[NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR: I owe this piece of fiction to Chuck Wendig. I don't know the man personally, but stalk him on Facebook when the spirit takes me. I know, I know, a skull-crushing, blood-drinking Viking incarnate like myself stalking the bespectacled ginger wunderkind seems a far stretch. But it's true. I read his short-stories--one after the other, like you should be reading these--and he's a Titan at what he does. His largest contribution, however, comes not in the writing itself (tighter and firmer than the buttocks of a Romanian gymnast), but his total disregard for what is an acceptable subject to write about. He just fucking writes. Which is what I have done here. With a base idea in mind, I've allowed the story to tell itself. It is unorthodox, strange, and altogether impossible. But oh! it was so much fun.]
I’d been at the oars for three months when I saw a dead man
smile. Chained on a wooden slave plank stained with shit and sweat and bits of
skin.
And vomit.
You’d be surprised at the sheer volume of vomit drying on
the decks of Spanish galleys in the year 1508.
I can’t speak Spanish, especially not the lispy dialect that
was used aboard the Castilian. I
laughed the first time I heard it, couldn’t help myself. Until the whiphandler
caught me with a backhand that chipped my teeth. My beer gut had vanished by
then. I could see sharp lines in my cheeks, the knurled bones in my elbows and
knees.
A bald three-hundred pound Spaniard would have sent you sprawling too.
So eat shit. I’m still sore about it.
I told Rachel not to fuck with the cards. Explicitly told her. But she was a goth, and hot besides. That’s a rarity, you know. The thing about goth
chicks: they’re either abortion-worthy ugly or Jesus-please-let-the-shoe-laces-on-those-combat-boots-come-undone-so-I-can-stare-down-her-corsette hot. Rachel was the latter, all creamy skin and melon
slice lips and a double handful of infernal utters. I’m not a misogynist, okay?
She called them that herself.
Said the left tit was for Lucifer, and the right one for his son.
We found it in a Goodwill on Venice Boulevard. The kind of
hard-shell Tarot deck you see on a gypsy’s collapsible fortune table behind
wisps of rising incense. The thrift store shared a parking lot with a donut
shop. My memories of that are clearer than the Goodwill itself. I’d give my
left ear for a bearclaw right now. If I have to crush another crab and suck
meat through an exoskeleton, I’m going to crap myself.
Which I’m already doing, now that I think about it.
A diet of seawater has its downside.
***
Rachel found it under a heap of gloves, sweat-stained caps,
and used underwear. A thong with a suspicious stain was wrapped around the
cracked-leather case like a weed around an axle. I didn’t want to touch it.
But Rachel?
Anything that was gross, wrong, taboo, iconoclastic, or
diabolical was her purpose on this earth. She batted her lashes and proceeded
to peel it with her teeth. She went low to do it. Like a whore disengaging a
client’s zipper. I got a stiffy. I still feel guilty about it. The stain on the
underwear somehow made it wrong.
She offered the box. “I did the dirty work. Now open it.”
“I’ve gone twenty whole years without AIDS, thank you.”
“Don’t be such a pussy. ”
“Shove it up your ass.” I paused. “No, seriously. I’ll
watch.”
“Come on, it might be haunted. Ghosts make me so hot.”
She was always talking about being hot. Bikers made her hot. Slasher Movies. The sight of
blood. Godzilla especially made
her hot. And when she got hot, I lost my nerve with hopes she’d finally show
me her tits.
She bent low to dare me, revealing the double milk crescents, the shadow between, and the faint blue lace of vein winding through her
cleavage. “Come ooooon. I might get so
hot you’ll have to do something
about it. My parents are out of town until Sunday.”
I spent the five bucks I’d planned to use on tacos so
quickly I almost sprained my wrist.
We took the cards out to the parking lot. There were
brownish blotches on the case. Sticky. I scratched it, held a thumbnail
under my nose. At first, it smelled like pennies. I say at first, because in the next instant it was like breathing
poison.
Rachel reached out to steady me. “You’re sweating.
