spend the weekend in Sydney for the Carols in the domain
Where you get in early, pick a great spot, and take in the Christmas spirit
Mind you, you have to wait in line at the toilets, but it's all in good fun
And mate, if you happen to lose, dad, or even your mum
Just go to the stage, and tell them that you are a lost boy
With no directional skills, and how do I find mummy again
Of course they will help find them, but you really just wanted to get on the idiot box
And mate, just wait for the hiding you get off mum or dad
For wasting important television viewing time
There are so many things you can do, but, mate
You need to get a job, oh yeah, don't make your mum and dad pay
That can make you uncool
You see, I am a 43 year old young dude, yeah
And I will be there, till the day I join the afterlife, oh yeah
i hear voices of people saying, i ain’t going to help you little cool ki, ****** oath i am cool kid



Hi little kid, you can't find your mummy, you are a baby
Cause this is a family event, and it's quite ****** safe
Just ask a fellow kid, sure you are safe little kid
But then another kid will come, and trick me into
Looking like a phedaphile, and I won't be able to get out of it
So little kid, keep looking around for your mummy
And, yes you will see her, and I ain't helping you
Cause I am not the kids teasing Buddy
You see I want kids to let me be a true grown up
Who wants to be cool, and have a lot of fun
With other grown ups, and if kids can think of Judy being with each other
The city will look after their needs a lot better
You see, I dressed up as Santa, but I ain't helping you kid
So *******, or I will put you in the toilet
Do you want that, I don't fucken think so
I can tell you, I ain't no kid, I am an adult
Who wants to have fun and enjoy life
I don't want you kids to come up to me
And ask me to do something inappripiate
Even if it looks innocent, it ain't, I aren't that type of guy
You kids are a pack of fucken losers
And just keep yourselfs in your family groups
Cause that will suit me just fine, because
I ain't gonna he

I was mad.

I was mad about being second best.
I was mad about taking a second place in your heads.
I was mad about what you discussed behind my back.
I was mad about realising how mad it all made me become.

I was sad.

I was sad about how excluded you made me feel.
I was sad about how vulnerable I had let myself become.
I was sad about not feeling as important to you anymore.
I was sad because I felt so alone without you.
With you.

I was tired.

I was tired of seeing them push me aside.
I was tired of being interrupted for your gains.
I was tired of being used to broaden your shoulders
And widen your egos
I was tired of seeing her face and hearing you laugh at her words.

I was wounded.

Wounded because you left me all alone when I needed you.
Wounded because you chose them over me. And her.
Wounded because I had finally found my place and they took it from me.
Wounded because my mistakes were haunting me.
Wounded because you were hurting me, neglecting me, rejecting me.

Now you've come back to me.

Come back like I predicted.
Come back like none of this ever happened.
Come back like she was never here.
Like I never asked you that question.
Come back like we were never different.
Come back like my heart is still yours and yours is still mine.

And now you smile at me,
Talk to me,
Laugh at me like nothing ever happened, nothing ever changed.
Like we will still remain
The same
And I don't know what to think anymore
Other than what love is made of.

Covent Garden.
Midnight.
Revellers and tourists combined.
The market is heaving.
Last trains are leaving.
An eclectic mix to broaden the mind.

Covent Garden.
2am.
The place is pretty quiet.
Pubs have closed.
Clubs.... God knows.
The tourists have frozen their riot.

Covent Garden.
4am.
A drunkard stumbles by.
Flood lit shops.
A rickshaw stops.
The backdrop against a reddish
sky.

Covent Garden.
6am.
Blokes lurk down Langley street.
The glint of a blade.
A blur in the shade.
Lava tip of cigarette falls to a strangers feet.

Covent Garden.
8am.
Commuters emerge from underground stations.
Workers prepare.
Visitors beware.
Pick pockets attracted like gravitation.

Always broaden your mind
Be willing to grab more knowledge
Never stop learning
As the world keeps on turning
What potency you will have
When you acquire valuable information
Continue to move ahead
With full speed instead

Show me your heart,
And I'll show you a work of art

I'll make it grand
I'll make it with allure
I'll make it to withstand
Even time and the impure

Give me that pen,
I'll make the horizons broaden

I'll let you see
The wonders of the universe
I'll show you that you're not just any
For you are a blessing, not a curse

How about just a smile,
And I'll walk with you down the aisle

We'll write of our adventures quaintly,
Be it with pens or pencils
Even with the most unlikely
of writing utensils

I've watched too late; the morn is near;
  One look at God's broad silent sky!
Oh, hopes and wishes vainly dear,
  How in your very strength ye die!

Even while your glow is on the cheek,
  And scarce the high pursuit begun,
The heart grows faint, the hand grows weak,
  The task of life is left undone.

See where upon the horizon's brim,
  Lies the still cloud in gloomy bars;
The waning moon, all pale and dim,
  Goes up amid the eternal stars.

Late, in a flood of tender light,
  She floated through the ethereal blue,
A softer sun, that shone all night
  Upon the gathering beads of dew.

And still thou wanest, pallid moon!
  The encroaching shadow grows apace;
Heaven's everlasting watchers soon
  Shall see thee blotted from thy place.

Oh, Night's dethroned and crownless queen!
  Well may thy sad, expiring ray
Be shed on those whose eyes have seen
  Hope's glorious visions fade away.

Shine thou for forms that once were bright,
  For sages in the mind's eclipse,
For those whose words were spells of might,
  But falter now on stammering lips!

In thy decaying beam there lies
  Full many a grave on hill and plain,
Of those who closed their dying eyes
  In grief that they had lived in vain.

Another night, and thou among
  The spheres of heaven shalt cease to shine,
All rayless in the glittering throng
  Whose lustre late was quenched in thine.

Yet soon a new and tender light
  From out thy darkened orb shall beam,
And broaden till it shines all night
  On glistening dew and glimmering stream.

