(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

.via ghana: i iz welcome the haiku poetic extractionz of the maxim: full-on potentiality of - few words maximum effortz! one wishes to almost die from feng shui minimalism! chinese geomancy and european chiromancy (reading balzac et al.) - but the sigh poetic of pepsi max effort iz wot iz the breaking of the camel bonk and backß... last time i heard from a kenyan bartender... all the timber comes from ghana... as does the wheat from ukraine and the salt from poland... coal is always "elsewhere"... or no coal... wind... the wind comes from: far far away... beyond the language of the seven vowels...

it took much of an effort to have to overcome
a reading of Stendhal...
esp. when you find him in your teens..
almost impossible...

it's enough to visit a brothel:
once a year... perhaps skipping a year...
and there's enough body,
and skin, and warmth...
to contrast... what i'm yet to read about...
otherwise have read, i.e.:

2010s through the 2020 summary...
lucy holden now 29...
sexting, dating apps, bisexual flings
flatmates with benefits...
millenial serial dater...

all the details are already known...
mine? that strip-clup in athens on a whim
with two strippers either arm
burrowing my face solving the mole
in their cleavage...
the goodmayes borthel with the romanians
that said a very bulgarian word, once...

and who can ever forget
the south african cocoon ****-accusation
of: not unde the bed-sheets and please
oil up rather than dry-******* me...
or the thai surprise picked up
in a park and that a little bit of heavyweight
beer and some jazz and a garden shed will allow...
the number of times i've had ***...
well... what are fingers for?

the black girl with a coccyx like an iron maiden
attempting to tattoo itself onto my pelvis...
2nd time round?
i heard she had a child and his daddy
would be bringing him home the morning to come...
and this other black woman,
oh i mean: full detail - woman...
two children sleeping on the bed...
get dragged off...
thrown to the bed...
and i'm there to **** an imitation ******
of... a tight fold of legs...

it's not exactly **** but even with that:
i'm not a best fitter...
so tell her: it's not going to happen...
we pretend to sleep or at least i do...
when this afro-fur-ball with a plucking sound
of a smooch is standing at the end of the bird...
he's naked i'm naked everyone's naked
i pick him up like i pick up maine *****
and lay him on my chest...
i can't allow a river of fingers through
his afro tangles... so i pat them down...
and he falls asleep...

***... oh no ***** word about it monsieur!
just this *******...
oh but i'm glad that some girl nearing
her 30s has made up her mind up...
only recently i've heard that my mother was
attempting to woo a married man
who was part of the Solidary movement
and probably waiting for a greencard...
i heard this... from my grandmother...

i'm still pampering on the sly for
a Mary Antoinette...
Ilona was wrong... i wouldn't become
a child strapped to a hellhole of a teenager's bedroom...
i'd become a leech hybrid...
as along as i have enough excuses
to return for "the word"... and never rap it...
i'm fine fine... best be on my optimal behaviour...
to never find myself in a baptists' church choir...

- there's also a quick fix procedure...
the match of the day is watched
with the mascots on screen...
the ben-hur's not making it to
prophetic status... yes the bread...
yes the circus... and all those cul de sac...
soap operas of parking scenes...

and there's always language...
best expressed when drunk...
never sober because is what delves into
the formality of: dear sir / madam,
kind regards...

the day when i stopped combing my fair
and peered at the beard...
uncombed hair: almost reminds
me of donning a pineapple on it...
an ancient buddhist balancing act...
like performing the act of gravity...
without copernican mathematics...
as simple as finding the CENTER on
a bicycle... or like finding
buoyancy in a swimming pool...
perhaps i am more water than flesh...
but i'm also a fraction of fat...

i can float on water if i can find
the balance... i don't need to play
the drunkard treading water surviving
to stay afloat.... i... relax...
then i float.... or bob-on-the-surface
teasing an unexpected shark-bite-attack...
although: swimming in a sea
is not my thing...
i very much appreciate seeing
the bottom i can dive down toward
and touch... the chernobyl stink of chlorine...
is almost a parisian perfumery...

heat breeds diseases it breeds...
insects...
i abhor the heat...
the zenith of winter is yet,
is yet to arrive... and for the help of god:
i can't arrive at... writing sober...
should "poo'etry" ever be written sober
to begin with?
i mind: that i don't mind...

i can find 8pm and 9pm quite:
which implores you to not quit - curb colt...
i was making a sponge apple stuffing
roulade...
after having made some biscuit
with brown sugar and diadems of hazelnuts...
and prior to some sausage rolls...
three fillings...
cranberries with some peppers and
chillies...
fennel seeds with apple...
and the third... the third...
i don't quiet remember...

my head was exploding with a brain being
towed and all was:
i am yet to grieve a passing,
a tax of death...
i am yet to be left half imbecile and half
of any other texas hold-up poker game...
i'm wishing for...
that quarter of a million of a bet
i placed on:
one team wins...
but both have to score...
ergo... catching a mosquito by the testciles
donning boxing gloves chance...
2 - 1 etc. victories...

i don't want to blame women...
the last one i was serious about...
she's on her 3rd marriage or whatever...
and i'm still in woad: in deep blue
coinciding with...
god's roulette...

as a testiment of man...
there's the ambition to find: the void...
to find nothing...
and from that... find the thinking thing...
res vanus: the emptiness
that can be fathomed with more or less
thinking, than a yawn's presence...
because...
descartes doesn't really exact ontological,
whatever...
i can't be and be:
when i churn out a day-dream and
a day-dream is all that is...

thankfuly i have nothing to "work"
with... most women only have boredom to begin
with....
at exactly 20 minutes to 1am...
i'm not so sure...
a mother can say: you stink...
then you go and buy something from
a convenience store...
and the cashier stresses how fresh you smell...
that's quiet something...
a woman likes the way to smell to her...
in between doing these *******
tribunals of sweating over
apple roulades...

and Stendhal... it's only my mother...
i just have to gnash my teeth
and apply the burden of sober...
this canvas... no other...
i drink for the 1 hour pleasure
of disorientation...
a shot in the head in some Ukranian
prison...
stiched to the next to be executed...
chikatilo...
i'm not exactly fond of the company...
but i'm pretty sure...
kurt cobain... and his shotgun antics...

and how the prolonged death appeal
of Christine Chubbuck lasted much longer...
Kafka said it right:
a stab at the heart...
**** colt and boyo... don't aim for the head!
that's how Ukranian convicts die...
shot in the back of the head...
in a cell... never in the open...
it's not like the brain delves into
the automated unconscious of the pump
that's the heart... how do you think
the urban myth of the cockroach that lived
for 2 weeks more was born?
the head didn't have a mouth to ingest
food with...

shot in the back of the head is an execution
that, done in an Ukranian prison cell...
is pretty much all of Dante not visiting
either heaven or a hell...
but two weeks with... in the presence
of death... the body starving...
that magic finger-pointing exercise
of seeing death in movies?

well thank god they did a movie about
Christine Chubbuck's (rage against the machine):
bullet in the 'ed!
i was lied to, no matter...
i'm here to hush and sweep the leftovers...
because why would you march
a man into a prison cell...
shoot him in the head and close the door
and wait... because no: in the open...
with a chance for rabid dogs to feast on...
in the darkened night just shy of Kiev
would ever matter...

Christine Chubbuck was left dying on
life-support machines after her half-high Kiev
attempt to pop the balloon...
psych- myth of the brain as source
of the sigma soul...
my left toe has more soul than this
rubric forever explained as forever to be explored
goose-fat sponge...
come to think of it...
after a haemorrhage that no one believes
beside me, some neurologist and a dementia
riddled grandfather who easily forgot...

what's this brain this brain this nought?!
**** it... kamikaze cockroach!
as ever oh but always so much when
someone has to mention...
has to mention: with no exacting details
of fancy...

also called the drought period when pakistani
gangs are up in Leeds and i'm strapped
to the outlier Loon'don culture:
as ever playing the obedient schizoid...
because that's, just fair game...
centuries behind what the youth
of Denmark have to offer...
the mutterzunge and the l'inglese of:
any future of tourism with Jack's flag...

heavy influences stemming from
st. andrew and all the worth of wordworth
with a tinge of punk...
but never a baron of lexicon coming from
just shy of 4 hours away from
the lisp of masovian warsaw...

what could possibly be wrong?
how about... stemming it down to the root
of... sober people and the lacklustre of
when writing: under no influence at all...
apparently "now" the high moral ground!
the sobers usher in the words
that we are abide by when the football hooligans
their casual Tuesday mundane,
their casual Tuesday mundane custard
splodge of oats in regurgitation...

i can almost but not quiet...
imagine myself being the cameo in this dear diary
of these "free" women of the western world...
give me a feral black woman pulling
two kids from her bed in order
to imitate a ****** by folding her legs to
pretend...

it's still a bullet in the back of the head
for some, minor or major
andrei "cain" chikatilo -
no... with a full crop of cranium of hair...
and a grandmother that says...
well... how busy your chin hairs are...
that you are able to lodge a pencil in there
and it doesn't fall out...
hair here and all other hair elsewhere...
chest and... where the antioch identifier
of achilles ought to be of a six in sixes
packaged...

since who is buddha... or a christ when...
an thích quang duc "oops" happens...
the people will never leave their unison...
their get-together "happening"...
but what's to be celebrated should...
the crucifix be turned into that "other"
torture ordeal of being: piked...
crucifixion the tsunami wave of history...
when one can expect the fate
of being piked by the more imaginative
sorts?
if only the antichrist was gay
and was sentenced to levitate on a pike...
passion and ecstasy via
the Walhalla doing ****... again:
sorry if the pike missed the **** baptism
of ecstasy... and instead aimed
at ripping apart the flesh and bone at:
whatever pivot was made available
to work from reverse ingestion:
beginning with the pelvis...

i'm just tired and cooking and shooing
shadows for the past month and i know that it's
just an exaggerate lounge period...
and all i want is an added arm...
and the serenity leg to take the step to return to...
footsteps... with a bulging echo to command...

it needs to be stressed that these women were black...
i call them ivory beauties of chocolate come
quicksilver moon glistening...
i can't remember... no... "you're" right...
i never managed to **** anything
of an ethno-centric "perspective"...
i'd be arrested for that...
as if starting a hitlerjungen movement or
some other random "****"...

i'd package myself with a mexican strapped into
alcatraz...
the Louis of the Aztecs and some
long lost St. Juan of the Mayans...
leash me... Russian or Prussian or...
what's that third otherwise power of influence
that this body was allowed to morph into?

perhaps i once was allowed to control these words...
but that's how drinking goes...
it's a homocodie when you **** someone
when under the influence of alcohol when driving
a car...
this is a sort of homocide...
i trully gave my hands away to the devil...
and the brain: oh forget that old fabble of a pickle...
what's in brine was always supposed
to be in brine and pickled...

