Xenon-135:

 

During the construction of the world’s nuclear weapons there were some problems in getting fission to reach the levels required. Sometimes it is called the Iodine pit or the Xenon pit. You have to shut down reactors and the energy has to remain stable while you continue the refinement of atomic construction. Xenon-135 is used for this creating this process.

 

The little unknown truth of Xenon is that it emits a small gravitational wave that can be seen with the most elementary of Gravitational telescopes. In the nearby galaxy Canis Major little bleeps and bloops sung out strings of numbers in an automated laboratory. The inhabitants of the lab, the planet and most of the galaxy were predictably absent.

 

There is a rule of the universe that all cosmic life have obeyed. This of course would be discovered by a human scientist in 4946 AD when photon or “Light based” telescopes had reached very detailed levels of sophistication. These telescopes used Xenon-135 in the miniature reactors.

 

The human scientist had been looking at distant life possible planets for 15 years, searching the surfaces for any signs of civilization. So far he had found nothing of a creature, nor a society. He had looked and strained his focus to every viable corner of the nearby Galaxies. He had seen less than 1%, space as it turns out is so large and vast that even if you know what you are searching for.

 

Today he found something, and the day after and the day after that he would find the same thing. He found ruins of old civilizations, abandoned but intact. Great spires of cities, vast empty dwellings of some kind, endless construction and buildings.

 

It was heralded as the greatest discovery of his time. Each day he seemed to find more debris but no creatures, no replies, no evidence that anyone as living there. The prizes, medals, accolades would pile high on his head, but not one sign of current life.

 

The great thing about photons is they take a while to travel. So if you can see light from thousands of years ago, you could see what their society was going. We could look back from another solar system at Earth’s light and watch JFK get shot or Marie Sklodowska Curie hunched over a table ironing out the evidence for radioactivity. So the next step would be seeing why and when all the life had left these crumbled and abandoned worlds. The light of these worlds was looked at, looked through like a window into the past.

 

Each world followed similar lines of technology, society, space exploration and sometimes even stability.

 

One by one they we watched to the present, the same inventible conclusion. The window darkened as the history unfolded to a biological demise. As each world acquired the technology to see the universe, even dip their toes into space travel they would suddenly stop. There was a withering that would happen, space travel then stagnation. The biological tide of existence was rolled back by some unseen force and the world would shrink into nothing or extinguish itself. All variety of cultures would end the same way.

 

World after world was watched, the history telescopes oscillating with Xenon-135, stretching further and deeper for more answers. There were none, there was no sign post to land mark explaining the predictable end to life, yet there is was, everywhere in every world.

 

Dismayed, scientists started looking for correlative effects, perhaps pollution or war, something that would let them make sense of a voluntary empty universe.

 

They found it, it was found in gravitational waves, and every world had ended within 3000 years of the first Xenon-135 blips. Some ended sooner, but it was overwhelming, perhaps not the cause but certainly consistent.

 

The year for Earth was coming up, 2-3 left max. The information spread like panicked plasma fire. Human anxiety found the correlation dismal, society began to crumble, and apathetic suicide peppered the Earth. The weight of the past smothered exploration, suffocated innovation, demolished optimism.  The biological need for life was face to face with an empty void that the human brain could not handle.

 

The psychological effects were stitched with needles of denial, mania and death.  The knowledge that every form of life had come to the same conclusion, it tore society down. The monstrous intelligence of human beings had finally been crushed by its own weight and lay on the shores of the polluted seas of space with wheezing acceptance. 

Doctor Duality’s Dialectical Dissertation #2:

 

I have lived my life through World War 2, I have seen the birth of the industrial world, the birth of the Machine. I have seen the assumption of eugenics, racial zoology, and the basic idea that human beings can be better people.

 

We may see an athlete at the zenith of their skill. They may have genetics that make them taller, faster, stronger or even smarter.  They may be commended for their achievements of physical or mental prowess, pushing the edge for the paramount of example. Eugenics took a logical approach and defined what is best is what makes things better, this is an agrarian idea. We weed out plants, invasive species or even cull a population to preserve the whole. The logic of eugenics can be understood fairly easily from a gardener’s perspective.

 

The tragic trap that I witnessed in World War 2, was that physical and mental benchmarks, or even being born into an affluent family does not change the integrity of your character. You are not a better or lesser person based on the hand that fate deals you. You could have a genetic malformation, a mental disorder, developmental problems, addiction and every spectrum of derangement suffered by human beings. None of those things change the integrity of your character or the goodness of your actions.

 

This trap of conclusions led to some of the vilest acts that human beings have every contrived, with the help of the Machine of course.  The Machine is more or less a symbol of a dynamic growing and decaying technology. Technology when leveraged by human being’s intelligence can be stronger, more productive, faster, smarter and longer lived than any human being. We are simply outmatched, the Machine can do it all without hitting our tribal fears. That is to say, it is not seen as a threat like a nation, culture or some other abstracted higher identity. The Machine just grinds up resources to make the world around us comfortable and achieve the goals of our more primitive selves. We live longer, more variety of food, medicine, communication and a whole gambit of external muscles we can equip to solve problems.

 

We as a collective humanity we use our devices and participate in the culture of the Machine. Our previous history washed away. The May Pole is photographed, the Pyramids documented and watched on demand, Wars are forgotten and twisted without preservation or posterity.

 

So what makes a good human being? Or precisely, what is a negative trait that is culled by the gardener of our minds? Both of these questions are subject to endless discussion and debate, no one is overly willing to come to a conclusion, doing so would mean you would be responsible for acting on that certainty. Beliefs are vaporous things that are judged by others, the goodness and badness of thing determined by the living.