.english colonialism used to be passive-aggressive, english post-colonialism is a strange dynamic of former colonial nations playing the endgame of colonialism with non-affiliated nations of the british empire (affiliated by trade anyway, although not based upon origins of the ruling elite's extending arm), there's a hot topic in england between the irish and the polish, the irish are provoking the polish into racism so someone else can look smug with a pakistani friend on the london tube.

you know the amount of pain i see writing my father's
invoices of manual labour with the irish *****
apparently running
the show protecting northern
irish outputs of poetry and cigarette smuggling -
keeping us migrants "in check"?
god the loathing,
i try to improvise each invoice
with an excess knowledge
of the english tongue to break through,
but my sole considering comforter
is still death,
**** this *******, i rather die
than see my father's eyes eye me
hurtful hopeful of seeing my "bright new life"
when i was nearly murdered by
an egyptian school-friend / childhood friend
and later told: boy you better pretend you're
mad... boy my ***, your father is just
an x-ray technician... go back
to the northern africa of your
pretending to be a semite and build
another pyramid... *******, **** all of this,
days of casual pretentious squeaky clean
non-offensive poetry are over...
gentlemen - let's broaden our minds... swear a little
take up oaths with truth...
we were born to down a pint of concrete before
ireland was born, rushing out of pubs
when the call was made: concrete has arrived!
run, run run run! break legs and whatnot,
because in an irish pub talking to a homeless
person in akimbo giving him a cigarette
is cause for argument with an irish girl
trying to get, familiar;
unlike the sword, a stick has two ends...
you can smack someone with it,
but then someone can rebel and grasp the same
stick and smack you with it, for a suckling
taste of a kiss in memory of reprimanding manners.

- and i do remember the good stuff coming
out of h'america...
    i once owned a copy of blue valentine
by tom waits on c.d.: scratched that record
from over-playing it...
found a vinyl copy in the shop today...
splashed out a staggering £20 on it...
lucky for me the mp3 record comes free...
     £20 is a lot?
       well... better that £20 which played
in the background as i finished off decorating
the kitchen...
   rage 2 deluxe edition for ps4 -
      £44.99... so sure... i splashed out...
          thank god i'm not a gamer...
with games it's like with movies...
   notably? vikings season 1...
     i thought i could watch it a second time...
couldn't...
   a bit of a hit and miss...
    with games and movies...
      when the narrative gets exhausted...
and you're still honing in on the narrative
whether a passive spectstor or the role player
in the game...
but investing in an album?
       background background...
and an almost infinite array of the comeos
against the record...
   one cameo decorating a kitchen
another cameo finishing the day off with
some cider on a windowsill...
   but once upon: that's what h'america was
about... united we stand,
divided we fall... blah blah...
           and it looks like that right now...
the cultural export zenith peaked and it isn't
coming back...
   not for a while at least...
now we only look at not the united
         but the balkanized states of europe...
the states pulling at each other:
where once there was a cohesive collective
      export of pure cancan h'americana...
tom waits' blue valentine...
                          now i'll am getting
"culturally" is a bunch of vlogger content...
export of problems,
existential qualms without support on
existential pillars from continental thought
of 20th century europe...
   19th century doesn't count:
   not even nietzsche does: but kierkegaard
doesn't.

what are those lyrics from that vomito *****
song enemy of the state?
we shall send you, in ever increasing number:
ships, planes, tanks, guns: that is your purpose
and, our pledge... (1941 state of the union speech
sample)

most americans are not aware that soon
the primary export of our national economy
won't be cars, or food, or microwaves.
instead we'll be exporting death.
instead will be exporting death.

   perhaps, once upon a time...
now the export is quiet different,
   at its cultural zenith of exported values...
it would seem h'america choked on
a bitter pill... h'america no longer provides
the sort of culture worth exporting,
notably in cinema in music...
                               in literature...

the behemoth lost all of its juggernaut
momentum... and stumbled into rehashing old
ideas... it's not plagiarizm as such:
more a plagiarizm ex per se...

norman davies: god's playground -
   1795 to the present:

the Belweder is a palace in Warsaw...
(belvedere: a beautiful view)
constructed in 1660 -
  the White House in Washington D.C.
constructed in circa 1796...
by god, what a similarity!

   polish emigration to the u.s.a.:
in social terms their educational and communal
organizations are less effective than those of
the ukranians,
   in political terms their problems
command less notice than those of the blacks,
chicans or amerindians...
in the vicious world of the american ethnic jungle,
the 'stupid and ignorant Pole' is a standard
stereotype... once the noble lord...
reasons no doubt exist: like the irish and
the sicilians... the greatest influx came from
Galicia containing a large number of
the 'wretched refuse': people so oppressed
by poverty and near-starvation:
supressed linguistically, religiously...
the instinct of mere survival...
accepted the most degrading forms of employment...
exploitation: 'industrial *******'...
they were the gangers of the great american
railway age...
a canadian textbook can be cited
(j. s. wordsworth, strangers within our gates,
toronto 1972):
'it is hard to think of the people of this
nationality other than in that vague class of
undesirable citizens' -
   very much like to today:
   to think of canadians being a people
beloning to the making of mankind -
    without the canadian concept of mankind
being: peoplekind...
even woodrow wilson (then) prof. at prince-ton
deemed the Poles to be 'inferior'.

- but who was to ever to keep grudges...
grand torino - the movie, starring and directed
by clint eastie-boy-sparking-wood...
waldermar kowalski... dumb pollack...
why do poles no integrate within a community
bias as such?
                   the proverb:
if you want to succeed within a framework
of immigration: steer away from your
fellow countrymen...

                     almost all other cultures that
come, but the host's nitty-picky:
oh look at our asian labradors...
why can't you lick our ***** like they can?
etc. one example out of the many...
some people, i guess: prefer to be in
the background...
post-colonial powers need tokens...
akin to a sadiq khan:
papa was an immigrant bus-driver -
quick step up from daddy being a bus driver
to the position of mayor of london...
browny points!

the english are smug like this:
you hear even today -
WE WON'T BE SORRY FOR OUR
FATHER'S AND FOREFATHER'S SINS...
not for our colonial past...
they say that consciously -
but subconsciously they are scoring
brownie points...
        i can't say they're doing this
unconsciously: since if they were:
there would be a unanimous concensus
and no: "diversity is our strength"
agenda...

             besides... you can't exactly
conquer an island...
the norman conquest of 1066? it wasn't really
a conquest: for a conquest to actually take
place you'd require the native population
to be displaced / replaced by the invading
force - akin to the saxon invasion...
'don't touch, their, women...
we don't breed with these people...
what sort of people would you think
that would breed? weak people... half people'
(king Cerdic from the film king arthur 2004)...
proof being?
when the normans invaded and "conquered"...
they simply replaced the ruling saxon elite...
hence? the domesday book...
the ruling elites were being replaced
and the new ruling elites wanted to have
an account of who they were going to rule...
it was less a conquest and more:
a change of guard... since...
            the locals were first investigated
and subsequently left to their own devices...
there was no conquest:
               as such...
                but you can get on with your
day-to-day life on an island with natural
fortifications (the ******* sea)...
and produce your little whizz-kids down
the years...
   but imagine being squeezed by:
prussia... russia, the ottomans,
                  the mongols...
                             the swedes...
                and subsequently by the austro-hungarians...
matka królów (the mother of kings),
i.e.: Elisabeth von Habsburg...

