Unk and Bro. Bro and Unk.

Driftwood twosome, see ‘em now in the hollow out by the derelict sawmill, where nights they nestle in the wrecked Subaru and savor starvation.

Hunger is the third who walks with them, an unwelcome friend.

See them as they search by sunup for berries and shrooms in the hollow, eternal pair. Drifters in their rags, old and young, who’ve come to a halt in this place near the creek. See them now how they differ in their approach to the hard day, so amusing.

Bro’s just a stubby nubbin of glumness. Heavy beetled brow, dark murder gaze. Unk, by contrast, stands free and airy in the daybreak dapple light. Nothing on his mind but celebration. He does what passes for a jig, trouserrags jimblejambling like motley.

This ain’t quite as it ought to be. Generationally, the whole thing should be reversed. You know: over here’s the crusty old grumblefuck muttering dark imprecations and over there’s a bright young thing brimming with joy of life and suchlike. But it is as it is: young guy irascible and mopey, old fella larking like a bride at the wedding feast. Reversal of the common way.

Unk’s occasion for celebration this day’s the discovery of a dead bird, sparrow or some such, on the forest floor mid a cluster of morel shrooms. Ripe and partially dried, that bird’s wormy body: cracked darkened thumbnails splice it open like some delectable peach. Unk sniffs the fruity guts of the sparrow and slavers some, drool gathering at the corner of his mouth.

Decides there’ll be no sharing this time. Bro’s being unfunny-funny that way he has: young, dumdum, full of cum. Fuck ‘im.

Cupped hands, bird giblets between his teeth like rustic vermicelli, nutty, chewable. Unk looks up now and takes pity, wordless proffers the bird. Making-up gift. Le’sbe friends.

Bro not biting, though. That’s that way of his he has: resentful-like.

Look at him now.

Bro: tall, but crooked over like a q-mark. Face marled and scuffed like with more time than he’s ever had on this earth. Would-might be handsome but for the scowl. And the deformity, the... unevenness. Whatever it is. The hare lip’s not a problem. There’s movie stars with hare lips, they’re okay. No, it’s the general demeanor of scabbed discontent and that way he has of bringing bitterness to all, to even the petty joys of life.

Unk’s just about had it. And he no angel an’ all, but still.

So they’re out in the woods. So they decide to go to town see what’s up.

Unk suggests: Wander on over to the town square? To that civ’lized world they got now?

Shrug-double-shrug’s all his answer. But still something. Consent of sorts, good enough.

So it’s off to town we go.

(Unk’s hobbling again, pain in the left ankle, sciatica running up and down the rump side, hole in the left sole of the patched boot. But mustn’t complain. We’ve had worse days, days as well as nights.)

This act’s well established by now: hum an’ shuffle, shuffle an’ hum... Tootle-oo, more-or-less Wish I Was In Dixie, some-shit, more-or-less The Wabash Cannonball. Hummed with vigor, so you know...? Indistinct, rightly the tune could be anything. If tune it is.

Unk hums, then, humming loud in the soreness of the throat so the rasp of lived experience registers in the ditty’s undertow. Sounds good, raw and alive. Feels good too.

Bro dances sorta, kinda mountain breakdown, kinda soft-shoe-shuffle. There in the square, that fucked-up little town square with the stopped clock and the gravelly lawn and the park bench with its persistent splinters. And all the scabrous squirrels and their brass impertinence. They skitter up to stare at the shuffle-hum you put on, and they look you over. And then they skitter away like you ain’t nothin’ at all if you make to object.

Passers-by actively ignored the show. Scant foottraffic anyways. Old fellas with gamey legs and green tractorcaps. Their side-eyed jaundice look a mere mirror of us preterite damned such as they know themselves to be. Like hates like when all are consigned to hell...

Their overalls stained with eggrun and black black grease. On their way to register land with the land registrar or pre-order chicken feed with a special offer coupon. Gaze lurching silent groundward, no pocketchange offered, no payment made for this performance put on for their exclusive benefit and entertainment.

For this is an entertainment, this hum-and-shuffle party, make no mistake, and more besides. At once ritual and solace, the most primordial form of act known to humans other than coupling and murder. A rawvoice chant, indistinct and throaty but recognizably music, with a near-enough rhythm beat out tom-tom style on a coffee can hauled out from the dumpster.

And dance as well, dance also, into the bargain. That slack-back shuffle in ancient homage to Terpsichore, The Muse of The Dance, or else somesuch other pagan asshole. Shimmy-hop, back-hop, raggy garments abounce, motley once again and cheery withal.

It was thus when bronze-age heroes and stone-age trogs took their repose, this scene in the town square of our blighted township in this age of Our Lord twenty-twenty-something, or maybe thirty-something, who the fuck cares.

In these squalid citizens there’s no spirit of giving though, no, no more than in the inquisitive and patchy squirrels who seem also to lack any joy of life. It’s like that way of his has come to infect them all, like they’ve caught the blight of the spirit. Bro has that way of his.

But soon things pick up. Unk has a surprise treat: not only a huff of glue, but some solvent he liberated from a garage on the outskirts of the township to boot. Huff-huff-huff and up: now things are kickin’. Bro’s soft-shoe-shuffle rowdy now, kickin’ up dust forward and back. Hooplas between the hummed chords, more primordial than a hobo ditty.

Ah, euphoria! This is the ancient ecstasy, the Dionysian rapture. Feel it, feel it: pumpity-pump the flutter in the breastbone. Hooboy the joy! Unk humming something shapeless now that has no name and interjecting whoops along with warcries and snippets of Adam’s tongue.

Bro is another kind of boy, or seems to be. All his resentment gone, looking now flushed, kicking up high and lively. The ritual’s complete. All his crookback is rightened, his figure graceful as a warrior. This other second way he has, harmonious and full of grace.

And then:

Cop, of course. But where in olden times he might just be a chubby redface corn-bred individual sweating through a button-strained shirt and snarling soft words honored by time, this here is another type of animal.

He’s full tactical in the sweltering overcast of the noontime haze, dark gray helmet with head attachments of some kind for nightwork, ballistic jacket bulking up that bulk still more. More flashbang utility loops and carabiners dangling off that harness than some old Depression jalopy janking on down a dusty trail with buckets and tintubs hanging off of it.

Shades too, not them classic patrolcop aviators, but undersized wraparounds wedged into his meaty faceflesh, pincering in around the eyes. Not lawman but counter-insurgent. An operator, an urban tactician.

The gaptoothed grin of the cop might’ve been warm and welcoming in some other setting. Here, under the iced mirror of the shades, amid the face furniture, it’s another story. Something green wedged in there, in the gap. Spinach, or...?

The silvery gaze swivels now upon the pilot cap. Bro’s flight-helmet: Snoopy-like, anomalous.

Bro’s had the pilot cap since he was a kiddiewink, since he was taken and adopted, his consolation and introductory gift to this new unexpected family. Unk had took it from a pilot dead in his cockpit, wreck of a wartime fighter, in some frondy forest somewhere way-way overseas. Leastways that’s the story and I ain’t changing it now.

Unk short for Unknown. Enigmatic to the core though also joyous and giving in spirit, father to all of what’s lost and stolen. Much said in condemnation of me, but nothing that’ll stick. I shall abide all the shit and live to see my haters in all their graves.

Bro says nothing, reverted now to the first way he has, that sullen nothingness, unmoving, darkened. Risky that way but the cop’s blithe and ignorant.

Then the sky bruises and dims with sudden black clouds that shimmy and blot the sun. Starlings in their thousands. They paint out urgent messages in their flock hieroglyphics, in warning or approval for what happens next. Noonday air enlightens and endarkens in momentary pulsations. The cop does not register. Only wants to think about the flight cap and the goggles.

The murmuration heads out to the west, the sun breaks from a cloud and the light is stark, gray and silvery weak. In such moments everyone, all of us, are revealed for what we truly are. We’re called on to repent of our foreordained errors, change our unchangeable ways.

Some joke brought on by clouds and flocks of birds.

Cop sneers, showing gaptooth and implanted greenery. He snatches off the flightcap and stomps on it once where it lies in the dust.

Crunch and tinkle.

Says:

Unk says:

And so we do. We GTFO just as required.

Bro’s all caught up now in his dark sullen way, not either of his other ways. Picks up the stomped-on flight helmet as he goes. Looks at it once, pockets it. You can tell he’s right sore in his quiet way. Grieving you might even say.

It’s only some time later at our camp beside the wrecked Subaru that his final way comes up upon him, and this is how:

For a time he looks at leather rag of the pilot’s cap, earmuffs like little saucers meant to hold a radio headset, a place for a radio jack to jack into the network and listen to all the voices, but dumb now, dead for decades. He looks across over at me and asks with his eyes for the tale.

So I tell him over again, thinking it will somehow soothe him:

How there was once a little dead guy all broke up dead in his fuselage, shattered body all leaked out and dried out in the suffocation of the deadhanging jungle air. Maggots and centipedes making a meeting place of his eyes and his broken mouth. How I took the helmet off his head, all crusted with the crust and stink of scalp-rot and decay. Little tufts of him coming away in the crown of the flight-cap.

How I walked away from that place far-far overseas and much later I came home and I said to myself:

And so it came to pass…

Bro did become my boy: found and taken, adopted and cared for. In due time he was given the flight cap and the story that came with it. Happy sorta ever after.

Now that-all may only be mere horseshit and huckster flim-flam, but I think you’ll agree it amounts to a stirring tale. Bro certainly thought so. The story became his talisman against hardship out on the scathing way of our never-belonging road.

But now maybe it wasn’t consolation no more. As he looked at the shattered lenses of the flight goggles, it was then his third way came upon him. Not silent and sullen like in resentful morning. Not carefree and dancing his droop-shouldered shuffle in the afternoon. That other way, that coming-out of the beast within him.

So he tramped on back to town at sundown time, and me trailing him like a forlorn puppy. Generational reversal, the opposite of how it all should be.

The time’s gone all to fuck. Oh curséd shit! That ever we should come to live in it.

Bro had an instinct for vengeance like a hungry bloodhound and so he found the cop’s place of residence with no trouble at all. Seems to encroach on inverisimiltude a little bit, but it was so.

Unk hung back, scared of this third way of his and all its sacred terror. Truth is, I’m afraid even to look at him when this way of his is upon him. It’s not a human way, not rightly, and in his expression there seems to beckon monstrous things from the farthest night. Cryptids from nightmares and half-glimpsed beasts in his eyes and the set of his mouth like something tearing your guts. It’s all I can do to look at him from the corners of my vision and register that animalistic way that’s fallen on him.

What’s more, he seemed bigger now too, not the crookbacked little tramp of the daytime with motley rags, clownish and pitiful. Grand then in his wroth and thirsting for a glory of slaughter.

Like a thing that the Lord wishes on sinful cities, like a... what d’you call it? A plague, yeah, like a plague. Bro was, in this third and most awful way of his, a plague upon humans, something we human beings had bred for ourselves unknowing and now had to face up to in this moment of dread reckoning.

And so here we are: so quickly we come to the home of the cop who’d broke his goggles. Bro had found his way by rage and intuition like a demon summoned by some cursed formula. There’s the fat cop now in his civvies, sky-blue too-tight polo shirt cupping his breasts, cargo shorts and sandals, pale legs hairy and shocking, weirdly thin, nursing a brew and spatulating some sizzling burgermeat on his backyard grill. With his face all uncovered looking meaner somehow, more piggish, waxy like some horror-movie thing glimpsed in the billow of all the searing beefsmoke.

If I was gonna stop this thing from happening, then now would be the moment to call out, to hold back the boy, to try to rein in the feral thing he’d become. But truth is, I was afraid to go near him... to go anywhere near it.

In the purpling sky of sundown, a disturbance. In the air, this music like a thrum, a music not to shuffle along with but to hear and cower down in fear.

Unk looked up and saw once more that huge murmuration of starlings, clouding and bunching in esoteric waves above all the houses and all the yards of evening. Their message was urgent now but still obscure, though it could be guessed, perhaps. Started to call across to him, to my faraway son possessed by a finality of purpose and this will not of my making.

Bro, I wanted to say. Bro, don’t be this way. Be glowering and glum in the morning, be light and cheery in the daytime, but please don’t follow this third brute way of night. Your father can’t bear it...

But I said nothing and he went on, vaulting on over the wirefence and into the cop’s scabby yard.

Bro looked back at me this moment and I saw it then full-on. Nothing human left in him, his way gone monstrous as creatures deep in the cadaver of time’s guts gnawing, like strange thongs on planets far away with unrecognizable organs and desires. A transformation: a thing that was all festerings and suckerslime and polyps like teeth and like eyes. Nothing like a man. Impossible to say what he was now, but he wasn’t a man.

So he leaped fast and pantherish onto the cop, whose one look was a flash of unbelieving terror then nothing at all. His face, now... his eyes gnawed out, the pieces of him falling sizzling onto the grill on top of the burgers. Bro embraced the mess of his chest where claws he’d somehow grown had rent out a deep wide wound, the fat man’s sky-blue shirt crimson now and ragged, and clutching him like a lover he implanted his face on the neck of the cop. Now the sizzle of meat and the creak of jaws on crushed windpipe sounded in a night sky full of the thrum of starling wings and their forlorn song.

There I stood watching as the beast that had been my boy made a charnelhouse mess of the victim. Gurgles and gasps filled the air along with an iron tang of bloodscent.

A voice, little and scared. A boy just like my boy years ago when he’d first come to me, so scared and so little. When I’d given him my pilot cap and its legend as a comfort to his fright. Now this cop’s young boy was looking out the back door of the house into the yard, and what he saw...

But the child didn’t scream or run, just stared and stared at the thing that was hewing out the caved-in chest and biting through broken windpipe of his father. He stood on the stoop with the door ajar and his pants darkened with urine and he stared and said nothing at all.

Bro was deep along his third lost way, his inhuman path for chaos and blood without limit. He looked up at the child and in that face – more like a human face now but still not a man – there was a lust.

Unk is unknown and unknowable, but he is after all human. What he’d created with his wish for a son was a dark stain of misery on the world, and the other ways of his son had been crowded out by the drive to take all life apart. Did I think or was it an unthinking thing?

I picked up the propane tank where it stood next to the grill, yanked off the tube and held the nozzle of it above the grill where an eye and gobs of cheek cooked between beef patties, where blood hissed there on the griddletop. Now I had a flame pouring steady from the hosepipe and I pointed it at him. Bro, my son, the one I’d taken and made my own boy.

He burned, he howled, he turned round to face me and his face was a human face again and I could see that he chose to accept the pain of my judgement and not touch me. There was something right in him at last, as if the jack were jacked into the network now.

And the neighbors came out to their yards and gawked at the four of us there: the fat man turned to a piece of meat, the howling and burning man in rags that scorched off the charring body and blew away in the dark like fireflies. That silent child on the stoop with wide eyes whose memories would be scarred forevermore. And the dumbfounded old man who’d brought all this about and had caused it all to cease again.

Out where night gathered and the dumb stars began to blink now approached a vast howling of many sirens, the lamentations of those who knew not why they even mourned. Quickly they came for me then.

Unk the father: the one who would be condemned by your law for this gross sin, for the awfulness of all that bloody chaos. And rightly so, for the origin of all the chaos was mine and my selfishness had brought it on. Bro and his three ways: the light and the dark and the brutally final...

I’d gone and I’d birthed him and all his ways, and the guilt of his doings was mine alone. Now I accept your condemnation as just. If such a sin can be expiated, then let judgement fall on me. May it be as final as a flock of birds blotting out the sky with inscrutable glyphs while sunset falls behind the houses on a suburban street hushed in all its fears as the darkness falls.

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=== THE THREE-WAY BRO // END ===

Both hands deep inside the ground beef, kneading, palpating the smooth flesh and the tiny globules of fat, squeezing that pliant stuff between his fingers, massaging in the spice mix, breathing hard against his facemask, his mind zoning out into the blissful blank of no-sight, gasping into the white void of the glosswhite tile of the kitchen wall, kneading and folding in, drool collecting in the corners of his masked mouth – no, not drooling, no – tongue darting out quick-as-blinks to smooth out the saliva, all unbidden, automatic, kneading and squeezing, eyes unfocussed, mind drawn into that bliss of no-thought, fingers deep into the soft beef, Speeny does not register in any conscious layer of his mind that he has a throbbing priapic boner rubbing against the countertop, the firmed-up glans finding no solace, only provocation, in that stainless steel surface mediated through aproncloth and jean denim.

Hennessy strides into the kitchen and says something which he doesn’t really hear, probably you’ve done enough there get on with something else. So Speeny eases himself out from the meat and the blissed drift of his mind toward the white tile, and permits the erection to subside in its own time.

The fluorescence of the tube above is intermittent, twitchy, like those things they show in movies when a spirit is about to appear, and Speeny’s mind ghosts with it for a mothflicker or two of witchtime. In his daydream he’s coursing through forests naked and running fast, in pursuit or pursuing who can tell. There are things out here, and maybe he’s one of them.

“Hey fuckface,” says Marvo. He’s disdainful of Speeny’s zoneout stance, of the soft focus of the gaze, and his pimpled face registers scorn. It twists in a way that makes the scarring of the pockmarks complex, striated like contour maps of a badlands. His bulk bellies up to Speeny where he swoons there at the beefbowl, boner half-diminished and consciousness covertly creeping back.

“Hey fuckface,” says Marvo once more. “You trippin’ or what? You high on your gramma’s fentanyl-molly-cocktail again, dawg?”

Speeny looks at him eyes fuzzed-out and brings to bear some slow recognition. He seems unperturbed by the encroaching bulk of Marvo, by his hostile stare, by the pitted face or his yellowed teeth with the left canine missing, or by that primordial swamp odor, breeding-ground scent for archaic reptilian carrion feeders.

“Yaah,” says Speeny. It’s not clear if he’s just admitted to being intoxicated by bootleg medication, whether he’s just saying yaah to be agreeable or just to say some minimal thing. Speeny’s like that: indefinition is a keynote.

Marvo looks at the skinny youth – now that Speeny has drawn down the facemask – his offset lips, that uneven face mismatched to the blissed-out stare. There’s no symmetry here to grasp onto. Speeny’s hare lip robs the observer of any context, so for Marvo, Speeny’s arcane mystery spools up and up, the indefinition revving like a hotrod at the lights. The lopsided grin might not be a grin at all but a hostile sneer. It entices.

“How about it?” asks Marvo.

“Not in the mouth this time,” grins Speeny. “I got a herpes or somethin’. A sore, ya know like a lesion.”

“Hand?” proffers Marvo. “Ten bucks.”

“Yaah, ten for hand twenny for mouth,” says Speeny, happy with the symmetry of it. Pleasing: two hands one mouth. “Okay, sure,” he says, making for the rear door to the backstreet. The venue for these encounters is the organic dumpster, ripe and fecund, apt for such encounters.

Says Marvo when he’s done: “You are my fetish, Speeny”.

Which is uncharacteristic. Speeny is unsure of what to say.

“Aww,” he says at last. “Sweet.” He smears his hand on his apron, and pockets the ten dollars.

“I don’t mean it like sweet,” says Marvo. “I kinda hate you, Speeny, ya know?” He sniffles some, smiles sheepish. “I hate me too. That’s what I mean, like fetish.” Sniffs like maybe he’s sobbing, but maybe it’s just a summer cold, or just like some whizz. Sometimes he gets bathtub crank from a cousin.

Enlarges on his point: “I had a uncle on my mom’s side put garbanzos up his ass. That was his fetish. He hated it, hated himself, but he hadda do it.”

Sniffs again, with a tear in his eye? Summer cold, could be.

“Compulsion, right Speeny? That’s what I think about you.”

“Bully boy,” says Speeny. “Bully for him.” The exact meaning of which is unclear.

They’re back in the kitchen by now. Hennessy is there. Large, sour, failing.

“Alright you two,” growls Hennessy. He’s impressive in his chef hat, crisped white perched over his coffee skin and his sizeable beachball head. All boss, his thick arms are crossed across his chest. The white chef’s trousers are crisp, ironed straight down to the gleaming white Nikes. He towers silent in the kitchen: monumental, imperious.

The stern boss-spiel continues: “Enough grab-assin’ an’ goofin’ off on my dime,” he barks. It’s uncertain whether he’s seen the backalley transaction. Probably not.

“Time to get to work, boys.” Marvo flinches at the word boys, older by some than the chef – but Hennessy is boss, and he, Marvo, is but a lackey. That’s labor relations: he must suck it up, however that may rankle. That said, Speeny is unfazed. Wacked-out or just serene, who’s to say.

So back to work. There’s a certain amount more needs doing before the actual chefs show up for the pre-lunch shift. Marvo starts prepping veg and Speeny is set to swabbing the floor. Hennessy steps out to source fresh fish at the market.

Pppssst! hisses Marvo from the chopping board. “Pssst, hey kid,” he whisper-yells hoarsely. There’s no need to whisper, there’s nobody else in this back end of the kitchen. But Marvo enjoys the implied conspiracy of it.

Speeny stops swabbing and looks over. No need. But whispers anyway: “What?” he says, grin-sneering at his companion.

“You better watch out about the cleanin’” says Marvo. “Iffen you don’t find yisself a replacement, move yisself up to where I am now, chopping veggies, you’ll get shitcanned. Not my rule: Hennessy’s. He says that we need a new guy to clean, after a while. After a while, he says, you can’t see the dirt anymore.” He grins, lips glistening: “So it’s up or out, handjob-boy.”

“An’ if I do move up to what you’re doin’ now, what will you be doin’?” says Speeny.

Good question. Maybe he ain’t so backward after all, this Speeny.

Marvo grunts, turns back to his task, and attacks a fat zucchini. Chops the tip right off.

“No yeah no, that’s not what business is.”
“So what is business, fuckin’ smartass?”
“You wanna know what business is, motherfucker? I’ll tell you ‘bout business, ese.”

After work Speeny dropped in to a bar with Marvo, who cautioned that it was a mob joint. The Calabria Bar, lousy with wiseguys – not Sicilians or anything, but hybrid Italo-Hispanic marginoids. Volatile chancers and moth-smitten burnouts flitting around big crime’s candleflame allure and hoping for a teeny-tiny nibble. Preterite rabble dawdling in the ramshackle outskirts of True Mob.

Marvo murmured for a little while more about how Speeny was his fetish, his dark obsession, but then he wandered away to talk to some guy about a pedigree dachshund for sale and then was gone away into the drift of night.

Now Speeny sits at the bar nursing a Taiwanese beer and a bourbon chaser with aftertones of antifreeze. As usual, his antennae are extended, grooving for vibes of hostility or cheer, anything out of the ordinary to relieve the tedium, that tendency he has to sway way-way out of his skull and into rudderless reverie.

And here’s just the thing: two guys at a nearby table, just at his five o’clock. He checks them in the overbar mirror, an oldschool decor touch. Dominating the table’s a heavyset dark dude in an untimely zootish suit of silver and puce, with sheeny bald skull, lumpish and interesting in its phrenological implications.

“Business is... look, what if I solved a problem you don’t have, and then sold you the solution to that problem?”
“Solution to a problem I don’t have...”

He’s deep in conversation with a Latino smallperson in lustrous Adidas trackwear and beanie, sideburns closely crafted into chinstrap beard, urgent and barely contained in his passion. The small guy challenges his buddy’s business acumen at every point, as if this were a theological disputation and they two medieval masters of divinity discussing pinhead angels.

“Problem I don’t have... What makes me buy into a solution to this problem I don’t have, dumbfuck?”

The zootsuiter leans in, definite, passionate: “Because I makes you worry about that problem, Shug! I makes it yours even if you ain’t even bothered by it. That’s sellin’, man, that’s fuckin’ business, hermano!”

Which prompts a pause for due contemplation. A sip of their respective drinks, zootsuiter straight scotch on the rocks, Shug the sportswear midget rum-n’-coke. Heavy hitters at noontide, unconcerned about the piffling punctilio of drinking etiquette. Focused rather on the solemn matter of what makes business business, true American talk.

This is where Speeny reveals himself, no kitchenhelp dipshit at last, but instead a man of agency and decision.He picks up his beer and chaser and shifts over to the table where they sit, setting them down on the table. They raise eyebrows in mild surmise but are way too cool to act ruffled by this hickster fuck’s faux pas.

“’Scuse me gents,” says Speeny. “Pardon my intrusive grossness an’ all, but I couldn’t help.” He grabs the third chair at the table and sits himself, regarding the pair eye to eye to eye.