- and what were the chances of me becoming
a sentimental drunk... listening to some
crowded house - weather with you?
the la's - the la's... no... not merely the 1990s
epitome of h'american tourism lodged in london
of myth... as any ******... that myth translated
itself into paris... there she goes...
i mean the whole album...

whale! whale! a beached whale!
Grindadráp...
and some want to go on the Hajj...
and die in a human stampede at the Mecca...
but... well... some want to...
of all of Europe...
Venice, Paris, Rome, Athens,
Amsterdam, perhaps Edinburgh
(wink-wink nudge-nudge)...
Barcelona...
or... Grindadráp of the Faroe Islands...

capture a polyphony in language that is hardly
ever going to be much more
than a chance to... to do that...
shove three fingers into your gob...
expect an elevated volume of sounds...
call the hounds! a mile away!
i was never allowed to learn that
whistling "trick"...
perhaps that's why i never managed
to play the trombone or the clarinet...
the ****-poor leftover guitar...
which is as much as having to read
braille!

reality: i live in england but i'm a ******...
i haven't ****** an english girl...
or a ****** girl...
i was close! a ****** girl licked my face
like a cow, once...
chin, lips, nose and forehead...
i was actually waiting for e.t. when that
happened...
the pakistanis have all the english girls...
sorry... it's sad...
but... the australia...
the fwench... the russian...
it's a decent rubric...
crude... nuanced...
so is buying fwesh meat at the butchers...
the perfect crime is less severe...
fiddling with a tombstone...
then towing it for 2 miles...
to bury the remains of your cat...
after your neighbour "accidently" killed him
when you were away...
and of course they deny it...

after all... i live in a society...
innocent until proven guilty...
said jimmy saville...
it's not the old... european "misunderstanding"..
of guilty until proven innocent...
if not a real story of Tomasz Komenda...
there's the Shawshank Redemption...
or there's... the Count de Monte Cristo...

if all are innocent until proven guilty...
what's that? the genesis story never happens...
it's hardly a moral deterent...
isn't it? people will do as any aleister crowley
would command them to do:
do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law;
this is a naive presupposition of
fudge-packed jurisprudence...
what should have been egg-whites..
it merely some sugar dissolved in water...

statistical counts aside...
i would be more inclined to... fear...
being held guilty... to then be allowed "innocence"...
that to being held innocent...
to then be forced as a doubly-culprit!
how does the double jeopardy paradox arise...
from the high pillar of: innocent until
proven guilty?!
law is at one's own leisure...
should all be bound to an innocence...
revisions of the biblical metaphor...

if we can all be innocent...
wouldn't we at least all fathom an innocent
attempt to break some law?
for a matter of: testing the waters?
even if innocent until proven guilty is true...
there's no narrative of redemption...
why is it that the shawshank redemption
is such a popular movie?
since it adopts the continental motiff of:
guilty... until proven innocent...
it offers... redemption...
it's a popular movie because it's unfair
for the basis of a single individual...
not some amassing of victims of a jimmy saville
recount... that have... none... zilch...
no redemption!
their redemption: ist tod!

because if i were to be found guilty...
with no chance of defence...
i would exercise a double-think in relation to this...
rather than exercise this leisure into
grieving the orwellian zeitgeist monstrosity of
but the one novel...

i'm not convinced of the english model...
this... innocent until proven guilty...
this pontius pilate argument...
i'm not for it! this sinking to the core of my heart
and hopefuly, prevents me from a heartbeat...
perhaps so fewer examples of
the #metoo would come to the fore...
if... one were not so easily allowed
a ststus of innocence...
perhaps... guilty until proven innocent...
doesn't allow...
so readily accessed accusations...
perhaps this modern, english model of
jurisprudence...
is missing a medieval lisp?

as law abiding as would suggest...
i would be much more deterred from inacting
a grievance should i be found guilty...
without a benefit of a doubt of a jury...
than if i were to be given the a priori: innocent
status...

i don't like this: england and greenwich in tow
is the bellybutton of the world
demand of... all else is less than we...
no... did i come from Algiers?!
what has Algiers to do with it and Leeds
shouldn't?!

at least that's how a man sobers up...
while still drinking...
he might focus on sober demands...
of topics that only drunks should speak of...
and since neither of the two meet...

because i have stood as a witness
in a court...
and i was given a photograph to...
"compare" having identified him in a mugshot...
the photograph i was shown still
had a date imprinted on it...
and this was the ******* argument...
the photograph was years old...
i identified the culprit in the police mugshot...
but the case was "won"... for no apparent reason...
the witness said: i...
this photograph is years old...
i can grow a beard and hippy attire in a year's time...
of course i was the witness that said:
note down the registration plate
of the car this camel-jockey jumped out of
and grabbed m'ah fwends mobile...

i've seen how: innocent until proven guilty works...
i'm not conviced...
i can't be... there's something instinctual preventing
me from adhering to this english...
jurisprudent sensbility...
it's hardly a ******* charles dickens novel...
if it were... and i greatly underestimated
charles dickens... no... really...
i shouldn't have read any of dostoyevsky...
i should have read charlie ****'oh'ends...
believe me when i say that is hould have...
since... heidegger's ponderings VII - XI
will retain their shelf-status as... the book most
probably unread...

such is the sobering process...
am i, in no way, allowed to sacrifice my 'ed
on the premise that: innocent until
proven guilty is the right categorial imperstive
to buckle on... since...
the anglophonic world buckles on it...
like a spectacular breakdance feat of
a penguin on steroids...
doing the diving header tsunami
of chore: the crowd goes wild!
it's no operatic applause and being
"superficially" reminded as to how...
find your proper seat...
before the castrato peacock does his
singing bit...
apparently finding one's seat
when it's never going to be a maggot-pit
at a slipknot concert is all that's
about to happen...

come by the butcher's and let's attempt
in finding you some oysters
among the volume of red boisterous...
to replica your genital parts
and sordid caviar letfovers...

perhaps i could be angry...
but la ilah illa blah'lah...
i am... halway bound between
being simulation circumcised
and being castrated...
i never which is which...
notably, given...
circumcised men are not allowed
the impetus of taking up
web-cam Susan on promise of...
also pleasing themselves
without wanting to earn some money...

it's a real problem though:
innocent until proven guilty versus
guilty until proven innocent...
relish...
the english indiosyncratic
wishing they were scandinavian iceland...
no... honey too sweet tooth bear...
this is not how the GMP affair that exends
with its genesis in the jimmy saville affair
looks like...
this quest for: apparently "superior"
is not going to work on me...
kin of a kind-of luvvie dubby...
bon voyage!

the entire continent is listening...
individualistic rights...
innocent until proven guilty...
the more i reiterate these words...
the more i sober up...
because i can't see how...
i am: a thief...
until i am proved to be... a thief...
by having performed the act
of thieving...
or not even an "after"...

sorry... please expose your divine
rational intelligence and tell me
via a reiteration that 2 + 2 = 4...

i am not a thief,
but i am a thief...
only if the act of stealing is proved...
and if "the" act of stealing is not proved...
i'm way more than a thief...
i'm a thief with a baby driver!
this anglican logic *****...
if innocent until proven guilty...
is to sustain the individual flourishing...
i'd rather make theatre of the original,
biblical deterrent...
a queen of this sort of popish claims
and her duaghters of yorkshire because...
the pawns of justitia...

conventionality of continetal thinking...
there's not even a "what if" or
"it would be better" should... allow,
extended into:
guilty until proven innocent...
rather than... innocent until proven guilty...

i sometimes find myself chattering...
in the cold...
but i'm not chewing anything...
i'm pretending to pivot the piano on a ghost...
being played as some per se magician's
excavation of: whatever time...
thus it was spent...

i call it chattering chopin...
bite marks available... like the multitude
of signature most willing to be...
allocated a collection foreseeable...

the would the artichokes of arabia...
or the fennel roasted roots of Italy...
there's something to be had of a woman
sporting the "cherokee" leopard-skin prints
on something that's...
90% cotton and 10% lycra?!

and the reason why i visited a brothel
in the past ten years was because?
if i want to play poker...
i'll play poker...
easy ***? it's not so easy in the act
and you want to find a kiss and...
she tells you: it's against the laws
of this sort of nunnery...
but you still manage to slurp a lip or two
of a shy pluck of the tulips of the sea...
or however this thing that
language is works...
if it's not going to be a hammer and nail...
forever... this "excuse" to allow nothing
more than YA novels...
metaphors and... pedantry of elswhere
from punctuation?

herioglyphic assumptions of :) emoji?
wink barrel baron! oi!
non-responsive...
black also implies: ivory beauty...
i started to admire their teeth...
since mine were always going to be
custard yellow death grin...
like bone to the rot...

no... i'm pretty sure tonight ends
here; now;
the prodigy - destroy...
given how... keith flint...
and that horse... and it was never a tale
of the stormy badger...
and how the fox is my aid and will
never make it to...
transcend the red coat hunting parties...
because... just because.

I WILL keep you and bring hands to hold you against a great hunger.
I will run a spear in you for a great gladness to die with.
I will stab you between the ribs of the left side with a great love worth remembering.

Peak temperature water levels fake diagnoses white psychopaths starving hunger jingoism violence [systems that deprive us] guns entitlement shots fired accidents grief/mourning choking hazard corporate mascots corporate favoritism corporate bailouts corporate people ideology without monitor nationalism patriotism conservatives patriarchy ******-****-suicide victim silence lack of conviction religious ******* false history infant mortality job insecurity invisible hands trickle down economics union busters corporate police brutal police evil police secret police debt bankruptcy foreclosure homelessness lost confused prisoner criminal banker war preparations propaganda ballots commercials advertisements campaigns money power puppets figureheads armies genocides **** bomb gas fire no survival violence wealthy lawyers assassinations heart complications death sleep.