Grant? Your nose…”
I sat hard on the curb, watching blood splash into my open palm. The smell of fried dough and molten glaze swelled in my throat. I tried to speak, but
all I could get out was, “Fuck…”
“It’s a nosebleed.
Quit whining. I’ve got tampons, if you need ‘em.”
Rachel picked up the leather case, staring, vapid, hungry. I could tell she no longer saw me, that the world surrounding her
had been replaced by a broiling dark. She traced black fingernails along the
stains, gripped the lid…
The leather parting from its smaller compartment sent a
whipcrack across the parking lot.
Car alarms went off, a stray cat went scrambling up a
dumpster enclosure, and a wall of humid wind scooped across the asphalt,
whipping her dress hard enough to tear a seam.
“Rachel. Seriously, just
put it—”
She ran before I could grab her, through parked cars and
over the dead grass bordering the parking lot. I thought she’d stop to turn
around and mock me, but she went over the sidewalk itself, laughing with her
arms out, staring at the street like it was magical. “Can’t you see it?
The Ocean! Holy shit, I’m standing in the—”
Her body clenched in surprise, and her boots sunk an inch into the asphalt. She turned in the middle of
Venice Boulevard, looking lost and dizzy, cars swerving around her as she tried
to free her legs. She lifted her green eyes toward mine, opened her mouth to
say something, but the sound of a horn overpowered her.
The bus tried to swerve.
Try being the key verb of that sentence.
Try being the key verb of that sentence.
***
Her body and the cards hit the ground at the same time. Only
she was still in Venice Boulevard, and the leather case was in the bag by my
feet.
I wiped my nose and stood to run. Then remembered she was my
… what was she? A girlfriend? A fling? Was a handjob in the back row of a
midnight showing of ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW grounds for commitment?
People started coming out of the shops. A Highway Patrolman
was cutting across traffic with his lights on. The bus doors hissed open, and a young black woman in a uniform wobbled to
where Rachel lay like a crooked mannequin, her upper torso rotated a full 180
degrees. The bus driver wailed, dropping to her knees. More people came
outside. Now they were looking at me, looking at Rachel, making the connection.
The bus driver was talking with the cop. She pointed toward the parking lot.
Then both of them turned to stare.
***
I didn’t drive; few unemployed Death Metal singers with GEDs
do. I ran as fast as my Doc Martens would move, scaled a gate, two gates,
caught my black jeans on the chainlink surrounding an abandoned lot and heard
them riiiiiiip.
I came down hard. Face first on the glass-rubble-sand. I
didn’t remember it being windy or dark, but suddenly that’s what it was. Gray
marine layer pressed against the atmosphere. Sand kicked in my eyes. I felt cold
air against bare flesh, and realized the fence had taken my back pocket and the
fabric beneath. I looked down.
The cards were in my hand.
I must have jumped four feet, straight up, coming down with slightly less grace than Nancy Carrigan. My ankle buckled and
exploded in white heat. The ground rushed up from nothing. Glass dug into my
shoulder blades. I rolled back and forth until I could see the
spot in the dirt where I’d thrown the card case.
Only it wasn’t in the dirt.
It was on my chest.
Open and chattering like one of those wind-up sets of
teeth.
A terrible sucking sound filled the world then. Pressure
reversed through every orifice, like my stomach was pulling on a milkshake. My
eyes went wide, then red. Blood exploded from my nose. I could taste it, pennies, wanted to cry out, to claw my way back over the fence and run toward Venice Boulevard so I could see her, so I could
tell them I was with her, that the card box had done something, the panties, the brownish stains.
But by then the clouds were rushing toward me like a
hydraulic press—either that, or I was rushing up. The sky breathed with
lightning, or was it only in my mind? I felt heat and then cold and then
absolutely nothing.
***
So that’s how I, Grant Shrieber, half-Jewish Death Metal
Vocalist for The Stillborn Lords, awoke
in a Spanish grotto in the year 1508, with an exposed ass-cheek peeking from my
black Levis, a bloody nose, and a shitload of questions.