 

We set ourselves up as judges, trying to improve on whatever constellations we can see in the dark night, squinting for a point to guide ourselves.  We work and sweat, bleed in battles, and die to fertilize the ground for the next generation to wrack their brains with the same issues.

 

After World War 2 the dominating perception was that the war was justified. Tons of well-meaning talkers, thinkers and survivors exalted the victory of World War 2. We can even borrow from the principles of self-sacrifice, duty and nations, symbols of the integrity that makes up the goodness of those who lived and the events that followed.

 

There was a writer named Kurt Vonnegut that was plagued by his experience in World War2, the bombing of Dresden and the consequences of war. He failed at suicide by a slow death of cigarettes, they didn’t kill him fast enough according to his own complaints. His perception could be seen by some as defeatist, that the meat grinder of World War 2 did not exalt the integrity of humanity but perhaps showed us how much sweet smelling integrity is. It is so sweet that even the sickly contemplation of pacifism is abhorrent to the living.

 

Having witnessed the bombing of Nagasaki in Japan first hand I can tell you that there was no higher principle at work, this was the Machine screaming its birthing pains. A wicked and headless creature made from the monstrosity of our intelligence.

 

While we all may never agree on the goodness of a thing or the correct action to take against the badness of thing. The inevitable fatalism washes over us, we could take the Machine down, but what foundation could be built in its absence? There is no king in the castle with a singular beheading ushering in peace and harmony forever, it isn’t our lot, and our fate is far heavier. We are baptized in the awareness of death, our tumorous consciousness crushes us with anxiety, imagination and fear.  No matter how rich, beautiful or privileged you are, the same suffering finds us all. If you are feeling guilty about an uneasy throne you sit on, haunted by the actions of civilization I can offer you nothing, you are certain of your participation in suffering.

 

So in the finest tradition of pessimism we have created the Machine, a creature without integrity or virtue. While I sit here remembering the days of my youth and sip my brandy overlooking a beautiful vista, I am equally troubled that enjoyment of such a thing is neither an experience of goodness nor badness. 

 

I look out to my garden and twist my brain into shapes over what plants to remove.  The lilies smell amazing but at what cost? The grass is green and alive, but some view water as sacred, should not these resources be saved for the human animal instead? I will probably hire someone so I don’t have to think about it anymore.

Samedi Part 1 of 2:

 

Brigitte was a beautiful Irish woman that made her living in Liverpool in 1716. It had only been a few years since the port open up and everyone was busy. There were jobs, construction and most important there were visitors.  The stimulus of the port of Liverpool was the beginning of a heartbeat, the ships sailing in and out in predictable timetables.

 

Brigitte was fair and fierce she had long red hair matted from toil.  She cooked at the dock side watering hole known as being the highest pub in all Liverpool. This served as place for Irish workers to find a little piece of home and enjoy a mug. Song and fight could be found if you waited for a half an hour.

 

Brigitte enjoyed work, it kept her out of trouble. “So far so good” was her general approach to life.

 

Liverpool was full of life, even within the ships that came and went like clockwork. The hulls full of black bodies of the Yoruba.  Slave trade was the big business and the logistics of food and waste dominated the concerns of the merchants.  Corpses unloaded, waste removed, food carried on by dock workers, and sometimes peeking out from behind small gaps in ship hulls were Yoruba eyes, human beings far from their home.

 

Brigitte had seen the black skinned Yoruba, both as corpses and as wary cargo, fearful of their fate. She tried not to think about them, not to think of their bodies cramped together in those rotten cargo holds. She would shudder, return to work and count her blessings that she wasn’t a Yoruba.

 

The idea haunted her in her dreams, even after a few years of experience. She could wake in a heavy sweat, the terror of black faces in wrenching pain in those dark cargo holds. The smell pressing down in hot suffocation. She tried to forget about her dreams and those anguished faces of imagination. She had never been on any of the slave ships and had no desire to learn more about them. The concept was prickly to think about. They were considered to be soulless or livestock, but their tears seemed real in her dreams, the faces looked as human as any others.

 

The first Yoruba she encountered in the highest pub in all Liverpool was a well-dressed merchant named Samedi.  He wore English dress, tailored and fresh, carrying a fine cigar from a place called Cuba. Samedi was polite and magnanimous. Brigitte served him like any other customer, her eyes glued to his smile. The chemistry was easy to see, they were drawn to each other.  He loved chatting her up, listening to all sorts of comings and goings of the dock and the pub. His laugh and smile calmed her easily.

 

 

He knew the questions and she unraveled the details of her life. She told him everything about who she was, where she lived, who she knew, everything just poured out of her as easily as the beer from the keg. Samedi listened and smoked his cigar from a faraway land called Cuba. He liked Brigitte, she was an innocent, and in his line of work you don’t run into those very often.  Samedi avoided conversation about the slave ships, those details took too long to explain. He could tell that the subject wasn’t something she could face yet.

 

They talked for hours that night and many more over the next year.

 

As the heavy hand of success increased its pressure upon Liverpool, the players of power grew. Guilds began to form, rivals spotted and the business of death got its paperwork started.

 

The death business was Samedi’s business, so the coin rolled in, murders, accidents, and all sorts of deranged plans ending in the creation of a corpse. He traded in poisons, curses, hexes, painful cripplings, and a long list of civilization approved tortures.  Samedi spent more time in the city the following year, visiting Brigitte whenever he could. He had found Irish folk to be fierce, beautiful and loyal. They had a heart like the ocean and the cliffs, vast and dark, unyielding to the storm of life. She in turn saw the world grow, oceans stretched to wider horizons. Samedi had plenty of secrets that he kept from Brigitte but he enjoyed telling her about all kinds of places. When he told her about the Congo, she lit up and shined. The details of jungles creatures and the deep music of the night pushed out the edges of her imagination.