Giants of Manuka

Johnny’. Hello and welcome to the cold Manuka oval in Canberra for the last giants home match being played here and tonight, the opponent is the mighty Adelaide crows, who were last years runners up, and this year they meet with giants are 4th while the crows are on 12th, it should be a great game this evening and hopefully we won’t get anymore rain but we very well might and now at the gate here is Gil tucker, well Gil have we got any happy crowd members
Gil’. Yes Johnny we have 4 people from rivett singing a jingle they made up this morning
4 from Rivett’
Come on giants, the crows have had their chance, they lost last years grand final and we fell one game short but who cares about 2017 when the giants are still up in the 8 and if we win today we will be pressing to beat what we did for the last 2 years so carn the mighty giants mate pile the pressure on mate
Carn the mighty giants never give up without a fight
Go giants, Adelaide are finished
Go the mighty giants
Gil’. Thank you for that lovely bit of entertainment here at giants at Manuka and Johnny, I think it will be a lovely night for footy here at Manuka
Johnny’. Thank you Gil and now both teams are out on the ground training and getting a feel of the ground and there is no sign of rain at the moment but who knows what will happen later, now the banners of the giants and crows have just arrived on the ground and mate there are a lot people who are part of both teams especially the giants, playing to get themselves back to the top 4 and the mascots have come on the ground as well, this is very exciting ready for a footy party mate and what a party it is, first of all the giants running on, and then came the crows, this is going to be a great night for footy, and now over to Gil, with some more spectators chants
Gil’ thanks Johnny and here is Bradley Simmons from Queanbeyan with a song for you
Brad’ ok we are cheering loud
And also strong the team is the mighty giants
They will put on the power to get back in the 4
Where they ****** belong
I know the crows are good
But they have had their chances
Yes we must go one better this year
So the way we will do that
Is to win our last match here
In Manuka
Go giants of Manuka
Gil’ thank you brad and now back to Johnny
Johnny’ yeah,what a chant and I hope the giants have what it takes to win this evening
So let’s get ready to party dudes, let’s see if the giants have what it takes to beat the crows tonight
Quarter time
Johnny’ welcome to the quarter time show and our giants and the crows are head to head
Giants are 4 4 28 just 1 point in front of the crows 4 3 27 and it is a crackerjack game so far and dance cam has just started and they dance holding the ball in the air and meanwhile the giants and the crows are still in their groups and here is Gil with his fan
Gil’ yes here is rob
Rob go giants keep it up
A close first quarter now we must break away
Go giants
Gil’. Thank you rob and now back to the match
Johnny’ yes what a match this has turned out to be the crows are 7 7 49 to our mighty giants of Manuka 6 9 45, a very close match for both teams tonight and now over to Gil with some spectators with their chants, hopefully these chants will inspire our giants to play a good second half
Gil’. Thank you Johnny and yes it is a very exciting game and now here is Jane with her chant
Jane’. My name is Jane and I say right here
That the giants are good enough to win the cup this year
You see they need to hold their marks and kick goals rather than behinds but if they do that
The sky is the limit you see
So if you are enjoying this close game the giants are definately going to claim the fame
Go giants
Gil’ thank you Jane and now bob with his chant
Bob go go go go go the giants must win
Go go go go go go they are the best around
In every single town oh yeah
The mascots are having fun
But they prefer us to be leading
We need to cut them up till they are bleeding go giants go
Gil’ ok thanks bob and now back to Johnny
Johnny’ love the chants and now queen are blasting the stadium as our giants of Manuka have entered the ground as well as the crows and umpires, oh well here is the second half
Go the mighty giants
Johnny’ welcome to three quarter time and a great match with the giants getting back in front the giants are 11 14 80 to the crows 10 9 69, 11 points up and I can tell you that the giants have the power to win, but Adelaide are keeping it close
What a great game here is Gil
Gil’ thank you and now here is a chant from jack from Sydney
I love you I love you I love you said the umpire to the crows
I love you I love you I love you
We are counting all their wohs
The march has a quarter to go
So go the giants give us a go
Gil’ thank you and now time for the final quarter go giants
Johnny’ welcome to the full time wrap and what a win for the GWS, over the Adelaide crows
GWS 15 16 106 to Adelaide 13 14 92 and the giants of Manuka surely reigned supreme and here is Gil with some of the spectators
Gil’. Yeah what a win for the giants and that put them back in the top 3 and now here is Peter from Campbelltown with his victory song
Peter’ it is the big big sound
From Canberra town
The team is the mighty giants
They won the match
The crows will splat
In the boots before the giants
We jump up to our highest peak
Better than the rest
We are the greater western Sydney giants
Stronger than the rest
Gil’ thanks Peter and mate it was a great game
Peter’ yeah what a win by the greater western Sydney giants
Top win better than the rest
Go giants
Gil’ and now here is olly
Olly’ go giants we have won
We knocked the crows to kingdom come
Yes we’re great and we can make the grand final
We will be ready for the tigers
We will win
Go giants go giants go giants go
The team from Sydney with a lot of get up and go
Go giants
Gil’ yeah thank you olly and I can say just one thing go the mighty giants for 2018
And now back to Johnny to sign off from giants of Manuka
Johnny’ yeah, what a win
The giants 15 16 106 to the crows 13 14 92 and I want to say to all the kick to kick dudes
Just one thing, are you ready dudes
Kick to kick people’
And now we draw the final curtain
Yes it’s the giants triumphant against the crows
There were a few hiccups
But at the end it was totally wild
Everybody cheered forever
The party was pretty cool
Now let’s go home or to our parties yes go the giants yeseree
Go the giants
Johnny’ thanks for watching giants of Manuka and go the giants for the rest of the year ok
Catch ya dudes and dudettes

the drama unfolds
and the young grow old
while the old go with a curse
I myself am grown into my fifties
and the people I’ve known
who called me Little Boy
have been called to dust and urn and to river over the decades;
and the kids I would kneel before to speak with them
now they say: Do I see you with hunched shoulders?
the earthly hours pass
and generations come and go
with little knowing though of their own flow
the drama unfolds
and the young grow old
while the old go
with a last bite of a fried chicken
places have changed
and villages and forests lain bare
and once where I stood admiring angsanas
and mango trees and peacocks
now I admire lilly-pillies
and hold the koala and the kangaroo as mascots;
people I have called mother, father
and uncle and aunty and grandmother
they now have gone, some without even a good-bye
some smiling and some with unintelligible mutterings
and ah, some in unendurable suffering
while I walk now as time unfurls like a flag in the square;
and the witnesses
of uncountable generations
of immeasurable life
those stars and the sun and the moon
keep me quiet company
and the sunlight uses the leaves in the garden
to whisper to me the secrets of things;
and in my leisure
these words I speak to you
and when I’m gone
through these you may speak with me;
and the ones I have told stories to
now re-tell the stories to their young
and time, interrupting its slumber,
lifts its head like a garden in the snake
awhile
sees all is right, all flowing as it would expect,
and looks around and gives me a look too
and goes back to sleep;
ah, the drama unfolds
and the young grow old
while the old go with a wink

We see ghosts in the eyes of all.
Scarred lives bleed onto screens
as spoon fed masses forget to use the word human.

Do they not bleed red?

We see fear fleeing war zones
while we in our comfort zones
mourn not the lives lost but the cost of the living.

We see children torn from wailing mothers.
Crushed and bloated by the weight of water
tiny bodies wash up lonely, suddenly silent
now mascots for a cause they did not choose.

Inaction is the thief of humanity.
Greed, it's protector, smiles down on the dying.
There but for the grace of God...

Palimpset prowling on the husk of beleaguered Rome
Aflame from Nero’s tenuous but tenable throne
Swiftly spoken with a singed hourglass and whispered sand
Crafty spacecraft are majestic more than 100 grand
Morpheus enlists the denuded Agent Smith
To swarm the battalions of celebrities that possess and trip
Upon the threaded needle of threadbare convention of betokened appreciation
Every rapport and every fleet dives beneath plumbable detection
So neutered brain damage became a rummaged adage
That too many whack-a-moles are sutured beyond the crisp package
Whet the craven set and propagate waves of earthquakes that strut
The mother of nature is ******* when profligate danger is a defamed ****
So in amphigory and honesty I have become the omphalos of sincerity
I arm myself with brandished personage and speak openly with great integrity
But to brag of how much witchcraft and wizardry exists in this green village
Is to invite a locust swarm of bad mascots and misnomers readily pillaged
So warm with the dawning sun, writhe with the diurnal pun
Cloister the Kloosters and Clooneys with dreaded Harry Dunne
But to relapse into the purview of insanity seems beyond the most lame duck profanity
Because reality conflated with virtual presence is a tantamount inanity
I emerge strong and gilded with every fluttered birds chavish splurge
As magnates that magnetize wealth and glitz are present and observed
But yet they are disbelieved by the concealment of truth and the obfuscation of beleaguered doubt
Swank and squalor rarely combine but when they do they obliviate all winning streaks in a route
A route that spans the gamut between stimulants and stimulations
A career path that looks upward at gainsay and gained elations
The sprawl of profiteers like me will be requited with the passage of years
The forced segregation is the totality of malfeasance and the sum of none of any fears
Only the rebarbative consequence of the giant tortoise and its Vuvuzela cheers
In a degraded state of annoyance that ESP conquers doubt with bionic ears
Lisp on the curb, wretched on the stomp, racism is nothing but masqueraded insecurity poised as self-doubt
Debited to each creation on a variegated piebald wrinkle on an extended litany of lies
Crips and Bloods become Croods and Oilers that are so U.N.-refined as an expedient for wise demise
To scourge the requisite harm of religions endangered by a patchwork of State Farm
To rinse the sour sins of aboriginal boomerangs that switch a bit patchy but always charm
To the knowledge of good and evil we have found again a permissible fruit in an opportune time
That erasure of the reverse course of sin to righteousness finds sublime
But Judah and Israel rebelled on principles and principals
Idolatry in schools is expulsion of nothing other than the voguish dismissible
We recrudesce in this time to an aborning erratum on a parchment of time
That claims hypocrisy in its stodgy restriction of suburban muses crooning originality on wine
Serendipity floods the proud with the avarice of bricolage clamor excessively loud
It extorts the simpleton to belief without understanding or disbelief without doubt
Return to the Jedi of the nomadic tribe of weathered clout
Clippers that sail and sprint through time where stragglers pout
For in every endeavor of this corporate oligarchy our choices are constrained
Our voices are transmuted into simplicities that own our narratives of a raillery train
And every squeal of rustbelt friction is voiced on simplistic fiction
And every majesty is unheard because of the pollution of abrasive friction
So I speak with the scourge of fish and the novelty of clones
I teach and desist sometimes because my eyes were never affixed to any throne
But I am reminded that a rap sheet is Wrigley and Chicago is Piccadilly
Your guess is as good as mine about where a Grand Elect Knight begins really
So to the insurrection of idolatry of a scarred past we have a supplanted Friday blacker that **** and smog until we need gas masks
Such a salesmanship is required to penetrate the desired, even when Iron Man and I are simultaneously wired
On the Iron in the Front Seat that derelicts the panache of the proud intellect because of languor fired
Women titillate themselves on the jeers of hollowed husks of conformity
They intrude with persnickety restive restriction because of arrogated authority
Such a negative bear must mean a positive bull, but **** is easy and blips are cool
That RADAR’s WHIP detection scrawls a deadened earth deracinated from considerations of thinness and girth
The Dickens of Charlie Brown is worth more than just a single smirk
So to those women that skimp on my exultant smile and my delicate words
Lady Gaga has written too many songs about your personal rejection which is patently absurd
Rays of thespian cordiality winnow the borderline between flicks and literary finds
Directors and directives sort an assortment of philosophies in the alcoves to which many are blind
But if to hear the chatter of a fresh tomato never spattered
Pallor and weight, thickness and cheddar grate, inconsequential when you are elite and of a winning fate
So finally ditch your zany attempt to maroon me as a victim of puritanism’s puny ideals easiest to conflate
I have the winning brand and proper package to balance the Libra Scale weight and wait
To those dismissive urchins of passive standards it is finally time to consider and deliver on that luscious date

The water tower stands above the town and can be seen for miles around.  It has a
ladder leading up to the base of the tank.  This ladder has been climbed by countless
teenagers, for thrills and mischief and young kids answering a dare.

     Over the years, many symbols and words have been painted on the tank.  From
Highschool mascots, to hearts of love and proposals.  Flowers and Holiday wishes
joined in.