   in conclusion... oh to hell with the whole
"incel" label... you have to pay for something
in the end... why not skip the *******'s worth
of pleasantries: the dating masquerade
and not get into the nitty-gritty with a *******
in one smooth stroke of a count worth an hour?
no hard-on shyness that way...
no ****-teasing...
whatever is an erectile dysfunction outside
of the brothel... doesn't seem to bother
whittle wichy while in a brothel...
so go figure...
                and relating to the stories of incels...
hmm... maybe it's the fickle women...
last time i checked...
i picked up a thai bisexual in a park,
a random stranger...
                took her home,
some beer, some jazz...
                  ****** her in the garden...
        i don't even think it's the case of
"i can't get laid" with these incels...
     english women: nuns on the outside...
latex gimp suited **** black boot licking
*** fiends in the bedroom...
   the madonna-***** complex...
the only aspect of Freud that resonates with me...

you know what, never mind...
      i'm just happy i collect vinyls...
free mp3 copy to boot...
and instead of spending 40+ quid on a game
that will become exhausted after one sitting /
completion (these are not arcade games,
nor are they the "free" new wave of games,
the ones where you play "superior"
opponents with a handicap -
since you didn't pay any in-game updates,
patience is a virtue,
   and someone people invest real money
into these games, but are still **** at them,
plus, these new wave games never really end...
i'll be dead and i won't be able to finish them,
added bonus? there's no NPC dimension
to them, added strategy: with a complete loss
of narrative / story-telling, genius!)
plus... how much does a vinyl player cost?
you can get one for under 70 quid...
sometimes vinyl bargains: under a tenner...
this one though, for 20 quid...
1 vinyl worth 20 quid once every two months?
oh yeah... i really splashed out on this one!

woman is a grand idea though...
    there is so much of woman i would be able
to love, if only the practicality of woman
wouldn't be associated...
alas: reality bites...
                       regrets...
                                  aged 33 and i feel as if...
i have managed a good enough sample
where both sexes can coexist within the confines
of me entertaining them:
as if they were to never meet and "preserve"
the "fate" of "humanity"...
      i'm pretty sure there are plenty of people
who have been bullied into this trap
associated with the otherwise "intelligent"
dodo mentality...
                          besides, i'm about to find out,
whether or not, they sell liter bottles of whiskey...
using my braille tally:

            ⠁ ⠃ ⠇ ⠧ ⠷ (⠿)
            1  2  3   4  5  (6)
             a  b  l   v  à  (é)

                        from what i drank yesterday
for that lullaby... i'm starting to supect that:
what they label as a liter... is actually more -

    if after ⠷⠻ ⠷⠻ (i.e. 50ml  20x) i'm not left
with an empty bottle... well then i'm not left
with an empty bottle.

Mommy why, i was just barely opening my heart to  you
Mommy you see me through the screen beating my life to you
120 beats per second ,faster than your heart mommy.
Mommy, I feel your smile broaden
Mommy I will love you conditionally
Moommyy what is this clamp mommy ,
please don't it hurts it hurts please mommy
Seven Weeks , Three Days Pregnant

I lost you my precious , Words will never define the darkness I feel in my heart . The darkness of how unloving my heart became, How heartless humanity was around me like infectious leech. Letting you go was the consequences of the bite. Please forgive me,  I made the biggest mistake in my life. The one mistake, where you won't grow up to learn from. What was left of my heart became stone cold , I let go my true shot of happiness, but I couldn't bring you into a world of brokenness and despair. You deserve better, but better than you will ever receive from me. One day I hope you understand. I promise you , my love lies deep in my veins.  I love you ,Heaven needed you back and I regret not standing like warrior and fighting for you. I never will wash dirt on my back,I can never stop apologizing for the vicious attacks you endured by me . Every sunrise and sunset I will forever mourn the death of my own humanity against you.
*One last breath,Mommy, I love you Forever
I'll float down the river ,patiently waiting for ocean to wash me into abyss , humming to the lullaby,I would have sang to you my precious gift.

Sometimes
Life keeps moving when you're trying so hard to hold still.
Roll with the punches, make changes, do something to better yourself
Or *simply fade away.
There's more out there,
There's undiscovered emotions and ideas that could broaden your horizons wider than the most beautiful sunset that you may never even see because you were too set in your ways to go outside your comfortable little box and really SEE the world.

*The choice is yours.

"Write hard and clear about what hurts." -- Ernest Hemingway

It hurts that my grandmother might not be around for my wedding
It hurts that my grandfather may be, but may not remember it
It hurts that I live so far my from people I love
It hurts knowing they will hurt when I tell them I want to move clear across the country
It hurts that I am stuck here, facing people I would rather avoid
It hurts that a place I called home has turned on me
It hurts more that I may be imagining they have turned on me
It hurts to think I may have disappointed the first person to give me a chance
It hurts that people I once called friends will speak so bitterly about me
It hurts that, ten months later, I so strongly miss someone who melds perfectly with us
It hurts that she would rather run than even attempt to see what it's like
It hurts that she may act so calm, as if nothing happened
It hurts that her facade is so strong, while mine crumbles at the sight of her
It hurts that the longer we go on, the more we risk becoming "that creepy older couple"
It hurts that it hurts him, when I still speak of wanting another
It hurts that I would not be complete without one or the other
It hurts that so many friends are married, and growing families
It hurts that I will have to defend my own choices in growing mine
It hurts that I must defend my family to my family
It hurts that so many people work the job that pays the bills, and the job they really love
It hurts that the job I love must be revealed strategically
It hurts that who I am must be revealed strategically
It hurts anticipating the hurt that will come from that judgement
It hurts when I try to broaden my horizons, and I can see the hurt in my best friend's eyes
It hurts watching people not fulfill their full potential
It hurts watching people work so hard, but still gain so little
It hurts working so hard in my job, becoming so tired that my joy, my passion falls by the wayside
It hurts that we work so hard for things that do not truly comfort us
It hurts that we take so little for granted
It hurts that we take so many for granted

Our palms press down
Muscles flow in eager rapture
Our shoulders broaden
Spines lengthen
Our hips press down
Fluid motion twisting
Around and through and above
We grow in balance
Feeling high above and far away
But here in total darkness
We see through feeling
And here in total darkness
The light in me reaches out
And tethers to the light in you.