The Church owned the grotto, as it happened, and it didn’t
take long for an Inquisitor to convict me. My Deicide shirt and leather wrist
gauntlets puzzled them. But when the friars spotted the silk-screened inverted
cross with a disemboweled Christ hammered to its wood, they threw me in an
oubliette with the rats.
Had merchants not come in to see if any prisoners might be
sold into slavery, I would have burnt at the stake. I’d heard them do it twice,
by then. An old Moore with a scar down his onyx cheek, and a woman that I guess
had been accused of killing babies. Bebe Muerta, or some such shit. Anyone who sings death metal in LA knows enough
Spanish to understand dead baby.
Captain Allatriste was his name. He had a greasy ponytail
and a soiled cummerbund that’s whiteness had long since withered to piss
yellow. He smelled like fish farts and rectal ointment. And his teeth were
black.
Had I known they were going to make me a galley slave, I
might have chanced the pyre. How bad could fire be? Human nerve endings sizzled
after the first 60 seconds of exposure, and the real death came from asphyxiation
by smoke. I told myself it would be like listening to Morbid Angel on the
world’s loudest PA, jamming my asshole right onto the tweeters.
Okay, maybe a little worse.
But a galley slave?
***
I won’t bore you with the injustices of servitude. You’ve
seen Amistad? Well, it’s worse. You’ve
seen Mel Gibson’s gore-porn flagellation in Passions of the Christ? That’s child’s play, friend. I once saw a man
whipped until one of his lungs fell through the back of his shattered ribs.
When they were done, they shoved him over the gunwales to feed the sharks. I
learned quickly—after that one time I laughed—and never gave them grounds to
punish me beyond the mandatory lashings that came when the whiphandler got
bored of smelling his breath.
A note: the dental and genital hygiene of 1508 is abysmal.
It smells slightly worse than a Wooly Mammoth’s ball sack roasting in the
middle of a Bigfoot Orgy in high summer. Doubly so with the heat and humidity
of the open sea, 40 to 50 men of varied race and size hunched together on slats
of wood under-deck, sweating and screaming with the pull of each oar.
Add that into the
equation and it smells like two Mammoth
ballsacks roasting on a dung fire in the belly of a sewage processing plant.
***
Three months later, the man I’d seen lashed to death sat
beside me. The whiphandler chained his ankle to the plank, muttered something
in his lisp, and slapped the back of the slave’s bald head, which was tattooed
with chips of blue in a pattern so complex it hurt my eyes.
He turned with a smile. “Did you miss me?”
I didn’t speak. I can’t say I was surprised—after watching
your half-possible girlfriend run out in front of a bus and being transported
back in time by a bloody case of cards, you kind of get desensitized—but I was
intrigued. “You speak English? No one here speaks English.” I paused. “I
watched you die.”
“I speak many tongues. And live many lives, it seems.”
“Not after losing a lung, you don’t. I watched the seagulls
eat that thing.”
“One lung is a mercy in this stink. I’ll warrant you’ll wish
that you were me by dawn.”
We started rowing. I stole looks at him as the sea moved and
beneath us. “What’s your name?”
He smiled. “What shall you call me?”
“The same thing your mother called you.”
His face shifted … and for a moment the chip tattoos on his
head and neck seemed to bristle and shine. It must have been the light, but the
effect was eerie. “She called me Bwandon.”
“You’re sure it wasn’t Brandon? Maybe she had a speech
impediment.”
“Bwandon,” he assured me. “After my Father.”
We rowed until the sun went down. My spine crunched with
every pull. My joints were brittle sinew. One day—and not long ahead—I was
convinced my arm was going to break off in a cloud of dust; that I’d sit there
with the same dazed look as Rachel, watching it bob up and down, still gripping
the oar.
***
I was dreaming about the tacos I never got to buy when a
finger poked me awake.
I blinked, hocked, and spat into the row ahead of me, hoping
it would hit the bearded Turk whose skin-boiling farts always seemed to drift
into my open mouth during particularly vigorous row sessions. When I turned, a
blue-tinted silhouette was watching me. I convinced myself I must be sleeping.