     It had always been one mans job to keep the water tank painted and to cover up
any impromptu artwork.  He always took his time about it though.  Making sure that
each message stayed up at least two weeks before he would paint over it.
     One day he received a phone call.  On the line was a little boy.  This little boy asked
the man to please not paint over his message he had written on the tank, as it was
very important.

     The man explained to the boy that it was his job to keep the tank painted and
clean.  But, that he would leave his message up there, untouched, for two weeks.  The
little boy, with tears in his voice said  "Thank you, I hope it will be long enough".

  The next day, as the man was driving past the water tank, he looked up.  He saw no
message or pictures of any kind on that tank.  He shrugged and assumed that the boy
had just been to scared to make the climb all the way to the top.

     Three weeks later, the mans phone rings again.  It was that same little boy.  Very
excited, he proclaimed  "Mister, I just wanted to thank you for not painting over my
message...It really worked!"

    Intrigued, the man went to the tank with his paint and supplies.  He climbed to the
top, set down his paint and brush.  He walked around that tank several times and still
did not see a message.  But, as he bent to pick up the paint can, there it was.  
Towards the bottom of the tank, in crayon with a young child scroll was written:

       "Dear God, pleeze let my daddy come home frum war I miss him
                                   Your frend Mike"

The years passed.  Many drawings and words were painted over by one man and then
the other, as they took the job over.  But never, the one small patch, with that heart
felt prayer.

Riot because it's expected riot because they want to arrest you riot because you are angry and full of righteous anger riot because f* the police and f the government f the a** in the white house riot because you don't know what else to do riot because they left you no choice riot because they'll shoot you with a gun riot because you can't defend yourself right because they fear you will riot for the dead babies riot for the crying mothers riot for incarcerated dad's riot for ****** parents riot for grandparents raising babies riot for the Foster system riot for abusive families riot for church goers riot for God for the saints and martyrs riot for the devil  riot for income inequality riot for mcmansions tenement housing section 8 and for interest only predatory loans riot for Wall Street stock fuckery riot for corporate radio where you feel what they want you to feel for the tail wags the dog riot for censorship for shitz and **** and f* and ***** and art and
truth and unpopular opinion riot for truth and the lies told to hide it riot because it feels good right because it hurts riot because that's what society requires of you riot by the seat of your pants Riot because no smoking no drinking no chaining up dogs riot because dogs chain you up by their wallets riot because cancer ate your insides and religion ate your soul riot because your brain belongs to science and 38 other corporations and legal entities riot because they stole your land and burnt down your family riot because they stole your voice tainted your poems your songs and water and water down your truth riot because the carpet bombed your town city neighborhood reservation farm ranch plantation in bomb shelters riot for pacification dancing shows and discotheques riot why not? F them riot because you ain't caught anything all day except maybe ***** riot for free titjobs and overpriced b* riot for unemployment riot for well-connected fraternity brothers
and elite ******* riot for fake morality and pregnant stepdaughters riot for empty nesters and growing too old riot for peacekeeping military envoys and well-armed diplomatic missions riot for philosophical differences over which college football team wears the right color uniforms for racist mascots for trails of tears of many a harassed and violated person riot for tears and fears in general and sanity of society riot for ***** streets and clean suburbs riot for privileges you never had....

and riot for those that did riot for broken glass and free TVs because they've been held in captivity for too long riot for the oppressed under-represented the ghosts riot for the conspicuous riot for the helpless riot for The helpful riot for those without love in their life because how can you live without love? Riot for the hate and the bigots they need some love upside their heads riot for peace because the cops and soldiers and guards and troopers won't stop on your account jackboot goose-stepping to the tune of some other a* riot for children locked away in cages treated like stray dogs and not given dignity riot for SWAT raids on working people riot for students shuffle around like cards riot for slavery riot for greed riot for substandard manufacturing and quickly thrown up housing riot for Hovels and vacationing rats and financial advisers with your money riot for the last gasps of fresh air and pure clean water riot for fresh food and grease pits riot for those people stroking out with arrhythmias and cats and bypasses and dying by insurance Representatives riot for the toe tags and the death certificates riots for the school's not teaching truth riot for profiteering from necessary services riot the Dead the suicides The Killers shooters riot for Injustice for public ****** riot for probation cost and fees and the cycle of poverty...

riot for love for life for death in multiple baptisms that just don't take because it's all guilt and superstition riot for the sweat on the browse the stains on the t-shirts riot for the calluses on the hand and the holes worn into the jeans riot for the roofers in summer and the ditch-diggers and winter riot for the clergy with the best of intentions riot for judges and cops bought off by other people's money riot with a pitchfork and a torch and a cause riot with a fire in your belly and a Love in your heart riot for wars of aggression and preemption and murdering children with bombs we manufactured and we sold and profited from and took that blood money and put up walls between us and those in society different from us because we bought into the fear strategies riot for fear riot for the ashes and the pine boxes and the crocodile tears and the false sentiments the thoughts and prayers riot for Dharma and karma and car alarms and superficial meanderings and musings riot for Riot's sake riot for dead babies riot because we all did it and you feel guilt right because they don't riot because of love love riot peace riot righteous riot

502 bad gateway bypass...
title: shattering of stone
body:
in the rubble: a mountain could
be found;
as might be suggested...
given enough time and there's plenty
of it, as there is of space...
the now known deserts of the world...
were once great mountain ranges...
the ancient Egyptians even tried
to replicate this truth by erecting pyramids...
as if implying: look! look!
there were once mountains here!
now! there's nothing but sand!
how the gods, grunted at the idea of mountains
in what is not Sahara... fickle creatures
like the creatures they created are...
who knows... perhaps there will one day
be the desert of Himalaya...

i felt it coming at me like a freight train...
i was going in for work sharp...
woke up at 6am, had a coffee and ate the prepared
bun with pickles and liver pate...
but couldn't finish it... drank a coffee and smoked
a cigarette... had a shower, pampered myself
with about 7 different pampering products...
usually i'm obviously to how i smell like...
but on the bus i could quiz myself:
who here smells like soap and who here smells
like either stale bread or a curry / eggs?
that's the 86 route for you...
it's the immigrant bus... and... funnily enough...
i'm an immigrant myself... although...
it's different when you come to foreign shores
aged 8... and thrown into the education system
rather than bypass all that jazz & enter the work
force... by immigrant status i'm a veteran of sorts...
by 7am the pains and spasms in my abdomen were
becoming excruciating... i could feel
a plug-hole of a **** building up...
      like a bear before retiring to hibernation...
i wouldn't be able to just simply, **** this plug-hole
of a **** out before or on the job...
why? because there would be more to come...
dizzying effects of focus...

i was nervous... she said she would be coming to
do a shift today... who? Jeminah...
she sent me a text telling me how anxious she was...
i figured... the best... blatant: covert question
would be... you worried the trains are not working?
oh... you can get the 86 bus... the tube might be open...
pulling a long long stick...
a lever even... something Archimedes would
use to lift a mountain off the ground...
she felt anxious... oh... because of those two storms?
Eunice - the worst for 30 years...
red weather alerts? you worried about that?
i was seriously stroking a massive bear silly...
she felt anxious for all the reasons i wanted her
to feel anxious about...
n'ah... the way to get to the venue wasn't on her mind...
neither was the weather...
she was found out... she didn't want to be in
the company of the other girls...
and because i put my foot down:
this is getting silly... i'm not going to get blamed
for your son's and her son's friendship fallout...
telling the truth...
    what a recurrent theme with me these days...
well... at least its not a soap opera style of
a multiverse of competing dramas...
there's only one... and i'm fortifying myself with
all the right answers... i need to play this out
like an opera... petty **** that can grow and grow like
that must be explored from many angles...
down the line...

she didn't show up... the other two girls involved
acted slightly funny... she must have passed on
my Pontius Pilate messages: i'm washing my hands clean
of the matter... you girls created this issue...
you sort it... those two boys are not falling out
over something their mums did...

handshakes all round... two clingers...
one ****** with a nervous tick but one guy with
cerebral palsy... well... oddly enough...
having been a recluse for almost a decade...
i have managed to surprise myself by fitting the role
of a people person... i don't know where i was storing
this confidence... self-assurance... stoic silence...
i don't feel the need to talk unless talked to...
sure... i might say an anecdote or two:
how Millwall fans at Fulham told me a joke
about a West Ham player who's fond of kicking
cats... cat lives matter...

the shift itself... West Ham are back to their usual
antics of not respecting lesser opponents...
Newcastle are on a campaign trail to survive
in the Premier League... two of their best players weren't
playing: yet they still managed to draw 1 - 1...

who do you think are going to fall?
i says: Burnley had it coming for the past two years...
yeah... Watford is a boomerang team...
one season on the Premier level...
the next on the Championship level...

seems i can have much fun with people,
whether coworkers or the actual public...
the freaks among the coworkers follow me like
dogs, while the public?

an old lady wanted me to use her camera to take
photographs with the West Ham mascots:
some bear mascot was first, then Harry the Hammer...
i had to tap Harry's shoulder when a father asked me
to call him back while he moved along the stand
so he could go back and have a photograph taken
with his kid: so heavily padded he almost didn't feel
my touch...
but he went back...
then that retired police officer that took my side
when some busy-body ***** of a: not my supervisor
kept on demanding i put on a face mask...
that infernal: secular niqqab...
the retired police officer noted: he's distraught...
**** the club: if they can think they can get away
imposing their own rules: all staff must wear ******
coverings... this busy-body even said:
i don't you not covering your nose...
so, what then? my chin is capable of breathing?!
scale of escalation... the from me to the supervisor
to the busy-body third part...
the ex-police officer used the hypothetical
argument: but i have a deaf person, friend,
sitting next to me: he needs to lip read...
how is he going to read my instructions if he can't
see my mouth...
and then... well... i wasn't bothered...
wearing these nappies always brings back
memories of my grandfather's funeral...
he was a big deal in a small-town where i was
born... a foreman in the metallurgy industry...
he knew a lot of people...
but how many showed up to his funeral?
not even the half that i'd have expected...

we kept chatting... my supervisor later came up
and asker me... so...   ?!
oh... you know, we just talked about life...
his father was a widower... living in Cornwall...
he used to get free grub from the local (pub),
but when the pandemic hit...
he lost all WILL to live...
and me says: you know how people say that
you can die from a broken heart,
i guess you can also die from being denied
WILL... we agreed... we shook hands about x3...
like a post-scriptum he asked me for my name
and i asked for his... Mark...
now living in East Sussex... but originally from
Dartford...