You are my sword and shield
you are my suit of armor
you are the helm upon my head,
the feather in my hair.
You smile and my spine straightens
my shoulders broaden
my muscles swell.
Someone tries to tell me that
your love is a sin
and my laughter is a spear
and the memory of your hand in mine
turns my heart to a weapon.
I am Achilles
and David
and Joan of Arc
I am Hua Mulan.
You kiss me and your breath
turns my lungs to billows,
your blood is in my veins
and not a drop will spill.
I can fight anyone
I can do anything
if it’s done in the name of you.

It was a starry night,

I remember the moon was bright.

As I sat in my canopied room

Atop the inn of gloom,

Its musty stench of walls and flesh,

Surrounded by dim light and floors below, strewn

-

At first I was anxious and nervous

About the spectre’s appearance

But something in his presence was calming

Curious as it was, I was longing.

-

He was not ghostly in the way you would think

He was as real looking, enough to drink,

Though it was something in his air and aura

That told me his demise like Gomorrah,

And how he was perished and dead,

And with these rotting words he said

-

“Gaze upon me and listen well,

For your silence I wish you not quell,

My words you will not stir,

You will absorb and then, good sir,

I will reappear as those who’ve been

You yourself and died again,

You are the last and only one,

Upon earth to know this secret done,

You will understand this true confusion

And soon be rid of your delusion.

But I warn there is a painful price,

In cherished aforementioned gift so nice

Of that you will find soon

And your burning soul will croon.

-

My name is High Lord Kellik,

And my touch you’ve already met.

You’ve felt me here before,

I walk with you, ancestor, but more.

I am the first of you in this lone world,

I suffered what once was unfurled.

-

Now know our cryptic secret revealed

Of the same bloodline congealed:

To all of us who are one,

This life is not your only one.

-

I’ve risen again from fallen,

I was in Jerusalem

When my Lord he calleth,

God chose not to follow them.

I was of the Tuetonics,

Though my death was quite ironic,

For they had me drawn for heresy

And quartered for allegedly

Stealing an Arab’s maidenhead

Even though my wife was pregnant then,”

(At this sentence, twas there I noticed,

The chainmail and a cross of lotus,

Betwixt his breast and penance

He seemed holy, even justice.)

“I loved my wife from first gaze through labor,

Twas the last I saw of her, I savored

The love in her eyes when I lost her.

All I wanted was to adore her.

They led me into ‘court’ they said,

Twas to be my own deathbed,

And when they called out all my sins,

Of course I denied, being pious within,

Although my truth they would not have,

I again suffered my brother’s terrible wrath.”

-

I spoke my first words, shaking, unstable,

Asking questions gated in stables,

“Sir, I know my silence is needed,

But I request some answers conceded,

Why did they not trust your pure enough claims,

Brothers, as you said, seeking no gain?”

-

Spake he “I understand your logic,

Twas mine although my brothers were stoic,

You see, it is the terrible price

That I spoke earlier, a wretched vice,

To know the things that we will tell,

You must know the darkest hell,

You must know that you will die

A most gruesome death without comply,

Because we are one, it must happen and then,

You’re born the same, to die again.”

-

I sat silent for a moment and pondered,

I thought of a tree that aimlessly wonders,

About its life serving no purpose,

To grow leaves and die, its only service,

It seemed of me, so pessimistic

To know this life is quite solipsistic.

-

He continued,

-

“Know that I had the easiest death,

The first brother-blade did pierce my chest,

It struck my heart, and I must make amends,

That is why none of us will find love again.

-

I was of the knights most valiant,

My fervor was the most resilient,

Whatever we may ever be,

It is irrelevant, you’ll die like me.”

-

Shocked, I sat in euilibrium,

You’d think it peaceful

But my world was undone,

It forever changed that starry night,

And was only the beginning of my hellish fright.

-

Lord Kellik departed there through my door,

I heard no steps upon the floor,

I thought it odd for plate boots to make,

No sounds on oaken plates of estate…

-

Soon my door was reopened again,

I looked up and gazed at him,

At me, twas now I started to see,

Resemblance in us, for no helmet he wore,

But rather a coat of a Hessian he bore,

He masked the same look I see on myself,

When I’ve been through darkness, my own hell,

The blue eyes like mine, were mine, and hair,

Dark brown, and had a piercing stare,

German accent had he upon conversing,

“Wie gehts? Ich heisse Kryztoff von Gersching,”

“Hallo Kryztoff, mein namme ist Andrew Marheine.”

-

“There is great hate between two factions,

Two worlds, once one, under taken action,

The English came and fought and tried,

The way Americans denied

The rights of those that were first here,

I was hired to broaden their fear.”

-

Surprised at his English,

I also switched,

“Sir, I noticed that your neck is stitched…?”

-

“A wound from battle, the only lucky

Thing that ever happened to me,

But knowing what I do know now,

I would pick severed jugular to doubt.

My unit was captured by a group of guerrilla yanks,

They slaughtered us each unless we joined their ranks,

In this massacre there was no honor,

In sending home bodies, lost sons and fathers,

I steadily refused to be a part,

So they began tearing me apart

Until they then realized

I would gladly be crucified,

That just for that, that I despised,

Each one of them for their “freedom” lies,

Their General King, although respected,

Washington should not have defected.

You see now where democracy has led,

The better off, are the lucky dead.

I see you ask of what I died?

Of what brought about a Hessian’s demise?

The gutless ******* shot me with small cannon

Direct in my stomach, you cannot fathom,

The amount of pain in three long hours…

I wished for death, but not from cowards.”

-

He was proud looking, but not Narcissus,

Battle worn, and quite seditious.

I noticed his sword, the handle notched,

For every inch of life he’d squashed

Like a child’s boot to an ant hill.

This man died alone and still.

-

He spoke once more

-

“You have been blessed with knowledge and wrought,

You though will be turned to naught,

The pain you’ll be in, too much to endure,

Your arteries pumping blood to the floor,

We know not how you will die,

But painful be it, no chance to survive.