Because the silhouette’s eyes were glowing.
“Are you awake?” Bwandon’s voice.
The glowing eyes and blue sheen made more sense then. He was
ghost, or demon, or alien, or the demonic ghost of an alien. I’d figured as
much. A man couldn’t be whipped like that and live.
“I was just about to eat tacos. Tacos, man. My back hurts. And now I have to shit. What a
trade off.” I climbed toward the bucket stored at the end of my plank,
navigating the snoring shapes of men that would all be dead of exhaustion in
less than a year. I didn’t bother to lift my chain, just let it drag. I was
beyond caring who I offended. Down here everyone was worthless.
I did my business in the collective bucket, looking at
Bwandon the whole time. I pulled the kerchief from a sleeping Indian, wiped my
ass, and shoved it in the poor bastard’s pocket. “What do you want?”
“To help.”
“Oh yeah? How about some cologne? I can smell my own balls.
Scratch that. I can smell everyone’s balls.”
“There is a storm coming.”
“I’ve already rowed through four. I can handle another.”
“There are mountains that move beneath us. Mountains that breathe.”
“You’re a fuckin’ poet.”
“Listen.” Something in his voice made me pause.
I looked into the glowing eyes, really looked, and saw a thing I’m still too afraid to repeat.
I tried to swallow, but my throat was dry. “I’m listening.”
“I see the hearts of men. The hearts that hide beneath. Do you understand?”
“Maybe.”
“I can see that you do. Ambition, my dear slave. Ambition.
And Allistriste, our fair captain, is blind with it. Treasure. Riches. Relics.”
“Is that where we’ve been heading?” I didn’t know, and
wasn’t allowed above deck. We’d stopped at several ports, and at each the
captain’s entourage would come back larger than before. “For gold?”
“There are treasures greater than gold. Allitriste has been hunting them for years. He means to row
for the Devil’s Whirlpool.”
“What’s that?”
“A place no living man has ever seen. I should know. I’ve
been there.”
What was that supposed
to mean?
“I don’t care where we’re
going. I’m going to die down here like everyone else. Everyone except for you,
maybe. Fucking shapeshifter. Can I sleep now?”
“You may sleep. But think deeply on this, slave: were there
a choice to live beyond these decks, would you fight for it?”
I thought about that for a long time, so weak I could barely
stay sitting. My joints were going gouty. A diet of scraps does wonders for an
over-worked body. My throat had ached so long from thirst that now I barely
noticed. Could I stand, let alone fight? Fighting in close quarters like this
would be like spinning in a mosh pit. I’d been a formidable pit fiend back
home. Except, in the human whirlpools at LA metal shows I had been drunk and
fifty pounds heavier.
Were there a choice to live beyond these decks, would you
fight for it?
The ass-cannon Turk trumpeted a wet one in the upper row,
and I thought I could see green tendrils creeping toward the rafters. Jesus,
the smell.
Would I fight, rather than shit in buckets and row for
eighteen to twenty hours a day?
Fuck yes, I would.
I turned to tell Bwandon as much.
But he was gone.
***
The plank remained empty beside me long enough to be filled
by a skinny boy of sixteen that died after the first week of rowing. At night I
dreamed of Rachel, of the cards and the hot humid wind that had rushed across
the parking lot when she’d opened them. I dreamed of Bwandon tied to a mast,
jerking with every lick of the whip. In the dream the lashes were slow. Cloudy
pieces of his back and splinters of his rib cage went wheeling into the air.
And always, before they dragged his limp body to the gunwales, always before
they tipped him, he looked up at me and
smiled.
“Be ready, slave. I’m coming.”
***
I didn’t think I’d see him again. Half of me believed that
I’d imagined the whole thing, that the glances we’d received when whispering on
the planks had come because there was no
one else, and I’d been talking to myself.
I lost track of time.