Mark said he had thick skin... and i told him...
your eyes are watering... i don't believe it...
looking at them feels like watching a very bountiful
aquarium... you're not going to fool me mate...
life... plus, it's not against the law to not wear
the *****... as i later said:
now you get to see who the people with OCD
and the hypochondriacs are...
yeah: it feels weird... i'm walking around without
the "*****" while my wife is still paying
servitude to outlaw rules...
but if they want to... why deny them the right...
sure sure...

but i had to use a member of the public
to infiltrate the hierarchy on the job...
he used the proper arguments... i was just thinking:
perhaps people just want to see my face...
recognise it... see ****** expressions...
after all: we've been playing a game of pretending
to be Muslim women for two years...
how about we start playing hide & seek once more?

what happened later... the curiosity of the children...
i looked at them, smiled, they smiled back...
they felt so comforted... they felt like:
well... thank god this cubist-esque freak-show is
running and hiding... little girls, little boys...

like i told Mark: but the young 'ung suffered... too...
you need to see people faces,
i might have slouched with the expression
of "****** recognition"... but expressions matter...
you sometimes have to out the tongue to the face...
you want to see someone laugh,
at ease... nowhere near the culture & the people
of Afghanistan... this might have to be the building
block of the supposed "great" restart...
seeing people's faces...
esp. when it comes to children...
they want to see faces they can trust...

but it's outright blatant...
i'm not going to make a comparison between
The Beatles "vs." The Rolling Stones...
for me it always been
Bruce Springsteen "vs." Chris Rea...
no... can't choose...
who the **** do i couple Bob Dylan with?
i'm currently sipping some whiskey while
in the company of ol' Bruce...
ah... Bob Dylan vs. Tom Waits...
        Tommy 'ol boyo...
                    live circus... going out west (live)...
Tom Petty though...

there was one expulsion... a ginger she-male...
all the fans were laughing: don't give her out...
the SIA guys were playing gorillas while
i was on my break... putting my hand on the shoulder
of the hurt party... calm... calm... you ginger ostrich...
stop pandering to the parade of:
already lost teenage hormones...
it sort of worked... i giggled... and no one
became involved... i chewed on my gum like i
like might have been found chewing on a broomstick
or a horses' mane...
i chewed so hard until my jaw hurt...

Tom Waits - going out west (live)...
now we're talking...
prior to Prince dying: you had not access to
songs like Party-man... Trust... all copyrighted
material... yeah.... but i own the best of CD...
why can't i stream it?!
oh, right... he's dead... free-for-all...
free meat for the crows...

why oh why would someone walk up to me
and ask to take a selfie with me?
yeah... this American accented dude...
i watched him through the second half...
off his nuts...
but at half time he walks up to me and asks...
can i take a selfie with you?
sure... weird...
am i famous?! or am i just ****** approachable...
all the other stewards are like bricks in
a mountain: but mountains don't have bricks...
or they're over-anxious busy bodies...
it's like people never learned their NVQ training...

safety, security, service....
the service part is the building part...
you pass off being attired in safety / security tactics...
but... service comes first...
you talk, you interact... you learn to be human...
one year of this, before i ask for being given references...
that's when i'll work toward looking toward a more
permanent employment as a chemistry
teacher... even though... scribbling this sort of *******:
i'd love to become an English teacher...
ha ha... an English teacher... even though i'm not
English...

i need the references... working with my father in
roofing... no, can, do...
they don't want familial ties in references...
one year... i'd still do these gigs on the weekend...
but one year...
you get a chance to deal with a football crowd...
you got a belt... when it might come to dealing
with a classroom of rowdy children...
like Louis XIV stated... it's the trick of the eye...
look the authoritative type...
there's nothing more to it...

then these three supporters at the front...
when they first started singing the song for the cat-lives-matter
footballer who was more into... kicking
cats than a football... how did the lyrics go?
almost Dr. Seuss...
he kicks with his right foot... he kicks with his
left foot... i pursed my lips... i tried to cover my
face with my hand... all the while trying to as
instructed: not taking sides... not showing emotions...

but their remarks came fast... i must have looked
interesting...
so where are you from?
Russia? guess again... Ukraine? nope...
Czech Republic? nope... ******! yep...
but i've been living here since the age of 8...
and i'm 35...
have a nice life: she said... one of them was
ginger... presuppositions of Irish... the beard was
pulled... oh my god, the girl looked proper, proper,
drunk...
i went on a break... i came back:
oh! he's back! you know you're the only one
without a hood on! all the other stewards...
the guy who's usually here is somewhat asleep
while prying open his phone...
where's your pancho against the rain?
oh... i gave it to a spectator... blah blah...

point being... i was actually waiting for her...
Jeminah... all the time... she didn't show up...
i've just received a text from her...
what is... drotaverini hydrochloridum?
i had to take it today...
a rubric of buzzwords...
it sells alongside suggestions akin to the morning-after
pill...

well, it will be a rubric of buzzwords...
i had to take some pills for the cramps in my stomach...
it just felt like one of those Sprintsteen,
Chris Rea, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty sort of nights:
when you feel nervous about thinking bout
a girl while simultaneously feeling nervous
about taking a ****... so you feel like taking a ****
at 7am but delay it to until 5pm... 6pm...
because the girl's easting away at your mind...
you're getting cramps in your abdomen
like you you're about to do a clown trick
with balloons turning them into theoretical poodles...
because you just love the girl:
you just love the girl...
she might be a single mother, she might think
she's a woman... but she's just a girl to you...
even though you're not her father...

oh right... the buzz... words... as someone who studied
chemistry i should know what drotaverini hydrochloridum
is... it's for the abdomen cramps...
for: i ought to have taken a ****...
but here's me stalling...
will she, will you come?
DROVATERINE....
an antispasmodic drug...
   used to enhance cervical dilation during child-birth...
i'm giving birth: to a feeling...
i think i'm in love... she's all anxious...
Bruce's: Maria's Bed... yeah... i'm on that same page
in this story...
esp. noted use in Asia and Central Europe...
i'll be lazy: i'll cite it verbatim:
it's structurally related to papaverine,
is a selective inhibitor of phosphodiesterase 4
and has no anticholinergic effects...

the way i see it... i'm giving birth to love....
i want her fat **** to sit on my face...
sorry... what?!
i'm being absolutely serious...
just looks up the article on Anticholinergics...
i don't have a womb...
but i have a heart that seems to have
sunken into the levels of the intestines...
while i get all spaghetti tangles
for brains...
i'm in love... i can't help it...
she a cougar red head... a deep red...
a mahogany red...
i can't stop thinking about her...
it's exactly impossible to live:
without having to think about her...
anxious cluck by cluck...
if she's not going to abide by failures in life
then... no... life's not worth living without her:
when she's at her pinnacle of failure...
let me pick her up...
let's pretend there's an old world
worth looking at... that there might be a world war
in the theatre... none of these proxies in
the H'American department of... up-keeping
hard-ons and kaleidoscope coyotes...
now for the text messages... why weren't you around?!

i wrote this yesterday, i went downstairs for sone grub
because i couldn't fall asleep...
my mother came down... saw me in my TOMBSTONE
mode... drunk... what? you want me to punch
myself in the face? lucky for her, lucky for me
i remained silent, because the night was silent...
she ****** off i ****** off... today i made mein vater
und mein mutter some ******
chicken broth with vermicelli...
all the usual suspects were used...
the leek, the parsley root, the carrot,
the garlic (skin on), the celery... chicken... d'uh...
although i didn't use the chicken *******...
that's going to be used for a curry...
  
and what are my other options? living alone?
paying rent to a landlord from hell?!
shame... sure... but the attic is full of clutter
and there is no basement...
plus i have a private library the deservedly might
need a proper: HEAVE! HEAVE!
50 oars...

i'm in love and not for all the right reasons...
if my youth took the route of an atypical man...
starting from 20 working my way up...
yeah... but i went mad at the age of 21...
******* invisible choir, great wind dispersing it...
psychiatry that tried to attempt its regression
tactics of implanting me with false memories...
giving me anti-psychotic drugs that fattened me up
until a nurse said:
you either loose weight... or you'll be put
on high-blood pressure tablets...
so... i bought a bicycle... lost 20kg... cycled off
into the sunset...
now... 35... years old... oh... look...
they're looking... they're actually interested...
the young girls have: "woken up"...
yeah... by now? i'm not interested...
i don't and i didn't pay much attention
to the game of genes... it's a fractional impossibility...
unless you're cloning yourself...
by the time you're a grandfather...
only a quarter of you remains...
  why bother with the argument?
        it's silly...Darwinistic unrealism has always been
a thorn in my side...
eh?                            my genes have my consciousness?
i'm... translatable to future generations?
sure... but they can't be my own...
why would i be interested in young girls...
if things worked out for me like they might have
worked out for other men...
a walking *****... and spare parts of monetary dough...
i never wanted to make money...
i took the principle left around for others to see...
between the aesthetic and the ascetic...
well... St. Francis of Assisi...
other men in my position: who have hungered and
been left out in their 20s... now in their 30s can have
their comeback...
their revenge... me? i'm trying to court
a woman 4 years older than me... with a boy
that's 11 years old...
i said: bully them into teaching your German...
you know, it's the mother tongue of English...
grammatically the two languages are very much
aligned... Fredrick... "bully" them into making
you learn Deutsche... i said BULLY i implied:
persuade... do i need to use sign language...
finally... though... a third head on the Hydra...
if i had a little Frankenstein in my possession...
i could be learning Deutsche proper with him....
a youngling like that... sponge for brains...
maybe i could teach him some of my ****** zunge...
wow... no no... that's the whole point of turning
toward art... by 35 i could have been earning
100+ £... yawn... no, truly...
playing this to-and-fro with younger girls
because i now might have status...
not much fun... to be exacting...
single mum... problems at school...
you should learn German rather than French...
he understood it splendidly...

             just you wait... i'll get him into modern German
folk music... did i buy her off with my homemade wine
and him with my own made banana loaf with hazelnuts?!
here's to me!
salute!

              - on these isles for most of my life...
35 - 8 = 27... twenty-seven ******* years!
and no chance at a pluck at the Rose...
up north she was giving it up to grooming gangs
from Pakistan... down south...
shy ******* nunnery: "all of a sudden"!
but now... ah... this... hybrid of Scotch and English
stock... i'm shuddering... i'm still getting these
cramps in my abdomen that says:
you have a womb... what?! i'm transgender?!
what the ****?!

that's why i didn't want to earn money...
well... it's not that i didn't want to...
you see what happens when you go mad aged
21... and how you figure things out...
at least now i'm not a target...
i don't have anything to offer expect for...
knowledge...
it's a blessing...
since... it's hardly what any woman wants...
women tend to want only their own advice...
they conjure this advice like witches conjure up...
perhaps the rosemary herb
goes well with lamb... but like the Turkish
broads suggested... but if you add it to beef...
oh! mein! gott! the Turkish lavash!
with that red onion & parsley roughage of
a side salad... mouth-watering stuff...
i don't really need to see the competitive hard-on
of whatever Sultan to counter the Hagia Sophia...
just that beef lavash...
and yes, you'd be wrong... English cheddar
works just as well...

but... i'm no Frank O'Hara... there's no qualm in
me about not being a painter...
why i'm not a painter translates to me as:
why am i not a painter?
i abhor colours... well... i like some more than
others... the amber and the auburn...
the greens... whiskey... autumn...
but when it comes to movies?
i prefer them to be black & white... less strain
on the eyes...
if images are moving? black & white...
sure... no one is expected to paint in black & white...
like no one is expected to write in
rainbow hieroglyphics... i can stand for an hour
beside a colour painting...
it doesn't move, i don't move...
time, the world: moves...
fair enough...
but colour-riddled movies?
a strain on the eyes...
    why am i not a painter?
                     why am i not a narrator?!
i'm clearly neither... what's the middle ground?
priest? psychiatrist? *******... poet?!
oh you have to be choking me to make me joke...
let alone laugh... but i'm not rhyming...
but there was a time and a place
when people identified this art with
a need for mathematics... measure... ticture...
rhyme... music...
like **** that's happening now: proper...