 

Samedi offered to take her with him on a couple occasions, Brigitte was tempted by the adventure. She could not face the fevered dreams of those slave ships, she could not imagine being aboard one of those floating coffins on the open ocean.

 

It was a Sunday after morning mass when a walking corpse was spotted. It was a slave and they had drowned days ago. Their body meat was falling off sections of their bones, shuffling down the dock. The mindless thing just walked slowly to nowhere particular.  Confusion mounted and someone pushed the animated body off the dock into the brackish waters.

 

Days of murmurs and speculation floated in the city, some said the person wasn’t dead yet, that hysteria had fooled us. Some said that evil spirits gathered in those slave ships. Brigitte told Samedi all about it when he docked. Samedi wanted to know everything about it, specifically where the body was pushed off the dock. He looked into the dark water, took some peppers from his jacket and mumbled words of his birthright.  He threw the peppers into the water, he warned Brigitte of staying in Liverpool very long and offered again to take her from this place. 

 

The next time the walking corpses were seen was in the deep hours of morning. Twenty slave bodies had been crawling around the quarter master’s house. Shuffling and gibbering if the bodies had mouths or feet. Those that gibbered were not tolerated very long. Their voice was disconnected from sound, it was felt, an empty reminder of death. The sound crawled up your throat until it squeezed the murmur from the living. The twenty bodies were hacked by confused townsfolk that could be heard repeating requests for silence from the gibbering collections of human meat.

 

Their bodies were buried as were the conversations of the event. When Samedi returned again, Brigitte emptied her head for him to look through. He went to the burial sites and dropped pinches of coffee on their unmarked graves. He let out a heavy sigh and warned Brigitte that if she did not come with him he would have to pinch some coffee on her grave. Brigitte could not face the darkness of the slave ships, she could not look into those eyes waiting on the other side of the hull. She could feel the slave eyes though and as much as she was growing to love Samedi, his reverence for the dead and peace that he carried, she could not leave Liverpool.

 

Part 2:

 

Two months later a slave ship docked, it had only a few sailors. They were rambling, they talked of black magic and nightmares. All the slaves had died on their ship due to food spoilage and sanitation. Haunted by death the sailors were inconsolable. They raved and began murmuring like the gibbering corpses by the quartermaster’s house. 

 

The raving sailors were given food and sleep. People shook their heads in pity, they knew the sailors weren’t crazy but had no consolation to give them. The sailors ran from the town, they wanted to be as far away from the slave ship as they could be. They left their ship in the dock, a coffin of 600 bodies.

 

All the imaginations and paranoia of the town were looking at the abandoned slave ship. Terror sculpted the mass of human beings into a frenzied mob. They didn’t want more walking bodies, or mindless corpses.  They burned ship, the blaze was fast and the fire gone by morning.

 

The rot of the burnt ship stayed for weeks, black body parts could be heard washing up against the other ships. An arm divorced of its body rapped a thud, thud, thud against the cargo holds of occupied slave ships. Some brave souls tried nets to get the blackened parts and debris from the waters.

 

When the last of the parts of the burnt ship were gone there was a silence that fell over the port, a great weighted hush that impressed itself into every conversation. The iron scale of silence was taking its measure. It was tangible, the tension mounted hour after hour until the deep darkness of morning.

 

The entire town was outside looking around in wide eyed panic. The 600 bodies of the dead slaves of the abandon slave ship were crawling out of the water. Their giblets and shreds, their arms and feet, faces and skulls, bones and charred pieces, all of them had come back.  The mass of meat was a swarm, it was headless and the murmuring sounds could be felt again. The half faces and skulls chattered and snapped, the fingers clicked and clawed the ground in animation. The swirl of human flesh flooded the docks.

 

The slow motion of the heap of bodies wavered and hobbled. Some that looked at it became mesmerized, paralyzed with a lethal fear as their throats closed and the last of their life squeezed from their lungs. The heap consumed those that stood and did nothing.

 

Those that fought with flame and force were valiant. The heap claimed them too, anger burned so hot in their minds that their brains boiled in maniacal furry.  They joined the heap with willing bodies. The crack in the night disintegrated the most stoic observer. All who witnessed fell into madness until the rage had unwound itself and the bodies of Liverpool laid on the ground.

 

Brigitte was no exception. She screamed with her townsfolk, she gnashed her teeth as hard as she could. She fought tooth and nail against the nightmare of bodies.  In the end she had joined the heap with her long red hair. She lay silent on the floor of the highest pub in Liverpool.

 

Samedi docked to an empty port. He lit his cigar and began pinching coffee and peppers over the bodies of those laying in the streets. He said the words of his birthright to all those that died.

 

Samedi made his way to the highest pub in Liverpool and found the red hair of the body of Brigitte. He wept for the first time in ages, her loyalty and companionship had stirred him. He bent down and kissed the lifeless lips of Brigitte. He pulled out a small red and black phial from his overcoat. The container hummed and churned with an unknown machinery. The contents emitted a glow that made Samedi uneasy, there were times to use the contents and he doubted for a moment if now was really the time.

 

He decided to finish his duty before considering the phial further. He walked all over Liverpool pinching peppers and coffee grounds over the corpses of the Yoruba, the English and the Irish. Their bodies all heaped together, a twisted and contorted desecration laid to rest by Samedi.

 

When he returned his mind was made. He opened the phial and poured the glowing contents into Brigitte’s lips. Her eyes becoming wide and her lungs gasping for air as the shock of life returned to her.  Samedi offered his hand and she stood to face him. Samedi bowed and offered one last time:

 

“Brigitte my love, there is death everywhere in this world, at least travel with me?”

 

Brigitte had seen the heap of bodies, she had been in the heart of terror, and her innocence was broken. She would not stay in Liverpool. She could face the hulls of those ships with the black skinned Yoruba. Death had made himself known and there was no going back.