Two more slaves came and went, each more frightened than the
last. The faces around me wizened until they dropped and had to be dragged
above deck by the whiphandler. I should have died with them. My bowel movements
were little more than sandy water, and my veins pronounced themselves across
each limb. My eyes sunk so deeply into my skull that sometimes I fancied I could
see the pulse of brain tissue where my eyebrows used to be.
But something had been uncovered that night in the darkness.
A glowing ember of persistence. A need to survive. I wanted to feel sand
beneath my toes again. Wanted to wade into the water one last time, then give
it the finger and never go near an ocean for the rest of my life.
I wanted to live.
***
That night I dreamed that Bwandon was standing over me,
though other shapes twisted in the shadows behind him. His flesh was
translucent, and coiled through every inch of his naked body was a pale eel,
braided as tightly as an insect in its cocoon. The head of the thing was poised
behind his own.
Looking at it made me dizzy.
His voice sounded garbled, filled with water. “I’ll call for
you. Not by your name, but by the one I’ve chosen. Anadoon. It means deceiver.”
“What the fuck are you talking—” He lunged and clamped my
throat before I could finish, hands too real to be a dream.
“Open your ears, Anadoon. The trumpets of freedom are
blowing. When the name is spoken, the chains will fall. Embrace me when the
lightning strikes. The Guardian awaits us.”
Then he struck me in the face and all was blackness.
***
Someone woke me with a kick.
They were already rowing, the slaves looking behind them,
fearful now. I could hear the wind blowing, and the Spanish word for SHIP!
SHIP! up above. The whiphandler scored my
back and I was up, on my plank, pulling with the rest of them.
The command for starboard oars—my side—was screamed. The
whip cracked like lightning behind us. I pulled, and when the command for
dragging came we sunk the oars into the water.
The ship groaned as it turned.
No more commands came. We sat, covered in sweat, rocking up
and down on the swells. Rain dripped through the decks onto our heads. Some of
the new slaves opened their mouths to swallow … but I knew better. The filth
that stained the decks would ease their thirst, but come moonrise they’d be
clutching their gut and shitting blood.
Voices came through the wind. Low. A boarding vessel. Such
vessels had come and gone before. Pirates with terms, or travelers asking for
news. The thump of a knotted ladder slammed the side of the ship, and then the
subtle groan of ropes being strained.
In five minutes the whiphandler appeared, surly as ever. In
his lispy voice he asked. “Anadoon? Anadoon?”
I couldn’t believe it. I looked back and raised my hand.
“I’m Anadoon.”
The whiphandler approached until we were eye to eye, his
bulk belly glistening with rain. I could tell by surrounding looks that the
slaves expected me to die, or be whipped, or worse. Yet the whiphandler dropped to one knee and drew his
keys.
“Free,” he said. “Free.”
***
The sky was a storm of grays. I squinted against the
brightness. It has been months since I had seen the vastness of the sky.
Captain Allitriste was waiting next to a man in a black robe. The stranger
pulled down his hood and looked at me.
It was not Bwandon, and yet it was. The eyes were the same.
But the face, the age, the build, had changed. He smiled at my approach,
clapped my shoulders, and gripped me. I can’t say I felt it happen, only that when Bwandon removed his hands,
I could suddenly understand the voices all around me.
Who the Devil is that? and
The old man looks rich enough to bleed gold … stick a knife in his
belly and find out! and What’s
that slave doing above deck? and Where’s
his ship? I can’t see his ship.
Allistriste smiled. “Anadoon, is it?”
I nodded.
“How long have you rowed?”
“I don’t know.”
“Ah, yes,” said the Captain, squinting his eyes. “You’re the
one they said fell from the sky … with strange raiment and the mark of evil
sewn upon your breast. I collected you from the dungeons of San Gabriel near a
year ago. Piss hole that it was.”
I staggered. A year?
Allitriste looked at Bwandon, whose old face was smiling
with an emotion that was not quite humor. “Your son is strong. Worth every
ounce, I assure you.”
“Ah yes, the gold.” Bwandon paused before handing over the
leather sack. “But, it seems to me there might be something of more value to
your cause.”