His blue eyes are mismatched and strabismotic, that skew-whiff only adding to his gaze’s intensity. Zootsuit’s dark eyes bore quizzically into him, while Shug shrugs and turns to the corner TV where silent beachclub honeys are reggatonning to Daddy Yankee.

Speeny proceeds: “Caught your discourse on the true meanin’ of business which happens to be an issue I have an intensive interest in, an’ I was wonderin if I could innerest you in a particular proposition regardin the food caterin’ and hostelry sector?”

Shug looks back at him from the TV and seems about to cast scorn but sees his expression and hangs fire. Speeny’s smile is nominally irregular, dentistry all awry and the teeth childish even in their smallness, but it speaks of sincerity and has some inexplicable power. The zootsuiter simply stares at him inscrutable as old stone, face reserved and eyes level.

“See, it’s about the lack of proper ethnic cuisine in this very ethnic barrio,” says Speeny. “Seems to me the place has too many fancy interlopers with their international fusion, too many distillations of reductions of foam whatever-the-fuck, and not enough hearty cocina del pueblo. Almost like an insult to the raza, no?”

Silence settles for a moment. The matter of the disputation rests for consideration. Shug the midget looks intently at Speeny and nods slightly.

“I’m Valentín,” says the zootsuited heavy, leaning in to engage Speeny’s wall-eyed regard at closer range. “Who you be, hermano?”

“My name is Sanpablo Patrick O’Neill Márquez” says Speeny. “Most folks call me Speeny. Glad to meet you Valentín. Mucho gusto.”

That smile of his: it’s most irregular in form, mouth skewed sideways – but so warm and forceful withal that it must undoubtedly be genuine, or so you tend to think.

First phase was a doozy. First phase went like gangbusters, like bandits with rockets up their asses. It was like: slip-slap, serve it up.

First phase is to get Marvo out, Shug in. This is accomplished with a minimum of fuss. Hennessy’s informed of several points, some provably true, some more tendentious, about Marvo’s kitchen demeanor: herpes outbreaks on the mouth, jacking off into the soup du jour, an enthusiastic study of true crime reports about infamous poisoners. This is phrased by Speeny as an inquiry into what to do about Marvo’s continual sexual molestation, in which the other details reluctantly, hesitantly, spill out.

That was all dandy. Hennessy catches the vibe of foul corruption in his kitchen, trailing nameless viruses and endless harassment lawsuits in their wake as potential sequelae. He cans the shit-heel Marvo without delay, using the evident weeping red lesions on Marvo’s unshaven upper lip as grounds for instant dismissal. He even threatens to kick Marvo’s ass and slams the kitchen-alleyway door right in his dumb pasty yellow face. Marvo falls back into the alleyway, where Valentin is present in order to encourage him to leave without further ado.

And guess what? Within twenty minutes, Shug is knocking at that same door, spruced up, clean-shaven, dressed in button-down shirt and clean slacks, with a fake-ass resumé that speaks of a wide-ranging diversity of experience in the food-preparation sector. Short-handed Hennessy is unsuspecting enough, as Speeny’d guessed, to immediately hire the midget as kitchen help without demur. After all, various bums and no-hope freaks try their hand at impromptu recruitment from time to time at this very alleyside door. Shug (resumé name: Kylan DeJennin Jackson) is a measurable step up from the usual dreck on that stoop.

“You’ll be on food prep,” says Hennessy to Speeny. “This is a great step up for you in responsibility, so don’t fuck it up.”

“Any incremental news on the wage front?” asks Speeny. “Any substantial augmentation of my periodical emolument?”

Hennessy looks funny at him.

Has Speeny lost it, he wonders? Maybe the sexual stress of being harassed by a grubby maladjusted short-eyes has done something to mess with his words?

“Look after the midget,” he says. “Show him where the broom and the mop are, and see that he gets all the dirt.”

So much for phase one. Phase one was – to repeat – a doozy.

Deliberations over phase two are by contrast much more intricate and protracted. These take place at The Calabria Bar, just as all developmental meetings for this project have done thus far.

Carlos Santana is an aural feature of this time. His version of Tito Puente’s “Oye ¿como va?” could stand as theme tune of the entire conspiracy.

Present: Valentín and Shug, zoot-and-track-suited, nursing themselves some thinking cocktails such as Red Bull and vodka. Speeny, teetotal on Diet Coke. Solemn where his co-conspirators are free-wheeling and spontaneous, generating blue-sky concepts with brio.

Not present, but lurking: Marvo, over by the bar, sinking brewskis and soaking up conspiratorial vibes. Though rightfully he’s too diffident to venture over and start shooting the shit with Speeny, his obsession and former fetish. Certain dagger-looks aimed his way from Valentín serve as effective forcefields, barriers made of insubstantial rage and the immanent promise of very real harm.

So Marvo lurks dangerously at a distance, though whether dangerous to himself or to the plotters at the table is still a matter in abeyance. Time will tell.

“So we’ve got Shug into the kitchen, that worked a treat,” says Valentín. “Now the tricky part. How we goin’ to put the squeeze on mister cookie-boy Hennessy?”
“Been thinking,” murmurs Speeny. “What we need to do is– ”
“Squeeze his balls,” says Shug. “Compressing testicles is a classic never-failer.”
“Shaddap Shug,” snaps Valentín. “Speeny’s talkin’.”

Speeny nods acknowledgement to Valentín, then takes a paused slug of Diet. Goes down great, and he looks up to address them again refreshed:

“It’s what you said, Valentín. Business is about selling solutions to a problem you don’t got. Hennessy don’t got no problems now, but he could soon enough, if we make it our business to supply him some.”

Valentín nods his head wisely, the slick ringlets that grace his skull sheen in the low light and his rich lips purse with understanding. “Supply-side economics, I like it.” He leans in as Speeny bends forward to confide.
Shug bustles his little head into the clutch that’s developing. “Tell us what’s on your mind, Speen-boy. Lay it all over us, brother.”

Over at the bar, Marvo weighs the risks of wandering over towards their table and picking up snippets of the huddle chat. On the whole he decides it’s not worth the bother, and begins counting his coins to see if he can order another beer.

This is about the time, little later of course, when they find Marvo in the same alley where he used to go for hand-relief for five bucks, Marvo with his throat slit and his tongue hauled out through the slit in what is only just then becoming known as a Colombian Necktie. These were those wild Clintonian times of the 90s, the Carteles were encroaching, and the glamor of mutilation was just a dawning glimmer.

Speeny stands out in the alleyway with other gawkers, perched on the kitchen door stoop. Marvo’s corpse lays under a tarp as a couple patrol officers poke around through garbage pails and rancid shit. You can tell they don’t like it.

Meanwhile the detectives, a hip young Black guy in Eddie Hazel t-shirt with a rad afro, and a middle-aged traditionalist in a mid-brown suit, make perfunctory inquiries round about the place. They don’t like it either. Loser death, stinky alley: no percentage in a nab, no glory in detection.

Forensic snappers come and lift the tarp. Speeny catches sight of the face. Marvo’s expression is grotesque, open-eyed, agonized, that yellowish pallor like urine-stained cream gone lumpy. Down below the chin a gushed mess, dried and cracked brown with camo-hued roaches exploring the new wealth. Speeny prefers not to look.

It’s his turn: the white middle-aged detective braces him on the kitchen doorstep. Lamest questioning ever.

“Know the guy?”
“Little bit. Worked in my kitchen as a sweeper. For a while. Boss dumped him, then he took to bummin’ around. Would see him round here panhandlin’, pickin’ up tricks.”
“Tricks?”
“BJs for fifty cents, hand a quarter, so they said. Pretty rough trade.”
“Your boss around?”
“Fish market. Be back around an hour, two hours...”
“Well,” said the cop. “We’ve got other shit, so. Give him this card? Ask him to call us?”
“Sure,” said Speeny, placing the cop’s business card carefully in his front apron pocket.

The tarp flaps up. Marvo’s death grimace upside-downs a flat reproach at Speeny for dishonoring him.

Unwarranted, thinks Speeny. Really there wasn’t much to dishonor when it came to Marvo.

Probably knew nothing. Still, easier this way anyway.

So much for phase two. Hennessy feels the squeeze. Problems. Cockroaches, back-alley murders, bad juju. Business down, the quality glossies seeing his joint as a no-no, a dose of bad scandal, the seamy type, not the hip scandal that puts asses on seats and mouths around the day’s special. Bankrupt stink, broke-ass naughtiness, that hinky whiff of grubby failure.

Phase three comes in a rush, like this:

Tonight is a slow night, as they have often been recently. Hennessy appears in the kitchen to send home the sous-chef Martin and the general helper-outer whose name nobody can remember. He doesn’t say so, but he’s likely never going to have them back in the kitchen again.

Hennessy looks like shit. He looks like death warmed over, as if death were a puffy soufflé that was simultaneously burnt to fuck and undercooked. His face has collapsed a little but only on one side. His chef outfit is unwashed and desperate. His days of special sections in the Sunday supplements, the little snapshots in which he beamed from the WHAT’S HOT columns in the papers, they are long gone.

Hennessy takes a glug or two from his namesake, the French VO brandy that sits over the dessert counter for bruléing the caramels.

“Closing up early,” he gasps. “I want you two to close the kitchen and clean up.” He sits down and loosens his chef buttons, swigs the cognac once more. “Hey, where’s the midget?”

“Gone to get somebody,” replies Speeny.
“Hey, turn off the broth,” says Hennessy, indicating the giant pot on which his famed bouillabaisse is simmering. It can reduce slow like that for hours and hours.
“Sure,” says Speeny, turning as if to switch off the gas, but not actually doing it. The huge pot of broth bubbles on softly.

“Having a rough night, boss?” he says as he turns back, wiping his grimy cloth over the countertop surfaces and clattering a few plates as if putting things in order.
“Whadda you think? Three booked, just called to cancel.”
“Seems like there’s kind of a problem.”
“Whadda you think?” Hennessy’s tanked the cognac. He looks around for the cooking wine, finds it behind him on the counter top, spits out the cork.

Tap tap tap at the kitchen door, from the alleyway side. “I’ll get it,” says Speeny.
“Tell ‘em to fuck the fuck off,” growls Hennessy from his chair. He’s spilled red wine down his not-quite-white chef jacket, the stain spreading out round his chest.

In steps Valentín. Large, broadshouldered even broader in his double-breasted zoot-suit of lustrous pearly gray with puce trimmings. Tie a tasteful matt gray, clasped with a platinum tie-clip. Topped by, as special panache for this occasion, his zoot fedora in matching gray, natch, with silken hatband sporting an ostrich plume.

Tagging alongside him is Shug, not quite up to his thighbone, kitchen apparel history, sportswear-clad, lycra beanie and gangsta bandana, shades bad n’black in the afterdark fluorescence of the kitchen tubelights.

Speeny stands the other side of Valentín so the dark zoot-suiter and his impressively tailored bulk forms the decorative center, Shug the other side and he this side, admittedly the least impressive in the sartorial sense. Rangy, his misfitting face a conciliation, he adopts a lopsided stance part-menace, part-reassurance, hands akimbo and palms open with the peace offering of nothing that can stab or slash.

“Brought a friend to talk with you, boss,” says Speeny. “Him n’us think you’d like to hear about his business proposition.”

Hennessy’s eyes are saucers, goggled saucers of bloodshot webbing half-lost in the blurry focus of his drunk. He opens his mouth as if to say something, then shrugs and slumps his shoulders, takes a swig of the cooking wine bottle and gestures for Valentín to speak.

Phase three was going good. No problems whatsoever with phase three. And then...

Valentín was presenting his spiel on behalf of a local consortium, Hennessy was listening patient and attentive, Speeny was gesturing one moment with mollifying signs and the next with motions of stern warning, but Hennessy wasn’t really looking at him anyway. All going smooth as silk, all tickety-boo.

But then Shug the motherfucking dwarf had to initiate his own phase. Call it phase fuckin’ four. Nobody’d planned for any phase four, but it’s what was happening.

Valentín, reasonable man-o’-business, art-of-the-dealin’ Hennessy with a solution to his problem: “...so we’d be happy to step in and take over for you on the day-to-day executive side, so you could step back, relax a little, who knows maybe retire? An’ you’d be realizing a substantial lump-sum payment...”
“Yeah asshole, just settle with us, man. Take your gentrifyin’ bullshit fancy-ass restaurant outta our barrio, motherfucker!”
“Hey Shug,” says Speeny. “Cool it, bro. Let Val do the talkin’, man, he’s our designated negotiator, we’re just here to lend support. Know what I’m sayin’?”

But some infernal bug has crawled up Shug’s tiny ass and he won’t quit. He’s berating Hennessy for stepping into a barrio where he’s not wanted, pushing up business rates, making the place unaffordable, I don’t-know-what-all. He’s on a grievance roll, just can’t be stopped.

“Hey fuckface!” calls Hennessy, “Chill out, you lil’ asshole. Nobody asked for your opinion. Button it, let the man say his say.”
“I’ll give you asshole, cabrón,” says Shug, a ball of inexplicable rage now, unleashed, untramelled. He flicks out a switchblade and waves it more or less in Hennessy’s face.

Later, Speeny will remember what went wrong. I mean, before this going wrong. He remembers that before Shug went outside to fetch Valentín, he stepped back into the bathroom and came back with his nose all powdered, sniffin’ like a lil’ freak. Bad coke. Bad, bad nieve de Florida, cut with something mean and surly. Now the small person’s gone all knife-happy and the deal’s headed sideways.

First Hennessy makes as if to rise, but then he jams a look of rigid torsion on his face and falls back into the chair, clutching at his chest. Speeny figures that Shug’s shivved him, and looks for blood blooming on the off-white jacket. But there’s only the wine stain, turning dark and fading dry in the fluorescent glare. Hennessy’s unstabbed alright, but looking critical, shaking and breathless in his plank-rigid posture on the seat.

Meanwhile Valentín’s swooped up Shug with one hand and grabbed hard at his right wrist holding the switchblade, which sure enough drops to the floor. He tosses Shug over to Speeny who catches him, a textbook midget wide receiver. Valentín moves hard then on Hennessy, checking ear-to-chest, yanking open his chef jacket and starting some half-assed version of CPR. Buttons fly and Hennessy starts to foam and jerk.

Shug is yelling, coke-mean and disarmed and furious. “Get rid of him!” yells Valentín. “Shut him the fuck up!”

For possibly the only time in his life so far, Speeny loses all his stoner composure. He’s spooked: the noise, the unwarranted action, the reversal of fortunes. With the small man struggling and kicking, hauling out fingers to scratch at his cheek, he looks around. And he sees it there, bubbling...

“So you wanna talk me through it, Jeff?” says Theo. “Since you got here first an’ all?”

Uniformeds bustle here and there. Forensic snappers snap, the pop and whirr of cameras a familiar music to Theo’s ears by now. Nobody bothers much with forensic bootees or gloves in this place. It’s not really that kind of murder.

A bit bedraggled, is Theo. Was hanging out with some homies, just a little ways down the block from here actually, when he got this homicide sqwawk. He stands facing the white detective in his crumpled besuited getup — Jeff, his partner of all of two weeks.

He’s not sure how this will work out. It’s not really like those chalk-and-cheese TV cop shows where beyond the badinage and harsh raillery there’s a true bond of comradeship building. Not much connection here. Not much camaraderie. More like chalk and chocolate.

“So first here, we got the owner, one Robert Hennessy, fifty-six,” says Jeff Noonan, gesturing at an overweight man in ripped off-white jacket. “No signs of violence to the body, though his garments are torn as you can see.” He smirks as he gestures with his left hand at the winestained t-shirt, the grayed-ashenbrown face with its rictus of pain. “Presumed natural causes.”

They step over to the kitchen doorway, the rear door that leads to the alley. There’s a bloodsplash on the stoop.

“Watch out you don’t step in that.”
“Yeah, it’s like you get so used to it you don’t see it.”

Here’s a body displaying some quite obvious signs of violence. Face battered, deep bruising around the neck. Wearing a kitchen apron. Odd-looking features, irregular to begin with, made all the worse by that beating.

“Kitchen employee – we’re looking for positive ID on this guy,” says Jeff. “But actually I talked to him just the other day when we came for the shout on the fruity sex worker with the neck-tie, remember? Right out here in the alley.”

“Connected, you think?” asks Theo. He can’t see why, but he can’t see why not either.
“Who the fuck knows?” says Jeff, like it’s a dumb question. “Anyway, death by strangulation on this one, we surmise.”
“Guess so, Jeff,” says Theo. “Both of ‘em caught in a robbery, older guy kicks off with fishy ticker, younger one struggles with assailant, loses.”
“Fairly simple, I’d say,” says Jeff. “Not lookin’ to tie this one in with the alleyway neck-tie. Keep it simple, opportunist robb–”

“Detectives… DETECTIVES! You need to take a look at this!” A call from inside the kitchen. They turn on the stoop and step inside over the decedent. This time they step in the blood and trail it over the kitchen floor. Sometimes you don’t see.

A uniformed, Officer Gordon is it? holding up a huge cover over a simmering pot, big as a trashcan, like twenty gallons or more. The officer’s looking pretty upset, holding his hand to his mouth and... gagging? sobbing?

Something smells good, thinks Theo, and his stomach growls. No supper so far. The rich scent of something seasoned with red wine and thyme, with rosemary and a stock of prime beef, swells up from the steam clouding over the pot. A rich and hearty odor.

The uniformed officer drops the pot cover with a clang and rushes out into the alleyway. Theo stands alongside Jeff at the low stovetop, stands on tippy-toe at the brim of the big big pot, and peers inside. And sees.

Sees a red-colored headrag floating amid the bubbles. Sees a fan of dark straight hair spread out across the surface of the soup. Sees the scalded hands bob-bob-bobbing as if trying to clutch at the bubbles popping between those peeling fingers.

END NOTE

Many thanks to who read through the draft and made such excellent suggestions.

This pìece will be the title story of my collection of noir tales which will be coming out soon.

Florence in August is the inferno.

Abandon all hope: pray for AC.

Here’s the Ponte Vecchio, noontime tourists sweating and jostling in pinkened clumps. Heatshimmer wavygravying a fetidfunk off the Arno River in dogday heat. American deodorants and kiosk wafflesyrup commingled with waft of garlic from the Oltrarno restaurants, rich sludge stink of mudbanks, feral catshit.

Eight hundred years ago Dante met Beatrice on this bridge and the encounter birthed both a heaven and a far more memorable hell.

And here’s light-fingered Fisadeia, nymph-named, working pockets, handbags and the all-too-open backpacks of heedless visitors. Hayseeds from Indiana, goggle-eyed, google-mapped, brain-stuffed by art and dazed with architecture.

Little Fizz delves in their neglected belongings, dips for treasure and plucks up cash and knicknacks in flicker fistfuls. Rick pickings from these hicks turned sluggish from jetlag and early pasta, and the polizia turistica sheltering out of blastfurnace summer in cool unseeing corners.

She’s disguised as who she is, the best disguise for those engaged in petty crime. Young Italian style: black leather jacket, mauve culottes, caligula sandals with stiletto heels. Designer mirrorshades conceal her shifty gaze as it scans prey. A desirably anonymous face framed in ruthless scrapeback of ravenblack hair. Urban camouflage: the capacious Hermès swagbag.

Midpoint of the bridge is where the action’s at.

Geeks gawp and stall, rubbernecking and snapping their instas. Tourguides, warbanners raised high, lead national mobs to this spot contemplated by so many millions of eyes since Dante’s eyes happened upon Beatrice’s beauty.

Hubbub is max. Fizz gets to work amid polyglot babble and bodyheat crush. Koreans mill with Canucks, Egyptians with Englishblobs scorched raw, their sensitive skin to be avoided.

She’s petite and unobtrusive. Other pickpockets have partners to stage distractions. Here the timeless beauty of Florence is distraction enough.

Simultaneity: two events at once.

BONG - noon angelus rings out once from Giotto’s Campanile. And now a quick strong hand clamps Fisadeia’s wrist, this sudden grip freezing her theft in mid-motion. Time stops and the crowd’s jabber seems to hush around her captured hand.

She looks up into his face. Shades like hers, mirrored into the mirror of her shades, an endless vista of mirrored faces reduplicate. An abysm of regard and eyes all yet unseen.

“Looking for this?” His left hand’s snatched his iPhone back from her right hand, held fast in his right, grip strong but gentle. He smiles: perfect white teeth in a field of coffee-brown. His face is full, smooth, close, reflection on reflection. Could be rockstar or policeman.

She smiles. Caught fair and square. His grip relaxes.

“Who needs it?” he says, and passes his phone to her left hand. “But now you won’t be able to call me.” His grip’s released; she’s free. “Tomasso,” he says.

She tosses the phone over the side of the bridge and it splunks into the midpoint of the river, between bank and bank. “Who needs to call?”

All asquawk, the tourists stand gaping as together they walk away towards the Oltrarno.

This is my REAL contribution to the Broad Ripple BUILDING BRIDGES project. Not having read the submission call properly, I didn’t realize it had a wordcount limit of 500 words.

My previous piece went over double that, and while I do quite like it, I didn’t fancy cutting it down so brutally to fit that limit, preferring instead to do something that’s designed with that constraint in mind.

So, here’s a tiny crime-noirish-meet-cute-romance-flash. Hope you dig it.

THE SHIELDBREAKER SAGA

FIC PRESENTS: Building Bridges for Broad Ripple

WE THE UNDERSIGNED have, over our eighteen-or-so months of undersigning things, put several mutual aid initiatives in place to directly benefit members of the Substack fiction-writing community…

Read more

2 months ago · 83 likes · 37 comments · Thomas Clark Schecter, Haly, the Moonlight Bard ✒️, Inzani D'Arpeggio, M.P. Fitzgerald, Emil Ottoman, Nick Winney, James Worth, Vinny Reads, Judith Ashcraft, Dylan Bosworth, Hunty Heifer, and Andrew Robert Colom

[EDIT 7 September - Having realized that this piece goes way over the wordcount limit of 500, and not wishing to cut it unduly, I hereby withdraw it from submission to the BUILDING BRIDGES project. Instead I’ve made a flash fiction designed to account for the constraint, which you can read here if you like]

Mavurin the knife sharpener used to meet Kika the folder of napkins and sheets underneath the bridge over the swollen creek most weekday afternoons when their daily tasks were accomplished. The obvious symbolism of the knifethrust and soft enfolding fabric didn’t register with them. They were simple folk, not the kind to inquire into emblems and hidden intents; they simply enjoyed the lovemaking.

They chose to meet under the bridge, equidistant from their two towns, wishing to avoid malicious scrutiny and attendant gossip.

One of these afternoons under the iron structure Kika considered her lover. Mavurin lay naked, dozing with a cigarette in his lips, the light gone out, the smoulder untroubled by purposeful breaths, the man breathing soft and regular in his peace.

He had a round fleshy face, always cleanshaven, giving him a babyish look. Eyes which when opened were deepset and startling dark, hardwood-dark. He had full lips like a girl’s, mismatching his body, which though hairless was taut and lean. The round face and the bulbous lips made him seem almost comical. His glans, too, was swelled and globular, laying there upon his thigh like a separate beast.

He stirred awake, shifted sleep-heavy eyes to her, and unexpected even to herself she confided in him, she blurted out:

I don’t want to be left all alone under the cold earth.

He took a moment to come into his woken presence, taking in the iron bridge and its underside which though unseen to those who crossed it was yet adorned with flourishes and wrought curlicues.

There was an inevitability about everything in that hour as the bruiseclouds bunched up in the August heaviness and rumbled but wouldn’t rain.

He lit his cigarette and replied:

You won’t be alone. You’ll have loved ones watching over you. A lover or two to lay there alongside you.

You?

Laughing: Not me, doll. I will never die.

She knelt there and pondered this difference between them, wondered if he measured the asymmetry of her scrawny breasts - left fuller, right drawn like the udders of a childless cow - her countable ribs. The scrawn of neck and clavicle, ungenerous, unappealling. She thought that with his thick obliging cock and his egglike glans he could have his pick of women and questioned what he was doing with her, a girl from the enemy town, these many afternoons under the bridge.

Your hair is nice. He spoke as if answering her thoughts. You have a fine body. Besides...

I’m revolting. She spoke with more vehemence than she’d intended.

Laughing: You lie. Like all women, you lie. Fishing, they call it. Well, I won’t say any more. I said my piece.

But it was true.

Here’s the story about the bridge. Long ago once a brave general led a charge of his men under a storm of fire across the bridge and so won a war. He became a great emperor or something. That was in the grandparents’ time or earlier. The iron slats of the bridge had all been replaced, from a basic structure to the ornament and rust of today, but it was still the same bridge. That was the story.