Brimstone and Lizards:

 

Tlazolteotl was part of the scout groups sent to find the creature. This creature was cloaked in strangeness and fear, but not to Tlazolteotl, she knew the rules of death. The creature was called Basilisk by the old Chilan, they had thrown the bones and talked with the spirits of the earth. The trees responded first, singing a choir of smooth unending life. The Chilan found the void in the choir and determined the direction was north into the dark forest and hidden caves.

 

The creature had ventured out of the hidden caves three days ago. It had walked a ruinous path through the jungle. Two purple orbs that appeared to be eyes herald its way. All life was drawn into it, men seeing it would turn to clay, and trees turned to dust. The gaze and focus of a creature could be felt like a heavy stone on your chest, heavier each moment until you ran away or turned into clay.

 

Tlazolteotl had been one of the original scouts that ran away, she knew she did not have the poison nor the magic to slay such a creature. Her description was echoed by two other scouts that got lucky and escaped before turning to clay.

 

The creature was a large lizard with six clawed legs, a flat wide head with two purple eyes. The tail was dark and gray, it never moved and seemed to be a weight dragged behind the lizard. The Basilisk was slow, it was a cave dweller, a creature of slow movements and slower stamina. The eyes of destruction had claimed four villagers and carved a wide path of jungle forest.

 

Now the tide had reversed and the village had sent scout and hunting groups to find and perhaps kill the creature. They brought spears, fresh curare, grass skirts for hiding, and supplies for ritual magic. The old Chilan had blessed them, the sigil of fire branded on their arms.

 

Tlazolteotl was a patient hunter and always kept her curare fresh she followed the other groups into the dark forest and hidden caves. The trail was easy, there was only a void to follow, empty land of dust, and the clawed prints were plain as the barren land.

 

The tracking groups joined together at the mouth of a large cave, Tlazolteotl kept silent as the leaders made plans and decisions. Two of the leaders wanted to hunt the creature in the cave with vengeance and wrath. A few decided to remain outside and prepare camp and some ritual magic.

 

Tlazolteotl looked around at the barren land thinking on its dust and clay shapes. She waited outside with the cautious.

 

Three days they waited and the hunters did not return, their fate growing more certain each day. There were rites and bones thrown, there was fear and talk of returning to the village in defeat. Tlazolteotl volunteered to scout the cave alone to find the fate of the hunters.

 

She brought no light, she drank the blood potion of the Wayob and felt the heart beats of all creatures. She did not need eyes to hunt. Her village had traded steeply for the blood potions of the Wayob and she did not waste a drop.

 

Slinking into the dark she could see the vague outlines of stones and tunnels, large holes into the rocks. The path was smooth and the air electric, the blood potion thumping silently to her heart beat, stretching her mind into the dark. Slowly she creeped through the cave and its growing maze.

 

She walked in the dark for nine hours, winding her way downward.

 

The tunnel opened to a large underground lake, an echo chamber of still black water. No light reached down here, but Tlazolteotl was able to hear the smallest currents of air, she heard the sleeping beast breathing on the far end of the cave. Slowly she made her way over, letting each of her own breaths go when the Basilisk exhaled, hiding in the shadow of its sleep.

 

She crawled next it. She decided not to use poison, such a creature could easily resist the organic death of the trees and plants. She found the tattered bags and weapons of the hunting group, their spears broken and skulls smashed or turned into clay.

 

The creature lay sleeping and the Wayob potion nearly reaching its peak. The brand of fire on her arm was still red and stung with each heartbeat. She waited, patiently watching, the creature only slept. She was at a crossroads, should she leave and report the fate of the hunting party, or did she try and kill it?

 

Tlazolteotl was a killer, she scratched her mind for inspiration. The brand of fire gave her an idea. She took some brimstone from her bag, used mainly in ritual magic, its ability to burn fast and hot was better than a wood fire. She moved in the breathing exhales of the Basilisk, she poured the brimstone on the eyes of the creature, hoping they would not smell it.

 

The Baslisk did smell it finally as more was poured onto its sleep eyes. It inhaled sharply and began to wake, it could see clearly in the dark. Tlazolteotl saw the moment, her heartbeats running three times as fast as the creature. She sparked the ritual flint and set the brimstone to fire. The flame consumed the slimly eyes of the creature quickly, purple and red flowed from its eye sockets as it voicelessly screamed in the black cave. Tlazolteotl ran, she ran with the blood of the Wayob and the fear of the Baslisk’s revenge.

 

She could hear the creature thrashing in the lake as she sprinted back into the tunnel, it had no roar, the eyes of the Baslisk had melted and the gaze of death was gone. The cave echoed with splashes of the crippled creature.

 

She return to the surface, told the story quickly and collapsed in a dream of blood and purple eyes.

Friends in Dark Places:

 

There was a phenomena in my youth that confused me. I lived next to boarded up houses on both sides. People still lived there though, I could hear them. They came and went like anyone else, they had plans to do and places to go. The houses had overgrown corners, wild weeds and rotten roofs.

 

As an adult I know that they were squatters, people living in unlived spaces. There was no paperwork for their existence, no lease or payment for their nightly occupation. Sometimes people lived there for a few days or weeks then would get scooped up by circumstance or some physical or mental derangement shuffling them off to another place.

 

I would speculate their lives and listen to their explosive shouting. I could smell the consequence of indiscretion. It was ammonia and cigarettes. Something certainly occupied them, contorted them, I was sure of it. I would put my ear to the wall and be as quiet as I could. Listening to only my heartbeat, waiting for a new outburst of an unknown language.

 

I have since left my house of my youth and have been shuffled into society and moved around for all kinds of reasons. When I drive by boarded houses I strain my neck and quickly focus my eyes into the overgrown corners and boarded thresholds. 