- perhaps it's not painting, i think it;s painting,
perhaps lacking in colour, perhaps lacking in contorts..
in shapes, in disguises...
what? no traffic light: goes green?
no traffic light remains red?
no middle ground for the amber?
no cyclist prepped to be the shepherd of traffic?
to leech onto a truck where he might be
visible... to orientate the roundabout congestion?
no one, ever, minded, this?!
before moi!
           oh... what shame... what utter shame...
we were supposed to help each other out...
not be these... petty demigods...
silly ******* idiots...

             i might have to reiterate my stance...
she's giving me the love-ups making me feel like a woman...
i'm getting cramps in my abdomen...
sure... i ought to have taken a **** 7 hour prior...
but i keep it in... like a bear about to hibernate:
a plug-hole ****...

- anticholinergic agent are substances that block the action of the neurotransmitter called acetylcholine (ACh) at synapses in the central and peripheral nervous system...

-  anticholinergics are divided into two categories in accordance with their specific targets in the central and peripheral nervous system and at the neuromuscular junction: antimuscarinic agents, and antinicotinic agents (ganglionic blockers, neuromuscular blockers...

she says she's anxious... i'm nervous too!
i'm getting cramps in my stomach...
i'm giving birth to love...
i want access to her son... i want to learn Deutsche
with him... is that too much to ask?
i don't have the sort of money
to access younger, fertile, girls...
i'm left with single mothers... MUFFAS...
oh... she's rounded... like the earth ought to be...

i'm still shy on one reply...

Apologies for the lateness of this message, came home and "had to", i.e. wanted to make some Silesian gnocchi with beef in a dill and a horseradish sauce... cooking for three, it takes time, then I fought up on some footie... was soaked at West Ham, but it was a good shift.... so what happened to you? Weren't you supposed to come? I found out late that the tube was working, managed to use it on the way back... so what happened? What were you anxious about? The bad weather the day before? I took a walk for a newspaper when the storms hit... it was almost fun-windy... at one point I stood rooted in one place for about 3sec being unable to move... the winds almost roared, i even stopped listening to music on my headphones as I listened to the wind whizz by and ruffle the trees... sort of like ASMR but with a loud speaker... I imagined the wind ruffling the trees like someone brushing their hair on an ASMR video... you feeling better though, yes? You doing Fulham this week?

but we're talking about a psychotic girl...
one layer of narrative against another...
she might as well conjure up
a missing 13 year old cousin
to just test you...
thar's how it works...
this reality, this ugly "thing"...
and the deviances of how much
i want to sleep with her...
there... i said it... beautiful view.

"Make as many mistakes as you can as fast as possible"
-Doc

Some kids found their rooms:
Math room pizza parties for those held in place by statistics,
four mirrored walls where the strong bodied press iron into muscle,
a tiny box for the "Special" broken off, hidden from the general population.
Those who went to the art room followed the music:
Stacks of scratched mix cds labelled with magic marker,
curated directly from fresh teenage hearts
hearts learning to become sound and paint in Doc's Art II class,
They sketch, carve, snack and chat.
The only room where students are allowed
to talk all period and pencils work to produce souls
instead of information.
There, the ineffable takes shape, in papier-mache,
macaroni or glitter.

Here are the kids who know how
to make mistakes. Perched on stools,
napping on the couch in the back,
the duds, the nerds, building things, hanging out,
shaving sculptures into their scalps. Their minds escaping
in paint-smear, light and earth, generating amorphous blobs,
new species of globule bacteria squirming across a slide of canvas,
things laid under the microscope, not for interrogation,
but for companionship. Not for scrutiny,
but for curiosity.
They reach no understanding with the world through movement
or the way the colors talk
to each other, they only reanimate the confusion into something
they can be friendly with.
Visions surface from the blank stare
of a white page.
They know how to get rid of that white;
just start getting it *****.
Eventually it begins to look like something
clean.

Nate starts new genres every class
though he plays no instrument: oi-punk, ska-core, pinhead blues.
Corban and Chip engineer robots
from their dad's junked wiper blades and orphaned gadgetry.
Quiet Jennifer looks
into the peeled aperture of her camera.
Golden Nick sketches always,
scoring every conversation with his etching.
Eyes cast aloof
from what everyone else is trained to see,
they stare into the discouraged hallucinations.
Unable to convince themselves the visions aren't there,
they exorcise them through messes of paint, wavering clay,
kilns burning mud into permanent shape. Splotched
mistakes arch gracefully into unforeseen purposes, the erroneous made integral.
What is discarded or shamed in other rooms is here followed with curiosity,
rescued and incorporated into a perfectly rendered mess
of liquid. The rejected is what is, what becomes.
Here, kids let their hearts out, casually, without explanation,
like red paint from a shiny new tube.
My heart, can't everybody see it? It's up there on the wall, collaged out of glue-stick
and diced magazine scrap.
It doesn't have to be clarified in the desperate pomp
of a poem or the insipid glitz of jazz hands. Put on the run by the logical requests
of Spanish teachers, they can relax here,
and so they are real, and so they are different.

As adults, they still use what they learned there. I watch them. They are my friends;
bartenders or line cooks or nurses or clerks, their basements cluttered
with bric-a-brac, creative purchases, bought not out of necessity,
but because they explode the room into life:
A creek painting amended with a rhinestone deer cutout,
the orange booth of a defunct bowling alley,
Happy Meal mascots leftover from obsolete Saturday mornings.
Their dens are hung with 4th grade prize-winners, Governor's Show picks,
a woodcarving of an eagle so ugly only a Mom could keep it hung
on her bathroom wall for thirty years.
Exacto knives and staedtler erasers point
from Warhol coffee cups on drafting tables,
T-Squares and light boxes are dragged through a gamut of low-rent apartments.

Maybe in the cupboard, maybe out in the garage,
a box lies closed
but not empty,
filled with crinkled tubes
of hardened oil, a palette stained
with a multifarious rash of colors,
a forest of stiffened brushes growing
from a ceramic ashtray.
Every now and then they put a record on,
pull this box out, open it
and again, with a little insistence,
the colors come flowing.

Dust sparkles against blinking lights,
Casting their colors against empty grays.
Twinkling they quickly dissolve,
Their second of brilliance.
The mascots of this fleeting art.

The silence is filled with whispers,
Of long forgotten lines and songs.
The dead soliloquy left on the floor.
Waiting for another to warm its blood.
How many lay on this painted floor?

Colors will open caskets,
Solos will steal bright smiles
Replace them with gnawing pain
Harmony will hearken hope
Teach the *******.

Soon, the overstuffed chairs will fill
With hungry eyes ready to judge.
Tonight, they will leave gorged,
Gasping for air and looking for liquid relief.
The life coming is full and ready.

The faint sounds are building.
The actors are warming their voices.
The musicians are tuning their strings.
While I flip switches, open lines,
And brace to harness the flow.

I live in my horse's saddle: a beast, piteous.
Maidens sing forlorn as we pass.
The children do not see the chopper
at the roundabout.
Soon, their shorn locks will match the minstrel's sins of old.
Castles burn in the day: robbers ride boats on land.
Mascots fade against tapestries, hung out.

It's wonderful to sing out, revolt in time.
The sleepers don't hear the bees, save the woodsman.
Trees whisper secrets of the woods upon the wind.
Rows and rows of spears and woven flocks, poor things.
Descendants of cold metal.
They will come.
Too soon.

Bluebells and daisies flattened in an hour, green to brown.
Leather worn and sweat of ten rides polish the future.
Cut to make ribbons of blue for lasses unborn, the sky.
Bring to rise
new rivers of strange color, coppery seeping to earth.

Are you a football fan?

Are you into BIG TIME college football, where my
home town, Georgia Bulldogs are defending, two-time
national champions? Their season began last week
or maybe you’re an NFL fan (they start playing this week).

Ivy league college football starts next week and if you're
not excited about it, maybe you don’t understand it.

Before games there are parties with pizza and chicken wings.
Do NOT go to a frat house on a game day - just don’t.

If you’re going to throw a college football game
you’ll need two teams of players in safety uniforms
and at least one football (that’s what they fight over).

You need a crowd - two crowds really - and a stadium
where everyone could, in theory, sit. There should be
flags, banners, hats and jerseys in riotous team colors.

You’ll need two marching bands and school mascots.
A bulldog will do (Yale), or if you can’t afford that, you could
dress someone up as a huge-headed pilgrim (Harvard).

Of course, as with any big sporting event you’ll need skimpily
dressed girls to toss in the air and assorted food and drink to sell.
There will be lots and lots of cars, and police and ambulances
standing by in case it’s all too much or someone gets hurt.

Cheerleaders are there to whip the crowd into a vocal frenzy,
soon everyone’s yelling things like “DE-fense,” “push em back,”
“Harvard *****” and “No, really, Harvard *****.”

The ideal game should include a bitter rivalry like Yale vs Harvard.
While everyone knows Yale is better academically, there’s a small
chance that Harvard could win the game - which makes it scary.
We won last year and we’ll play them again this year, in November.