Now it was war again. But as yet there was no fighting in this place, which was by no means as strategically vital as it had been in the days of that warlord emperor. Now this region was a backwater, and though the bridge was a front line, nobody even stood guard here. The towns, notional adversaries, watched each other across the swollen creek with the sullen hostility mandated by their sovereigns, but did nothing. It was their duty to resent each other but no orders had been received to do more, so there it was left.

Now Marvurin the knife-sharpener of the district and Kika the folder of napkins and sheets at the Foremost Laundry had all the more reason to be furtive in their lovemaking. Not just malicious gossip and scornful looks, but accusations of treachery now menaced their trysting afternoons. Kika thought they should change their meeting spot to somewhere further away, more concealed. But they’d become used to this place tucked into the elbow between the sustaining pillars and the packed dark dust, and left their plaid picnic blanket there betweentimes. Nobody ever came to disturb them, not even rats or voles.

Thunder grumbled and swore in those heavy clouds that lowered from the sky towards the swollen creek that had no name, just ‘creek’. The iron bridge creaked in response to the soft buffetings of pressure. Now they climbed over each other, these small lovers, in the face of such immense disturbance, the intimacy of their contact being the one comfort in a bruised world.

They spoke in the lulls: There. Touch here. Go slower.

It wasn’t necessary to speak because they well knew one another’s wants and pleasures. But these whispered words helped in such a place, where a storm brewed and all without rain.

It was war. They were traitors and enemies. They had disregarded the sovereign wish of their nations in order to taste the imperfect union of their frailties. They were mistaken.

Overhead, in the thinnest of air where nothing sounds, a projectile was at the apex of its arc and just now descending. It was a warhead, a head filled with war. It built and built in velocity and in its fall it began to whistle, then to shriek.

The projectile tasted the thickening air and was glad. This was what it was made to do. Its purpose was clear. Soon its speed passed through the sound and it was silent again, the shriek in its wake like a train of joy.

Done as part of the FiC mutual aid project BUILDING BRIDGES in aid of the Broad Ripple Center in Indianapolis.

Thanks to for organizing and for prodding me in my August lazy haze…

THE SHIELDBREAKER SAGA

FIC PRESENTS: Building Bridges for Broad Ripple

WE THE UNDERSIGNED have, over our eighteen-or-so months of undersigning things, put several mutual aid initiatives in place to directly benefit members of the Substack fiction-writing community…

Read more

2 months ago · 69 likes · 31 comments · Thomas Clark Schecter, Haly, the Moonlight Bard ✒️, Inzani D'Arpeggio, M.P. Fitzgerald, Emil Ottoman, Nick Winney, James Worth, Vinny Reads, Judith Ashcraft, Dylan Bosworth, Ichor and Embers, and Andrew Robert Colom

PICTURE CREDIT: Jeff Buck at geograph.org.uk
Photo of Aldford Iron Bridge, Cheshire, UK

In this slowscape stretch of sunup
                                                           - night fug fleeing -
the shimmer quiverlifts dewback bucking steeds
mist groups itself and glimmers in oddlight
coagulating now to sly wraithfinger tendrils
that grip by many throats the insubstantial airs



As the incendiary rose of sun blooms up over wetland
a wobbling flamingo bursts forth from literal shrubs
ruffling pink feathers 
                                        - an indeterminate mood.
Asymmetrically peering down your offensive bill
perfervid bird, you quiz new babyday for hints 



Mephitic vapours go coating all the gravels and the waters
and peeled eucalyptus boughs with a sweaty radiance
 - fake sheen of time's persistence, clown paint of permanence - 
denying mutability in the face of axiomatic swampy stinks.
But the unconvinced flamingo's incorrupt n' stolid in refusal



Flamingo snakes neck to sinuousities - says once: 'Bollocks',
speaking distinctly, insistent, an adept of transience -
then resumes that silent dubious stalking of the shore
reverse knees in defiance of all sense and precedent
stoops to crickets and to frogs and to reverences of dawn



A wetland goblin now in stained culottes erupts from splashes
of surprised water - comedy shoes bogged in miasmic sludge -
boos and hoots like all prankery gone all awry, like failed fun. 
The shocked flamingo says once distinctly: 'Shit' 
                                                                            - but doesn't fly away -
shimmies as a ruse slow wingtips, makes as if to stretch 
                                                                                        - and stays. 

Ghostlight of dawn solidifies, mist tendrils dwindle away to clarity.
Homunculus dense as planets, stuck in all that kneedeep mud 
with his undue malice. Day develops ideas, sketching all possible paths.
The scene's suspended 
                                  - observant goblin, bird in depth of wadewater - 
at last flamingo under goblin's baleful stare picks out a way ahead. 




Saying once, distinctly: 'Fuck' 
                                                 - the bird vamooses stately as kings
into anonymity of high-bobbing reeds to murmur lone foulnesses. 
Now with that unique and prominent preachspot that he craved
 - wielding a swaggerstick, in lush Provençal accent like a troubadour - 
sludgegoblin sings to you and me a scabbed encomium on Time


                             Time's your only enemy
                                 Time is not your friend
                                     Today your sad beginning
                                         Tomorrow your sadder end


Pleased - adopting a new tone, John-Wayneish - proceeds the rogue:
'Pilgrim, patssy, pusssy, oh my plausible pard and peephole! 
I'm all for invitin' ye to a hostelry hootenanny this fair morn - 
to an Occult Pie Party for Individual Pie-Eatin' Units such as ye - 
all ye need do: say Yea or Yes or Sí or Oui - assent howe'er ye may.'


You agree - no brainer - breakfast is sweet, dinner aeons back. 
'Arrooo arrray!' squeals mannikin - 'By Demeter's sweetarse, ye're agreeable!'
Then the menu's told by that swampy goblin lad to your very great amaze:
'Ma tripes, bro! You gonna be chowin' on my very innards, swee'pea!
A what-they-call sacrifishul rite, kiddo, for restorin' o' th' primal unity!'


A seraglio of seconds parade in swamp as this goblin's guts are spread.
We chomp and chaw on his chewy viscera, you and I 
                                                                                         - remember? -
as gobbets glop in mire to pepper its funk with iron and with irony.
Time drops away 
                        - flamingo day comes stalled and it's morning forever.
Scratch n' sniff, scat n' snitch, snatch-up n' stitch-up 
                                                                      - time's got all seized-up!

Not pies we made then of the living squirming tripes, but hyperpancakes
folded then in novel origamis of taste and specularity, dimensions 
laced with that syrupy bite of authentic suffering and ecstasy, mouthfeel
dribbling red ick on chins - spicy regret, sugared rage, the salt of bliss - 

The cavern abdomen of swamp hobgoblin an aching forever of abyss.

ILLUSTRATION CREDIT

GOBLIN by Sarah Phinn Huntley from The Illustrated Field Guide to DMT Entities (David Brown and Sarah Phinn Huntley, Park Street Press, 2025)

The Shipping Forecast

Broadcast every single day for the last 101 years, the BBC Shipping forecast is one of the most popular broadcasts on radio.

In the forecast, the waters around the British Isles are divided into 31 sea areas, also known as weather areas. A forecast for each individual sea area covers wind speed and direction, precipitation, and visibility.

This one is read by Alan Bennett and is included in the story.

Viking, North Utsire, South Utsire: southwesterly five or six veering westerly or northwesterly four or five; moderate or rough; showers; good.

The stormfront is in abeyance as he sits there eating his breakfast: fried bread, sausage, bacon, two fried eggs, black pudding, mushrooms. This diet will kill him before he’s sixty, but it’s too late to change now.

Mum cleans the frying pan and goes back upstairs in her dressing gown. Here I am, back from the paper round, muddy slush on workboots. He sops up the egg yolk with the crusty golden fried bread.

The radio on, BBC Shipping Forecast at 6.30 am

Forties, Cromarty Forth, Tyne, Northwest Dogger: southwesterly veering westerly or northwesterly five or six occasionally seven later; moderate or rough; showers; good, occasionally moderate.

He sips on his tea: steaming hot, five sugars. Dead before sixty. Looks at me as I faff with the kettle and Nescafé, condensation building on my chilled nylon parka in the kitchen fug. I chew on the fur lining of the hood. The nylon fur has become mangy with anxiety.

“How is it that you left the kitchen light on all night then?” To the casual observer his manner might seem easygoing, casual. But those in the know, the intimates, are able to taste the undergrowl, the falling barometric pressure of resentment.

Southeast Dogger, Fisher: southwesterly five to seven, becoming cyclonic gale eight to storm ten for a time; rough or very rough; rain or squally showers; moderate or poor, occasionally good.

“It’s a fluorescent tube,” I say. “It costs more to switch it on one time than to run it continuously for twelve hours. We did that at school. There’s burglars operating in the neighbourhood, they said so down at the shop.”

I know this is heresy, but it is true. Galileo suffered for his truth, and then he pointed his finger at the sky and said: “And yet the moons of Jupiter move, as anyone can see.”

Me, with my Nescafé and steaming breath, with my nylon parka weeping dew, I am a Galileo of fluorescent lighting.

“Fuck yer lip,” he says, rising from the table.

German Bight: southwest six to gale eight, becoming cyclonic storm ten to hurricane force twelve for a time; rough or very rough becoming high; rain; moderate or poor.

“It don’t cost you nothin’!” I say, making my voice more London, more English, than it’s ever been. He hates the fact that his sons are English, talk like the English. He prays to the framed pictures of Hitler, of Che Guevara, of Moshe Dayan and Enoch Powell lining the kitchen walls that the English might come to respect him, but he squirms with hatred for them nonetheless.

“Fuck yer feckin’ lip,” he says and makes as if to strike. The navvy’s thick right arm goes back, the palm and those sausage fingers. Then it’s sprung forward like a trebuchet, swift clean inward arc.

Humber: cyclonic severe gale nine to violent storm eleven becoming southwest six to gale eight; rough or very rough; rain then squally showers; moderate or poor becoming good.

But a strange thing happens. I catch the wrist as it approaches my cheek. He’s slow, too slow. It stops dead in the air an inch from my face. I can feel the heat surging off it, radiating across that space between the palm and my soft hairless cheek. His face contorts, what is this, but it’s true: his wrist is held fast. So amazed is he that he doesn’t even think to try the other hand. He’s out of practice with scrapping. I ain’t.

Thames, Dover: southwest storm ten or violent storm eleven, decreasing seven to severe gale nine; rough or very rough becoming very rough or high; high rain then slight showers; moderate or poor.

“Ye fuckin’ little bastard!” he says, and tries to yank back his right hand. It doesn’t move. A realization brews like a squall on the dark sea. I am as strong as him.

Wight, Portland, Plymouth: southwest severe gale nine to violent storm eleven, veering west seven to severe gale nine; very rough or high occasionally very high in Plymouth squally showers; moderate or poor, occasionally good.

Now he figures out his other hand exists. He lets loose with his left, but slow again, too slow. That hand is trapped too. My right foot goes behind his foot and trips him, he stumbles, down on his knees. My hands still on his wrists, still pinned tight. Thunder and lightning: he roars out a babble of rage, and I hear the steps of Mum and my brothers clattering down the stairs.

Shannon, Rockall, Malin, Hebrides Bailey: northwest six to gale eight very occasionally severe, gale nine in Shannon and Rockall; very rough or high squally showers; good, occasionally moderate.

What they see as they cluster in the kitchen doorway, illuminated by that merciless fluorescent light: a middle aged man, overweight, red with rage, frothing slightly at the corners of his mouth, kneeling on the floor, a kid in a parka standing over him, hands gripped over the thicker hairier wrists of his father.

Fair Isle, Faroes: cyclonic becoming northwest five to seven, decreasing four at times; rough or very rough showers; good, occasionally moderate.

His eyes flick towards the door and the aghast family bundled there. “Sure an’ I didn’t mean nothin’ by it,” he gasps. “No need for all this malarkey, like.” Fog and rising mists rolling in, the obscured tide.

Southeast Iceland: northerly five or six increasing seven to severe gale nine; rough or very rough; occasional rain; moderate or good, occasionally poor.

The wrists are released; the red-faced man rises with some difficulty. He stands there puffing, stormclouds of rage boiling in a tempestuous cyclone. And the clouds dissipate, they disappear: the huge dark pillars of thunderous wrath evaporate like nothing at all was ever there.

Mum edges into the kitchen to pick up the breakfast plate and its congealed fat and bacon rinds tough as sinews, pick up the drained teamug with its crystalline sludge of sugar at bottom, and put it all in the sink. She moves with grace between the ragged rocks like a clipper.

Dad straightens up with dignity and strides straightbacked out of the kitchen, up the stairs.

To the upstairs bathroom to ponder his usurpation, to shit and brood, to strain against his furred arteries with his swelling begrudgement and gall.

Blistered wanderers drifted up from the outlands and listened.

“What is the meaning of utopia, brethren?” asked the Speaker.
“I’ll tell you. Utopia builds on happenstance and improves on random gifts.”

Gesturing expansively to the compass points, out over the cracked road: “Look at this place. Two ways meet at a crossroads. There is some power to that, is there not? What brought these roads together, friends? Some dim design in a planner’s mind…?”

A stamp of his foot. “Or was it happenstance, the dumb contingency of fate? Or was it even some godly impulse, a whim that manifests as this cross on the ground?”

Out over the back fields to the east the sky purpled. Closer to the crossroads where this homily on providence unwound, the shattered building of the Conoco filling station slouched on its collapsed ground like a lumpen giant.

Figures picked about inside the Conoco, looking for some gift that had been spared the eyes and grasp of a thousand thousand foragers before them, a can of botulitic peaches perhaps, or a dry melted and remelted candy bar. They found nothing, of course, then wandered out to lift blistered faces to the speaker, for what else could they do?

There were maybe a dozen or fifteen gathered at that spot as the speaker went on, stood against the crackle of purple discharge in the excitable clouds of afternoon. He was stood on an abandoned car, a family sedan, rusted and scuffed. Its paintwork scabbed away in flakes, and all the windows were shattered and toothed with jagged remainings.

“Utopia, then, is the act of building on the beginnings that the designs of providence or the random sketchings of our fate have left us as our building blocks. We make better; we cease our labors; we retire in satisfaction, pleased at the beginnings we’ve made. Others come and build on that and then others still.”

The clouds began to clear, and the speaker gazd quickly at the sky and seemed satisfied. The sun came through, the old reliable sun, only a little changed, the light now altered as if it were always later than it was. Noonday light was like evening, afternoon was like the gloamlight of sundown.

“If we toil together, that, friends, that is our utopia. We carry utopia in our straining muscles as we stoop to tender the legumes, we hammer utopia into the timbers along with the nail which was before so bent but which we’ve straightened for this task.”

In the breaks of sunlight the speaker’s face was revealed. Unlike those who were gathered, there were no blotches or blisters on it. He was a middle-aged man, headhair and face stubble the same grizzled length like the fur of a silvery hound. One long thin scar ran from the crown of his head, down across the forehead, and alongside the nose to terminate at the lip. The hair around it was shocked whiter than the gunmetal gray of the rest, the nick in his moustache hair like a tiny moustache-within-a-moustache.

Like everyone, his dress was patched rags, but patched neater than the rough repairs made to the old ripped blankets and windcheaters of the blistered congregation. He was a cut above, or so it seemed to them as they clustered near but not too near on the rifts and rents in the blacktop at the crossroad where stood the dead sentinel of the old Conoco station.

A disturbance: an old woman, bulked up by swathes of rags, pushed through the listeners and shoved her way to the front. She stood beneath the preacher and spoke her complaint.

“Those are fine words, preachin’ man, but you ain’t told us anythin’ ‘bout feedin’ our bellies.”
“Perhaps your bellies are better empty, your sight all the clearer for your hunger.”
“The fuck you know ‘bout hunger, reverend? Standin’ up there with your fancy talk, utopia and happenstance and whatever the fuck. Poor starvin’ folks got no thoughts of all that spiritual horseshit, mister. Only a bowl o’ stew could suffice.”

The scarred man who’d been speaking eyed the sky anxiously. He seemed unperturbed by the woman’s carping, but something about the day or the time gave him an unease. He shifted, and bent down to address her now.

“What are you saying, sister?”
“Sayin’ shit or get off the pot. Sayin’ cease your vain predicatin’. Sayin’ feed us now, big guy.”

The scarred man glanced up again at the sky and seemed relieved.

“What if I offered you a miracle instead? What if I asked of the Lord, or the Cosmos, or Time itself and Fate, to blacken our sky this very moment?”

The woman seemed unimpressed. “And what iffen you did, ya bigmouth motherfucker? What then?”

He raised himself to his full height on top of the wrecked vehicle, lifted up his arms and addressed the others at the crossroads: “Behold!”

The sun’s light was so much dimmer than before The Kollapse, and it hardly strained the eyes to stare into the milky disk of it as it neared the western horizon above the fields, above the plains with all their splits and rifts. You could see the sun not much brighter than a full moon used to be, and you could see a bite being taken out of it. Time passed and the bite grew to swallow a third of the sun.

Krak-crows and the jitterings of prairie dograts ceased and the life around became a silence. There was a soft chiming in the air as the darkness gathered all the sound to itself and turned it back to the listeners as a remnant, a sonic wraith.

The man on top of his wrecked car spoke on…

There’s quite a lot of time between when you first notice that small bite taken out of the dimmed sun up there in the sky and when the disk becomes fully darkened, the bubbling glister and the ring of white fire. How much time? How many minutes? Nobody counts time by minutes any more in this world; time is counted by pulses of blood in the veins, the gasping and hawking of scarce breath.

During that unmeasured time here at the crossroads, Slate the Speaker goes on speaking to the assembled wanderers from the outland. It’s glib and easy for him by now to talk so passionately, though he’s never before had such an opportunity to gather in so many. Usually it will be one or two, and paradoxically it’s a greater verbal effort to convince one than to convince many.

As he spools out the alluring spiel of the Tomorrow Brotherhood without hardly any thought, prophecy piled upon foretelling, Slate’s mind turns to the woman standing at the front, the one who’d badgered him with all the complaints about empty bellies. She seems hearty for all her talk of starvation. In all the swathed rags it’s difficult to tell her weight, but her face and neck seem meaty enough.

He imagines her - in his mind he calls her Brigitte - rootling around through the sacks in the encampment larder and finding nothing. Maybe a warty turnip or two. She’s going to be the first. All the others will have followed him to the Tomorrow Brotherhood encampment, the old airfield, but she will be the first.

As he goes on in his confident babble, he envisions the future, for despite all his trickery with almanacs and predetermined celestial events, he is something of a prophet. He sees the future with the clarity of a single ray of light escaping the sun’s corona.

She’ll look up from the near-empty sacks and demand to know where the food is kept. He’ll inform her then that the harvest is due. That the first ones to gather the harvest traditionally get the lion’s share, the first pick. He’ll ask Brigitte if she’d like to be a First Harvester.

She’ll say Yes. The hungriest ones always say Yes.

And then the walk to the perimeter fence, to the Harvesting Field. He’ll hang back just enough, while the other Tomorrow Brethren emerge to follow them at a distance. Except for the ones still in the Terminal Building, welcoming the blistered arrivals to their new home.

Now she’ll be at The Mouths and he’ll make that little summoning whistle which they understand. Two soft whoops.

Out they’ll swarm, the crawling ones and the bright flying ones. Brigitte’ll be able to outrun the crawling ones - she looks plenty healthy and more than fast enough - but the flying ones will be on her in but a gasping breath or two. They’ll be all over her head and she’ll flail and stumble and go down. Slate’s seen it enough to know how it’ll play out.

Flying ants, or are they termites? Not black like ants are - iridescent wings and eyes and pale milky bodies. The Tomorrow Folk call them BanderAnts. “Because they bander together”. They fly not like insects fly, random and darting, but like hawks, direct to their target and straight as an arrow. It’s a weird thing to see, this flight: so unnatural, so purposeful.

The crawling ones that scurry out after the fliers are longer, fat as a man’s arm, with scorpion-like tails, and have those purplish iridescences striped lengthwise along the segmented cream-colored thorax. They have a strange sweetish smell like babies supping on sweetened milk if you get close enough to them. Only Slate and one or two others dare to get so close.

There’s an understanding between the swarm at The Mouths and the people clustered in the airfield terminal, the bedraggled community who call themselves the Tomorrow Brotherhood. When the struggle is done, when Brigitte ceases to grunt and to writhe, the Exchange will begin.

Brigitte lies there, being gnawed by a thousand mouths into a million pieces, and the crawling BanderAnts return back to The Mouths with tiny rich chunks of her.

The Tomorrow Folk have gathered a few paces behind Slate. And the Exchange begins.

Out now come the Carriers, more of the crawling creatures, in a procession stately and pompous as those old-timey European royal funerals used to be. In single file they process, each carrying a Grub. These are the quid pro quo for the small gobbets of Brigitte that are streaming back down inside the earth through The Mouths.

The Exchange, a mystery and a gift.

These Grubs are slightly bigger than footballs - than footballs used to be - and each one undulates with slight momentary pressures, bulbs and fists of inner soft white tissue pressing up against the yellowish translucence of their wet membrane skin. They too are segmented, except not strongly, but almost undefined as if their segmentation was an afterthough to their true form, bulbous pulsating blobs that sniff at the air with tufted muzzles. They are rich and generous organisms, like fat sacks of clotted cream in a restless animal motion.

When the file approaches where Slate stands, he bends down, but not too fast, for he remembers how he got his scar. He bends down, takes a fat Grub from each of the crawling BanderAnts, sniffing the sweetened air around them, and then turns back to hand the writhing thing to one of the Tomorrow Brethren. The Exchange is generous to them: a Grub for each of them in return for a single Harvest Sacrifice.

It is a beautiful thing. It is a gift of fate, or of some wry and humorous god, or just of some pure contingent random happenstance. The thing is not to question your gift but to receive it with grace.

And as Slate continued his speech on the top of the car wreck underneath the eclipse and the midnight noon sky, approaching his peroration now as the rings gleamed white fire at the borders of the sun, he saw all of future stretch around the world like a jacket woven for them all. As if preordained, written in some almanac which nobody would ever know how to rightly read.

And he looked down on the ragged woman at his feet and paused in his speech. He saw she was no longer scowling, but smiling wide with gap-toothed joy. And he smiled back at her, at his Brigitte, and conferred on her all the grace and beauty he could muster.

And the ring loosened at the edge of the sun and the light broke out again.

And all seemed much brighter and more hopeful than it had ever been before.

And... publish.

There: the website was live, the venture was launched. Forward Deployment LLC was now active as a start-up.

Jenelope O’Mee leaned back in her gamerchair and laced her fingers together behind her head. Felt good. Well, not good, exactly. It felt... something. A bit scary? Trepidation? Is that what they call it?

“The feeling is that of launching on a brave and rushing sea,” said the other in a rich voice. “Jagged rocks on one side, the sucking void of a maelstrom on the other. It is a journey, an adventure. An epic, if you will. It’s natural that there should be some trepidation.”

“Yes,” said Jenelope. “Natural enough.”
And then thought: what other? Who the fuck’s speaking to me?

Looking round, she was startled to discover that she wasn’t startled at all by the appearance of this stranger in her apartment. Sitting on the rug, cross-legged. A handsome man in his forties with salt-and-pepper hair in a conventional trim, short beard, dressed in a stylish slimline Italian one-button suit and black turtleneck. A single silver pendant with a small device of an all-seeing eye.

She should be alarmed right now, screaming, reaching for her phone to call it in. But it was like this visitor was expected, like he was supposed to be here. He exuded confidence and a sense of belonging. There was almost something more than that, almost something like an aura. Not an aura exactly, but something radiant. No, not something radiant, something...

“Excuse me, Ms O’Mee,” said the man. “I knocked but you didn’t reply. The door was open. I called but you seemed fully absorbed. Natural enough. A momentous hour, the foundation of a new enterprise, who knows? A firm that might be a giant in tech one day.” He stroked his silken beard, silver and dark. His other hand fondled the pendant, moving the tiny eye to meet Jenelope’s gaze. “Momentous,” he repeated. “I sat and waited for an opportune moment to address you.”

“But you, how did you know what...?”

“It’s a common feeling, believe me, I’ve met many many entrepreneurs in my time, from merchants in Tyre looking to set sail with valuable cargoes for new markets, to the man who invented a gun to fire around corners. There’s nothing quite like the present generation of strivers, though, so gifted, so...” He gestured about the apartment, a tiny space: a fold-out bed with dining table that deployed to eat or work while seated on the bed; half-sized cubic couch cramped into the corner, coffee table with entertainment tablet. “...so willing to renounce creature comforts and knuckle down to the grind.”