 

Now I am an old man and have lived next legally occupied houses for most of my life. The neighbors were dear old friends and recently I have had to say good bye to them. As with all old friends, conversations that lasted years will never be spoken again.  

 

The house sat empty for 8 months. Then the boards were put up, the weeds began to grow and the house began to remind me of childhood. I am retired now so watching the empty house became a sort of fascination. I bought some binoculars and set up external video camera equipment. I ordered a drone and learned how to fly the secret spy device. It felt illicit and harmless, there was no one that I was spying on, what was the harm?

 

It was many months after my fascination dimmed that I noticed spray paint on the plywood next door. The paint was a crude skull and cross bones, probably some crust punks. Days later there was more paint and obvious signs of human beings coming and going. Cigarette butts decorated the entrance and the ammonia smell came soon after.

 

As a retired and curious person the mystery was overwhelming. I started watching with my drone and binoculars, hiding my presence and keeping my doors locked. I saw all the characters of this unseen play, I saw them come down from drugs, I saw them tweak out in private conversations with themselves. Mostly they were just stowing their stinky bodies somewhere out of sight of the rest of the world.

 

I had breached their privacy, I had creeped into a private boarded up world that they didn’t want anyone to see. Over the next couple months I noticed there was a regular occupant of the house that managed not to be shuffled off at the rising or falling of blacker tides.  They chose to be there.

 

The regular was a mumbling lunatic. They spent their time collecting markers and paints from unknown places. When they were within the house they drew, scratched and scrawled all over the house. Walls lined in secret words. Senseless words, strings of profanities, slime poetry, all kinds of things that lunatics empty out of their heads. They spoke to no one, having long conversations with only themselves.

 

I was a spider under the table, I listened for two years of the ramblings of the scrawler squatter. There was no end to the variety of imagination that they had. They imagined a cornucopia of paranoia, simplified into certainty. They thought of great authorities, complex collaboration of the most exotic forces, latticed circumstance that led down an endless hallway of conclusions. It was a butchery of logic from topic to topic, the microphone on my drone was my accomplice.

 

The scrawler was better than any television show, any movie, or any golden horde of coins. This was a secret stage that only I could see and hear. I could have listened to the gibbering madness for years, teased to mouthwatering speculation. Unfortunately unoccupied houses are sold to people willing to fill out paperwork.  The scrawler was finally scooped up by tides of a greater darkness and shuffled off to somewhere else.

 

For those two years I got the chance to listen to someone’s long conversation with themselves. It reminded me of long conversations with my old friends, it felt like listening to them, picking up where death left off. The weight of memory is invoked from time to time by talking to myself and pretending that I am the scrawler, a little attempt to wrap up old conversations.

Gemini and the Acorns:

 

On the dirty road we found three heavy metallic golden acorns in a black leather bag. They were the size of large marbles, finely crafted into identical natural perfection. There was no flaw, the smooth gold luster warmed in our hands and gleamed in the morning light.

 

What traveler dropped such a precious treasure? We looked for clues in the bag. The leather was soft and used, elegant and old. There were no markings or indication of where or who the bag once belonged. The bag was a deep black, it drew its own portion of attention. It was meticulous in craftsmanship. The acorns and bag were kept together, our hands did not seem clean enough to hold such a rare trinity.

 

We continued our walk to the village, two hours of opulent speculation. Perhaps a hidden royalty fleeing in the night to escape some catastrophe? Maybe a hermetic lunatic that discovered an ancient trove in the mountains? We enjoyed the mystery for the walk, there was nothing we could discover until we got to the village.

 

As we approached the familiar village we decided that only trustworthy people should be asked about such a discovery. We also thought that a jeweler would be knowledgeable about its creation, gold working of this caliber required an authority. The first stop was our grandmother, and second was the jeweler.

 

My grandmother had traveled much in her youth and her lips would be sealed if we asked.  She eyed the golden seeds for a while, silent minutes and mental shovel work could be heard. She dug through the old tunnels of memory in quiet thoroughness.  She licked her lips and sighed heavily and offered us little advice. “Sell these quickly, for cheap if you can.”

 

The foreboding advice gave us pause to think more. Perhaps the owner would come looking for them with violence. Someone who owned such a thing would not let them go so easily. The fear crept in and paranoia joined a few hours later.

 

We decided against the jeweler and buried two acorns and the black leather bag in a wooden box by our house at the base of the mountain. We buried them with deep secrets while we looked for someone that could provide certainty. We kept one acorn in a small glass bottle under the floorboards. A week passed, our questioning and inquisition bore no fruit. We showed no one, and any description was met with half chuckled skepticism.

A few weeks passed, then we noticed something in the bottle changing the third acorn. There was a sprout coming from the acorn. It was a shock, such a crafted thing behaving as an organic seed. We watched it carefully for days. The sprout grew a little, then curled and withered into a flakey gold skin. The acorn was lost, it fell apart and dissolved into dust.

 

We returned to the base of the mountain where we planted the box with the two remaining acorns. There was a small sapling growing out of the ground, its smooth bark glistened in the sunlight. Small black leaves could be seen on its stems.

 

A golden tree is not something you leave out for the world. We tried to dig it up, but even as a sapling its roots would not release the soil. The roots went down 9ft before we gave up. Something had accelerated its growth and it wouldn’t be possible for us to remove it. We started to build a wooden wall, some hidden alcove so the tree could not be seen from a distance.

 

We worked 3 days days to hide the tree, every day it exploded with growth, the leaves and branches grew in number. The luster of the tree was mesmerizing, it was warm to the touch and seemed to hum with imaginations of wealth we would have once we could harvest such a tree.