Because, like us, you have no one here,

Like us, not missed, no tragic dear,

Your name be forgotten until

The next of us lives to see us fill.”

-

He exited without another word,

I found it quaint, unlike the herd,

I strove to be different, I suspect I’ve succeeded,

After all, who knew their death, and believed it?

-

Wondering if I would again be visited

Or if my passed lives were but two limited,

I also thought of how they appeared…

I could not recall how the first had veered,

Or why they ventured to me and told

Me of their stories that would make hearts cold

Stuck with this thought, another come forth,

From my wooden frame of door,

His brilliant armor, black with silver,

Across his back, a sheathe and quiver,

He looked at me, and I again saw myself,

And again saw another me been felled,

“Hello,” I said “won’t you come in?”

“Obliged,” spake he “see what lies therein.

-

He began,

-

“Young man, you know not missing your home,

But I come from the brightest years of Rome,

Although I knew only Coliseum

I hoped my soul be with Ellysium,

I was a slave in the rich man’s bloodsport,

And the crowd, they cheered for more and more,

To live every day knowing you must fight,

Can bring great depression to one’s very life,

Caesar said I could in time be free,

I fell my last fight, suffering,

The anguish that flowed through me at then,

Was not of physical harm, but when,

My bowels were visible on the ground,

All I could feel was loss never found,

I swore allegiance to men never met,

And all it brought was discontent.

Never think twice about an act,

It could save your life until this pact,

Although you will die, nameless forever,

Know that even the smallest endeavor,

Will not change this predestination,

This marvelous melancholy is Hades’ invention,

We will not wake until we’ve slept,

The eternal slumber, and mourner’s have wept,

About a loss that is so profound,

Until they forget why the feelings endowed,

Are the enemy to their own happiness,

They then know not of what ‘revolting’ is.”

-

This nameless man stood up and gazed,

Outside of my withered window pane,

His eyes lightened and looked ever broken,

And I could see a man who’s life and freedom were stolen,

If ever I had wanted to cry in confrontation

It would’ve been at his lamentation,

But I bit my tongue and held back from that,

Although he noticed with eyes like a cat,

He smiled at me, I smiled at me,

And it was then that he began to proceed,

Out of my door, and out of my eyes,

I thought about my ending surprise.

I now knew death was not to be,

An old man while I was in my sleep,

But rather a darker, gruesome end,

Perhaps lacerations from within,

And as this trickled across my brain,

I could swear to God I went insane,

I sat in my room for weeks despaired,

Tasting nothing except the stale air,

and then one day it finally clicked,

That life is what it is, a foul ******* trick.

The friend request. There it was.
The gods must have sent it.
Here I am, two weeks in the past,
Staring dreamily into a picture of you.
Those eyes, garnished with thick dark eyelashes,
Staring deeply into someone you’ve never met.
That jet black hair. Shadowy curtains,
Keeping your heart-shaped face safe.
But those lips. Painted with pure blood daily.
The most inviting fruit before my own eyes.
Yours is a beauty I have only seen in French cinema.
Like Audrey Tatou, ordering in a restaurant,
With a smile of pure inviting mischief.
And I imagine…oh I imagine…
Am I ready to break this wasteland?
The scorching desert that is alone?
I can almost smell her foreign perfume.
But she is merely pixels upon a screen.
You snap out of it, son.

And lo, the friend request.
My stomach leaps as I click ‘accept’.
She types. She compliments.
I compliment. We chat.
We exchange clips of Led Zeppelin.
She sends me gothic rock.
Moody and dark. The blackest of music.
I am never wearing colours again.
And I take the leap. I type some x’s and some o’s.
And she types them back.

Let us meet.
Where do we meet in this god-forsaken town?
Coffee. Easy. Neither formal nor gritty.
Just enough class, just enough mediocrity.
And she sways across the floor and greets me.
Her dress is of vintage design and flowing beauty.
Her glasses project her gaze into mine.
Ordering coffee, sitting with her chin resting on her hand.
Her smile is as warm as the sun.
Is she Mia Wallace? Is this Pulp Fiction?
My witty remark is quite crude and depicts violence.
A normal girl would shudder and frown.
She loves it. She loves that sort of thing.
This was lovely. Let us do it again sometime.

Next minute, we’re kissing passionately in amongst the bamboo.
She cares not for my bristles. In fact she likes it.
Her lipstick gets destroyed. She cares not.
So much drive for a ******.
We’re a secret. No one shall know.
She messages me. Tells me she is still drunk on me.
What we have is otherworldly.
Are we two aliens, a race from a far-off land?
Destined to be together? The last of our kind?

We touch, we caress. We burn CDs.
Trip hop, soul orchestras and shoegaze.
Hand-written burnt CD track listings.
The fact that she has written each word
Brings warmth. It creeps up from my stomach
And my arms can’t help but engulf her little frame.
She calls me a genius.
She loves every single note I play, every word I write.
I am a god to her. She adores me. And I her.
She watches me lovingly on the stage.
And before she boards the train home
I tell her. Three words.
I love you.
It’s the truth. And she loves me back.
Was it too early to tell her this? No, surely not.

Our love creeps and crawls up the stone wall.
An overgrown vine of pleasure and euphoria.
Kiss me hard, push your face so hard into mine.
It’s time. Relax. Just go with it.
Olive skin, so soft. Cover me with you.
Nothing can stop our intergalactic empire.
I stand atop an interstellar battlefield of victory,
With you at my side, my Queen.
If I could just float around space in a bubble
With you my dear, I would be happy
For an eternity.

And you say you’re leaving.
You don’t want it to change us.
It won’t, I promise.
You must further yourself by any means.
Broaden your horizons.
I will still love you to death.
I promise.
And away you fly, off into the sunset.

The phone calls start. You’re in a bad way.
An alien in a strange city, on your own.
What’s going on? The choice has been made.
Think of the money. Can you back out now?
Not just for me, surely. Stick it out.
That’s it, you’re coming back.

And through the drizzle, the plane lands.
You’re back.
In a leather jacket and black dress. My love.
I kiss you like I used to.
But it isn’t like it used to be.
Wait, no. No no no.
What has happened?
My stomach hurts. This pain is excruciating.
Piranhas are attacking my insides.
Make them stop.
The tears burn. I stifle them for days and days.
And finally they fall. What the ****?
It’s gone. It’s just gone.
We sit together. I glance over at your frightened eyes.
I am a murderer, waiting around the corner,
Sharpening my knife for the ****** in the alleyway.
We must end. I don’t know why.
The feeling’s gone. I can’t explain it.
This was like an epic jouney.
I thought it would never end.
You were perfect.
You were badass. You were kickass.
You were beautiful.
You were amazing.
You adored me. You loved me.
You were perfect.
We were perfect.
I loved you.