“It’s not easy, you know,” blurted Jenelope, not understanding why she was confiding in this absolute stranger. “A woman trying to break in to the military tech sector. You know what a sausage-fest it is, aeronautical engineering?”
“I understand that the CEOs of the major military contractors of the Pentagon are all women?” said the man, not confrontational, but quizzical. Like, what’s the problem here?

“I’m talking ground level, establishing yourself as an independent contractor,” said Jenelope. “I bet those Raytheon-Rockwell bitches sucked and fucked their way up the ladder.”
“The ‘casting target-range’, as it were,” said the visitor. “I see. However I’m not here to discuss the sexual politics of the military-industrial complex leadership class, as fascinating as that may be. I’m here to talk turkey. Tell me about your weapons system.”
“C’mon, man. How did you find out about kILLdRONE-X?” asked Jenelope. “I only just put up the website, you couldn’t’ve-”
“Little bird told me,” said the man with a droll smile. “Maybe it was the turkey I came here to talk.”

So the man sitting cross-legged on the rug listened with rapt attention, his three eyes all turned on her and her alone, as Jenelope made her first ever pitch for kILLdRONE-X. Fully modular, with guidance and warhead easily swapped out. Truly a multi-function all-weather weapons system with an affordable unit price.

“So you can sell it as a defensive weapon?” asked the visitor. “Market it to the public as defensive in nature but then easily switch to offensive uses?”
“Yup,” said Jenelope. “Versatility is the key.”
“And it has a full range of warhead packages?”
“Yessir.”
“Drone interceptor, tank-buster, artillery support.”
“Just click-click-click and you got that new offensive package ready to go. Fully modular, like I said.”

He seemed to be breathing more heavily, but his composure was unvarying. He placed his hands on his outstretched knees, thumbs-to-index-finger, like a medidating monk, and drew air in through his nostrils.

“Guidance to match, Ms O’Mee?”
“All pre-programmed. Just choose from the drop-down menu.”
“Anti-personnel?”
“Got a burster that sprays razor-edged steel darts at head-shoulder height,” said Jenelope. “Beauty is, it doesn’t even kill, but disables. Folks are there with steel darts stickin’ outta their eyes and ears, the medical teams are sent in... double tap. Triple. The cascade opportunities are endless.”

Breathing more deeply now, eyes half closed in beatific serenity and satisfaction.

“White phosphorous?” he inquired.
“Sizzle sizzle,” said Jenelope, excited now in spite of herself. This was after all an enthusiastic audience at last to her great project. All those ‘friends’ who’d reacted with disgust, the blanking, the humiliation. “It’s quite the sizzle, so I hear. The little specks drop onto the skin, keep twistin’ their way in, wormholin’ through the flesh, into the livin’ marrow. Unpleasant, yeah maybe, but quite an effective anti-personnel application.”
“And all fully automated. No special training required.”
“Idiot-proof. Plug and play. Fire and forget.”

The man lay on his back on the rug and looked up at the ceiling where the overhead fan hummed uneven, installed out of true and spinning skew-whiff, beset by friction and asymmetry. His long legs stretched out towards Jenelope at her work desk. She saw that the fine leather soles of his shoes were unmarked.

“It’s a beautiful product you’ve made, Jenelope O’Mee,” he said to the ceiling. “Truly, you should be very proud of your work.”
“Fully patented,” she said. “Don’t even think of stealing it, I have a patent attorney who’d-”
“No, no,” he said. “You’ve got me all wrong, Jen.”

He sat up, stood up somehow, without all the awkward knee motions that people would normally make raising themselves from such a posture. He took her hands in his and she let him. There was a soft pressure but no heat, no feeling of flesh being present in that grip. `

“I’m your opportunity, young lady,” he said, smiling strangely. “I’m your way in. I’m an angel investor.”

And there was a paper on her desk. And a fine old silver-nibbed fountain pen. He motioned for her to read it. “Please.”

She read. “This is a contract for an initial investment of $5 million dollars in return for an equity stake of 0.5% of the company,” said Jenelope. “Meaning my start-up firm according to this valuation is worth... one billion dollars!”

“Good at mathematics I see,” said the investor. “It figures that a genius such as yourself wouldn’t miss such a thing.” He was close to her face, he should be breathing on her neck, yet she felt... nothing, no breath, no warmth from his closeness.

She squinted at the space for signatures: “And you are… Doctor Malachi Hamascheet?”

He performed a little bow, left hand on his all-seeing eye pendant. “Pleased to make your formal acquaintance, ma’am. Chief executive of Azazel Investments, at your service.”
“Well everything seems... all in order. But...?”
“But please, Jen, what troubles you? Let’s clear the air, let’s not have any unspoken reservations. After all we are partners now.”
“Look... it’s that investors... partners. They usually want more than a half-point stake.”

“It could be ratcheted up as we go along, as the firm accumulates value, by mutual agreement. But I’m unlikely to ask for more. Here’s the thing, Jen: I’m not really in this for the money, but for the love of innovation.”
“Love of innovation.” Her tone was dry, unconvinced.
“I love to see brilliant minds succeed. It’s what the system’s all about, is it not?”
“I guess...”

His eyes urged the pen, gleaming softly as the moon rose through the window. She picked it up. She didn’t desire to pick it up, but she picked it up…

He had grappa to toast their partnership, or something like grappa - he had a strange word for it - something from his homeland. Ruby-colored and bittersweet like cloves and honey. Some strange aftertaste like fungal rot, like the taste on your cracked dry palate in the 3am sleepless night when death is in those moist bedsheets clinging to your clammy skin. She slammed it down straight from the bottle, shivered and then was glad of the fierce warmth that radiated through her body.

And then he took his leave. He assured her that his representatives would be in touch in the morning to set up production, begin hiring personnel, start on the business plan, compile the presentation decks. He promised her contact details of procurement staff in the adminsitration, the movers and shakers, the ‘in’ that she needed to make a start as a defense contractor in a big way.

“I sense big things brewing, Ms O’Mee,” he said in her tiny hallway as he shook her hand. “The next time I see you I think it will be in very different circumstances.”

And she couldn’t resist. After he walked out down the corridor, down the stairs, she leaned against the window pane, pushing her nose against the glass, forcing a view down onto the street. She couldn’t lean out, since as a suicide prevention measure in this low-income housing, the window couldn’t be opened more than a tiny crack.

The street below was quiet. Only a black cat moved among the dumpsters and wailed up at the crescent moon. She saw Dr Hamascheet come out of the building, stand there on the street, then something flickered and then... he wasn’t there.

She followed the gaze of the amazed black cat, its eyes laser-red turned up to the night sky. Up there above the city, poised as if between the horns of the descending crescent moon, was a great dark shape.

No, not dark like a black cat, she thought. Not simply black. That draught of her angel investor’s strange bittersweet liquor had gifted her with some strange insight.

Rather, the flying figure was radiant with the aura of the unseeable void. She looked into the sky again with the borrowed eyes of prophecy and she knew what she saw then.

She saw an angel soaring out into the abyss of tomorrow, with the whole piled-up wreckage of history at its back, the shattered buildings and all the bodies heaping up beneath it like a tower of some godlike construction never seen before this our gifted hour.

My tale is of the city of Barshilūna under the rule of Sulayman ibn Yaqdhan al-Kalbí al-Arabí, Walí of the Catalan lands by the Grace of Allah the Most Merciful.

This city, founded a thousand years before as Barkheno by Hamílcar the Carthaginian, was known later as the Roman Barkino and retained this harsh name under the Visigoths until its name was softened into the mellifluous Barshilūna by the lyrical beauty of the Arab tongue: a transition from the uncouth masculine to the graceful feminine.

Well, it is of this fair city I wish to speak now, how one day a poor man went weeping through her streets disconsolate. He was a Christian, a Visigoth named Roderic, and a poor man with many children. His wife had just given birth to their eighth child, a son, and they had no clothes, no money, and in time would have no food to give the boy. Nobody would even be Godfather to the child, for the Christians have this thing called a baptism where one promises to be a father in the eyes of God and this Godfather must give the birth family a money gift. Such is their barbarism.

Roderic went cursing his poverty through the streets near the Rambla where the creek flows from the hills, and there in the dawn light he met a radiant man who asked him what was amiss. He told the glowing golden man of his trouble, how he was poor with many children and that no man would be Godfather to his newborn son.

“I will be Godfather to your son,” said the beautiful radiant man.

“And who are you?” asked Roderic.

“I am Jeshua, Jesus called your Christ, the true-shooter, the one who aims and shoots true with an arrow of holiness.”

“No thank you, then,” said Roderic. “You are not a just divinity: to some you give plenty, and to others you give misery and want. You allow this division into rich and poor and do nothing. Good day to you.” And he went on his way.

Then he met a fiery man with deep crimson skin and black horns, with a rather fetching little pointed beard and tigery eyes, though sinister in mien. Again they conversed, and again Roderic told him how he had no money and nobody to be Godfather to his poor child.

“I will be Godfather to your son,” said the sinister one.

“And who are you?” asked Roderic.

“I am Sheitan, called the Devil by your people,” said the man, “though truly I do not deserve the rep they’ve given me. I step out into the world to seek human sympathy, for truly I am a man of wealth and taste. I will stand Godfather to your son.”

“Nay then, I must respectfully decline,” said Roderic. “You are unjust, because you reward those who’ve served you faithfully all their lives with eternal torments, which hardly seems fair.” And he went on his way.

Then, at the place where the Rambla stream meets the sea, where men point into the distance and dream of New Worlds, Roderic met a third man. A tall thin man dressed in mournful robes with a scythe on his shoulder. Hooded so deeply that his face could not be seen.

This man also asked what ailed the poor beggarman. Again Roderic told of his woes, and how he had no Godfather for his baby.

“I will be Godfather to your son,” said the mysterious one.

“And who are you?” asked Roderic.

“I am Death.”

“Then I accept your gracious offer sir,” said Roderic. “You are a just man because you give the same to all, and make no distinction between the high-born and the low-born.”

So Death and the poor man went to fetch the child and they all went to the Church for this Christian baptism, this dunking-in-the-water which means so much to them. The Christian washes once in his lifetime, while the Muslim washes five times a day.

When it was done, Master Death said: “My Godson will become a famous physician. As a christening gift I give him the power to see whether a person will live or die. If at the foot of a sick-bed he sees me standing, the patient shall die. If I am absent then the patient shall live. Tell the boy when he reaches adolescence that his fortune is made and he shall be a rich doctor.”

So it came to pass. In time Roderic told his son Arnau about his special gift and set him up as apprentice to a barber-surgeon. Soon the lad was famous far and wide as an unerring diagnostician, though poverty had crippled him with lameness and he walked with a cane. He accrued many riches and set up his ailing parents in a fine house.

One day the Walí Sulayman called on Doctor Arnau, though the lad was no more than fifteen years of age. His Vizier Maliq, whom he’d always relied on for his wise judgement, was unwell, and the great lord demanded that Arnau cure him. He offered two barrels full of gold coins and a fine Arabian stallion to any man who could cure his minister.

When Arnau got to Maliq’s bedside he saw that Death his Godfather was at the foot of the bed, an infallible sign of the patient’s imminent passing. Desiring the gold and the honor, he begged Death to leave, but Death repeatedly refused him this request.

So Arnau turned the death-bed around, made it so Death was standing at the head and not the foot of the bed. Immediately the Vizier Maliq began to get well, and Death retired in frustration.

Arnau received the gold reward and the fine stallion and was appointed as personal surgeon to the Walí, but Death was angry and visited his Godson one night.

“If you trick me like this again, you shall die!” he threatened, shaking his bony fist.

Arnau was sore afraid and vowed never to trick Godfather Death again. But soon the great lord Walí Sulayman’s daughter, the beautiful Jazmin, was sick unto death, and Doctor Arnau was called to her bedside. This time the great lord promised the hand of his daughter, along with a handsome dowry, to whoever would cure her.

Of course Arnau saw Godfather Death there standing at the foot of the sick-bed. Of course he pleaded with him, beseeched the grim figure, to go away and leave the maiden in peace and health. Of course Death refused, because accompanying those destined to die is his duty – nay, literally it’s his only job.

And again, in desperation, Arnau played the bed-trick again. He turned it round so Death was standing at the head of the bed, the princess became well instantly, and Godfather Death went away in fury, vowing a final repayment for this treachery.

On the night of the wedding between Doctor Arnau and the Princess Jazmin, when they were alone in their luxuriant chamber of muslin silk and fine candles, when they had committed their seeds the each to other in the act of matrimonial love, when the bride lay sleeping, there came a heavy knock at the door.

Arnau answered the door in his bedchamber-robe. It was his Godfather Death come to visit. His Godfather led Arnau to the balcony of the chamber, lay down his scythe, and they stood there watching a procession of millions of tiny lights. Death lowered his hood and it was the face of an ordinary man, not a skull – but a face of the deepest melancholy with the most woeful eyes anyone might ever see.

“What are these lights, Godfather?”

“The are the life-lights of all the men and women on Earth, my son,” said Death. “Each one burns for a time and illumines the dark night, then is snuffed out just as others spark into being.”

“Which one is mine?”

“This one,” said Death, showing him a tiny flame guttering out in the palm of his bony hand. “This one will now be extinguished.”

And he opened his other fist to show a new flame just kindling into existence. “This is the life-light of your child, who lies sleeping in the belly of your bride, the woman sleeping now in the soft bed of her altered destiny.”

Arnau watched as the two flames were presented to him by Death, the one slowly dying out while the other was struggling to life. The failing light flickered out and Arnau dropped dead at the feet of his Godfather, who spoke mournfully to him as to his own son gone away:

“And so you thought to cheat Death! My son, nobody can cheat Death... least of all Death himself.”

And that is why Death will not show his countenance: so that we will not see the great sadness in his eyes as he carries out his duty and so feel pity for him.

For such pity is something he could not bear coming from us mere humans.

ATTACK OF THE GOLEM

Joschka, gatekeeper to the Ulmach stronghold, upon hearing the foreboding stomp-stomp of something so massive and then seeing the great clay man approach his doorway, opens his eyes wide from mingled dread and startlement. His mouth gapes to display the broken shards of his rotted molars and some half-chewed sausage.

Things are moving fast, a situation for which this humble lackey has never been prepared. The doorman’s voice debates between a shriek and a groan, his legs between a swift bolt and a jelly collapse. In the event his voice remains silent and his legs opt for the immobility of doubt.

Seven-and-a-half feet tall, its flesh a moist terracotta clay that somehow does not crease or crumble when in motion, the Golem steps up towards the paralyzed Joschka and twists his head off as if it were a ripe raspberry on a bush.

Blood fountains from the twisted neckstump all over the pliant clay of the Golem’s fingers, which makes no difference to anything. The Golem’s clay-flesh remains impollute, infused as it is with impervious magic, and the blood merely skitters off, dripping to the ground and leaving no mark at all, no stain behind.

The Golem has few opinions, few thoughts. In the strictest sense it has none, really, given that an unshakeable compulsion that the wishes of Master be carried out to the letter isn’t so much an independent thought or opinion but an adamantine imperative.

Take the Master’s order just now to deal with the man standing before the stronghold’s door. Executed without pity, without fury, without hesitation. Done just like that with no inner decision-tree to run through.

Likewise the teeming experience of life, that scars us and mars us, which in turns will wound us to the quick and bloom through our hearts bursting blossoms of joy, makes no impression whatsoever for the Golem. A slab of action with no agency, the gleaming turquoise gemstones of his eyes void of any will or passion.

So the Golem stands: splay-footed, dense, the agonized fruit of the doorman’s twisted-off gurning head in that left hand, manus sinistra, bleeding its libation of lifejuice into the dusty ground in front of the door.

Then the Golem drops the head like so much garbage, like nothing. Awaiting now the Master, awaiting some direction. Here it stands, the thick blood dripping and already fading away. A monster would lick its fingers. A moral man would be revulsed by shame. The Golem does neither.

It’s not so very interesting really, this our tale so far, except for a quick taste of manslaughter. Storywise we’ve lucked out with Joschka, who was stilled by terror and whose part was in any event brief and insignificant, and with the Golem, who has no inner life whatsoever. What then of the Master?

Here he comes, stepping dainty over the deadheaded corpse of the doorkeeper, lifting the hem of his dark gray necromancer’s robes so as to clear the puddle of gore at the gateway. Surely the Master must be thrilled with the awesome power of his mighty Golem, must he not?

Just now Master Letmontoff, watching safely from some distance, has urged himself to cackle aloud as the doorkeeper’s head was plucked away. A master of dark arts should laugh, if only to himself. But he could only manage a hesitant snigger.

He thinks of his power, his unrivalled mastery of the magic of necromancy, and tries to feel some joy at it. He fails on all counts, assailed rather by a sour disappointment, some null vacancy gnawing at the pit of his belly.

Now he commands the Golem to break down the door. The thing steps one impossible pace forward and with clammy clayey fists clasped together, fists that do not squidge or distort in any way but rather land like iron cannonballs, bursts the door’s oaken heaviness to flinders.

Planking and splintery timber wreckage scatters all about the portal. Necromancer Letmontoff comes out of his crouch, uncovers his head, and steps behind his creature through the shattered doorway and into Ulmach Stronghold.

===

Nomination is domination. If I name you, I’ve mastered you.

The magic of the Primal Sign, that creating word, told the Golem into existence like an obscene poem, like a promise coerced from the Lord – a violation, a case of blackmail. Necromancer Letmontoff pushed the Tetragrammaton glyph into the clay figure’s forehead, murmured the incantations, and – wonder of wonders! – those turquoise glass eyes came then to life. Except not really, for there was no life behind them.

This was the first of Letmontoff’s disappointments, the beginning of that hollow pit in the belly which has become a constant gnawing at his soul.

WITHIN THE STRONGHOLD

Inside the entrance hall the Master stands, taking in the damp clay smell of the Golem, that slab petrichor scent which has lingered ever since he sculpted this thing. He looks up at the creature but its turquoise eyes remain fixed on the end of the passageway, awaiting its order. Letmontoff senses its heavy breathing, but then corrects himself: the Golem does not breathe. That desperate panting sound comes from the Master himself.

He gestures ahead: the creature marches with a dull thunking tread down the dark hallway.

At certain points along their journey, bunches of armed men appear from doorways, wielding rapiers, or great thwacking blades, or buckshot blunderbusses. They do their worst, but the Golem’s clay flesh smoothes over every wound. At once he deals them retribution, unspeaking and unruffled. Backhanded into stone walls, their skulls caving in with a nutcracker pop, or else swatted down like bugs, the dense ochre hand of the giant thing come blatting down upon them. Shards of cranium and stray eyeball, teeth and undifferentiated goo, go skittering out through the passageway and splash all over the creature. But all the time the Golem remains unstained, the terracotta smoothness impeccable.

One man charges out from a corner, just behind the Golem and right in front of the Master, a wild-eyed ruffian with a huge crude hardwood club, fragments of glass and rusted nails embedded in its splintery great head. This man doesn’t see the necromancer there, his panicky gaze fixed solely on the Golem, and as he swings his weapon backward with both hands, Master Letmontoff has to execute a smartish backstep so as not to be brained. The ugly head of the club, chunks of rotted flesh hooked onto the nails, swooshes past the Master’s face. He feels the foul breeze of it as it swings forward again in a fatal arc, gaining vast momentum as it whumps down onto the Golem’s head.

===

When the Golem first moved, when the enchantment had done its work and this grotesque violation of God’s creation was complete, Master Necromancer Letmontoff felt nothing at all. Not even triumph, not even the satisfaction of a piece of work crafted with such great skill. Though the animation of this huge creature was indeed a masterwork of the occult art, its sheer obscenity left it worthless in his eyes. It was like an ugly piece forged by a master jeweler gone insane, left with a repugnant ornament for which he’d invested everything in life but which in the end had no value in the marketplace.

He roared to the Golem’s blank slab of a face, its unblinking turquoise eyes: “Tell me I’m your Master! Tell me I’m right! That I’m right to create you!” The face which he’d moulded so crudely, which he now saw resembled an uncanny version of himself, stared his way empty of intent and spoke nothing at all to him.

Man has the knowledge to create a new creature by the means of Sefer Yezirah, but he cannot confer speech upon it.

===

Does the Golem even feel the atrocious barbed club thunking into that thick mass of head? Something has surely been noticed, because it raises a hand to feel into the clay for the jagged mass impacted there. The creature graps the head of the club and pulls, glooping out the weapon’s hooks and glass, snatching the handle of the club from the man’s hands as it does so, and slowly turns around. Raw chunks of terracotta clay seem to come out attached to the barbs, and the surface of the Golem’s crown is seen to be chaotically pitted, but the deep irregularities smooth over instantly. The Golem reverses its grip on the club, holding it now by its handle, and swings upward.

The wild-eyed ruffian has seen enough. Empty-handed and dreadstruck he turns, as if making to escape, but sees Master Letmontoff right in front of him, a mere two paces away in the stone corridor. He starts to run, but the necromancer pushes him hard with both hands in the chest and again steps smartly back... just in time.

The Golem plunges the hooked and splintered hardwood weapon down onto the man. The force is such that it snaps along its handle, but the heavy head of the club slams into him with a juddering jolt and a blasting splashing noise of liquid-and-leather that annihilates the victim’s skull. Bone, tissue and blood spatter out across the hallway; an eyeball and a fragment of jaw with rotted molars impact hard against the necromancer’s chest. The broken remnant of torso-and-legs simply skitters along a floor now awash in visceral refuse.

Though the backblast of stains will vanish magically from the ochre clay flesh of the Golem, the Master is not quite so fortunate. He’s utterly befouled, clothing and flesh, with offal and the contents of burst skulls and intestines. He tastes the iron sweetness of blood and something salty like oysters in his mouth.

THE TREASURE, THE PRIZE

The Golem pushes open a final pair of doors at the end of the charnel corridor. And with that they are both of them, both gore-polluted man and impollute abomination, at last within the stronghold’s main chamber, its unwindowed heart. The Golem, lacking any further instruction, comes to a motiveless halt just inside this huge and undecorated interior room, lit by a wealth of candelabras and whale-sperm oil lamps that scatter crazed glows on the shifting shadows of the walls and alcoves.

And there she is: Master Necromancer Isaiah Oriel Letmontoff has come for her, and there she is. There she is, he tells himself, there she is!

And there indeed she is, draped stylishly over a divan and clad in odalisque pantaloons of mauve and a gold-coin brassiere, on her head a dinky turban of gold lamé. A sheer gossamer veil of ultramarine is draped across her unseen-but-insane lips, which Master Letmontoff from prior acquaintance knows indeed to be full and bee-sting alluring. For has he not violated God’s creation, brought mayhem to this place, condemned his immortal soul in a descent into murderous passions... and all so he might see again those veiled lips, the thighs beneath the satin pantaloons, those ching-ching breasts?

Ma’amoiselle Violetta does not appear to be in any way fazed by the huge clay man sculpted so crudely who stands before her with these unliving turquoise eyes and their emanation of inhuman mineral energy. She makes as if to yawn and stretches herself upon the couch more languidly than before, if such a thing were possible. Master Letmontoff recalls the thighs beneath these voluminous trousers, hears the gold coins, these pirated doubloons, jingle-jangle so generously across her breasts and her ankle-bangles of opal and electrum tinkle in tiny rhyme.

Beneath his befouled necromancer’s gown his male member stirs itself toward some nostalgic form of erection, which otherwise he would have to spend a fortune in rhino-horn powder and essence of monkey-gland to achieve. The stirring of his nether blood makes him woozy and he drops into an ottoman facing this vision, his quest.

Once before, this woman then a captive, he beheld these thighs, these breasts, those lips. And he did not touch her; nay, not even a hair of her raven tresses did he once disturb. He simply stood and stared at her in her iron cage, drinking in her perfection, sniffing up her tiger-and-lily scent, and lost himself in a fleshly reverie. He hopes now she remembers his kindness in merely looking, merely tasting her presence, and in never going farther. Her perfection it seemed then would not brook of his imperfection upon her in a tangible way. Noli me tangere said her lustrous nakedness to him – dare not to touch me, defiler!

To become worthy of a touch like that of Ma’amoiselle Violetta, he would by necessity have to create something monstrous and grandiose, a creation as unnecessary and beautiful in its superfluity as that which the Lord undertook on those six days at the commencement of time. Perhaps, thinks Lermontoff now, lost in his fleshly blasphemy, perhaps God made all the universe and all the races of living beings, all those howling stretches of lost humanity, only to have the excuse to gaze upon Eve in her nakedness.