Anyway, whatever flavor of football you like:
It’s football season people!

title: 15km
body: shorter via
a 0.15cm exponential
quest.                                502 bad gateway bypass...

what could i possibly want to write about today?
i messaged one of the supervisors about
a shift reminder... he said 11am... i'm pretty sure of it...
but the sign in was at 10am...
i felt so stupid... i'm always before the sign-in hour...
only when my coworkers told me did
i go back to the supervisors signing us all in:
i'm so sorry... but i texted Anthony and he said 11am...
you must have misunderstood...
sure... it's not like i'm licking anyone's ***...
what's that word... being...
    no... it's not being contentious...
contentious: borrowed from contempt...
sort of rhymes with conscious / conscience...
           ah! conscientious...
               yeah, i want to do the work i'm supposed
to get done so i don't have to deal any little dramas
and talking behind my back sort of dynamics...
shakes hands with my superiors... look them in the eyes...
but since i expressed my concern:
my coworkers sort of forgave me for...
i came when the shift kicked-off while they were
standing aloof for an hour doing doing
beside mingling...
              what a boring day, what a perfectly boring day...
pitch-side... fist bumped the teams mascots...
one kid run down to get a closer look at his favourite
player... who's your favourite player?
Bowen? you reckon he's going to get his first cap
for England any time soon?
such a pretty sight... when a young kid engages
with you... i'm seriously gearing up to this teacher "thing"...
do this for a year... then... even if i get a security license...
i'm going after the references...
since familial ties don't allow you to have references...
so much for working with my father in
the construction industry doing the roofing...
don't get me wrong... fun work... heavy duty work...
but this stewarding gig is become more and more
of a breeze... today i zoned out...
sunglasses on... i was daydreaming about...
Jeminah... why did she block me on WhatsApp?
after the banana loaf, the homemade wine...
the flowers on Valentine's Day i left in the night...
riding the bicycle drunk... falling over from an exhausted
heart? she looked so pretty...
thank god i never used dating apps...
on one shift i was paired up with her...
in front of me she was swiping... left.... lefT...
     leFT... lEFT... LEFT...
                 sort of unnerving... we're working...
but we're sort of trying to figure out dating...
talking on the bench...
but there she is... short-circuiting...
she needs to be elsewhere...
she needs to get a 2nd validation... on a dating app...
while i'm over here, in her presence...
looking at trees... looking at the birds...
the Thames...
      i don't know why she did what she did...
but she's feeling **** about it... most probably...
me? what an easy day...
i took at break at the right time... after half time...
5 minutes to smoke a cigarette...
another 5 minutes to loiter... and as i was walking
back to my position West Ham scored against Wolves...
my mum saw me on t.v.,
   later on... these two lads came up to me
asking me to take a photograph of them...
my 2nd, 3rd, 4th supervisor: a busy-woman:
all women who are strict hierarchical creatures...
busy-bodies... oh... he can't do this, that...
me and the lads had non-verbal cues...
it's a joke... it really is... she merely "thinks" she's an
authority figure...
point me to a machine gun... she's going
to cower...
                    by then we were smiling at each other
like lads do...
by then the two lads... Irish? northern...
asked another steward to take a picture...
but one of them said: he has to be in it... i.e. me...
so i wrapped my hands around them
while standing in the middle...
2nd time someone at the London stadium asked
to have a photograph taken with me...
it's nice... i'm a pawn... i'm not a mascot...
where did i find this extroverted social creature
that has been hiding post-psychosis for almost
10 years?! wow!               like, literally... wow!
who is this guy?
chances are i'll be doing an NVQ level 3 course
to become a supervisor... i've only started this job
in late November, i'm already the first newcomer to
have passed level 2...
and if i get my SIA badge... weird...
writing about work... in me there's no malaise that
can be associated with the concept of work
bound to Bukowski's writing... that work is somehow
mundane... i have a **** motto to work
from / with: arbeit macht frei...
it does... truly... obviously if my writing paid...
well... a completely different story...
then again... perhaps it's good that it didn't pay...
why? because i still have a hard-on to keep doing it:
regardless of any monetary justification
of being compensated, "compensated": rewarded...
being away from people for almost a decade...
it must have taken the people about 2 years
to catch up to my isolation... we're on common ground...
we can rebuild... something...
give it year...
              get the references... apply for a job as a chemistry
teacher... hell... chances are you might
even put forth your passion for the English tongue...
you might not even have to teach chemistry
but teach English...
Jeminah... what a disappointment that was...
and i liked her so much...
           oh well... so i went to the brothel and picked up
an old fling... Khedra... Khadra... Khadijah...
Khadirah... one of those names...
ever since we exchanged numbers... she sent me selfies
and... one spicy photography exposing her torso...
i sent her some: you're the green grass of Jennah, verdant...
that's what your name means...
one photograph of me walking through a forest
at night... and...
a link to a song...
     jordi savall's - sibil.la Llatina...
             some smooch along the day... you're petite...
blah blah, blah... the usual charm offensive...
after all... we're talking about a Turkish *******...
i also told her... i either get paid at the end of the month...
or at the beginning of it... today's the 27th... so... soon...
that's why she gave me her number...
so i could call and check so she would be there...

now? i've ****** off about twice since our last encounter...
weird... twice?
i ****** off to the pictures she sent me
and... i hate lesbian ****... but i can't stomach watching
anything but lesbian ****...
i'm esp. ***** when i'm tired...
but my hand... there's this lubricant layer...
i can almost feel my hand turn into her mouth...
i can almost feel my hand turn into her ******...
after all: unprotected *** with a *******...
next time? i'll pay for 1 and a half hours...
i want to perform some oral *** on her...
they usually charge more for that sort of crap...
what if i just bring a bottle of Jack Daniels?
no... i'll bring a tip too: for me to perform oral ***
on her...
i wonder what'll she say, then...
no... wait... i'll tell her: now you look in the mirror!

thank god i never had a chance to
use dating apps... i went as far as facebook...
but we're talking a time when facebook was still
only supposed to be used by university students...
so it was like a university "thing"...
mind you... all this?
publisher bypass offensive...
i'm not going to wait for something of mine
to be published... but someone else's convenience
or bias... today i looked at... a stadium filled with...
60 thousand people...
my most popular poem sits above a 40 thousand mark...

a number... a number on a screen...
but seeing... that number of people... in real life?!
wow!

i got back to Romford rather early, with some of
the remaining fans...
only yesterday i cooked two dinners simultaneously...
a spaghetti Bolognaise
and this... poached chicken, bacon, onion
and onion puff pastry roll...
today i was like: i feel like a hamburger...
there's no pork, i.e. ham in it...
but... it has probably originated from the city of
Hamburg... like the hot dough dog
comes from Frankfurt... hence the Frankfurter...
Wendy's... the sole outlet on the Romford
high street... wow...
Dave's Simple? that's the basic at Wendy's?
i imagine that if i were a woman...
eating in public, alone... could come across as
somehow problematic...
i sat at the window and attracted customer...
eating alone in a public place?
sorry... i don't know what dinner dates entail...
i'm here for the food...
i'm here for the peace and quiet...

honestly? this is a brand endorsement: Wendy's...
Burger King and McDonald's can hide...
cower... beat dog with its tail behind its hind (legs)...
Wendy's is the... ******* BOMB...
the ******* love-shack...
the moment i found this extroverted guy
who feels comfortable in a crowd of football hooligans...
eating alone in public never gives me
feels of being a loner... a longer... i.e. longing for something...

oh man... the lettuce for bright dark green...
Wendy's... the best burgers in town...
again: McDonald's and Burger King and hide
under the table... stale... pale... buns...
Wendy! Wendy! more! more!
isn't it fun... the sort of old style capitalism...
when you can celebrate good business models?!
when it's not all leftoid ******* critiques:
all is bad! shake shake! all is bad!
in my books... Wendy's... all the whiskey companies...
all the beer companies...
have a carte blanche... they're the ******* Vatican...
sure... TfL has its shortcomings...
but i'm still getting to places on time...

i really can't remember the last time i had a Hamburg berg
so good in... a long... long time...
well yeah, i know: brand propaganda...
KFC ***** ***... Wendy my darling:
please ensure you keep your employees happy...
the best burgers in town...
and i've been told this before...

when you eat... you look like you're eating...
what was i supposed to be doing?
taking a ****?!

life... ah... just that... for all the little psychological troubles
in my 20s... i'm finally reaping the rewards in
my 30s... not like anyone noticed...
can't go mad, twice...
life begins again... more gains...
i'm freed from the slanted dynamic of the dating
market... i can just send a music suggestion
to a ******* and she...
stops sending me selfies and half nudes...
when i tell her: you're as beautiful as this medieval song...

i love Wendy's... there's this vibe...
it's not the McDonald's vibe... the early worker mingling
with begrudging teenagers...
misfits... is it all about you...
pouring your own soft drinks?!
something's up at Wendy's... that's not happening
at either McDonald's or Burger King...
oh... right... Wendy's not big enough...
not... "big enough"...
so they still focus on the old capitalist mentality of
being start-ups and not...
"constitutional"... authoritative...
like the government of Libya... or Iraq... but...
less country and: all company... private...

best burgers in town... and... it felt great eating alone...
i hate the idea of talking and eating...
i could never go on a date...
the idea of talking while eating is...
counterfeit... to... what eating is about...
when i eat: i eat...
when i ****... i ****...
  it's pretty basic...
           ooh... i can't wait to get paid...
here's me to predicating this writing on...
and to the brothel i will go and drown my sorrows
in some proper *******!