Now I don’t.

What?

J.A.W. 19/10/11 1:20 AM

Want to know the secret
To a long happy life?
Well it’s rather simple

First,
There’s this thing called
The Golden Rule.
If you don’t know what that is,
Then you’re a fool.
Get out of that rock you’ve been living under,
What it means is this:
Be a gentleman,
Hold the door open for others,
Because odds are,
At least five people will hold a door for you.
If you see a starving man,
Feed them.
Because odds are,
If you end up living in a box,
At least five people will feed you

Second,
Get Cultured.
Read a book or two.
Because odds are,
There’s a story about you.
Paint a Picture
Even if you’re color blind
Because odds are,
It’s art in someone’s eyes.
Broaden your horizons
The close minded are weak.
Learn a new language
Try a different way to speak
Or sign
Or write
Or even read

Third,
Learn to cook for others
Something people can at least chew
Because odds are,
At least five people have cooked for you.
Don’t be afraid to spice things up
Have a taste for something
Even if no one else craves it.
Let someone else lick the spoon
If they dare.

Fourth,
Listen to a new sound
Music that is true
Because odds are,
Someone is singing for you.
If your heart is broken,
There’s a song for that
If you’re just mellow
There’s a song for that too.
If you’re looking for a song with meaning
With words of a poet
Or you’re just wanting to feel inspired
Odds are,
Someone’s got you covered.

Five
Be brave
Choose the bolder thing to do
If glasses make you look smarter,
Then go ahead and wear them
Whether you need them to see or not
They may serve as a good luck charm
& help you pass that test you’ve cracked open book after book over
Or to help you understand that novel you’ve been reading
If you’re not too bold for red
Wear it proud
Either on a dress that flows to your rhythm
Or on your lips as you pucker up with pride.
If others have an opinion
You can pick & choose which ones matter
But I advise you not to choose any at all
Just smile & wave as if you’re saying
“Thanks anyway, but I’m fine.”
Because odds are,
At least five people have judged you
While five others have secretly admired you
& have even embraced your unique qualities

Finally
Embrace your roots as much as possible
As much as you’ve dreamed of city lights
& hated country living
The fact is that’s where you came from
& it has value.
Because it has made you partially who you are
But don’t forget that you are also your own person
Your soul is your own as well as your life
There are some things that only you can possess
You have lots of perks
As well as your quirks.
Maybe you have the ability to see through the dark
& notice the light in the most complicated things
& you have no fear as you venture your way to it
Maybe you’re brave enough to jump off a waterfall
Cannonballing into a strong current
One that goes a different direction than your used to
Maybe you’re the kid who makes a wish upon a star
Or upon the clock at 11:11
& even though it doesn’t come true you keep wishing
Maybe you’re the kid who thinks wishing is overrated
So you say a prayer instead
& you don’t just bow your head
Because that’s just a minor detail God doesn’t pay mind to
You know He just wants to hear you
At least someone does
Maybe you’re the one who takes action
& would more likely lead a protest for no reason
Than stand on the sidelines with a reason to
Maybe you’re the kind of man who is confused by art
While your children can only paint pictures to get a message to you
Maybe you’ll be a proud mother
Of another mother’s baby.
Maybe you’ll live the longest
Out of anyone on this planet.
Maybe you’ll cure cancer.

“Keep Calm & Carry On”
I see on everyone’s mugs
Maybe this whole thing is absurd
You can correct me if I’m wrong about it all
But I will stand for what I believe
& I will keep what is mine.
I expect everyone to do the same.

The grey gulls drift across the bay
Softly and still as flakes of snow
Against the thinning fog. All day
I sat and watched them come and go;
And now at last the sun was set,
Filling the waves with colored fire
Till each seemed like a jewelled spire
****** up from some drowned city. Soon
From peak and cliff and minaret
The city's lights began to wink,
Each like a friendly word. The moon
Began to broaden out her shield,
Spurting with silver. Straight before
The brown hills lay like quiet beasts
Stretched out beside a well-loved door,
And filling earth and sky and field
With the calm heaving of their *******.

Nothing was gone, nothing was changed,
The smallest wave was unestranged
By all the long ache of the years
Since last I saw them, blind with tears.
Their welcome like the hills stood fast:
And I, I had come home at last.

So I laughed out with them aloud
To think that now the sun was broad,
And climbing up the iron sky,
Where the raw streets stretched sullenly
About another room I knew,
In a mean house -- and soon there, too,
The smith would burst the flimsy door
And find me lying on the floor.
Just where I fell the other night,
After that breaking wave of pain. --
How they will storm and rage and fight,
Servants and mistress, one and all,
"No money for the funeral!"

I broke my life there. Let it stand
At that.
The waters are a plain,
Heaving and bright on either hand,
A tremulous and lustral peace
Which shall endure though all things cease,
Filling my heart as water fills
A cup. There stand the quiet hills.
So, waiting for my wings to grow,
I watch the gulls sail to and fro,
Rising and falling, soft and swift,
Drifting along as bubbles drift.
And, though I see the face of God
Hereafter -- this day have I trod
Nearer to Him than I shall tread
Ever again. The night is dead.
And there's the dawn, poured out like wine
Along the dim horizon-line.
And from the city comes the chimes --

We have our heaven on earth -- sometimes!