Maybe, urges the Master’s heretical imagination in its frenzy, could it be...? That God was really the Serpent, snaking through the Garden to stare at woman Eve’s sublime being, his own creation? The Creator scaly and incarnate in the coldness of his assumed serpentine flesh, hissing in quiet satisfaction as he drank in Eve’s special womanscent, licking it in through that flickering tongue of His? And with greatest of good fortune, a divine miracle no less, to become a snake trampled over by those perfect feet!

The Master’s idling imagination, as his eyes rest upon Violetta, now conjures an idyll in Eden: the hapless Adam off somewhere delving and harrowing, while God the Serpent squirms underfoot, relishing in Eve’s gracefully curved soles. Perhaps that snaky head, that flickering tongue, might process up between those thighs and reach a warm haven, a ticklish place where He would please her and she delight Him.

Only, unfortunately, it was not to be. The Lord’s sick mind got in the way of such a beautiful arrangement. He had to pry and poke and test; He is one sick puppy. And yet He, for all His sickness, never quite created anything as vile and as crude as Master Necromancer Letmontoff’s slapdash hand-sculpted Golem. Leave it to Letmontoff to beat even The Lord in grotesquerie.

“Watcha thinking, freak?” asks the woman on the divan. She doesn’t seem very interested, neither in him and his bloodied robes, nor in the giant sculpted mud-man, nor even yet in his reply. It’s something she asks as if to pass the time in this candle-lit vaulted chamber so much like a mausoleum. Her scent crosses the uneasy space between them and inflames yet more Letmontoff’s feverish fancy.

“Well, you see, Eve – Violetta – I was im- imagining us, together, in a peaceful, beautiful place,” stammers the Master. “A garden where there was just beauty, and us together, and, and... im- imagination!” He is aware that he’s repeating himself like a nervous schoolboy facing his first exam. He can’t help it. He’s lost all his mastery.

“Yah,” she twangs, “sounds real good, ‘bout like when you kept me all nekkid in a cage.” Her drawl is vulgar, it’s true, but still that peasant mountain dialect of hers is mellifluous enough, and if one overlooks the common accent, her honeyed voice still stirs something in him.

For some reason he looks over to the Golem before going on. Does he need reassurance from this graven lump of clods?

“Not so, Violetta, my sweet, it was not I who held you in that cage, remember? It was my lord the Duke. I was there only to observe.”

“Yah,” she giggles. “You observed right enough, playing with yourself beneath your special magic-man robe.”

“It’s not true... I didn’t... I kept...” stutters Letmontoff, all pretense of control now vanished. He stammers out the beginnings of a few replies but fails to get anywhere... “My viewings of you were quite completely chaste!” he somehow squeezes out in the end. The necromancer blushes at the stupidity of his outburst. And crumpled by this girl’s disdain and stained by the spilled innards of so many victims, he sits back on the ottoman, vanquished by shame.

===

When he learned that the captive Violetta had been transferred to the Duke’s remote stronghold of Ulmach, high in the mountains, Master Letmontoff knew that he finally had a use for his Golem. For months the thing had stood in his laboratory among the alembics and the retorts, neglected simply because, having created this affront to the Lord, having ventured to birth his own obscene and majestic form of life, the Master simply didn’t know what to do with it.

The Golem, undirected by his Master, had stood silent and without purpose in that shadowy corner gathering a patina of neglect. He was a presence without presence, waiting silent with his turquoise eyes boring twin tunnels of vacuity into the dusty air. His sculpting could have been improved in all that time, but no work was undertaken and the thing remained crude and rudimentary, a child’s clay doll made huge and atrocious in its rustic bulk. Likewise his Master, having demonstrated the ultimate in Godlike power, had no clue about the next step to take. He waited and waited as if himself expecting some instruction from an unseen Master somewhere whose orders had yet to arrive.

So it was that when he learned that the gorgeous Ma’amoiselle Violetta had been spirited from the Duke’s bedroom cage to Stronghold Ulmach he felt some obscure stirring that may have been a sought-for purpose, or may have been a vague unacknowledged movement of lustful desire, or may have been even a cry to the Long-Gone Creator to come back once and for all and rectify the ugly unbalanced universe He’d left behind in all His laziness and His sloppy negligence.

Whatever it was, it launched him towards the stronghold and caused him to set his killing thing on a horde of luckless lackeys.

Until he found himself in a vaulted chamber with a million flames and this perfect woman now at his solitary mercy.

===

He snaps back to that now.

The woman on the divan is scrutinizing him as if studying a captured bug. No doubt she wonders what Master Letmonoff’s intent is, after having slaughtered a score of underlings with his monster, his clayey blob of a giant, what he plans to do with her now he has her alone and at his mercy. Master Letmonoff wonders this same thing himself. The truth is that everything that has to do with Violetta becomes confusing to him, muddies his perspective.

When he’s combing through his Lurianic texts of Qabbalah, soaking up the occult secrets of millennia, everything seems clear to him. But now he’s here, opposite this fleshly perfection, soaking in her molecules of scent, breathing the same air in which her dark hair ripples, and gazing unable to help himself at the turn of her ankles, of her feet in these light graceful sandals, then all his mental definiteness evaporates like an alchemical experiment gone on too long, and the Master’s mind is left like sluggard residue in the bottom of a flask just about to crack.

“So,” he utters, breaking the long silence as she engages him with her stare, at once both enticing and brutally challenging. “So, uh... Ma’amoiselle Violetta... I have a, er, suggestion for you.”

Her look doesn’t change one jot; he is a bug and she the entymologist with a terminal spike. But with a vague wave of her lovely hand she bids him continue.

“I was ho-hoping we could leave here to-together. If you’re tired, my lady, you could travel in my, uh, servant’s arms, and he can carry you back to a house I’ve prepared, far from here, way outside the Duke’s jurisdiction.”

Surprising himself, he leaps off the ottoman to fall at her feet, kneeling on the rough stone floor and him with his sore rheumatic patella. He attempts to take her dainty hands in his, but she pulls them away with a eww-ick expression that leaves no room for ambiguity. But he manages an eye contact, emboldened as he is now by a fierce and desperate desire... a desire to...

“Come with me angel! Come to where we will be safe, guarded by the unsleeping vigil of my watchman!” He seizes the edge of the divan in his eagerness, and ever-so-slightly she shifts away from those blooded fingers and the stains they make on the damask fabric.

“We will be alone in a simple but homely rural cottage in a wondrous clearing in a forest, a discreet place far from the hubbub of crowds, oh my love! You will get to know me... in time, perhaps, even to feel something for me! But I ask for nothing except for your wellbeing!”

She continues to stare at him, expression unmoved and unchanged. He thinks of extending his appeal but calculates that he’s said enough. More than enough is too much: such is the punishing calculus of love. He waits.

“So... here’s the thing… I’m with child,” she says at last. “Knocked up. You know, pregnant. I’ll be bearing the Duke’s bastard child come next springtime thaw.”

“Worrit not, oh my love!” exclaims The Master. “Oh, do not fret your sweet heart! I know a good woman who can fix things like that, I have a few cunning potions of my own devising, and if you decide to keep... it... well, then we can make the necessary arrangements. I bear no rancor.”

“Yeah, well, here’s how it is, Magic Man.” She sits up on her sofa and straightens herself, becoming all business. “The Duke’s offered to make me an official concubine. If it’s a boy and a – what did he call it? – a viable heir, then he says he might even marry me and make me the Duchess, once he gets the old Duchess off his hands.”

She shows him a large diamond on a golden ring on her left hand. “It’s a solid offer. So thanks, and all, but I think you made a wasted journey.”

THE VOID EYES OF THE NOTHING-AT-ALL

Necromancer Letmontoff had plotted long in his laboratory, looking into the blank face of his Golem, those nonentity eyes in bright empty turquoise, muttering soft snippets of strategy, fragments of an elaborate rescue plan that when it came down to it would amount to nothing more than smash and slaughter. He never thought, never gave a single consideration, as to whether the Golem was listening or understood his words. He was speaking to hear his own words, the Ducal Castle now abandoned and the Duke gone away to his stronghold to take his delight in his caged plaything.

He burned with indignation, he smouldered with jealousy and shame, and over and over again he told the crude moulded face of clay and that bright vacant gaze, told it of his love for Violetta, of how she of all things in this disordered world so shoddily patched together by the Slob-God, she alone was a work of true Art, a piece of something precious and sublime. He spoke toward that dumb visage of his yearning and he fantasized whole epics of her rescue and her ineluctable gratitude to Letmontoff, her rescuer.

And the Golem said nothing. Simply stared and stared. What of all that endless parade of his words penetrated into that slow preconscious of clay? Maybe nothing... or maybe one simple idea was implanted there.

===

Now the Master on his aching knee before this indifferent woman, who leans forward to pick out a black olive from a dainty dish upon a dainty table just beside her damasked divan, now he falls into a null chasm of disappointed rage.

He’s not the type to scream or howl his fury. In his crumpled stained robes and his spoiled master’s skullcap he’s a tawdry enough sight and none looking upon him, the oblivious beauty Violetta for instance, could ever guess at the hideous ravening hatred that brews up now within his voided heart. He twitches a little, looks down onto the flagstone floor, and his world shifts around him: from a glimmer of hope and an affection for something so perfect as this mindless girl, he comes to an awareness of the extent of the dull indifference of the universe and his own botched place in this shoddy carnival of existence.

Looking up again he speaks to the creature: “Golem.” It comes to life and turns its turquoise eyes to him, the sigil for TRUTH so clearly visible where the Master once had scored it with his index finger into its soft clay forehead. Unblinking it waits for its command.

The Master points that same index finger which had etched אמת, emet, The Truth, into the Golem on its birthing day. “Kill her,” he breathes.

===

Last chance: here we make one final attempt to penetrate into the mind of the creature, this Golem. If it had a mind. Was it aware of its surroundings? It had to be, or else it may not have traversed the world so unerringly.

Was it then conscious of its world and its place in the world? That depends, dear reader: are you? How much of what do as we sweat our way through this imperfect life is something we even think about? It could be that alone of all Creation only the Golem was truly aware of its place and its purpose as the flawed progeny of a flawed Master, a humbled botcher and his piece of hesitant handiwork, full knowing how imperfect was the process that brought him into being.

But in any case we must fail in our endeavor to understand this creature. How can we know the inner state of a thing like a Golem? Let us rather attempt to know ourselves in our own imperfection, and may that halfway-wisdom content us as sufficient for the day at hand.

===

“Kill her,” murmurs the Master Necromancer once again. But the Golem looks upon him and does nothing. “I command you in the name of Truth, Golem,” speaking louder “I command you to kill her.”

She has not shrieked or attempted to scurry away. She sits on her divan and picks at the black olives. Her maddening scent swims over from where she sits into the nostrils of Master Letmontoff. No more.

“KILL HER!” he yells at the Golem. And slowly, hesitantly, it moves. He guesses he sees a reluctance there in its shuffling toward them, but though he has lost confidence in all else, his faith in his own mastery over this monstrous being remains unshaken.

And it is upon them, this thing. It looms over the man, who levers himself painfully to his feet by leaning on the seat of the divan, and over the woman, who defies her imminent death while munching on these dark bitter fruits, that dish of black olives.

He points the finger that gave his Golem a form of life right at the woman’s forehead. Not that sigil ‘emet’ – truth – he utters, but rather he elides the aleph and pronounces her fate in the word of power: “MET”. Death.

And the hand of the Golem comes down, down so very slow.

Down slow onto the eggshell skull of his Master and father.

As he pronounces the only word of his life to date: “No”.

That soft pressure, becoming stronger and yet stronger

the softness becoming so unbearable and hard

and all at once it cracks, that eggshell skull

shards and soft pink matter burst away

the pressure, the force, an instant

and it is accomplished

consummatum est

the crack, snap

a black

black

no

This time the girl Violetta does indeed scurry away, and her lovely odalisque outfit remains unsullied. The oozing stuff that a moment ago was Master Letmontoff’s brains splashes out across the divan where she’s been sitting, spoiling her snack dish of succulent olives.

And those brains of the Master in their final moment exude a single thought that leaks into the air just as the pink-and-gray substance of them oozes into the fabric of the sofa, staining it for always with his impure mind, and drips like slow jelly onto the floor.

That thought is gratitude: the liquiescing matter of his mind urges thanks upon his creation, this crude Golem monster created in a simulacrum of the truth, for relieving him of all his sad embitterment.

The Master’s last thought is of how shoddy his existence has been, how negligent and thoughtless his maker, that Creator of the whole pale sham of a cosmos, and how he at least has done no worse.

He sought validation in those turquoise empty eyes and they looked at him and saw nothing. And he saw nothing back. But now his son, this clod-crafted slab of clumsy power, this bastard Golem of rebellion, with his act of defiance has at least become a something.

And now his mind puddles on the floor, clogs the weave of the damask upholstery, and thinks no more. This world no longer concerns him.

So then at last there are just these two: the woman in her beauty and the great figure of the clay giant standing as the stains of his Master’s blood and tissue vanish from his fingertips.

She looks over at him and sees him drying and crumbling. Little dry clumps of his terracotta flesh softly crack and begin to drop off him and onto the floor. He becomes parched and rigid, inching to a slow standstill. But wait...

Is that a smile on his crudely sculpted face? Or a shimmering of the candlelight, the brilliant flicker of the sperm oil lamps playing tricks?

Just as she thinks she sees the creature’s drying-out smile, the baby in her womb makes a little leap.

The life within her cannot wait for the springtime thaw to come.

ENVOI

Thirsty himself to know the thoughts of God,
Judah Loew ran all the combinations,
all the letters, all the variations,
at last pronounced the Key Which Is The Word:

The Gate, The Echo, The Guest, The Palace
and spoke it to this crude thing, mannikin
he’d moulded, sought to teach it doctrines
so secret of Letters, Time and Space

That figure then its heavy eyelids raised
first saw all the forms and the colors there
and grasped them not, for it was all a blur
then, halting, those first motions made.

Like us, the Golem came to discover
that it was well webbed in wordy snares:
After and Before, Past and Now, Then and There,
Left and Right, Me and You, This, Those Others.

Jorge Luís Borges, “The Golem”
[author’s translation]

Jifagly nopusta gwankala iniikk gha maolspag granunty fisbog ashoola grolyap namallinaian um grillafakan ushulik ghrenky imn rufnalah duboodi. Tranallan opsuta granfanan uslaki empa, wozli trenaka juk.

Reoplanaish Hon! Spigalinak ghotor invalinja, ud pastalybo wosha perklana… O bi, o fas, o migan! Jelanan uspesla juk, maskallin yan yan uffiklil, hasnolam jasko linnto puk.

Juppalina usnen — Yas dran “Ub ub ub!” stretlisni. Zan zakalin zabbada. Ibonak brelanani usporestallin ub crakika kulash.

Yestalani yestayer mias omli vestaka ne obolik. “Yigill, ji astaban drobali nuk nuk sayan,” djibban astulin. Mias jillsaxin puk: “Yigill nuk alkon kal mastinak”. Usla eb ristigiluskinas offiastil.

Nhe hi, ne hil, kal alkon kelanantik ud jasko jelik juk. Tranallan crakika trenaka ghotor feksin granfanan brelanani nam as. Pontamul ub ji gha ushulik kulash uslaki ud o ghrenky wozli wosha offiastil. Yigill gwankala niok invalinja opsuta.

Mias duboodi. Mias krostalani um ud vronlinak feksin ista? Ibonak rufnalah zakalin ad ashoola granunty puk yan. Uf numini hasnolam usnen stretlisni usporestallin maskallin. Feks… mastinak dran yan vestaka jublin obulanitak mias empa reullasta astulin uspesla eb nopusta drobali asta.

Hon julinnon nuk puk. Yabani perklanod sayan. Mias takkan jillsaxin ako grillafakan juranalin: hepta omli obul nabulin iniikkobas. Zan analo ub ittalinok imn ud migan fisbog ristigiluskinas!

Usla nofigas bi ud o muk Ittas. O ella lastanik trakliss. Inpola uffiklil reoplanaish mas djibban namallinaian nuk zabbada. Ub pastalybo grolyap…

Spigalinak fretja nuk, maspag linnisho juppalina kuba yigill grabujj astaban obolik. Ittas ittam - ittalinok gra bujj ud lastanik obulanitak. Mias obul nabulin ad vronlinak kuba trakliss feks.

Feks… ud analo feksin feksin ella. Mias juranalin ud jublin, ako hepta julinnon. Inpola niok inpolani, reullasta ud fretja hil. Uf ista?

Yabani-muk asta numini jelik nam, mas takkan!

Reaching under the Christmas tree for his gift, Victor pulls out a little packet in gold reflective wrapping with a simple yet bold red ribbon bow. A creamy vellum label bears his name in cursive sharpie with a little black doodleheart.

Trey perches on the velour cream sofa looking on, all smiles, eyes wide and hands poised just apart in suspended applause

But it’s not Christmas. There’s a family tradition that on Victor’s birthday, June 25th, the Christmas tree is deployed for “Half-Christmas” and his birthday presents are laid there as if by some midsummer Santa. The result of a throwaway remark Victor made over thirty years ago which, taken up as a piece of delightful whimsy by Trey and incorporated into their domestic life, is at once a savage delight to Trey and a source of ongoing bowel-stirring disgruntlement to Victor.

“Wait, wait!” says Trey, giving a single clap as a call for attention but otherwise leaving further applause in abeyance. He shimmies his bulk over to the other end of the sofa, swells of his belly swoshing in tidal consonance beneath his Rudolf sweater, and picks up his iPhone.

“There!” he says. “We gotta let Tracey in on the action!” He dials just as the ambient music switches from Maria Carey to George Michael.

Morning sun breaks in on the room like judgement. Rays starting low, glistering on the tree-tinsel, outclassing the lights. Soon the sunbeams will incide on the whole room and the Yuletide morning setup will be revealed as an imposture, a Potemkin psyop. This is what Victor fears and abhors; this is what Trey welcomes from the shallows of his kitsch multibypassed heart.

“Hi Dads!” says Tracey on video. She’s deployed overseas in some place that sounds Spanish but really is British but really is American: Diego Garcia. An atoll in the nowhere-swept vastness of the Indian Ocean.

“Hi Dad!” she says to Victor, “Happy birthday to you this Half-Christmas!” Something forced in her smile. She’s looking tanned in army tanktop and fatigue pants, short buzzed blond hair, seated at a console.

“Thanks honey!” says Victor, attempting cheer. “I guess it’s presents-time.”

So Tracey, empalmed now in Trey’s right hand, watches on as Victor unwraps his Half-Christmas gift. George Michael muted, Trey and Tracey both sing in unison:

Happy Christmas to you
Happy Christmas to you
Happy Christmas dear Victor
Happy Christmas to you

The gift: it’s the Criterion ‘Hitmen Boxed Set’: Le Samouraï by Jean-Pierre Melville, Day of the Jackal by Fred Zinneman, Leon the Professional by Luc Besson, Ghost Dog by Jim Jarmusch, and The Killer by David Fincher.

Not sure why Andrew Dominik’s Killing Them Softly wasn’t included, thinks Victor. Two nice performances there, Pitt/Gandolfini. Cool atmosphere, cool action. You could leave out Ghost Dog, downgrade it as a fey postmodern take on worn-out tropes, and swap in Dominik’s taut thriller.

“It’s wonderful!” he smiles.

“I got you something too! Take another look under the tree!” says Tracey.

A smaller more discreet package, wrapped in black matte paper and a tightly-drawn dark grey cross-binding ribbon, tough to break. Victor risks his teeth.

HITMAN De Luxe Edition for Xbox

Free Xbox seasonpass included! says the sticker.

“Dad suggested it for you!” says Tracey, beaming, her freckled broad face showing her gleaming white dentalwork. No beauty, but good enough, thinks Victor. Good enough for what? he asks himself but doesn’t answer. Tracey leans in: “I asked him what’s a good game you don’t have and might like, and that’s what he said!”

“It’s wonderful!” he smiles. “Gotta dust off the Xbox and play it.”

“Kind of a themed set of gifts!” says Tracey, giggling. She looks over her shoulder. “I... uh... I gotta go, dad. Something’s come up. Happy Christmas, birthday boy!”

And she’s gone.

George Michael is back on. Last Christmas I gave you my heart. Victor looks down at the two gifts and registers the message.

“You callous fuck,” he growls low to Trey. “Won’t work though. They’re not real.”

“You’re gonna die, you two-timing asshole,” says Trey, tone just as even. His smile is unchangeable.

Balding, pudgy, content and murderous on his couch, in his Rudolf festive sweater he’s a midsummer Christmas monument to hatred.

============

This is Victor Blum’s opinion: at any given moment within all this far-stretching bump-and-grind that we call the world, there may be a hundred thousand rackets, scams, and ponzi schemes all in simultaneous operation. Some guy who’s susceptible to righting wrongs, one prone to fancying himself the vigilante do-gooder, could spend whole lifetimes Ahabbing round the globe seeking to push his righteous harpoon into the heart of all that villanous duplicity.

A definite opinion. It’s been spelled out to his followers on Twitter, his followers on Facebook, acquaintances in the neighborhood, and each and every employee of his at the Belnap Beach Dog Rescue Center. What need is there to crusade after scammers? Let them scam, let those other suckers get drawn in. It can’t affect me none, so let it ride.

But now Victor Blum is compelled to look at it another way. Now it’s his money that’s been scammed, converted to crypto and pissed away on some Darkweb Craigslist, and all in order that his dumb-as-fuck partner can hire some fake contract killer to murder him.

“Hitmen don’t really exist. They’re a movie thing, a crime-story thing. When have you ever heard of an actual contract killer actually really killing someone in the real actual world?”

So he’s telling his personal trainer Milo at the Hi-Muscle Workout Center, minus the bit about the involvement of Trey in the scam, the bit where his own money is used to supposedly kill him.

“Yah very true,” says Milo while chewing gum, eyes strayed elsewhere. “Careful to keep your legs bent on the shoulder press.”

Victor Blum is fighting all the time, not just against notional scammers, but against the onset of late-middle-aged flab. Today, the day of his sixty-second birthday, it might just as well be termed senior flab. Fighting the strain of thirty-five pounds on his shoulders for forty reps, fighting ignorance and complacency, an Ahab of informed opinion.

“Yah, keep focussed on the set,” says Milo, sneaking a glance down into his cellphone.

“But you know what I’m talking about?” says Victor. “They advertise on the darkweb, on weird little forums where perverts hang out, even over on Craigslist with all kinda crytpid references. ‘I’ll take out your trash. I’ll paint your walls’. Movie terminology. Bullshit.”

“Yah, coming up for thirty reps,” says Milo.

“Just a scam. Wiseguys, yeah, wiseguys, they have people. Special people they can call on. Those spooks and shit, the what-have-you, the deep state, they got people. But people-people? Regular joe-schmos? Can’t do it.”

“And forty. Rest.”

“There’s no way... no, no way,” puffs out Victor. He catches a glance at himself in the gym wallmirror and quickly looks away. Where Trey is filling into himself, cute as a button in his Rudolf sweater and huggable like a big teddybear, Victor... well, Victor is a fuckin’ mess.

In his old green Celtics tanktop, too tight, stained now in wet dark sweat, showing off the shame of desuetude and age. Bloat all up on those oldman saggy dugs and grotesque belly, a generous mass of flesh, sure, but scraggy hanging looseness all elsewhere: spindly arms, atrophied thighs, neck wattles, shoulders frail like porcelain dolls.

Worst of all, barely seen in this snatched sideglance, the blown-out eyes, twin Stalingrads in the bombed out waste of Victor’s face, those red-veined horrors telling of torment and unhealth. It’s getting so he combs his transplanted hair by focussing strictly on the crown of the head, never letting the gaze stray south into that danger zone.

“No way, no way...” he repeats, struggling now against a tightness across the chest and a searing in the pharynx. His hand darts to his sternum as if to clutch something not there.

“Rest means no talking, Vic,” says Milo, picking his nose. “Just rest. Forty reps on the rowing machine up next. Two minutes.”

Gritted yellow teeth: “Just no fuckin’ way.”

============

Today would not be Victor’s happy Half-Christmas at work either. Word was passed to him mid-morning that the Dog Rescue Center would be consumed in conflagration, the little pups burnt all up.

“Sad, but it is what it is.”

“What the fuck you tellin’ me, Ursula?”

Ursula is the latest thing in mob enforcement. Big Lou’s crew needed someone who was forceful yet not brutal. And Big Lou, who was a traditionalist in so many respects, was keen to be seen to move with the times in this instance. Hence, Ursula, the cougar mob enforcer.