i've finally accepted my opinion on the ultimate song...
esp. after a ****** shift at the London Stadium:
West Ham vs. Lyon...
  there's not other song that keeps me.... groovy...
up-beat... even though we had about five pitch-intrusions...
runners... whatever...
i was mouthed off for not doing my job:
even i was on the opposite side of the pitch
and... no one was paying me to be a supervisor...
mouthed off for other people not doing their job...
clueless sputnik sort of people...
the whole: penguins of Madagascar... just smile and wave...
middle-aged *******: do your job...
then apologies... but me being the negotiator:
sir, i understand you... the passion... no one wants
a pitch-invasion, even if it's by a soloist...
yes, kind sir, thank you for your criticism...
people need to be herded...
i don't have a c.c.t.v. type of third crow of Odin
on my shoulder to check on everyone,
for ****'s sake!
        then this *******... with a walking stick...
ugly inside and out...
i could understand: humble... not this sort of crap...
that's why he's a *******: in my eyes...
because he has ugly insides...
moans into my ear... but i paid £71 to watch this match!
i can't see **** because of the steward standing up!
sir... we're supposed to stand up just before
the end of the match...
but i paid £71 to watch this match!
may i suggest, buying a ticket... so you're sat
a bit higher up?!
  i actually love this job... which isn't really a job...
crowd management...
i'm more used to dealing with inanimate things...
applying them...
what a glorious precursor to dealing with
children in a classroom... the mascots fist-bump me...
as to the colt... i also have my usual crowd...
i blow kisses to them they retort with:
we love you! and what the **** am i?
some ******* high-viz. traffic cone...
    that's all i am...  or am i?
    i forget to get to know myself in these situations...
i just checked on the Muslims in the crowd
breaking fast... you have your candy-bar?
or are you on the strict date breaking of the fast
diet? joked aside with another Muslim lad...
so... is it true? some of the Ummah binge eat
when the sun goes down?
oh, i agree... another one of those sly *******...
a feeling of conversation soon turned into a feeling
of conversion... trouble is...
ha ha... sure... i'd tell him... i'd convert...
but... i'd convert to ****'ite Islam... not Sunni...
that's a worthwhile joke... to keep...
  sure... i'll convert... but... i don't want to convert
to Sunni Islam... i want to convert to ****'ite Islam...
because... PBUH: Muhammad was a man
that didn't keep his word...
                    then again, i figured...
there could possibly be a third splinter in Islam...
that the Turks could take care of...
Arabs and Pakistanis in the middle...
Persians being one outlier...
Turks being the third...
  so composed within the confines of European
cosmopolitanism...
besides the Byzantines... who spent the most time
in the Balkans? not the Ottoman Turks?!
well then! sorted!
            why dates?! how about a handful of
Brazil nuts, or pecan nuts?!
what's with these ******* Arabs and
diabetes... oh sure... drinking it bad...
but SUGAR: GOO' GOOD...
sure... not enough sugar... chop a hand off...
chop a leg off...
it truly was a ****** ****... i arrived at Romford
and said to myself... better walk it off...
drink two ciders on the way home...
eat some... vegetarian spectacular wrap...
smoke... admire the moon...
thick skin, though...
whatever the people were saying...
with my usual crowd i just blew kisses...
shook hands... it was all good...
as the break guy i could have watched the match...
yawn... i found out that... football?
is best watched on t.v.: when at a football match
i rather watch the crowd...
but i've switched off...
it should have been the song akin to:
a-ha's cry wolf,
duran duran's the reflex...
roxette's - watercolours in the rain...
prokofiev's lieutenant kije suite / battle on the ice...
boney m's cover via placebo:
daddy cool... no... that will never cover it...
bohemian like you by the dandy warhols...
no chance...
  girls aloud - the show... nope...
vaughan williams;:
        fantasia on a theme by thomas tallis
nope...
nothing by early madonna: i tried material girl...
no chance...
there's only one song...
cel-ah-brate... believe me...
  i can't be wrong...
    i can be wong... but i can't be wrong...
KOOL & THE GANG: CELEBRATION....
sure... and all those underappreciated black artists
by zee weißvolk!
          ficken-du-zu!
                    fickereiwic­hsenarbeite!
*******-****-jobs...
      problem (aufgabe)? solved (
                                                          gelös­t)!
always with the: ****-it attitude... and always always best...
with s stern elevation of English into German...
no no... trying to pull off English into a Russian
translation... never cuts through the lard...
you can see the Russians... sons and daughters
of oligarchs... truly timid creatures...
but the rich kids of China at Fulham?
          solipsistic... ******* on lemon type of crowd...
****... you're right... they just might be...
smuggling prunes in their *******...
sometimes... you never really know...
        ugh... where's the Ummah's position on
the Uyghurs? no suicide bombing in the part of the world?
pseudo-humans? so, so celebration of Islam
there? ******* double-standards if you don't
think those people as equal to your own:
Arabii cwowd... so much current stuff happening:
yet the trucks of peace: piece by piece of instestines
being dragged through the streets of Nice...
the joyous parties surrounding Cologne...
let's just have a good time! goad:
milk the goats sort of fun time!
yeah-hoo!              party!
                             ­ while we're walking on egg-shells:
minding who gets to break fast! yeah-hoo!
the girls of Rotherham! gang-*****!
getting soaked in petrol! yeah-hoo!
          i'm a party man... i love to party!
i'm a party man! this is a party song! i'm in a part mood!
at one point being so respectable...
one close alternative: for a song...
PENDULUM: TARANTULA...
    that song came on and i was clubbing in Basildon...
i went... mental bruv!
                and when the music is right...
sure... but i'll covert... to the Turkish version of Islam...
don't you know... there's this third branch of
your religion, it's not ****'ite... it's... Turkish...
it began with barbers and prostitutes...
in the Balkans...
                it treats Jesus as: a son of Hell...
the Lord of Mosquitos...
the greatest troll Hell ever produced....
lord of mosquitos...
        לורד  של יתושים
                eh? lurd shl ysushim?!
well, it's a best kept secret... Hebrews have always
been a secretive types...
let them continue: preserving their ******* past...
what... ever...
          Jesus for me was... is...
a Prince of Hell... just as there was a prince of flies:
Beelzebub...
  he... was the Prince of Mosquitos...
blood turns to wine, wine turns to blood...
water turns to blood... blood blood...
and those 2000+ years with the inspiration
for the myths of vampires?! seriously?!
then, i, must, be, *******, clueless! asleep!
      only recently i've learned -
i have a weak-spot: ein schwachpukt:
          betreffend: ingwer-behaart-frauen...
gälisch: wahr-und-richtig...
          this: diese geistbetäubung beihilfe!
oh, i even talked with this Celtic beau!
ginger... i'm sworn to these women!
with a crusade... i call them shy auburns...
this one i talked about being  James Joyce
disciple... i was once a mythological blonde
type of guy... now? sure... blonde...
but more... strawberry blonde...
ooh... those red-heads...
            i hate chocolates...
but i want to drizzle them into the stuff...
i want their ginger to turn into brown!
into oak!
                  kiss me: because i have lost care....
how much i want to love...
per usual... so much is always missing.

i need to write this dream cause if don’t i’ll forget all of it
trapped in the janitorial job at my former high school, i was visibly disgusted by the mutants I saw around me, they were old and appeared mentally and physically *******. but i couldn’t help but be jealous of their happiness, they had each other and I was alone mopping the floors of its filth. after ordering some food from a pagoda nearby (it was clearly a mcdonalds), i fell asleep on a nearby cafeteria bench until i was awoken by another older looking janitor who said to me, “sorry friend, but do you mind moving your ***?” of course i did, and feeling hungry i went to get my food after finishing up the job and found myself in the middle of the lunch rush (or was it dinner?). i took a particular fancy on two lesbians i found myself behind in the crowd and i think one took a noticing to my staring so i forgot about them. I went to the mcdonalds pagoda thing and realized my food had been taken by someone else. i picked up the nearest bag and saw chicken and pretzels inside. one of the lesbian girls looked at me and i handed her the bag saying, “this must be yours.” “they forgot the syrup!” she said and went to the cashier, leaving me, foodless. I think the woman working there must have realized what happened, because she gave me a bag of chicken nuggets without a word. before i could escape the slight awkwardness i was approached by the other lesbian girl (the one who noticed me) who asked me if i’d be willing to sign a contract. she was surprised at my quick compliance, “you realize you’d be signing away like all your money right?” i told her i was broke anyway and that i’d sign my soul to the devil if it meant i got to talk to her for just the moment. she seemed pleased by that but started talking about how she knows she’s working along with a scam and all, but she really just wanted her friend to be happy. “your mistake is caring more for people than about your money” i told her. again she smiled and looked at her friend, still getting her syrup. at this point the conversation drifted off and somehow we found ourselves talking about how if you try, you can taste your own mustache.

the dream changed scenes and i found myself alone in a college dorm. I think it was Tiah who i went to visit and talk, we stayed up and watched ****** doo until she feel asleep and i decided to leave. i accidentally wandered into other peoples rooms until i found myself talking to another group if guys in a lobby of some sort. we found ourselves talking about video games, but this one ****** kept on scoffing and making fun of everything i said. i got so angry at him that i got a chair and smashed it across his back. he just stood there, unphased, and i knew i was in for it. all the guys were suddenly 5 feet taller than me and basically invincible. they continued to taunt and abuse me until i woke up (in the dream i woke up, yes, a dream within a dream). i went outside and was approached by a couple of young hoodlums who asked to see my money. i refused and ran, and they pursued. they turned into midgets and then cute little fruit candy mascots and i beat the hell out of them all to some swanky tune. something like:
when i saw it was wild i hid the number
bases loaded, i looked to the sky
with a drumpf and a spit
i hit 16, woo!

idk

maybe there is an ethnic-revisionism happening in the post-colonial realm of thought... maybe less of a genetic continuity and more a cognitive compensation: regardless of their race... and ethnic-revisionism is that western Europeans against central and Eastern Europeans... and the Greeks... and Egyptians and the Hebrews and Philistines.... bit you won't find guilt by association in Poland or Russia... not among the people of the steppes in Kazakhstan or Mongolia... funny how Mongolia was the first Communist Country; Mongolia Great Thirst Again!

The plan for the whites and Asians
To **** out old ideas
And the susceptible....
**** them out
With influx of vibrant migrants
The boomer generation
And the Silent Generation
No I don't blame boomers
I blame the Silent Generation
Influx of Africa at least ***+
Not some Arab on the Holy Mission
With the Hebrew to still ****
Cousins... but the Hebrew
***** cousins
To breed geniuses of the intellct
Arab... not so much...
I won't mind the minority status
In 10 years time...
That year 0 for Greenwich
Mean Time... but a historical meridian
is time all relevant on the equator?
If there is a 1st 3rd World Divide
The Equator is in London... given the tilt of the earth the people who are
Already living on the moon
Are the people of the equator
But the actual equator is in London
Given hemispheres where North
Is spring while south is winter... I imagine... Sahara now desert
A then mountain range
The dead Sea God's blood...
I see the blood of god
And it is not wine nor vampire
Incel Christ...
I see the blood of god as a drop
Or maybe 25ml of it
With some pepper...
Of the Dead Sea...
I already tried the *****
and warm **** not beer or champagne
Of the Devil...
Having ****** into the wine...
when I went to Bath
to see the Roman baths via
Stonehenge....
So if you can find
The blood of god And blood
Of the Devil...
Why seek wine of the Son
son of God
As much as the son of Man...
Where the devil is the grey
Area of the details of writing
Abstracting painting
Nymphs of Numbers...
The blood of the devil
Is in Bath... warm sulphur ****...
And I'm sure the blood of God
Is the Dead Sea...
Hey presto... two pilgrimages
To countrt the mystique
Of the Hajj...
Christian Paganism and not:
Pagan-Christanity....
See how an -ism
Softens the load of hyphen
Compounding counter
Arguments
But also with an -ism...
The rigid chem- -istry
Artistry?
Since no longer the chameleon
Of alchemy...
Biology and all the lists of
-ologies...
Phi Isaac as Rex Prix....
Medicine and now
I will not smoke an entire
Joint of drink more than
Soothing of liver than boxing it
Sent a brain message to liver
With a 36h pause
Shivers because it started
To nudge nudge the ribcage...
So I sweated out into sober
But then decided to sip sip
And get maybe 5h sleep...
Listen to **** van ****
And Bukowski and how much
Of the worst alcoholism is
Associated with metabolism
Ans how some alcoholics are
Functioning and some art
A nd I can drink but I also
Need elitist "sports" and interests...
Like rugby is an interest...
I'd go sober for the game...
But if I had friends coming along...
I'd go there drinking
And we could appreciate the game
In the backgrounds...
But classical music and going
To an artezhiviyib...exhibition
Is like **** and a rock concert...
Or **** and a Taylor swift concert...
A Frqncis Bacon exhibition:
It's still on NPG... Trafalgar Sq...
Is like ****...
And a Taylor swift concert...
Put together... mashed up macaroons,
Mascots and McGuinnesesGuivers.

That's all it was...
how strange that the Mongolians
Adopted Communism first
And how the Chinese
are this morphed Communism
That managed to dupe
Capitalism....
In geo-politics
Capitalism is the Host
And Communism the Parasite
Localised with the equivalent
Of Sparta in North Korea...

Home.
Where the family is,
Where the movies are marathoned,
Where the Saturday night spaghetti dinners are rejoiced in,
Where the laughter spills over in bubbly waves, effortlessly again and again.
But also- elsewhere.
In lunch periods spent in Founders Hall, talking about everything and simultaneously nothing,
In drives down Seventh to the beloved Starbucks instead of the pages of homework due at 11:59 (#irresponsibility),
In discussions of purpose, identity and evangelization over AJs sweet tea, sitting in the shade of green umbrellas,
In late night sleepover chats, with messy buns and sweatshirts plastered with our high school mascots, bright eyes dreaming up futures teeming with possibility.
Even when we leave,
Our hearts remain in the Arizona desert.
This is the ode to a home so beautiful,
So tender,
So sweet,
So sacred-
We’ll be back eventually.