“What is more valuable than gold?”
Bwandon smiled. “Information. It is rumored that you quest
for the Devil’s Whirpool.”
Allitriste’s eyes flared at once. His men bristled behind
him, hands dropping to their swords. “Where did you hear such madness?”
In the distance, thunder marched across the waves.
“I did not hear. I saw.”
Bwandon didn’t seem to mind the dozen or so filthy murderers closing in around
him. “The whirlpool is a place of magic. Though it bears a Christian name, it
precedes them by millennia. Some say it is older than even earth. That all we
know grew up around it.”
“I am a Christian,” the captain said, but his eyes were
guarded, filled with hunger. “What would the King say to hear his captain
supporting such claims?”
“Likely, that you should burn at the stake. So stay quiet,
sir. And let me talk.”
The thunder boomed again, closer now. The wind picked up
four-fold. Whitecaps broke across the sea. The men looked uneasy, some of them
glancing overboard to where Bwandon’s small vessel clattered against the
starboard hull. I looked out through the mist, but couldn’t see Bwandon’s ship,
either. More of the others were coming to the same conclusion, tugging and
pointing with whispers.
“All that see the devil’s whirlpool,” Bwandon whispered,
“leave a piece of themselves behind. That piece is traded for wealth and
strength. In times of olde, the great warriors who fought and died long before
the world kept records would visit and bleed their offering. Some left memories
of love, others the innocence of childhood. But the whirlpool’s nature is to suck, and leave something you must.
“I have been there, as has my son. These riches I offer are
naught to me … and yet I am a man of fairness. Just because a thing is
meaningless does not mean it lacks principle. This gold is a flake of my
treasury. But the strength of my son, a year below deck, speaks for itself. I
am no stranger to the cruelties of Spanish galleys.”
Allitriste looked at me with new appreciation, twisting his
greasy mustache. “This is strange news, indeed.”
“Alas, my son and I must be leaving soon. Your choice,
Captain. I’d have it now.”
“The whirpool,” he said without hesitation.
Bwandon grinned that same awful grin. And now I saw the
emotion for what it was.
Vengeance.
***
The lightning struck next to the ship, filling the sky with
heat. Bwandon moved faster than my eyes could track. He swung the heavy bag
across Allitriste’s face, pulling the captian’s sword from its scabbard and throwing
it over my shoulder. I heard a grunt and turned just in time to see the whiphandler
fall over with the blade in his neck.
I froze like Rachel had in the street, watching Allitriste
fall onto his back. The bag unfurled, spilling not gold, but bone white
creatures like scorpions with wings. They covered the captain’s face, squirming
over one another until their bodies were dripping red and the captain stopped
kicking. By then the crew was in revolt, slamming into each other and slicing
their daggers through the air.
The clouds boomed, throwing flashes across the ocean.
Bwandon was busy fighting, shouting things I couldn’t hear. I staggered to the
gunwales, wind and sleet washing the filth into my eyes. Now the ocean itself
seemed to be flashing as far as I could see. A lightning storm beneath the
waves.
Embrace me when the lightning strikes.
I turned just in time to be tackled. I screamed as we fell
toward the water. But not Bwandon; he was laughing like thing gone mad.
And his eyes were filled with light.
***
Weightless, I closed my eyes, waiting for the water to rip
the air from my lungs, the life from my body. A part of me wanted that. To
float forever in the open sea. Now that I’d tasted freedom, there was a sense
of triumph. I’d done it. I’d survived. Who cared what came next.
Fuck it, I thought. Fuck
everything.
What we hit wasn’t precisely water or flesh or coral reef,
but a combination of all three. It had a giving, prosthetic quality, like
rubber wax gone soft in sunlight. The impact emptied my lungs. There was
something hard beneath the softness. I thought we’d landed on folded sails,
maybe in the middle of the boat Bwandon had used to board the Castillion. But when I reached down to push myself up, I slipped
on a gelid slope.
The entire ocean was gone.