Ursula is fifty-something, dressed sharp in a gray pinstriped business suit, gold jewelry, heels. To all intents and purposes she is what they call a MILF, thinks Victor. Hot, well-built, sophisticated, elegant like a realtor. She always visits alone, which in itself shows cojones. Before her, Big Lou’s heavy boys always showed up in pairs.

“Victor, Victor, you know me, you know Lou,” states Ursula in her rich furry tones. “You know it’s all on the up-and-up.”

“But burn down my Center. What...?”

“It’s rough, but we need to do it. What it is. Quarterlies, adjustments, assets, policies. It would be boring. Just accept.”

“But the pups...?”

“Will be valued as pedigree breeders on the claim. If you want, swap out the ones you like for some ugly-ass strays. All we need are a bunch of charred bodies.”

Victor reaches into his desk drawer for the whiskey bottle. He remembers his manners and offers the fifth to Ursula, nodding at his BEST DAD WORLDWIDE coffeemug on the desk. She declines with a delicate gesture of thanks, a tasteful waveaway.

Victor takes a slug of his top-shelf booze straight from the neck, no mug. Vile, bitter, warm, comforting. The taste of humiliation. The taste of himself.

“But Ursula... you and I?”

She smiles warmly. “Victor, what you and I?”

“Our... thing. Six months ago.”

“That was not in any way a thing,” she says, straightening in her chair. Polite, measured, stern. “It was a non-thing. Too many whiskeys, Christmas Party, you thought momentarily you were hetero-man Vic. Turns out, you’re very much not a hetero-man.”

“Trey found out about it,” says Victor. “He found about you and me.”

“Vic, baby, there was no you and me. You tried something, that something didn’t work, at which point it ceased to be a thing. Don’t sweat it.”

Flash of that body of his in the gym mirror. Sweat pooled under the protruding breasts, welling in the hollow above the roundness of the belly. Those eyes... Did she see all that in the bathroom of the WaysAway Club? A swig more of his shame, hot and peaty, warm.

“But Ursula, he found out... Trey... says I’m a two-timing fuck... says he’s gonna...”

Flash to those eyes, the web of blood vessels, blue shot all to hell, the dark dark black of nothing pupils, the nothing. Tears squirt now across his right hand, holding the whiskey bottle up to his mouth. Taste of bitterness.

“Gonna what, Vic?”

“Gonna hire... has hired...” sobbing hard now, “... hire a hitman to take me out.”

“Oh, Victor,” voice vibing low with sympathy, and you can see why Big Lou chose her. That savoir-faire, her wide range of options, menace-to-consolation, that versatility. “Oh Vic, normies can’t hire a hitman. Silly. You’d have to know somebody. Somebody like me.”

Pouring one more. Flash to his eye in the bottom of the bottle, where the amber liquid thins to clear and the red web stares back out.

============

Days pass, a week. Then:

He dreamed of being an outcast, an exile on streets of grit, searching in torn pockets for ID that wasn’t there, for credit cards that aren’t there, downspiralling, downspiralling, and he wakes on the stale single bed in the guest room at 3.00AM or something.

Victor knows this is the last day of all days, the day when all the things that are circling out there come home, but his head is full of fogged inconsequence. He rises slow and creaky out of that bed and prowls the landing, past where Trey sleeps in the Master Bedroom, down the stairs to the kitchen for a drink or something.

He wonders why in the week since his birthday Trey hasn’t just kicked him out, why he never tried to reconcile with Trey either, never established that it was just a silly passing thing he tried that didn’t work.

Trey believes it’s a sacred responsibility not to break up the family, unfaithfulness is sin, the only true sin he said. If they split, they’ve failed, the family is broken forever. But if Trey punishes him with a contracted death, then the family remains together and it will be like there’s nothing really wrong, nothing at all. Penance and payment. Bills come due and are settled.

The scorch smell hits him now from the dream. He knows now what’s gonna happen tonight. He picks up the Four Roses and heads out to the garage, pajama’d in his macaroon leather slippers, thinning hair tousled and greasy. There’s a Glock 19 in the glove box, compact, next to his driving glasses.

============

On the drive over to the Belnap Beach Dog Rescue Center Victor consumes half of the fifth of Four Roses and rummages in the glove box for the Glock. He spurts through red-and-ambering lights with a mind half on a cancellation of outcomes, but there’s nobody here on the streets, nobody, not even some cop with the will to annul Victor’s perplexity for him with a swift and terminal exchange of fire.

There’s a driving-seat blip through his memories: acquiring the Rescue Center as a write-off for the mob, Big Lou dominant in the consortium, eager to flush money through the pups, a good loss investment twenty years ago, straydog rescues trending high, favors taken and gained, all so kosher and so so comfortable.

Then a certain sourness ebbed into the arrangment. Hard to pin down, coinciding as it did with the more constant disgruntlement of middle-aged anomie, of the unlovely spread of Trey’s gut, the discordancy of Tracey’s adolescence and her fluctuating rages at all that was gay and then at all that was straight. Big Lou not so happy laundering cash through the dogs anymore, limits reached, looking elsewhere for conduits: crypto, memestocks, superpacs, freeports.

And the thing that was to happen this night. The puppies all burned up in their pens. Kerosene as an accelerant and zippo cremation, howlings from the deepest pits of hell.

There’s a guy they use for this kind of work: Mr Lonelybuns. Some Irishman, a pyromaniac, resolute and pitiless, from Connemara so they say. Call on this most unstoppable of firebugs for insurance scams and fire shakedowns. Lawrence or something. Lawrence Lonelybuns from Connemara, a name so much more poetic than the reality. Victor’s met him: mulleted, tripey, shell-suited, smelling of complex solvents and atrocious intent expressed in cryptic pheromones. Devilish in the most scorched pitch-black sense of the word, thinks Victor. No happy rapscallion but a heinous thing of rot and sulfur.

There he is now, standing on the desolate industrial street outside the Rescue Center.

Now screeching locking brakes now shouldering out of the car now raising the pistol to shoulder height not even aiming he fires once again again again. Mr Lonelybuns, who’s sloshing a jerrycan of kerosene against the unit with the dogs yelping and barking inside, torques sideways and appears hit but won’t quit won’t stop he turns and kneel-walks towards Victor still holding the can which jerks and sploshes and he’s growling motherfucker gonna kill ye so I am he’s nearing Victor across the blacktop knees abraded and bloody, blood too leaking from under the tracksuit top he’s hit but he won’t fucking quit and now Victor remembers there’s more rounds in the clip or do you say mag and shoots again again.

Mr Lonelybuns plops tired down onto greasy pavement and crawls, growling, moving slow and Victor senses retribution building within himself and reaches with his left into his overcoat thrown over the pajamas and finds that plastic disposable lighter and softpack of Lucky Strikes only three left and he puts the gun in his right pocket and lights a cigarette as Lonelybuns unstoppable Irishman mutters underbreath and crawls bleeding up toward where he stands, and Victor leans forward and lights him up with his lighter.

There’s not a sudden whoosh but a lambent growing flame. A flicker like a crème brulée in a fancy restaurant blue at first and then orange and yellow, and not a scream but a muted gurgled cursing in guttural tongue from the man as first his blond-gray mullet catches, then the polyester blue crackles of his tracksuit, melting slick drips, he continues miraculously crawling forward, and Victor goes back toward the car, thinking first to fetch the Four Roses and empty the bottle on him but on second thought getting back in to drive away as the Irishman crawls on and along, an inching torch of resolve on the asphalt shining.

============

Having done all this, having made it back home alive, Victor makes the decision never to go back again to the Dog Rescue Center no matter what, checking the clip and loading up pop-click-pop as the gray dawn approaches and the last of the Four Roses he takes in his mouth, grateful for the decision not to waste it on the final scorching of Mr Lonelybuns. He sloshes it round like mouthwash, savoring sourmash burn, then yanks open the driver door and onto the driveway vomits that whiskey and a full load of anxious heavy bile all over all across. And then lights the Lucky Strike the last Lucky Strike and gasps the smooth soothing smoke into the retching and hiccupping moment of utter calming peace that falls.

For Victor at this time has achieved this strange serenity, knowing or at least suspecting that the puppies will be alright no matter what else. That his action in its absoluteness could not have been in vain. God, and this is actually the first time in a long time he’s considered God in any way, God would not permit such an unthinkable action to be wasted, that the conflagration of such a hideous person as the Irishman could amount to nothing at all. Something has to come from that, thinks Victor. A redeemable.

There’s a stirring in the house, curtains twitch apart, and Trey’s face appears at the window looking out at him in the driveway. Then gone.

Could there be a reconciliation now?

Victor thinks there could be. In the same way that puppies go unburnt, so these stray errors of our lives might find forgiveness. He’ll finish his Lucky Strike in the car then go in and make everything alright with Trey. Maybe they’ll both watch Alain Delon in Le Samouraï. They met at college film club and bonded over Delon in Plein Soleil, so alive and youthful. It could be that way again.

But now the front door opens and it’s not Trey. It’s Tracey, somehow, unexpected in the here and now of morning. Black bomber jacket and aviator shades as the first pink light of dawn emerges out over the Atlantic and the gulls cry out in expectation of the day and the day’s catch. Blond military buzzcut, tan, looking so... little girl all grown up. Victor starts to bawl but fusses himself back into normalcy by stubbing out the Lucky.

She steps up to the car, noting the puddle of whiskey and bile on the driveway. Stands clear of it, looks over.

“How you doing, Dad?”

She leans in to the driver window, obliging him to lower the glass. Hard eyes, hazel and hard.

“Not so great, frankly,” he snuffles. She sniffs tobacco, vomit, whiskey, smoulder. Nods once.

“What’s that in your lap? A gun?”

“Yeah, I was just... uh, cleaning it.” The lie rings pathetic and hollow and it lays there flat and discarded.

“How about you give it to me, huh?” She reaches a hand. A working man’s hand: tough, calloused.

“Uh, sure.”

She pushes it into her waistband, strides round the front of the car, and slides into the passenger seat.

“Let’s go for a drive, Dad.”

“But I had a drink, a couple drinks, and...”

“You’ll be alright. Just a quick run to the ocean, we’ll watch the sun come up. You and I gotta have a talk. To figure something out: you, Dad Trey, the family.”

As the car crawls away up their suburban street, he catches sight in the rearview of Trey walking out of the garage with the hose, spraying away that puddle of vomit on the driveway.

============

Still nobody on the road this predawn hour with the western sky bruise-blue and the eastern reaches out above the sea flushing an emboldening pink, scattered clouds orange-lined precursors to the coming sun.

Tracey took an earlier flight than expected when her deployment ended, some kind of delay, details not important. Here now, and from what she could tell, it wasn’t a moment too soon.

Victor didn’t follow her talk too close. He was focussing on the road and on the nausea that tided up and down through belly and heart. Barfing so voluminously on the drive should have put paid to that, he thought, but no.

He was also fatigued, dragged like a slow bell to a heavy toll that gonged out slow as oceans. Microblinks became microdreams of the Irishman’s hair flaring blue as gas then red-orange on the pavement as dogs howled inside.

“...and so that’s why Dad Trey told me all about how you betrayed us, betrayed our family.”

He pulled up to the patch of open ground next to the beach as he clicked back into what Tracey was saying.

“You are such a scumbag making my father suffer like that. How could you do it, Dad? It’s just like all those other times, all those times you let us down...”

The gulls bucked and bounced in brash seagusts like kids riding swings. He thought of her with her cowboy hat and her little gun seesawing on the backyard plank he’d set while he swigged a sour mouthful of Jim Beam. That seemed like far in the past; everything seemed like the past.

“See, I done this before, this kind of work. It’s what they trained me for in the service. I’m ready for this, you know.”

Sunfire crowned the far horizon over the shimmer of ocean waves, a fringe of it, then a bright shell, then a light that scorched the eyes with clarity. Weeping eyes. Couldn’t see but only water.

He felt something squeezed into his right hand, hard and metallic, familiar now, her strong grip pulling his small fist within her fist. Bending his arm up towards his head sobbing, feeling the touch on his temple, the strong loving finger held upon his trigger finger.

“There’s no such thing...” he started to say, but was not able to finish the thought.

Thanks to for suggestions, feedback, and hints about workout reps and the ideal automatic weapon for a middle-aged schlub to wield.

“You don’t see that so much anymore. Not like you used to.”
“What?”
“See that? Bug impact on the windshield.”
“Huh?”
“Bugsplat. When we were kids you used to see it all the time. Drive anywhere, the lil’ buggers would be caked all over the glass.”
“Oh yeah... I remember now. Yeah, that was a thing, wasn’t it?”
“Don’t see it much these days.”
“Guess not.”

He was thinking, as he sometimes did: Harriet drives confidently, so directly. Kind of like a racing pigeon with a strong sense of going somewhere definite.

Freddie loved that about her. It was why he was so happy to ride shotgun. Twenty-eight years before, before they were even married, he excused his lack of manliness, his eschewing of his rightful place in the driving seat, by saying that he was better at reading maps and could shout out directions. A co-driver, what they say in rally racing.

Now we have GPS calling out all the turns and Freddie didn’t have that excuse any longer. But still.

“Another one.”
“What?”
“Bug on the window.”
“Freddie, you don’t need to call out every time a bug hits the windshield. It’s distracting.”
“How, distracting? Anyway, it’s something of interest. You don’t see it so much these days.”
“You already said that.”
“Not like before. Before when I was a kid it was like ‘splat’ ‘splat’ ‘splat’.”
“Yes, you said. Distracting.”
“You hadda, I mean my dad hadda, pull into the gas station. Not to fill up so much but to get a glass clean. Full service them days, ‘Yessir right away sir, shall I check your oil sir?’ Lotta bugs back then.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Not so much now. I mean not so many.”
“Maybe your dad killed them all with his crazy driving.”

Freddie knew that Harriet wasn’t truly distracted by the bugsplat callouts. Not at all. That was just an excuse. Really it was that she preferred to avoid unpleasant topics. The mass die-out of the insect world, the depletion of the fauna all across our environment, that was just something she would rather not think about. That was why she made him shut up.

He switched the music, hoping it would heal the wounded ambience in the car. David Soul: “Don’t Give Up On Us Baby”. We’re still worth one more try.

“That one was bigger. Did you hear it go splat?”
“Freddie, please?”
“No but seriously. I heard it, like really: SPLAT. Like the old days.”
“Distracting. Really.”

David had a pleasant voice. Don’t give up on us baby, Lord knows we’ve come this far, Can’t we stay the way we are? Whatever happened to him? Didn’t he become a cult leader, commit mass suicide? Alien abductions, skinshifters, babybrain drinking?

“Hey, was he Starsky or Hutch?”
“Who?”
“This guy singing. David Soul.”
“Is that a real name?”
“Starsky? Or Hutch?”
“Hutch maybe? I think Starksy was Jewish, and he doesn’t look it.”
“Did he become a cult leader and commit mass suicide?”
“Uh, I don’t know. I think maybe it was Starsky? Or maybe Kojak?”

Did Kojak lead a cult full of devotees through an orgy of self-annihilation? Poisoned lollipops? Didn’t seem like him somehow. Too cool for that. David Soul on the other hand. Just look at the mustache on his album graphic…

“SPLAT! You must have heard that one, Harriet.”
“Don’t distract me, Freddie. Yes I did hear it.”
“Then I couldn’t have distracted you, could I? You had the bug splatter do that.”

Really, though. They were getting bigger. This one was like a small taco in dimension. Greeny-gray guts and fragmented dark brown chitin. Legs with little hooks that curved back round on themselves. Harriet hit the spritzer and ran the wipers. The big bug got oozed out across the windshield. It was like in biology class: smear the sample across the microscope slide. Peer at the revealed secrets.

“Hey, do they still have microscopes in high school?”
“What?”
“You know, we had microscopes. Blood corpuscles. Prick your finger. Hair scales. Do they still do that in school?”
“Maybe not. They have apps for things like that now.”

The angel and the dreamer, who sometimes plays a fool. Don’t give up on us, I know — we can still come... through.

High note, very pure. Like a girl. So pure.

David, why did you suicide all those people?

Thunk

The glass cracked.

The thing was not real.

“This thing just isn’t real.”
“Oh my God! What a shock!”
“How about pull over, Harr?”
“What for?”
“The glass is cracked.”
“You’re gonna uncrack it?”
“No, but... we can examine it.”
“Examine it? You’re an entomologist now, Frederick?”
“Never seen the like, not even in the old days.”

Part centipede, with segmented body sections the size of a child’s fist, legs jerking on either side, part winged creature like a dragonfly, the impacted bug sat in a crater in the left side of the windshield, short fine laminate cracks radiating outward on the glass.

Directly facing Freddie.

Pink and green-yellow ichor splayed out in an impact pattern, a tracery of goo and chunks like lime marmalade. There were fibrous white strands of something.

Freddie could see its mandibles opening and closing: large, bladed, like a stag-beetle’s. Its eyes, its many eyes, looking at him while it tried to snap snap snap.

“You know I really think you should...”
“What, Fred? You know you can be a royal pain in the fuckin’ tits sometimes.”
“Harriet, it’s a living thing, like a new strange thing unknown to science.”
“The fuck you know about science, Freddie? You’re a retired accountant.”

These eyes, boring into his. The spastic repetitive motion of the mandibles, those hooked black blades, snap-snapping.

“But you know Harriet I think we should slow down at least before we get -”

All is turned over, the world is turned and turned again, time slows itself and then rushes forward in a wild spurt.

Over and over, the noise and the silence. The shattering and the creaking and the crunch that is metal buckle and crack. Then silent and black.

Black and black and black. Time passes.

No time has passed. Freddie is here, again, in the shotgun seat, strapped in, the airbag pressing against his chest, cushioning his chin. Something’s wrong, something’s not right, he’s... He’s blind, blurred, he’s panicblind and this world is a blur.

He’s upside-down, snot and blood seeping out of his nose and dripping into his eyes. He lifts his fingers and cleans his eyes and finds that he can in fact see.

Windshield wrecked. Steam rising from the buckled hood before him. He hears a snap-snap.

“Harriet, are you okay, I think we-”

Turning he sees her. He sees it. He sees Harriet’s body strapped in, held in place, airbag pressing her torso snug into the driver’s seat. Blood smoodged across it wantonly.

Her head is gone. Harriet’s head is gone. In its place is an insect head, twisted away almost from the broken wreckage of chitin and mess of legs that hangs downward, drooping in an unthinkable ooze assemblage from the impact zone. But the creature’s head is there, hard, occupying the place where hers should be.

The mandibles snap snap as the black bead eyes zero in on Freddie’s yelling. Can it hear, he thinks, strangely detached from his own panic.

Dissociated as he is from his fate, the last thing he thinks hanging upside-down in his self-bound web, right before the sharp spasms of the blade jaws slice into his exposed neck: maybe they’re coming back.

Maybe the fauna is returning now to its home.

FURTHER READING

For anyone curious about the phenomenon underlying this little vignette, here are some articles and studies:

WIRED: A Car ‘Splatometer’ Study Finds Huge Insect Die-Off

THE CONVERSATION: Fewer insects hitting your car windscreen? Here’s why

BBC: ‘Troubling’ fall in insects, says new bug survey

WIKIPEDIA: Decline in insect populations

Remember Hitchcock’s The Birds (based on a Daphne du Maurier story)? If birds can get upset at a little ornithological squeeze-out, what are the bugs planning collectively to do in revenge/self-defence?

One thinks of William T. Vollman’s literary monster You Bright and Risen Angels, and the potential for popular horror fare seems limitless.

Prophetic too, perhaps.

But there have been forerunners, warning us of insect vengeance to come…

PART 1:The Twins’ Correspondence

Chapter 1 - In which the twins relate their prison woes

Chapter 2 - In which the Twins recount stories of their infancy

Chapter 3 - In which travails continue and grotesques are met with

Chapter 4 - In which the Twins plot escape and reunion

Chapter 5 - Breakout! Un condamné à mort s'est échappé

Chapter 6 - Freedom as dream and as reality

Part 2: The Twin Dossier

Chapter 7 - A hideous discovery and a released lunatic

Part 3: The Marat Papers

Chapter 8 - The notable revolutionary and his Faustian pact

Part 4: “The Citizen’s Escapade”

Chapter 9 - The Marquis gets close to the insurgent masses

Chapter 10 - Le jour de gloire est arrivé !

====

We hope you enjoy taking part in this horror/alt-history/fantasy/political satire adventure…

If you have any questions, suggestions, complaints or revolutionary schemes, please drop a comment below. We’d love to hear from you!

Aux armes citoyens! À bientôt!

For Part 1 of this serial, read HERE

For the previous part read HERE

“What delightful sexual escapades, what sensual delights, awaited me in this rented room with this depraved pair dedicated entirely to the wishes of Lucifer and the realization of his kingdom on this earth? Such were my thoughts as I climbed the stair along with the wolfish twins…”

Editor’s Note

At this point in the Marquis de Sade’s narration there is a lacuna, as what is estimated to be a page or two of text is missing from the manuscript.

What was written in this part is not known, but it may be of interest to note that the author’s wife, la Marquise de Sade, Renée-Pélagie Cordier de Launay, wrote in a letter to her brother that “I excised a part of my husband’s description of the Bastille Day events as being more absolutely disgusting than anything he had ever written” – which if true is an eye-opening indication as to the depravity of the events described in this missing section – “and that moreover struck me as entirely implausible.” It seems that Madame la Marquise had little suspicion, as we now know, that the entire narrative of the Marquis de Sade’s escapades on July 14, 1789, was an invention from beginning to end. Thus the excised section, as perverted as it may have been , is neither more nor less plausible than the farrago of inventions from the sick mind of the Marquis.

After this hiatus, the text continues…

THE CITIZEN’S ESCAPADE [continuation]

...which for Marat was no problem at all to obtain. He always seemed to have access to firearms, and in later periods would often be seen, even in the National Tribune of Deputies, to be carrying a pistol or two in his breeches. Soon we mounted onto the wagon with his team of pikemen and chanting fishwives and set off through the streets, the new flag of the Jacobins – showing the red of the bloody revolt, the white of the eventual peace, and the blue of the city of Paris – streaming behind us.

We attracted quite a following on our passage through the city streets. Marat continued screaming out fiery slogans and became quite hoarse; I appointed myself chief refreshments officer of the Revolutionary Council, and soothed his worn-out voice box with good vin de pays.

After a while I noticed that the twins Marie and Joseph were missing from our group. I looked about for them and soon I saw something remarkable: the young man, waving his hat in the air like a festive horseman, riding on a great beast like a huge hound or wolf, as it leapt across the rooftops parallel to our journey towards the royal prison. It was something to be seen, and yet of all that throng I alone was able to see them. I wonder yet whether the history of that great event would have been received in quite the same way if it had become known that a Great Beast, like the Beast of the Gévaudan, had accompanied those first revolutionaries of the Fourteenth of July.

Soon we were across the city and near the gates of the castle of the Bastille, a towering structure which as a resident of so many years I knew very well and had but lately departed. But rarely had I seen it from the outside, and it was indeed an impressive structure, redolent of royal power, blotting out the sun and leaving so much of the city in its terrible shadow.

“AUX ARMES, CITOYENS!” screamed Marat, jumping down from our tumbril. The massed pikemen, Jacobin musketeers and fishwives streamed out around his tiny figure, and it seemed he was swept up with them to be at the vanguard of the assault force. But then when I looked again, the rebellious mob had swept up the street towards the gates and he remained impassively like a rock where he had been before. So he had wisely chosen to lead from the rear. At least he would have his revolution this day. And I mine.

I could swear that I saw about him the shadow of something dark and massive, yet strangely insubstantial. I heard a hoarse voice saying “Four years hence, Marat!” but I took it as the imaginings of one so overtaken with exhaustion and sexual satiety.

And now, looking up to my right, I saw the Great Beast advancing across the final few rooftops on the street, with the young man on its back now holding its fur with both hands and clutching at its sides with his clenched legs. His plumed hat was gone. The creature, who only I and the rider knew to be a succulent and desirable woman, was gigantic now, swollen with the lust for freedom that engorges all flesh until it seems it might burst.

I have never seen such a magnificent sight in my life. My cock grew hard from politico-revolutionary fervor.

The creature, oh sweet delightful monster, gave a mighty leap from the last rooftop just as a laundry maid hanging out sheets on the roof let out a scream and fell to the terrace in a swoon. It was up and over the Bastille’s ramparts and within the fortress at the same exact moment Marat’s assault force reached the gates down below.

The Fall of the Bastille was underway.