 

The leaves grew and fell at a prolific speed. The ground near the fallen leaves grew black and smelled of basements and cellars. The ground would not rot, it only dried and continued to blacken the soil and the wooden alcove.

 

Within two weeks the tree could not be contained, it had contaminated everything within 50ft around it. It consumed the wooden alcove hiding it. During this time another villager discovered the golden tree and brought others to investigate. When the others found the tree the imaginations of wealth could be seen in their eyes. The logistics of moving, harvesting or hiding the tree were now something we could not do. They began negotiating with each other, planning, plotting and promising all the worlds they would create with the wealth.

 

The tree continued to drop its black leaves and blighted the lands nearby, the leaves were picked up by the wind and polluted every farm, every river and stream near our village. We left shortly after the pollution reached the river, the weight of the golden tree kept everyone scheming for months.

 

We travelled to a larger nearby town and kept our mouths shut about the golden tree and its black leaves.  We heard plans of armies, guilds, nations interested in the heavy golden tree. Many days later smoke and blood forced us to travel further from the tree and the swirling plans of larger predators.

 

The leaves still fall, we have traveled to the edges of the world and there seems to be no end to those joining the plans for the harvest of the gigantic golden tree. The tree is seen from many miles away, towering over all with its black canopy of ruinous leaves. They float down in great numbers but no one seems to care about the ruin, only the luster.   

Fictional Obituaries of Forgotten People:

 

Abadory  Julie Hogarth:

 

Abadory entered this world on 1722. She was the daughter of a successful prostitute who roamed the largest Gin alley in London. Her mother, an unmarried woman with a wicked sense of humor and a forked tongue was known for a scar across the left side of her face, probably related to the keen sense of humor.

 

Abadory was born in the basement of St. Paul’s corner church next to 3 distilleries. Her mother had unsuccessfully tried to abort her twice. Perhaps determined to enter this world, Abadory entrance was marked by the death of her mother. Her mother was carried into the arms of St. Gerard Majella the patron saint of pregnant women on October 22^nd at 2:51 in the afternoon.

 

She was raised by the nuns of St.Paul’s corner church until she was 12 years old. Abadory was kind to the nuns, but cruel and often bitter towards the rest of humanity. She contemplated joining the nunnery for many years as she crawled through life looking for something.

 

She was a curious child and the Church held few roots for her.  Abadory had a feral streak, civilization was not able to impose its sense of importance fully into her. She rejected politeness and courtesy in favor of solitude and safety. She avoided men, officials and violence. She hid herself in jobs that she could be left alone.

 

By the time she was 16 she had her first encounters with Gin.

 

Gin filled the emptiness inside her, turned off her brain and set her life to purpose.  Gin was cheap, cheaper than food and shelter. Drop by drop the pain of life was relieved. Abadory spent much of her life in the deep well of intoxication, numbing the vividness of existence.

 

 Before her death two events marked any significance on her life and the lives of those around her.

 

The first was that she was responsible for the murder of a street pimp who tried to recruit her into the fold of nightwalkers. She clawed his eyes out with dirty fingernails, the infection killed him 6 days later in blinded anguish. As unlikely as it seems, she was left alone without retaliation, the pimp was in poor favor and his death was a relief for those around him.

 

The other event that perhaps scratched some impact into this world was the effort and pain she endured in fighting the fire of St. Paul’s corner church.  The cause of the fire was unknown and the blaze endangered the 3 distilleries nearby. Abadory helped organize a water chain and saved a few of the nuns inside. She suffered painful burns on the left side of her face and arms. This mark was like her mother’s scars, it identified her for the rest of her days.

 

Abadory did not live long past the church fire, she died in the brackish waters of Gin. She drank until the hole overflowed and drowned her in a nauseated confusion. In 1750 at the age of 28 she joined the ranks of those that lived their entire lives under the heavy numbing waters of distilleries.  

 

She was survived by no one and was welcomed into the arms of St. Jude at 10:14 in the morning on a Monday.  She will be remembered as a haunt of those that have fallen under the Mother’s Ruin.

The Frog Sermon:

 

Let’s imagine that human experience was marked on a spectrum, divided and categorized objectively, all our sufferings carefully marked down in bureaucratic paper taxonomy.  Imagine a gigantic book full of all the mental and physical derangements, deformities, alterations of the human body written down each time some poor soul fell under the experience of wrenching existence.

 

This book would be very large indeed, each human being most likely taking up a portion of a page or chapter. Some human beings might take up more or less that other human beings, a distilled calamity measured word by word. You could turn to any point and read for a few hours, watching similar experiences overwhelm each human being. You may notice certain sufferings to be common, exotic and perhaps alien. You may find one or two sentences that are unique, some strange experience that when written down appear to stand out, sharply different than other experiences.

 

We all take our turn adding our paper bodies to the book. We line up, open a vein and drain our hearts onto the pages.  History licks a finger and blindly turns the page, a blank slab waiting for the next human being to be born.  So let us open this book together, read a few lines of a common experience. Let’s remember that as human beings this chapter could be us, either in the future or in memory.

 

The Book: Chapter 34296112 verse 33:

 

Jorga was a water bearer, she managed a small cart most of her life.  She would travel to the ground well twice each day. Her cart was full of clay pots decorated in motifs from each family that paid her for clean water.

 

She tended her cart, its wheels and herself. She kept them in working order, maintained them and cared for them. She never drank wine, stayed awake past first dark or looked for adventure. She was content to bring water to the families. She repaired the clay pots as part of the service, she worked for meager amounts and argued with no one. She rejected marriage, she had no family of her own. Her bloodline had come to an end, her parents buried and her brothers dead from war.

 

Jorga was accepted by the nearby town and fell into the order of the land, found her place as a water bearer and counted her blessings that pain and toil had passed her over. She offered frankincense to her ancestors on the proper holidays, bowed her head and paid her tithe.