Replaced by knobby rises and swells of grayish blue. The
landscape seemed larger than Los Angeles, than California. It disappeared into the horizon, pooled with lakes
and channels that rippled and misted in the wind.
“Marvelous, is it not?” Bwandon came up beside me. His skin
was no longer old, nor crinkled. His gut had melted clean off. A rippling
abdominal shelf that would have made Rachel hot glimmered in the storm light. I saw now that the tattoos on his head
traveled across every limb. And that they weren’t tattoos at all.
They were scales.
“What the hell is this
place?”
“Not a place, but a thing. We stand on the back of The Guardian.” Bwandon pointed behind us. “Look
for yourself. He rises.”
The ship was below us, growing smaller. What I had first
confused for wind was actually the sound of breathing. We were standing on the
edge of a monster. A living, breathing thing. The ship churned in the waters below. I glimpsed the white scorpion
flies picking what was left of the crew.
I felt the world shift, though it happened within me, the feeling of reality ripping itself in two. I
fell to my knees and puked. “You tricked me!” I grabbed hold of his shoulders
and wrenched him down. “I was better off rowing! Where the hell am I supposed
to go? Where are you taking me? Who are you? What are you?”
The questions took on a whispering quality. The power
drained from my legs, then my arms. I curled up slowly on the squishy surface,
felt the thu-thu-thump of its pulse
miles beneath my ear. Could such a vast thing have a heart? A brain? Did it dream?
“We voyage for freedom, slave. As for me? I am confused of
my place in things. Men have always fascinated me. We left the world to its
wars and struggles when you were still apes. Sank beneath it with the weight of
wisdom. But not all of us are content. There are those that hunger for other
places, other things.”
“There are others?”
“Millions,” Bwandon said. “But few so bold as I. There is an
island near by. There’s not much water. But at least you’ll die free.”
“I don’t want to die.”
“Then choices will have to be made.”
“What kind of choices?” I was too tired to talk, too tired
to breathe. “I…”
“Shhhh.” Bwandon pressed a cold hand over my eyes. “You must
not watch the movements of the Guardian, for his ways are strange to men.”
But I did watch.
And it changed me.
***
It’s taken me three days to write this. I’m hungry and tired
and my face is peeling from the sun … but there’s a strength beneath it, the
pulse of something waiting to be born.
I stare at the waves all night, and when I listen closely I
swear I can hear something churning the deepest ocean floors, rolling like a
slug on a million glistening legs. I can almost see the tunnels and compounds, warriors
and priests draped in their pearls of kelp. I glimpsed such in the Guardian’s
lightning, which is the way I think it breathes. Our weather, our seasons, are
its exhaust. It feeds us with its flatus.
I keep thinking about what Bwandon said: Then choices
will have to be made.
Half the time I’m sure I’m crazy, and the other half I’m
certain that Bwandon wants me. I tell myself he’s lonely. He’s curious. He
needs a pet. Someone to join him on his follies. But then the logic of a dying
man’s need to hope comes crowding into my mind. I’ll wait.
I’ll wait and make choices.
***
Breaking out in sores. Some kind of infection.
Tired. Can’t keep food down.
Can’t think.
My thoughts drown in the heartbeat of The Guardian.
***
Too tired. Too...
***
Goodbye Rachel. Goodbye earth. I’ve never felt so wonderful.
I fell into the tide, meaning to drown myself. But
underwater, in the silence, the beautiful silence, the boils on my body popped in a mist of puss … and
as I watched in the filtering sunlight, a fabric of scales rippled across my
arms.
I’ve never swam so strong or fast. My teeth are falling out.
But who needs teeth?
***
Forgtting how to rite
forgtting
world, ship, everthing
Evn now I fel it slppng awy
But. Thers noys.
In th watr.
Noyses.
Comng closr.
May 10th, 2014, Lawndale, CA, running late for work, 10:17AM www.Carsonstandiferfiction.com
[Comments are welcome. Facebook: Novelist Carson Standifer. Twitter: CarsonStandifer]
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