I felt some small satisfaction at what I, Citizen Donatien Sade, soi-disant le Marquis de Sade, a scion of the aristocracy now turned leading light of the revolution, had wrought this day. I leaned back in the straw of the wagon bed, and as Chief Refreshments Officer of the People’s Revolutionary Militia, awarded myself a bottle of the insolent though quite refreshing vin ordinaire which I had brought along.

And to think that in all future commemorations, this day, 14th of July, would be forever remembered as Sade Day, the day the Sadeian Revolution came to fruition.

I leaned back in my horsecart and drained the bottle in one.

===== FIN =====

Note from the authors

Of course the twins, Doctor Jean-Paul Marat, the Glutton Tararre, le Marquis de Sade, and all the characters in this sad tale, lived in an unfortunate time when the poor were exploited by a caste of entrenched parasites who bled them with extortionate rents, high food prices, and miserly pittances for wages, and finally left them to die in the street when their economic utility was at an end… which is of course very different from the situation today

They did not have the redress that we do, to freely elect representatives who represent our interests with integrity and courage, completely free from the influence of the parasitic classes which existed in the Ancien Régime (but not, we repeat, today). They did not have access to a panoply of laws which ensure quality of life, as is the case in our more enlightened times

Since everything today is so very peachy and just, we see no need for resistance or revolution in any form. We call on all of our free and entirely unexploited brothers and sisters to join with us in the following inactions:

• NOT to organize with others of your class to call for fundamental change

• NOT to resist the power of the state, its peaceful officers and its watchful custodians

• NOT to form provisional commissions that carry out direct actions to obstruct the workings of a regime that isn’t in any way oppressive

• NOT to strike to oblige your employer to pay you a living wage - the stockholders are already squeezed as it is, and yachts don’t grow on trees!

• NOT to demand full citizen rights like education, healthcare and pensions

We hope with this series of completely passive inactions nothing will ever change and the present ideal condition of the planet will go on forever and ever

Meanwhile, keep on voting! As sure as shit is shit, voting for a different, more friendly face will keep things purring over tickety-boo, just as God intended

All was in readiness for the burning. Uriel the preacher, the barber-surgeon, and all the town elders, had places reserved for them on a pew dragged out of the church and set down to face the pyre. They filed out and took their places alongside the parents, seating themselves with decorum and a seemly modesty. A light drizzle of rain was beginning to clear up. Nothing that would cause a problem with the fire.

Behind them the townsfolk had been gathering for some time. The atmosphere in the square was strangely casual for such a solemn occasion. Perhaps a fiddler playing some mournful music would have helped to instill the correct mood. The men and women, along with a few scuffed wide-eyed children, stood around chewing sesame seeds and spitting out the tiny husks, gnawing on those wizened apples that grew here, scratching under their homespun garb, squeezing lice between chipped and cruddy fingernails, and chatting amiably with neighbors. The children tried to play chase and catch with each other but lacked the energy and soon gave up.

Here at last she came, led out by Markus and Peter the two deputies cradling shotguns in the crooks of their elbows as they edged the manacled girl forward, not roughly but with some solicitude for her wellbeing. These men were the most uncomfortable of any in the square at this moment, the least at ease with their place in the proceedings. And no wonder.

They walked patiently enough as the girl shuffled forward. She looked terrified and seemed to want to stop walking, but each slight nudge from the deputies would set her forward again. She was compelled not by brute force but by some obligation these men had over her, the shotgun or the ragged bits of uniform, or some intangible remnant of authority.

These men looped the chain around the stake and stepped back. At this point everything could be annulled, the whole thing could be called off, they could say there was a new foretelling, a different and better prophecy. The girl snuffled just a little and looked at her parents, sat a mere ten paces from her. They could hear her ragged breath, perhaps even smell her fear.

Uriel the preacher stood, turned and bowed to the congregation. This was unusual. He never usually bowed. At least the correct spirit had come upon the townsfolk and they gazed at the girl who was to burn with some awe and even a little pity. The children stopped their weary play and snuggled into their mothers’ skirts, sucking thumbs and picking noses. They seemed curious, tired, defeated.

“The parents of this young person have deemed her both worthy of the prophecy and unworthy of our concern,” spoke Uriel in his strong voice. He of course was solemn but there was the wisp of a smile about his thin moustache, his fleshy lips, as if there was some undeniable pleasure also to be had in his sad duty.

“This is a paradox, worthy and unworthy, which speaks to us of the deep mystery of the Maker’s will. If it were easy to know this will we would all be gods. But there is only one Maker, and we have need of one special one who can hear his voice and know that oblique wishing.” Again he bowed, as if in modest acknowledgement of his special gift and its vast responsibilities.

“The parents have specified that the child will receive no bludgeoning, no draught of easement, no swift garotte, as we sometimes administer in such cases.” Uriel pulled himself up to his full height and spoke more clearly than ever, stroking the pendant at his chest. “This is a tribute to her purity, her readiness, her worthiness”

The girl seemed lost now and simply looked down at the wooden scraps piled at her feet, old planks sharp with rough splinters and the dry cracked logs taken from abandoned old woodsheds. There was nothing further from her. Her parents similarly looked to the drying dust at their feet, as did the town elders. The men and women of the town and their dull children gazed at the girl with indifference as she drooped.

Then it was done, without words, without ceremony. Markus and Peter appeared bearing flaming brands and chucked the torches into the woodpile at the girl’s feet. Then it was done.

The girl whimpered softly as flames bloomed like flowers from her feet. Had Uriel lied, had she been eased by some drugged draught, or stunned by a blow from a cudgel before being led out? No: the burning caught hold of her and the shriek came. This sound, this screaming called forth from her inner self, this mechanical sound of life being forced out of a narrow space, this was the offering. Nothing else could make that sound, nothing else could assuage the Maker. It was his music.

Compared with which the crisping of the flesh in brittle strips that cast off into the funneling updraft and became like mothwings in flight was nothing. The swift mechanical jerkings of that body which were quickly stilled to inert stillness, nothing. The smell, so familiar, so secretly delicious, so sought-for in dreams of smoke and sizzle, nothing at all. The only acceptable sacrifice was the long and constant shrieking.

Now the townsfolk were absorbed, no longer distracted by snacks and gossip. Now the exhausted children goggled and filled their mind with sensations that would live in their hearts forever. Even the dulled town elders sat up and paid an absorbed attention. Only the parents still gazed at the ground and would not look. But they would hear; they could not help but hear.

When it was done, when this acceptable sacrifice had become an uplifting shriek ascending into the high air and a stump of dark scorched matter emitting that singular incense of familiarity, Uriel turned again to his congregation. This time there was no ambivalence about his demeanor: he was well pleased. The barber-surgeon led the parents away to where they would receive a tranquilizing posset and a quart of peach brandy.

Uriel spoke up: “Well my children, I’m certain that this most fitting sacrifice will be pleasing to the Maker, that our troubles are at an end and that the ground will again yield unto us its bounty. I’m sure that-”

But he stopped abruptly. He looked out beyond the town square, over the low squalid cabins that clustered around them. The townsfolk turned, following his gaze.

Smoke. Climbing up over the hillside. He looked to his right, to the east where the silvered sun gleamed pale behind overcast. Another column of smoke, beyond the fields. And north: smoke rising from the other side of the dry creekbed. And the sound of a wailing, a shrieking, like the ghost of the shriek they had all raised together to the sky of the Maker.

A burning was approaching.

The burning which would make of them all — all, man and woman, young and old — an acceptable sacrifice.

All was now in readiness.

For Part 1 of this serial, read HERE

For the previous part read HERE

PART 4 – “The Citizen’s Escapade”

EDITOR’S NOTE

The following tale by le Marquis Donatien Alphonse François de Sade, entitled “The Citizen’s Escapade” had been believed lost, but was recovered in 2017 when the MS was discovered during construction work at the former asylum of Charenton, concealed beneath a plaster panel.

The author, in a letter of 1802 to his wife the Marquise, which referred to this tale, claimed that it was no more than a factual documentary account of his time following release from Charenton, when he walked Paris as a free man and went by the plain revolutionary title of Citizen François Sade. The Marquise herself, and all subsequent scholars in Sadeian studies, poured scorn on this claim of factual biography for the text and treated it as a fiction, the lone work of this prolific writer which strayed from the strictly erotic or pornographic into Gothic horror fiction.

This editor reserves judgment. Naturally the details contained in the text are absurd, ludicrous if taken at face value as a factual account of true events. But it may well be that the fevered brain of the Marquis after his release from the asylum at Charenton on July 10th 1789, combined with the apocalyptic mood of those revolutionary days, caused him to imagine these events as actually happening to him. In which case it is indeed a biographical account, though not of factual events but of a psychotic episode in the author’s life, and no less a valuable document for the light it sheds on a time of great rupture in an already ruptured mind.

THE CITIZEN’S ESCAPADE

[manuscript dated July 15, 1789]

“What you call the French Race is nothing but a collection of riffraff like me, bleary-eyed, flea-bitten, chilled to the bone. They poured in from the four corners of the earth, driven by hunger, plague, tumors, and the cold, and they stopped here. They couldn’t go any further because of the ocean. That’s France, that’s the French people.”

So spoke my comrade, Citizen Louis-Ferdinand, in refutation of the Rights of Man to rebel against tyrannical forces, as we took coffee in the Café des Beaux Arts at the Palais Royal on the thirteenth day of July, 1789, the very eve of the great assault on the Bastille where I had lately languished as a captive.

I took umbrage at his words and slapped him, though not too hard, as he had been paying for our coffees and might well do so again.

“You!” I said. “And you a former officer in the French Army, a patriot and veteran of the American Revolution, to speak so!”

“Discount soldiers, heroes to the rich folk, scum to everyone else,” he spat out, heeding not my indignant blow and continuing with his rant. “We’re talking monkeys, you and I, throwing out tortured words, we are the minions of King Misery. He’s our lord and master! When we misbehave, he tightens his grip… his fingers round our neck, that makes it hard to talk, got to be careful…”

Clearly, the man had lost his mind. His venerable status as a former man of war and benefactor of my coffee consumption notwithstanding, I rose and strode away from his table. He went on declaiming treacherous sentiments and I felt sure he would fall foul of the many Jacobins around us, but it would not be me who would denounce him. I owed my former comrade at arms that much.

In the courtyard of the Palais Royale, many had gathered to hear the speech of Camille Desmoulins. His florid style and lisping delivery did not attract me in the least, and so instead of listening, I searched out faces in the crowd who might aid me in my quest to gain entry to the Bastille and recover the manuscript of my great work The One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom.

Who did I spot there but Marat, the doctor, the scientist, the inventor, the orator and now the devoted rebel against the crown? I recognized him from the Jacobin papers I had been reading since my release from Charenton. There he was, scratching his great simian jaw, scratching simultaneously the bulge in his culottes, looking for all the world like a learned ape of dermatology.

And who was standing there with him? Why, the twin youths who had assailed my carriage just the week before, bringing me such delight and such torment! I felt a sudden throbbing in my loins and the urge to sink with these delightful monsters into libertine lassitude and erotic discharge. But I sensed also that there were great political matters afoot, and so bethought myself to approach the trio with circumspection. Was Marat also delighting in their perverse talents? I considered making this my first aim.

“Good day Citizen-Doctor Marat, and to you also my young friends,” I said, making bold to present myself to them all. Marat barely noticed me, but the young man and woman regarded me with an admixture of surprise, admiration and fiercely sexual hunger.

The woman spoke first, “They let a man such as you roam free?” Her mouth twisted into a devilish grin. Although I’d felt her teeth upon our first meeting, I had not inspected them until the morning sun glinted off them just then. This curious creature had canines not unlike a dog or cat. I felt my member stiffen at the thought of the scars she’d left there. I took her hand as though she were not in filthy peasants’ garb and kissed her moist, dirt-caked palm. I would have licked it if Marat hadn’t looked askance at me. Was that jealousy I detected in his pompous eyes?

“Abolishment of the Lettres de cachet, a divorce from my wretched wife, and I am Liberty itself.”

“None of us are free,” Marat growled. “We are slaves to our oppressors. But that will change, events must be set in motion tonight...”

I ignored him, since a man for whom violence must have a purpose other than self-gratification and the expression of aesthetic delight is both dangerous and tiresome.

Meanwhile this dog-toothed creature was sniffing at my neck like a madwoman. Her bosom pressed against me, the faint scent of sewage in her hair, were it not for the threat of re-incarceration, I would have torn her clothes from her body then and there and reveled in the shock and horror of the crowd as I flogged that beast within her. Her brother tapped her lightly on the shoulder and barely whispered her name, “Marie,” she stood and stepped back to his side.

Taking his hand she whispered back, “Forgive me, my soul.” He merely nodded while looking to Marat, who again looked wounded. Understandable, if he’d had her, than to lose her would be exquisite torture.

“What must be set in motion tonight?”

Marat, looking around at the crowd, “Just this morning Paris electors agreed to form a militia 48,000 men strong, from the bourgeoisie, if we don’t strike tomorrow, we’ll be overrun with unsympathetic rich men. Our revolution will never succeed. We’ll be crushed.”

The woman reached out and caressed his face, “Mon amour, you have a pact. You will have your revolution.”

He brushed her hand away. “All the same, I prefer to be prepared. The people will need guns and powder.” Their eyes lingered upon one another, before he looked away.

To brush away the hand of one so willing to give violent pleasure confirmed all I had long suspected about Marat. Clearly he was incapable of ecstasy unless it was brought about by masses of throbbing, armed, peasants begging for blood in the streets. A lone woman, violent or not was not enough; Marat needed mob violence to make his willy quiver.

The injustice of my being labeled a degenerate and him a revolutionary was not lost on me. That said, I too desired a revolution. A revolution of thought, one that made all men freer to follow their wills would benefit me particularly. And this revolution would naturally follow from the kind of class leveling Marat desired. I decided to insert myself into this threesome. The more the merrier, after all.

“If you’ll permit me, I know of a man who might be able to help you. That is to say, me.”

Marat looked at me just as wolfishly as the woman had, although, his motive was clearly different than hers. I was to be used, one way or the other. Since my meeting of the twins in the carriage, I had desired with painful ardency to be abused by them again. I needed to stay close to him in order to be with them.

“I know of an arms cache kept in the Hôtel des Invalides. I am former military, you know.”
“Too cruel and degraded even for the ranks, from what I heard,” Marat scratched absently at his torso. “How many guns?”
“Around 30,000.”
“And it’s only guarded there by the old soldiers of the Bastille?”
“Exactement, they won’t bother putting up a fight.”

Marat looked at the twins. The man nodded to him. “I have heard this as well.”

“The people are already rioting all over the city,” the woman said, her hand reaching out to me, strange white nubs protruded from her fingertips. Her brother interfered again. I was liking him less and less. If a man wants to be torn apart by a beautiful, filthy woman, that should be his right. The longer I was near her, the more certain I was that I would bleed to death in the street for her.

“Redirecting them to des Invalides should be a simple matter. Just a few of the right words, those I always have.” Marat looked up at the still lisping Desmoulins, standing atop a table outside the coffee shop. “I need to get him to shut up.”

The woman grinned, her wolfish teeth prominent and inviting, “Get to that table at the boulangerie,” she pointed at the opposite side of the courtyard from Desmoulins, then disappeared into the crowd. I followed, rapt, pulled along by her intoxicating promise of violence. The crowd seemed to part for her, as if they, too, could sense the beast lurking within and sought to flee. At Desmoulins’ impromptu stage she threw herself at his feet, grasping him so tightly he almost fell.

“Monsieur! Monsieur Desmoulins, Camille! Please! Our child, you must acknowledge our child! I can no longer bear the weight of responsibility on my own!” She wept, nearly hysterical, it was an impressive show. Desmoulins half crouched, half sat on the table, attempting to disentangle her from his legs.

“Mademoiselle, I do not know you, please let me go,” he muttered meekly, glancing around him in shame as the crowd snickered and pointed. From across the courtyard, I heard Marat’s call to attention. Marie still had Desmoulins entangled and I saw my chance to aid her in dissipating the crowd. I walked up to Desmoulins and offered an outstretched hand.

“Some assistance, Monsieur?” He gladly took it and with as much detachment as I could muster, I shoved Marie away. Touching her, even through her dress sent shivers of need through me, but I maintained impassive, dismissive even.

“Good Sir, you are a lawyer, are you not?”

Desmoulins, brows furrowed, nodded.

“I wonder if I might ask you for some legal advice, you see I am the former Marquis de Sade and I am currently in a protracted and bitter divorce from my wife and I wonder if I could trouble you for some legal advice.” I took the man’s arm and steered him to the coffee shop. Meanwhile, behind me, Marie had disappeared, and the crowd had moved to Marat’s side of the courtyard. The last words I heard from Marat before we slipped inside were, “Citizens, you need guns to fight a revolution, and I know where to get them. Tell me, do you want to be free?”

Once inside, I sat Camille Desmoulins down at a table and ordered a pot of coffee: “The gentleman will pay.” He looked dazed. Clearly the ruse of the damsel-in-a-state-of-embarrassment which young Marie had concocted had done its work on him. No doubt he was wondering what his sylph-like wife would say at this whiff of improper scandal; Desmoulins was, for all his radical airs and long hair of the romantic poet, a bourgeois househusband through and through. I served him his coffee and he sat there in stunned silence, his eloquence failing him completely.

Soon I slipped out of the coffee-shop and returned to the courtyard in the Palais-Royal. Marat was up on a table, haranguing the people, whipping them up into a frenzy. The brother and sister, hangman and wolf-woman, were standing there rapt in his words. Clearly there was no time to be lost. I approached the pair and propositioned them immediately.

“Come,” I said. “There are rooms for hire here at the adjoining guest-house. Let us retire and reacquaint ourselves.”

They agreed to come with me, and so we set off through the arcades. At that moment the noon cannon, lit by a magnifying glass which is positioned to ignite the fuse at exactly the meridian hour, set off its charge of blank explosives. Joseph the stalwart soldier didn’t startle, but Marie, perhaps from coquetrie, leaped so charmingly into my arms.

“Don’t worry, my dear,” I said to her. “Your protector Donatien de Sade is here to ensure you come to no harm.” I saw a sardonic grin from the brother, and then we were at the door of the guest-house adjoining the royal residence of the Duc d’Orléans, now known (like me) by a more plebeian name as Philippe Égalité.

What delightful sexual escapades, what sensual delights, awaited me in this rented room with this depraved pair dedicated entirely to the wishes of Lucifer and the realization of his kingdom on this earth? Such were my thoughts as I climbed the stair along with the wolfish twins…

===

For the continuation read HERE

I know not with what weapons World War Three will be fought, but World War Four will be fought with sticks and stones
Albert Einstein

President Muffley: You’re talking about mass murder, General, not war!
General Buck Turgidson: Mr. President, I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I DO say: no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops. Uh... depending on the breaks.
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

THE DOOMSDAY CLOCK

In 1947 a group of concerned experts from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set up the DOOMSDAY CLOCK as an indicator of how close the planet was to an extinction-level catastrophe. Simple premise, as shown in the Watchmen comics and film: If the clock reaches midnight, it’s curtains for the human race.

At that time it was seven minutes to midnight.

In 1953 the time shortened to 11.58, just two minutes to doomsday, with the testing of hydrogen bombs by both the US and the USSR. It seemed at that time that the end was extremely nigh.

But fortunately over the next few years a number of treaties between the nuclear powers pushed that dial back.

The Partial Test Ban Treaty of 1963, disallowing atmospheric nuclear tests: 5 minutes back.

The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1969: 3 minutes between us and the end.

1972: Strategic Arms Limitations Talks (SALT 1) and the Anti-Ballistic Treaty added another minute to our margins.

Then in 1988 the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty and increased détente between the US and the Soviet Union added three minutes. Soon after that we had the end of the Cold War and four minutes more of safety.

By 1991 we were back at 11.43 with 17 minutes now jammed between us and the end of all human life on Earth. It was rad, it was hip, the Cold War was over... Pretty soon everyone switched on the TV and started watching X-Files, becoming interested in these whippersnappers Bill and Hilary Clinton, and saying things like “Hey Kramer!” in a cheery voice and “Hello Newman” with sullen hostility.

It was the end of history. Everything was cool and nobody would have to worry about anything ever again.

So let’s just look at where we are today on the Doomsday Clock... With things going so well, we gotta be backed up to about half-past eleven or even 11 PM by now, right?

[NEEDLE SCRATCH]

Oh my God.

We’re at 85 seconds to the end of humanity. Just a little over a minute to midnight, closer to our extinction than ever before in history.

How did we get from Cold War stability to here?

THOUGH TERRIFYING, THE BALANCE OF TERROR WAS AT LEAST A BALANCE

Q: What’s the difference between the European and NATO leadership of the 1980s and the European and NATO leadership of today?

A: About 20 IQ points, an awareness that nuclear weapons exist, and a sense of shame.

Of course that’s just a joke, and not a very accurate joke at that. There’s almost certainly more than 20 IQ points in difference between the cunning “Iron Lady” Margaret Thatcher of the 1980s and the present-day Prime Minister of the UK, Sir Keirdrew Starburnham.1

Literally nobody touches French president Immanuel Macron for ingrained idiocy and stubbornness - he lost control of his country more than three years ago but has refused to accept reality in all that time, and will likely present himself for election again to certain crushing defeat. As for Chancellor Merz of Germany, nobody in the history of his nation has approached him for vapid cretinitude and cringeworthy unpopularity.

And Estonia has never before now dreamed of anyone as staggeringly blank as the European Union warlord Kaja Kallas - a nonentity in every way who was chosen for her role purely on the basis of her gargantuan Russophobia.

Even mentioning the name of NATO chief Mark Rutte causes outbreaks of uncontrollable sniggering and embarassment, both at home in the Netherlands and indeed all across the EU. A man who calls Donald Trump his daddy and who cringes subserviently to every command of his emperor.

What did we do to deserve these unbelievable losers? Why are we allowing these Keystone Kops of statescraft to impose war exceptions over our regular civil law and society, banning and sanctioning anyone who doesn’t agree with a warhawk policy?

Why, above all why this... why are we permitting them to lead us into a catastrophic Europe-wide confrontation with a nuclear power? Have we all gone insane?

We were never so blindly suicidal in the Cold War... which is in fact why we are alive today.

So at what point did these weak dullards whom we call European leaders forget that nuclear bombs and missiles are actual real things that can terminate their lives and the lives of their people, as well as their oh-so-important professional careers?

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE 1980s AND TODAY

Of course all of the foregoing is merely gallows humour and discussion of the black joke of nuclear annihilation, not to be taken seriously. Just a little banter, that rough-and-tumble of divisive rhetoric which we have these days. Though it probably qualifies as anti-EU thought and quite sanctionable.

If not treasonous. I’m one of those weird subversives who prefers not to have my entire world burned to a crisp. You know, one of those Putin-agents.

Let’s start over to examine the question anew: what is the difference between the Cold War and today? Here’s two important differences, expressed as a response to the question: why didn’t we all die in the Cold War? How come we survived that two-minutes-to-midnight confrontation with species extinction, and actually made it LESS likely not MORE likely that we would all be burned to ashes?

Here’s the conclusion of strategist David Yost:

It is not totally clear what prevented the U.S.-Soviet stalemate from erupting into a catastrophic world war... [Nevertheless] two overlapping basic factors contributed substantially to the avoidance of a direct armed conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States. First, these two superpowers enjoyed political and military preeminence in relation to their rivals, allies, security partners, and neutral and nonaligned states. Second, they both had a profound fear of nuclear war. Despite the political ambitions expressed by both superpowers throughout the Cold War, as well as their risk-taking in crises, their essential orientation was cautious and directed toward the avoidance of nuclear war, especially after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Davis S. Yost, “Strategic Stability in the Cold War: Lessons for Continuing Challenges” (2011)2

Thus Yost isolates two key factors in our survival from 1947 to 1989:

1. Stability of the nuclear superpowers within their hegemonic sphere; they didn’t at any point feel in danger of collapsing internally or losing control of their security; and

2. Fear of nuclear annihilation.

Together these two factors made up what was known as The Balance of Terror: I’m stable within my own realm and I fear you because you can destroy me utterly (and I can destroy you). Likewise you are secure within your realm and fear me because I can destroy you utterly (and you me).

Best not to make any sudden moves, and keep channels of communication wide open. And while we confront each other over this precipice with our hands on each other’s throats, see if we can go about loosening that grip somehow and give ourselves a little wiggle room.

THE IMBALANCE OF UNCERTAINTY

It doesn’t take a genius to see that the first condition Yost outlines — stable hegemonic power and governments secure in their legitimacy — has been completely lost. In Europe there are no stable zones of hegemony any longer, and all certainty has been dissipated.