 

The past three years have been ice, cold blankets of struggle. Many elder folk and new faces had died in the three winters.   

Jorga was filling her beautiful clay pots by the ground well when she heard the first croak. A lone toad belching a greeting to no-one. It was a surprise, the creatures of the swamp had been silent for the deep winters.  Jorga enjoyed the greeting and giggled a bit as she remembered her youth playing with the clammy creatures of the mud and stink. The rich smell of tadpoles and muddy rot played a soft chime in her brain.

 

The next few days the frogs made a choir. Every trip a few more joined in, their croaks reverberating from the nearby swamps. Jorga enjoyed those days, music of the swamp keeping her company on her trips bearing water.

 

The next few days a great black storm was seen on the horizon and the families prepared. The rains would be heavy and hopefully there would be no flooding. The great dark sky crept up day after day, Jorga listened to the frogs heralding the coming rains. Jorga wasn’t worried, she had no storerooms to watch, no family to sooth, no farmland to fear going to rot.  The mud may be hard to drive her cart but everyone would have fresh water well water if she was slow or missed a day.  She would bend and bow to the movement of the world much as she always had.

 

The storm brought rain in predictable amounts, it brought sheets of wind and gusts that battered the town.  The storm brought something else too. The great winds had scooped up and dropped thousands of frogs upon the town, hundreds of them piled up. Most of them had died, yet some still lived surviving the plummet from unknown heights. The croaked and hopped in the mud and rain, simply going about their existence continuing to be frogs, innocent of the rarity of such an occurrence.

 

The falling frogs terrified the town, truly they thought some great monstrous creature was punishing them with vile strangeness, some unknown rule or law they had violated. Some wailed and cursed the faceless evil. They blamed and pointed at the world around them in confusion.

 

The rains passed, the frogs rotted and were cleared away. The minds of town were on fire, their stomachs churning in fear and nausea. The written suffering was just beginning.

 

In all the dramatic display of the storm the nausea was written off as worry and fear. The truth as written in the great Book was that the frogs in their great bloom of existence had polluted the ground water. The winters had begotten a tremendous hibernation and the waste of the great population of frogs had crept into the stomachs of the town. The biological pollution had oozed its way into the ground water and the well that Jorga took water from.

 

A bacteria had set up shop and unleashed the glory of its existence. The town continued the next two weeks in cramped and sweaty shapes. Curled next to some empty clay pot, emptying themselves in waves of distortion.

 

The history and mechanism of the contamination remained unknown to the village and they continued to drink the water that Jorga brought each day, convinced that the punishment was from a supernatural source.  Jorga again counted her blessings that she was unaffected and attributed it to the proper offerings that she made. She remained ignorant that she brought the contaminated water to the village. Luckily superstition had protected her this time.

 

The last lines of the verse reads as follows:

 

Nausea cannot be negotiated with, you simply have to ride out the storm.

The Mountain: 

There is a beautiful mountain by my parent’s house. It stands in the back yard, tall and straight. It has snow on it in the winter and frames the sun in a warm orange in the evening. The mountain is quiet and unchanging. 

 

All of my memories have pieces of the mountain in it. The north side is my house, the south is where I camped with my friends in the 4^th grade and told each other things to melt into the excitement of the night. The stars near this mountain are brighter, the lack of light pollution paints a depth that is rarely seen because of interference from the city.  The other sides have other adventures, vivid recollections that ooze into every memory of my childhood.

 

Whenever I look at outdoor pictures from old scrap books, the mountain is there. Sometimes it is just a foothill or peak over the fence from a party or gathering going on. The mountain posed with me when I was wrapped up snow clothes, garbage bags on my feet and rosy cheeks. I was a little scuttle bug in the shadow.

 

As an adult my brain got filled with all kinds of ideas. In times of drowning I felt drawn back to the mountain, the simplicity of a vast thing standing there, unmoving.  I could crawl out of the rising water of anxiety and find shelter in the downward perspective of smallness. I could look down with a pleasant memory, or up to the unending points of light bejeweled in the familiar night sky. The mountain was a place I could go when things got rough and raw.

 

I used this coping mechanism for many years until I became older and the memory of the mountain started to fade.

 

Like all things, it travels across the horizon and disappears. I had used the memory for so long I was terrified of forgetting such a cornerstone to my life. I started making trips back home to the mountain. It wasn’t the same of course, but it helped.

 

My parents were dead and the rest of my family lived elsewhere. This is not uncommon, I am 72 now and those memories of youth are understandably distant.

 

I am physically fit and thought it would be a great idea to travel to the summit of my childhood mountain.  Perhaps I could rekindle the vivid impact of those 4^th grade camping trips. I was hoping for an epiphany as well. I had seen this mountain and this place in my dreams, my memories and my home. I thought going to the pinnacle would perhaps shake something lose, perhaps etch the perspective into my brain.

 

The trail was rough, the air thin and my body was heavy. I was patient and careful, each step was closer to the summit. I could feel the glory, each struggle met it would be that much sweeter. I made it to the peak and looked down on the world I came from. I looked up to the stars and was mesmerized by the sparkling beauty of the cosmos.  I stayed there for 4 hours, taking the experience in, letting is soften deeply into every corner and dusty closet of my mind. I knew at my age I wasn’t going to be able to make this climb again. I returned back down, elated from the vastness I was a part of.

 

It was many years, I think I was 87 when I started to feel my brain and body disintegrate. I felt my memories go with them. I don’t know how long the perspective of the mountain will remain.