A QUIET GIRL TO MANY I SEEMED
THEY AREN'T AWARE OF WHAT I CAN BE
MY WAYS ARE IMPROVING THROUGH FINE CARE
I MASTER INTRICATE PROBLEMS WITH FLAIR

TRUST IS SOMETHING EARNED OVER A LONG TIME
RESPONSIBILITY IS TAUGHT THROUGH TRUST AND HOPE
I WANT MY ELDERS TO SEE THOSE QUALITIES WITHIN
SO THAT THEY CAN DEPEND ON ME IN TIMES OF DISTRAUGHT

MY GRADES SEEMED SNAIL LIKE
MY DREAMS A SIMILARITY
THIS YEAR I'M TRYING TO IMPROVE
AND BE BETTER THAN WHAT I WAS PREVIOUSLY
SCHOOL, FROM NOW ON IS A TOP PRIORITY
MY SUBJECTS WILL BE EASY,I HOPE
I AM TRYING MY BEST

I MIGHT SEEM QUIET AND DETACHED
BUT I'M DREAMING BIG, THAT'S A FACT
MY SELF CONFIDENCE SEEMS LOW
BUT MY SELF ESTEEM A HIGH ONE, THOUGH
THINGS CAN ONLY GO BETTER
THAN IT WAS BEFORE

IT'LL TAKE PATIENCE
PERSEVERANCE
DETERMINATION
THAT'S GOOD SURE

THE EARTH IS IN OF HELPERS
TO PROTECT AND CONSERVE HER
SHE CRIES WHEN WE POLLUTE
SHE SMILED WHEN WE MAKE A DIFFERENCE

I INTEND TO BE A PART OF A GROUP
THAT CLEANS UP THIS WORLD
SO THAT IN FUTURE MANY CAN REAL THE RICHNESS OF IT

RUNNING A MILE IS DIFFERENT
BUT THAT'S GOING TO CHANGE
I'M SURE IT WILL

THIS WILL BALANCE MY LIFE
BROADEN MY BRAIN
RELAX MY BODY
I'M GOING TO NEED DEDICATION
MOTIVATION
PARTICIPATION

A COLD PLACE FAR UP NORTH
IS WHERE IS LIKE TO TRAVEL FOURTH
AND MEET A FEW BOYS, WHO ARE
SPECIAL TO ME

Her alias was Sunrise
The affable Sky
Brags her entity
In the high latitude
Her voice was heard.

There exists Energy
He puts up the plug
With the invisible outlet
Of the naked Sky
His charged particles
Brought collision
Brought wonder
To the full-sized Universe.

The solar wind
The Earth
Both were crowd-pullers
Every one knelt down
As they see
The Roman Goddess of Dawn
Her melodramatic entrance
Her chameleon-like aptitude
The neon lights
Without Christmas *****
Made her zone broaden.

I am the Seeker
A Dreamer
In this winter breeze
I lied down
With the techy remote
Unearthing
The Goddess of Fantasy.

(12/5/13 @xirlleelang)

By night we linger'd on the lawn,
For underfoot the herb was dry;
And genial warmth; and o'er the sky
The silvery haze of summer drawn;

And calm that let the tapers burn
Unwavering: not a cricket chirr'd:
The brook alone far-off was heard,
And on the board the fluttering urn:

And bats went round in fragrant skies,
And wheel'd or lit the filmy shapes
That haunt the dusk, with ermine capes
And woolly ******* and beaded eyes;

While now we sang old songs that peal'd
From knoll to knoll, where, couch'd at ease,
The white kine glimmer'd, and the trees
Laid their dark arms about the field.

But when those others, one by one,
Withdrew themselves from me and night,
And in the house light after light
Went out, and I was all alone,

A hunger seized my heart; I read
Of that glad year which once had been,
In those fall'n leaves which kept their green,
The noble letters of the dead:

And strangely on the silence broke
The silent-speaking words, and strange
Was love's dumb cry defying change
To test his worth; and strangely spoke

The faith, the vigour, bold to dwell
On doubts that drive the coward back,
And keen thro' wordy snares to track
Suggestion to her inmost cell.

So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touch'd me from the past,
And all at once it seem'd at last
The living soul was flash'd on mine,

And mine in this was wound, and whirl'd
About empyreal heights of thought,
And came on that which is, and caught
The deep pulsations of the world,

aeonian music measuring out
The steps of Time--the shocks of Chance--
The blows of Death. At length my trance
Was cancell'd, stricken thro' with doubt.

Vague words! but ah, how hard to frame
In matter-moulded forms of speech,
Thro' memory that which I became:

Till now the doubtful dusk reveal'd
The knolls once more where, couch'd at ease,
The white kine glimmer'd, and the trees
Laid their dark arms about the field:

And ****'d from out the distant gloom
A breeze began to tremble o'er
The large leaves of the sycamore,
And fluctuate all the still perfume,

And gathering freshlier overhead,
Rock'd the full-foliaged elms, and swung
The heavy-folded rose, and flung
The lilies to and fro, and said

"The dawn, the dawn," and died away;
And East and West, without a breath,
Mixt their dim lights, like life and death,
To broaden into boundless day.

I have been witness to many things
You must fear not what cold winter brings
You are young, but the reason this bird sings
To you, sapling, this bird clings
Let go of your evergreen hesitations
Your leaves will fall in wondrous presentations
Followed by gazes of beautiful validation
Your stems a sign of majestic acclimatization
While your trunk grows larger and far more in tune
Your leaves will broaden to as large as the moon
To each passing insect and all birds here soon
Your pits to catch water as a natural spoon
You see, young sapling, you are a delight
Do not see winter as a source for fright
Each tree in this forest has seen the same plight
But all have continued their journey for light

Who am I inside my own mind?
Deep inside the answer lies
I’m not sure what I’ll find
In the confines of my head

Throw away what’s fake
Forgive my mistakes

As I walk down this crooked street
It seems to narrow for me
My ego and my id
The infants and the old
Dividing house and home
Broaden my perception

I see more than what’s here
At last visions clear
Joy out weights my fears
Not everything’s black and white
No words for what I’ve seen
It’s all mine, it’s me

There’s always something more
Look further and examine
Find the truth, toss out the lies
And just enjoy your life

Take the blue or take the red
Take a trip inside your head
Are we living, living dead
Right is wrong and left is right
Yell and scream day is night
Beauty so serene

Hello goodbye nowhere somewhere
Going at your own pace, see the signs
The answers almost there
So clear
So near
My dear

My window has no seat, why would it? I wish it did.
There is just a glossy magnolia ledge, barely wide enough to
cater a slender bottom. Upon the ledge books and candles
rest, illuminating the murk outside. Directly opposite orchard
trees recede as I welcome autumn with a zealous smirk.
For now faintly visible between their visceral arms are the
all-seeing hillocks that in winter will dominate my view.

An impartial observer once stated they were mere freckles
on the landscapes recumbent spine, but to me their sight alone
is vertiginous. On balmy April days I would surmount them,
a personal expedition, up there where I’m the valleys curator, wearing
pristine white gloves I meticulously unravel the terrain: an ancient
manuscript, the vellum inked with meandering streams, occasional farms,
cursive hamlets and little else - a land of sobriety and dearth.