Don’t believe me? How about Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney, quite possibly the least idiotic of all our NATO leaders at present:

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So, we... participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

“A rupture not a transition”. The US hegemonic power is busted, is what Carney is saying. It was fun while it lasted, and we “Western” powers made bank by riding on the US empire’s fiction of rules-based order and following that order into the Global South to exploit these weak countries and extract their resources at will. But now the “medium powers” are on their own.

The old New World Order is dying, the new New World Order is struggling to be born, says Carney. Right now it’s a time of great big monsters, eh?

…And if they don’t exist, these monsters, well we sure as shit can invent them.

Thus it is that Putin has grown in European eyes from ‘an authoritarian who has some unpleasant habits but is essentially someone we can do business with’ to ‘a new Hitler, poised to unleash his armoured divisions to sweep across Central and Western Europe’. And all without him expanding his army in any way, a miraculous transformation that can only occur in a fevered mind affected by the extensive workings MI6 psy-ops, along with assiduous legacy media consent-manufacturing.

RUSSIA THE ALL-TOO-CONVENIENT BOGEYMAN

Consider how we went from this situation regarding the NATO mood as reported in 2024-2025:

Last year [2024] saw John Foreman, the former British defense attaché in Moscow, pen an article entitled “Russia will not attack NATO” in the Spectator. His retired colleague, Britain’s current chief of the defense staff, Admiral Tony Radakin, has also stated that Russia will not attack NATO, according to an article in the Financial Times earlier this year [2025].

At this same time [2024], NATO boss Stoltenberg was quite sanguine:

Q: Germany and Baltic countries say a Russian attack could happen in just five years. What’s your assessment?
Stoltenberg: We don’t see any imminent military threat against any NATO ally.

...but then in no time at all (following clear indications of Ukrainian defeat on the battlefield) we went from that calm and measured tone to this stark and frankly hysterical warning from the UK’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton that “Britain’s sons and daughters need to be ready to fight Russians”... presumably on the beaches, on the landing grounds and so on.

And a short year later we arrive at this rather unappetizing scenario from a UK interview, as a different British admiral describes how school breakfasts for malnourished children will have to be sacrificed because if not, the UK will be invaded by Russians shooting down those same malnourished British kids in the streets.

Notably, the admiral in question doesn’t seem to be very affected by a shortage of calories or any awareness of how fantastically grotesque he appears. This British admiral also seems to overlook the fact that starving children are unlikely to fight very hard for their homeland, whether from physical weakness or from the demoralizing realization that they have been left by their society to waste away.

There’s an unending litany of similarly callous pronouncements from senior military figures in NATO (who collectively seem, as the idiom has it, to have ‘lost their tiny fucking minds’) whether it be about French children who need to be sacrificed for the greater good or overly pacific Germans who need to wake up once more to reclaim their long-lost military destiny.

Europe has gone war-crazy, at least from up top. Down on the streets it seems to be another matter, as enthusiasm for mass-suicide seems to be quite lacking. Only the UK and some central European states - Poland, Czechia, and the Baltic States - appear to have caught the war fever in their populist bones. Poles and Czechs will be the first to call you an ‘appeaser’ if you suggest some form of Russian rapprochement, apparently believing that they are somehow immune to nuclear detonations (though at the same time vulnerable to Russian tanks.)

War drums in the UK have by now risen to a deafening crescendo. At this time (mid-2026) the UK mainstream media literally have no other political issue on their minds.

So when Andy Burnham presents himself as new Labour leader, the BBC says there are ONLY two issues for him to decide: his position vis-a-vis Donald Trump3, and the UK military budget. Not schools, housing, economic stagnation… the much-desired (by the establishment) military build-up.

“Would he be willing to find the money to provide the military with the money they claim they need to keep us safe? And if he was, how is he going to pay for it?” asks the BBC’s Chris Mason, whose urgent anxiety over this question has tangled up his syntax beyond repair.

All this despite the fact that the “war issue” did not play a significant part in Starmer’s downfall, though it did emerge in the very final days before his resignation. No, the public turned against Starmer’s government on two significant issues: lack of economic growth and continuing hardship amid growing inequality, and the continued hardline support by the UK government for Israeli genocide in Gaza - a position that continues to undercut the claims of belonging to a “rules-based order” at every single turn. .

Yet the BBC seems uninterested either in widespread inequality and worsening economic prospects for ordinary people in their country or in the collusion of their nation with genocidal atrocities on an unprecedented scale. Instead the only important question posed for Andy Burnham is his military stance and its positioning within the US-NATO alliance.

Funny that... it’s almost like the whole “war with Russia” thing has been manufactured by elite circles in order to keep the publics of the UK, France, Germany and Europe in general completely distracted from the economic and social failures of their national governments (and the EU austerity regime in particular).

Almost as if there’s a plan to achieve some kind of economic stimulus through the only means that’s allowed to neoliberalism with its hatred of public investment, public services and public goods - “military keynesianism”, the permissible pouring of vast amounts of public funds into weaponry and military infrastructure which is not permissible in the case of schools, hospitals and civilian infrastructure.

Guns and not butter is the order of the day in the treasuries of the West. Terror is the order of the day in the studios of the official consensus-manufacturing apparatus of the legacy media. Coercion is the order of the day in relation to those young people with diminishing prospects for their future. Don’t think about getting a home and raising a family like your parents did: fight for your nation.

Fight and die. You fight him and I’ll tell you what to do.

Fight or else I’ll lose my prestige.

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

A poem that’s not very much mentioned any longer in the UK of today.

Here’s the truth for the lions led by donkeys of 2026: You fight and we all die.

Conclusion: The present war fever, then, is not so much for a war against Russian aggression as it is a Class War of Euro-elites against their own exploited people.

The Strangeness Kit

Are we in a new Cold War?

Baby, this is gonna blow ‘em all away…

Read more

7 months ago · 7 likes · 6 comments · A.P. Murphy

WINSTON CHURCHILL SAID ONE THING ONCE THAT WASN’T COMPLETELY ABHORRENT

The Brits are obsessive about the Churchill myth, above all the figure of the bulldog man as the strong non-appeaser, in contrast with Neville Chamberlain — the appeaser who “allowed” Hitler the time he needed to invade Europe.4

Yet Winston Churchill said one very smart and non-atrocious thing in his life, now forgotten, one thing that wasn’t purely about the preservation of the elite of the British Empire amid their inevitable decline. One thing that wasn’t about how best to exploit poor and coloured people of the Global South and how to squeeze prestige and profit from their weakness.

It’s that single thing, that single pearl of Churchillian wisdom, that the UK and Euro elite prefer to ignore today.

He said: “Jaw, jaw is better than war, war.”5

In other words: that it is better to talk peace, endlessly if necessary, than to descend into conflict. There is need for people to actually fear war again rather than just accept it as one more of those things like economic slumps that happen from time to time.

To go back to Yost once again:

There is solid evidence that Soviet as well as U.S. leaders feared nuclear war. In 1992 General Colonel Andrian Danilevich described an exercise in 1972 in which the General Staff presented the results of ananalysis of a hypothetical U.S. attack against the USSR: “Brezhnev and Kosygin were visibly terrified by what they heard… Brezhnev was actually provided a button in the exercise and was to “push the button” at the appropriate time. Marshal Grechko was standing next to him and I next to Marshal Grechko. When the time came to push the button, Brezhnev was visibly shaken and pale and his hand trembled and he asked Grechko several times for assurances that the action would not have any real-world consequences. ‘Andrei Antonovich, are you sure this is just an exercise?’”

Fear like this is what caused Brezhnev to seek to de-escalate by means of direct talks with the US. SALT and other arms-limitation talks were the result, which we have already seen pushing back the Doomsday Clock. When things got particularly hairy, as with Operation ABLE ARCHER in 1983, calm and seriousness prevailed at the highest levels:

At dawn on November 11, the command post for Able Archer signaled the order for nuclear missiles to be launched against targets in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Soviet Military Intelligence did not flinch, because they knew they were monitoring an exercise.
Gordon S. Barrass, The Great Cold War: A Journey Through the Hall of Mirrors, 2009, p. 301

That seriousness, that dread, is what is lacking among the slick Euro-donkeys of today, the Starmer-Burnhams, the Macrons, the Ruttes and Merzes. They are simply not serious people. The British top brass are a particularly worrisome bunch, with evident signs of being overtaken by delusions of post-imperial grandeur. It seems that those mischievous tykes at MI6 are constantly feeding them talking points and - who knows? - maybe stuffing their pockets when simple appeals to their patriotism are found wanting. Nothing in Perfidious Albion has the capacity to shock any more.

In June 2026, in his last gasping days, the moribund Keir Starmer came under pressure following the resignation of his Defence Secretary over military funding.

His response was to send the Royal Marines to board a Russian civilian vessel in international waters in an act of blatant piracy. The UK has no authority to stop and unilaterally seize a ship in international waters.

This is the manifest weakness of an unstable and extraordinarily weak leader. Incidentally, the footage of the seizure was blatantly sexed-up, with the video camera operator moving out ahead of the breaching stack of marines (1’13” onwards), something that would never be allowed on an operation. This was certainly staged after the vessel had been cleared.

JAW-JAW OR WAR-WAR (AND GLOBAL SUICIDE)?

It is a question of the utmost urgency and of the most paramount importance for our planetary survival as a species that we in ‘the West’ begin to do what the leadership of the Cold War era used to do as a matter of course: to talk to the adversary, seeking always to de-escalate. This would mean in the first instance entering into exploratory talks between European powers and Russia without any a priori red lines.

Talks with Russia about the future of Ukraine are likely to be hard, but if entered into in good faith will no doubt lead to a de-escalation in tensions. And in time can only become more accommodating on both sides. The issue is not to posture about our non-existent strength and resolve and thereby put us all in peril, but to try in good faith to find a path for survival.

For Part 1 of this serial, read HERE

For the previous part read HERE

The Story So Far - We are in the fading days of Ancien Régime France, a time of great upheaval. We have followed the correspondence of twins Joseph-Marie, a witch, and Marie-Joseph, a deserting soldier, as they broke out jail and sought to provoke a revolt against the predatory elites.

But now we also run into other figures plotting their own form of upheaval, the Marquis de Sade and firebrand revolutionary Jean-Paul Marat…

PART 3 – The Marat Papers

8th July 1789

Les Cordeliers, Paris

Antoine,

I feel certain that the king’s officers are seeking me after I published the Project for the Constitution and the Rights of Man just as the Estates General began gathering. I fear – not really fear, for Jean-Paul Marat fears nothing, but suspect – I suspect, then, that the law is after me. I must take refuge in the only place safe at present, the sewers of Paris.

This means I will be unable to make the final revisions to the text of the journal. So as my typesetter and confidant, I trust in you to make the following changes to issue 1:

Title: The proposed name Publiciste parisien is shit, what am I, a goddamn advertising shill? No, though of course if we can find sponsors for our serious political work, so much the better. I’ve decided on L’ami du peuple. Good, right? I am a friend to the people, and heaven knows the people need a friend in the hard times ahead.

Text: In reference to Lafayette, replace the phrase “that lackey to the King, Lafayette” with “George Washington’s bumboy, the pedophile Lafayette.” It’s time to remind people that though he dared much against the King of England, he won’t do shit to bring discomfort to the King of France. Such a reference would be very timely, as I believe the Americans have chosen today as their national day or somesuch. We reference them, then, in honor of their constitution (though mine is better).

The reference to “the good doctor G’s delicate machine” is on reflection a little obscure. We need to call a spade a spade. Change that to: “that national razor, the good Doctor Guillotine’s aristo-shortening device, must be given full rein in these liberating times.”

That’s all for now, if I consider any other urgent changes to the text I’ll let you know from the sewers. By all means get this journal – The Friend of the People, Volume One, Issue One – out onto the streets as soon as possible.

Adieu, my friend and may good fortune serve you. I’ve hired a strong young man to help me on my journey into the sewers, an ex-soldier (I think he’s a deserter) called Joseph. He says he can carry me through the streams of sewage if the waters get deep, and that he has a sister who will meet us with provisions of food and wine.

I think everything is going to be alright, though I confess to concerns now and again that the people will lack for heart and falter at the critical moment. Let us pray – to the Goddess Liberty, not to their Kingly God – that we will give them the courage to take action when action is needed.

Give my love to your beautiful sister Simone, tell her I think of her always and keep her lock of hair in a locket close to my chest.

Your friend and comrade

Doctor Jean-Paul Marat

Colonel Perrin,

As you well know I have been tracking the escaped witch and suspected murderer Marie-Joseph Beauchêne. I have reason now to believe that she and a brother of hers, possibly a deserter from the King’s army, are somewhere in Paris. The attached document is a transcription of a message written (allegedly) in blood on a wall in the Paris sewer.

It is almost too shocking. That it implicates that reprobate mob-monger Jean-Paul Marat is no surprise. Make of this document what you will, Sir, but at the very least it implicates the woman as a vile heretic and proves her wicked heart. I have men combing the streets, we believe they are no longer in the sewers.

Capitaine Lucien Pelletier

13 July

(Found in the Paris sewers by a transient and reported to the Garde nationale, transcribed by Frère Marcelin.)

“Written in blood on this day of our Dark Lord, Prince, and Infernal Master, The Unmaker, The Great Leveler and One True Judge, His Unholiness, Satan, 13 July 1789.

The blood whereof this pact is written was mixed in equal parts of Marie-Joseph Beauchêne, Joseph-Marie Beauchêne, and Jean-Paul Marat, that it may bring forth the full power of Mighty Hell to bare down upon the oppressors and enslavers of the sans-culottes. Let it be also known that nine rats, the number of wisdom and prophecy, were sacrificed in alignment with the rules set down in the Great Tract of Semyaz in the Spirit of Attainment.

Cast down into these sewers, as the benay Elohim were cast down from Heaven, we called upon the powers of Beliar and Leraje and Eligos, Powerful Demons of Hell, to grant Jean-Paul Marat a Revolution for His People. In our nakedness and frenzy, we danced in firelight, baring ourselves to The Infernal Divine, offering our bodies to these Spirits who birth war.

And let it be known, here writ in blood, that these Spirits did appear and did eat of our sacrifices, and did enjoy of our bodies and drink of our blood and our offering was deemed acceptable to them. Jean-Paul Marat did enter into a covenant with them, that he would have his revolution, at the cost of the comfort of his own flesh and that his own life must also be paid as debt.

This covenant hereby signed,

Jean-Paul Marat

FOUR YEARS HENCE, MARAT

I CLAIM YOUR LIFE

FOUR YEARS TO THIS DAY

For the continuation read HERE

“Not a cult. Not that.”
“What then?”

This flippant, sneering man. This stern woman in her ragged sheriff’s uniform. Their guns to hand.

“Support group.”
“Looks pretty culty to me. Chanting and bloodsigns and whatnot.”

Borderland: everything is on the border with something else. Nothing defined as anything for sure. Shifting definitions.

“A heterodox faith group with strong internal dynamics.”
“Yeah, figures you’d say that.”

Words exchanged in this northernmost of places, this failed waffle franchise abutting the Canada frontier.

“Cult is just one of them terms people use when they don’t want to look at truth.”
“I’m looking, and I know the truth I’m seeing.”

Stale fry-oil, iron scent of drying blood. Giggles in dark corners. This small man, hard as only an underfed refugee can be, hard with inbred defiance of the abject.

“Sheriff, if that’s what you are, you have no idea what you’re seeing.”
“I know what I’m seeing.”

This situation is so ridiculous. But then so is everything else.

“So, Ms cop-lady, perhaps we could cut the shit and get to the point.”
“Point is, you have minors in here. Point is, we don’t trust you-all with them kids. Point is, we’re gonna take them away to be cared for.”

Hand on his revolver. In abeyance. When will the moment be, the switch-up?

“That so, ma’am? ‘We’? I don’t see no ‘we’. Just you here, all on your lonesome.”
“I’d say it is so. Don’t need no more’n me.”

That’s the moment. A step across that border into something else. Snap of fear, snap of distrust. And the game changes: someone reaches, someone aims and fires.

Shots blast hard within these thin walls, walls covered in occult devices scrawled in dried blood, dogeared notices with today’s special three pancakes for a dollar. Blast of the shots rebounds, echo slams into echo and nullifies.

The kids huddling behind the kitchen countertop start wailing but nobody hears them. The kids’ ears ring strong and they can’t even hear themselves. Void spots of nulled-out noise and these other spots where ballistic shockwaves redouble. The released energy in this small place big and chaotic.

Ten shots, twelve? Something like that, hard to say, what with the echo and re-echo.

At least the shooting’s stopped now. And energy resumes its slow crawl to nowhere.

Everybody dead, all the grown-ups? No, there’s one still alive, someone still moving.

About three years ago the Waffle House franchise operation collapsed, along with the entire society in which it nestled. All the complex arrangements, all those thin threads snapped at last.

A mile outside Croggins Cross, the stripmall next to the Conoco station fell silent, like all places of commerce everywhere. All the retail locations accumulated weeds and vermin: Waffle House, Sturgeon Station, Burrley Animal Clinic, Han Fashion Imports Discount Boutique.

The Kollapse they called it, with a K for some reason. Krisis, then Kontamination, then Kollapse. In faraway cities millions died, refugees took to the roads, and first the wary countryfolk upgunned themselves, then they gunned down all those wandering undesirables.

The gas station was burned, a fine fierce conflagration for a new moon night that first May after our world fell apart. Black smoke and the dust which the strong winds from the midcountry bore along in roaring air dirtied all the pine needles on the trees, settled on the soft forest floor. Everything became slightly soiled. The stripmall joints became smudged wrecks.

But something redeemed this abandoned little space of the Waffle House: a freshwater creek running just behind it. Stragglers passed through and were gone to the north, but some few stayed to drink and to wash. There wasn’t much sweet clean water in the world, what with the Kontamination and the winddrifting smuts of soot.

While there was still some gas, Sheriff Val Martins would take her patrolcar and check round the Croggins Cross township, dropping in on the derelict stripmall. While there were food supplies still at the Church, she might take in refugee families for an overnight restock, on strict condition they’d move along in the morning. Sometimes she’d take an orphaned child in to a kindly neighbor. Neighbors were still sometimes kindly during those first few months.

She stuck to law-enforcement even though there were no more county paychecks and no more law to enforce. For a while her husband Dave supported her decision; he said the local community would be reassured to see her uniform, that comforting illusion of some order. Brought in venison and hogmeat from the woods to eat and to trade. But then Dave died of a strange and sudden throat tumor beginning of the second year. Hollow eyes poisoned with pain, tongue congested, mute appeal to her for the mercy of a bullet.

She stayed on. In theory the townsfolk chipped in for her keep, but in reality she was on her own. Hauling Dave’s body out to woods where he’d hunted. Alone, no neighbor to help or even attend the burial. Meanwhile the refugee population on the roads thinned out.

After the gas was gone, she’d patrol on horseback, mounted on Roddy her eight-year-old stallion, the horse hobbling and wheezing. Now when she found anyone at the stripmall, she’d move the people on. Once or twice there’d been gunplay, and she’d had to bury the bodies down behind the burned-out Conoco. Unhallowed ground, sure enough, but fuck, this here is the Kollapse.

A song played in her memory.

This ain’t no party, this ain’t no disco, this ain’t no foolin’ around

No more music in the world but what was strummed by townsfolk behind closed doors.

On the second year too she started noticing the first signs of occupation at the Waffle House. Signs of someone present, but not anybody she could see. Strange markings, drawn in blood on the walls. Too risky for her alone to check out. Strangers held rituals on full moons and new moons, and screams of slaughtered beasts rippled out across the valley to the township.

Shoulda burned the place down then and there. Not just Waffle House, the whole stripmall: raze it. But with no more gas or kerosene left, it would be a matter of collecting lumber and stacking it up in there. Sheriff Val determined to leave it until she could rustle up some kinda posse one day, come back in force. That day never came. Folks were in short supply to go out and do the work. Folks shut their doors to her.

The carious rot of the stripmall intensified. Gaps, weeds and stray critters.

One morning two years well in, all days now a smudged overcast, an ever-wintering bleary blur, her mount Roddy was too broken to carry her very far along. She led him back by his bridle out behind the woodshed and put a shotgun slug in his brain. Too weary to skin, dress and salt him now, Sheriff Val wandered out of town towards the stripmall and the Waffle place.

Hungry eyes gathered at the windows of neighboring houses. She knew there would be nothing left of Roddy by the time she got back. If she came back. She’d feared even to check Dave’s rough grave in the days after his burial.

Trudging in sooty slush amid greyfalling ash, it took her two hours to cover the distance to the stripmall. Silver breaks of ghostlight over the place, transcending its tawdriness. By now there was no doubt: the Waffle House was fully a desecrated space. Skulls of deer and badgers stood on poles around the mall, twigs woven into charms and talismans hung from the eaves of the corrugated roofing.

There were women fussing round a fire under the mall directory sign, bent sideways as windbreak and rainshelter. She stepped up to one of them, a young one, slicing wild radishes into a big pot, as other women backed away into the Waffle House.

“What’s cookin’?” she inquired, all friendly-like.
“Sacrilege soup,” said the woman without looking. Then, not recognizing the voice, she stared up into the eyes of Sheriff Val Martins.
“Ummm, my favorite,” said Val, and kicked over the pot, the soup and the grayish cuts of meat sizzling over the cookfire.

Inside the Waffle House their leader was by now well warned of her arrival. Women bundled the kids, not their own, into the rear kitchen and washup area. Some stayed; most took off through the backdoor and the gaps opening in the kitchen wall to light out beyond the creek.

There he was. Clear clear blue eyes in a leathery face, not old. Lean and wiry as a stoat. Mouth opened to show snaggy yellowed teeth, completing the stoatish likeness. He wore his auburn-tinged hair long in grease tresses and a beard, bare of moustache like a bible elder, revealing a disfigured hare lip with yet some charm. Red shirt with dangling fringes on the arms: old-timey gunfighter or hippy. In the waistband of his patched jeans was stuffed a fat revolver, a .44 magnum or the like.

This man was nominally ugly, parts not cohering into a physical harmony, his person raw and beast-touched. But it could be his animality, that untroubled poise and unconcern, it may have been his very roughness that gifted him this uncanny allure. Repulsed by him yet, Val Martins felt some obscure tug of fascination.

A stray thought, quickly pushed away: stay with these people, become one of his women, become tribemother to the brood.

“Name’s Olaf,” he said. “I run this place.”
“You run this cult, you mean.”

The shattered law which she pulls back together. And then the ridiculousness.

Smoke clears and the ears ring. Blastwaves of noise still blatter off the walls and collide at unknown angles. This short time of death was loud, louder than anyone had a right to expect.

The women, those sad bedraggled witches, are gone away. They might creep back or they may run deeper and deeper into the forests and never return again in human form.

But the children are still here, in the kitchen huddled under steeltopped counters, kids in their strangeness, in their wildness, with hands clamped tight over their ears. The one who seems to be the eldest, maybe seven, steps up to where she stands.

He casts a sideways look at Olaf dead in his blood, crimson staining dark through the scarlet of his fringy shirt, clear blue predator eyes fixed toward the ceiling. This older kid is unconcerned by any of this, and the others come out to gather round him. Not smiling, not sad; unlike any children Val has ever seen.

They’re odd, thinks Sheriff Val, otherworldly. Which seems about right as they’ve come to awareness in this other world. Not kids so much: offspring.

This elder child picks up Olaf’s revolver where it lies near his left hand. She speaks:

“How do you like the feel of that?”
“Warm. Still warm”

His breath steams within the murk. Now silvery glints break through cracks in the roof, pour in through the cracked skylight.

“I’d say you-all need something warm like that.”
“We been cold here.”

His smile sharp as a weasel, the dead man’s estranged brute bearing writ small. Heavy revolver cuddled to his chest for warmth.

“I’m gonna take you-all somewhere warm and safe, okay?”
“Ummm... okay.”

A flat-out lie. Her township is filled with betrayal and denial, but maybe...

“All I want you kids to do is just one thing for me, okay?”
“What thing?”

Holsters her own pistol, reaches out to the child for the heavy revolver.

“Call me Mommy.”
“Mommy.”

The child holding the great gun looks round at his siblings and they all nod together. Then make a strange sign, wiggling their thumb over their face like Catholics do. But different.

“Mommy.”
“Yes, your Mommy.”

Slowly they process out of the Waffle House into the broken silver daylight, making their way to their new home, their new world. A restitution of law.

Written in response to the original SUM FLUX Waffle House open call