 

Day after day I repeat the mantra of sorts. I repeat the journey to the top over and over, and the star gazing. I can feel myself begin to fall into ribbons, a pile of memories that can’t connect, a tangled mess of beautiful and horrific experiences. Sometimes the mountain is alien when I dream about it, in my dreamscape I can’t remember but I can feel the vastness of the things I am losing.

 

The space left from my memories seems to only have clues about the previous occupants. I can remember how my grandmother smelt but not what she looked like. As each memory gets dark the mountain seems bigger. The pictures from scrap books and photo albums seems to be singularly about the mountain and the people in the pictures are strangers.

 

Why do I have so many pictures about the mountain, why can’t I remember why it was important? It is a monstrous emptiness in my dreams. My waking thoughts are swallowed up by its icy peaks and jagged edges. Like a mouth that has eaten something and grins in sadistic satisfaction that only it knows what it consumed.

 

I and bed ridden now, maybe I am 92 maybe 93, tubes and needles tear at my skin. My grandchildren have said their goodbyes, their faces are smooth stones in the avalanche I feel I am caught in. The rumbling is louder, I think the mountain will claim me soon.

 

All is dark, it is so quiet. My thoughts feel like they are intruding upon this empty space. The needle point of light guides me, step after step I am walking on some deep black trail. I feel so tired, my limbs are heavy and my breathing is weak and thin.

 

The light point shows me one small patch of earth, it is the edge of the mountain summit. I stand there in the spotlight looking out into the black. I can see last threads of tattered memories. I wish I could remember what they were, instead I feel the mountain. I feel the heaviness of the unseen, all the emptiness of forgotten memories piled high, with sharp crags and cold cliffs.

 

I hear the avalanche coming, I can hear the teeth chomping, and the mountain will claim me. I can’t see the rocks and the dirt but I hear them in the darkness coming from every direction. I hold my breath and the last bits that I am falls from the horizon.

 

All that remains is the mountain.

Tony Bids dies:

 

Tony Bids was a certificate clerk at the Church of Loa. He had duties and responsibilities, however the glamour of the Church wasn’t there. Tony Bids was resentful of being born, he was critical of the Church and as much as the Church brochure exclaimed that they were the first eternal organization, he knew that wasn’t the case. He had seen behind the curtain of the Loa. He had experienced enough to be certain.

 

Deep down he thought that his resentment to being born was evidence that nothing was eternal.  As with any organization or culture some small participation is necessary for the thing to continue. Tony Bids didn’t believe that the v22.6s robots were truly deathless. Part of his job illuminated this fact, sooner or later the v22.6s would want to die, simply to have a different experience. The Church of Loa was only as eternal as the fail safes or protocols of the machines, nothing more.

 

Tony Bids lived a fairly comfortable life regardless of his gloomy disposition and jaded perspective. He worked and lived much like other beings, a wind-up toy slowly unfolding all the causes and effects that he could. He would end his life like anyone else…. All used up.

 

The job he was so entrusted to was overseeing the bureaucratic creation of birth certificates, more accurately called by Tony Bids as birth licenses.  He would oversee who and why human beings could have children within a certain district. He would review standards of life, potential, genetic abnormalities, mental disposition and all sorts of other factors before determining if someone could have a child.

 

The two main points he would have to evaluate was suffering and impact on others.  If someone was born with a mania, psychosis or homicidal tendencies the Church of Loa held a portion of the liability.  The Church avoid liabilities as much as they could, certain temperaments were denied.  The benefit was that no one was born with homicidal, degenerate or transgressive brains.

 

Tony Bids was assigned to this job because he felt responsible for his life. He felt responsible for all the things he did and said both consciously or unconsciously affected others. He felt responsible for all the certificates he signed, allowing new life to be born and new creatures to run around and inflict their ideas on other people.

 

Tony was very careful in this process, armed with legions of advisors he would deliberate most sincerely about who and when new human beings would be created.

 

If you were an XX you had the option to gestate within yourself or you could have a machine grow the fetus in an incubation chamber. If you were XY the incubation chamber was the easiest option for a single parent, there were other ways, negotiation with walking Loas or the collaboration with an XX.

 

Tony Bids reviewed applications, the method of birth, the probability of life style, the expected amount of suffering and method of death. All this had to be determined before the approval, anything left to unknowns meant liability of the Church. If an XX or XY lied on the application or falsified it in some way (which only happened once in Tony Bid’s lifetime) the precedent was that the parent(s) of the new human life would be responsible rather than the Church.  Every double check was made thoroughly to avoid creating a human life that would experience unnecessary amounts of suffering.  

 

The other consideration that was heaped up upon his brain was the material consequence of making creatures. In the creation of both the seemingly supernatural Loa and the human beings free of unnecessary suffering there was a consequence of pollution.

 

Since Tony Bids was in the heart of it all, seeing the cost and material waste that goes into construction of new living creatures.  He knew about Iodine-129, Xenon-135, and a myriad of million year half-life structures that could corrode any containers they are placed in. He knew that with the creation of the Loa, their powers and abilities meant huge amounts of radioactive time bombs were entering the world of human beings. Substances that crawled out of the depths of gigantic reactors and then disappeared into hiding, waiting for the right moment to crush something under its lethal surprise.

 

These ideas that plagued poor Tony Bids until the very moment he walked into a suicide booth. Like any sane human being, the weight of witnessing something so monstrous is enough to take the slow walk to the booth. Tony Bids didn’t take the walk because of what he witnessed, certainly that was part of it. The idea that claimed him had culminated year after year of approving and rejecting birth certificates. It created a contentious guilt. It mounted and weighed heavy upon his brittle human brain. The same idea was the one he believed would ultimately cause the v22.6s kill themselves and disprove the shiny assertion that the Church of Loa was eternal.

 

The idea was simple: Tony Bids was never asked to be born in the first place. It was time for his revenge and the only person he could take it out on was himself.