In November though there is a permanent mist and its source
inexplicable. Does it simply effervesce from the precipitous tors about?
Is it the villager’s enshrined collective sigh? No it is something
more. Sitting atop the villages head it’s the beloved satin bonnet you
wore religiously as a child. Wholly impractical for this season
its gossamer fabric offers little solace or insulation to those below
as its pleated extremities elope with the moss-brown hinterland.

Fervently stoking their hearths the villagers broaden the
ethereal cloth with a smoke not acrid but satisfying and nourishing:
with a terrifically edible, hardwood flavour. From my hillock
vantage, the sanguine stone of the manorial chimneys is all that
penetrates the film; casually they release torrents of smoke like
ivory doves that weft patterns instinctively into the sky’s pallid damask.






©*Thomas Gabriel

Everything is on like it is gone
The colours of the world just got inverted
I see the paint smudged on the wall
I moved out of a rain forest for concrete lake
the colour left my face as I realised my fate
It's the initial days, but scenery is replaced
I wish I could be six years back
Following my destiny
I would be smiling looking at my face frowning
how little I was, how little I knew
Isn't it my problem, can I just broaden my view?

You've got a pale mind and skin to match.
Misery still wet on your lips.
Don't shy away from the sun darling-
It with it's horizon will broaden yours.
It's time to stop showing your scars
But to restore your golden glow.
We're all cowards at something in our heads.
Heads filled with endless delight.
Heads filled with drowning corpses.
But
Our dreams-
Sliced the expectations of brainwashed bystanders.
Intertwined with poison and passion can show us-
Love
Will
Always
Survive.

Cease your perpetually rushed tendencies,
and listen to a boy who believes himself to be wise.
Calm the churning of your thoughts,
open your eyes and broaden your horizons.
Feel the steady beat of your heart.
Slow your breathing, and ready yourself.
I speak in metaphors and analogies,
in an oftentimes futile attempt to understand life.
I spend my days writing, singing, hoping and dreaming.
Sometimes, it is an incoherent and nonsensical mess.
Other times, I find myself caught in an epiphany.
In those moments, I take one step closer,
closer to an answer, to that one question all ask themselves:
What is my purpose for being here?
In the short span of years that I have been alive,
I have experienced a diverse multitude of things.
Some of them possessed of a ravishing beauty.
The soft caress of a lover, her sweet words whispered in my ear.
Or the involvement in something greater, better than myself.
Others have had abhorrent and malevolent qualities.
The loss of oneself to the avaricious fingers of addiction.
Or the helplessness of holding a loved one as they leave this world.
At times I have found myself fighting for my very life.
At others I have found myself willing to leave it behind.
I incessantly find my heart vying with my mind for *******.
I have foolishly stood by and watched with apathetic eyes,
my slow and agonizing departure from sanity.
Even consumed by insanity there is truth to be gleaned.
If only one finds in themselves the exit from its’ purgatorial cell.
Life is not preordained, it is not predictable, or even reasonable.
Life simply exists in its’ entirety with multitudinous choices.
The body is the vassal for life, and thus, you have a choice.
Life is what you make it; you can choose to make it good.
Or, whether through naivety or foolhardy bravado,
you can choose to make it irrevocably bad.
This is not to say you will always choose what is right.
But rather that you alone have the power to define yourself.
I am no longer a child, nor do I profess myself to be aged.
But I can say with undeniable certainty, that my mind,
being enigmatic as it is, has surpassed my physical age.
If only now I might find the remedy to purge my heart,
for it pumps the poison of love into me everyday.
But even being as caustic and acidic as love may be,
to rid yourself of it would be to squander your life.
Harness love and you wield a double-edged sword.
It can cut you down just as easily as another.
I have released my heart to do as it will.
In someone else’s hands it now lies insecurely.
But with a stubborn valor it remains there despite my calls.
With askance acquiescence I call no longer.
I wait with a stoic trepidation overshadowing all hope.
But even cast in shadow as it is, hope has its own light
So now I find myself waiting, forever if I must.
The answers I so desperately yearn for are just on the horizon.
If only I could reach out, with feeble, trembling hands,
and sieze them before they escape my grasp again.
Perhaps then I will reminisce upon the past,
therein finding the reaason behind every occurence of importance.
I've never been the most hardy of people.
But despite all of the walls obscurring my path,
I have somehow endured, and so I shall continue to do.

Broaden my soul, keep me dreaming,
enable my soul to do good, infinitely, forever.
Speak over the barriers,then let me celebrate
in the halls of your power and song.

Let me be taken underneath
a thousand more colors of peace,
teach my soul and knit wisdom into me,
  make me whole.

Keep me in love with you,
take away my blindness,
clear the soul scars,
open the mirrors of yesterday no more.

Dry out the pain in my heart,
let me not stare in fear,
or wander, teach me, uplift me,
be my star in the sky.

Lord, remove my enemies,
appoint your strong angels
against them,
for they are many who seek
to destroy.

I am yours, think of me

always, blend my soul with your
breath and beloved music and song.

Keep me as long as the Earth endures.

  Sincerely,  
  
          I love you.

Slipping through the willow curtain
Easing among the leafy overhang
Green sheltering cloak that sways
With an invitation to be my guest

I pass through, broaden my peripheral vision
Turn my cheek and my eyes lock
Pulled toward fierce or friendly
Mottled door, camouflaged grey as a stone

I swivel to listen before leather soles
Respond and move me without guard
I feel fear, uncertain to obey my instinct
Ruining the scene for the ticket holder

The choice it seems is taken from me
Though temporal, the entrance hides...it is coy
The gatehouse of resistance clangs
Its repertoire stumbles but my vision

Knows its route....the pathway falls away
And unwillingness encircles me like a bear hug
I cannot turn or go back, the door makes way
To tumbling steps gaining their advantage

Driven pathway recedes and I stalk the
Shadowy shapes that spill out to paralyse
Locking me to the wall
Solid and comforting yet stalling

The dreaded moment of choice
Invites its gangsters to dine with me
The here and now overwhelming
Its clues forlorn and disadvantaged

Rounding the dark corner of courage
I strengthen my resolve, and
Claim the light I so desire
It throws open a vivid saffron

Vibrant colour penetrates, seeping into me
I wade through this maze of superb
Splendour and I am feathered to the ground.
Book in hand … I gaze toward the.....
                                                           Willow Curtain