the valley of shadows

dreamer

2011-09-17T03:04:00.002-05:00

Horror wells up inside Zov's mouth in muffled gurgling sobs, strangely familiar.

Jellied eyelids pried open, he sees blobs bathed in a faint yellow light overhead. Tears streak across his temples and congeal into pendulous imps swinging by his earlobes whispering foul secrets. His tongue rolls up like a slice of dry cured ham and pushes backagainst his throat.

“H-e-l-l....”, he draws a sharp breath and tries to scream but merely intones in the manner of a mute.

“Feeling a little tongue-tied, Master? Might you be that randy little dandy that stole my tongue-twister?”, a gravelly drawl crawls up from the miasma.

As Zov rolls his eyeballs, his eyelashes fizz into his sockets like soldering irons.

"Well, well, ma' deah boy, we all want free speech, don't we?", the voice now resounds clearly before bursting into menacing mirth.

“What hell is this, Macabre Punster!”, Zov demands.

Or so he would have as he attempts a gut utterance after the guttural fails him, half-hoping a flourish of indignant characterization might resonate with the jesting knave's heartless wit. An instant endowment ofventriloquism by the Lord's even-handed ways (as they are rumored to be) he reckons would make two-bit counterpoint to the amorphous malignity that holds his body captive and tears at his soul, but a counterpoint nevertheless. Yet not a squeak escapes his corporeal innards.

It strikes him then that even the most desperate entreaties of the conscious mind (that naive moribund sailor whose charmed odysseys atop torrential undercurrents lead him to be enamored of his own illusory powers of navigation) would never appeasethe Ambivalent Dreamer Who Knows And Yet Doesn't...

hear, tortoise.

2010-11-21T17:37:00.012-06:00

Sully once told his favorite tortoise to shut up.

The tortoise kept quiet and crawled on, poise being one of her strong points. Besides, poor Mrellis hadn't really said much at all.

The one sign, quite likely reflexive if so, of any displeasure was an imperceptible hiccup in her shuffle. Other than that, she kept on keeping mum and trudged on.

Sully was a curiously spoiled man-child. His mum had never really taught him (or quite possibly herself understood) the value of squelching one's fantastical notions from being given voice at all times. He would on occasion slip into the wildest of reveries (if one could call them that; most of which were anything but pleasant) and to everyone's dread, enact them out in a manner far more disgraceful than the previous one.

This one personality tic, to put it gently, alone guaranteed that “Silly Sully” (thus went the unimaginative nickname) was regularly avoided in polite circles. Not that he took much notice of it.

His only company, however indifferent, was the band of tortoises with whom he regularly took (mostly silent) “walkabouts” along the wooded outskirts of Dervishire. It wasn't such a terrible arrangement, for the man's proclivity for what one might conceive of as part-perambulation and part-circumabulation kept him roughly in pace with his unidirectionally-slow fellows.

Tortoises tend to be excellent listeners – they like to keep to themselves most of their long, rarely tonous lives.

One of Mrellis' few social graces involved rolling her eyeballs while yawning throaty grunts of a very low frequency, inaudible to Sully or any other human. Sully however took that to be a case of reptilian sarcasm in response to his one of his spirited soliloquys, which if he had bothered to enquire, was decidedly a laughable proposition if there ever was one.

Strictly speaking, not entirely improbable. Scientifically speaking however, it would classify as a non-starter and dead-end rolled into one within the narrow confines of zoological research -- the unstated dogma being that tortoises are incapable of irony. One can safely say that it will likely never be conclusively proven or otherwise (that would require a cross-disciplinary study backed by equally improbable funding).

But then Sully didn't think much of science either – not in a particularly critical way, he just never thought about it...

light matters

2010-08-08T00:33:00.005-05:00

Pics are picky,

fickle to flickers.

or, for that matter,

so are flickers in flicks.

as they are, lightly put, impressions

of light on matter

of light ejected by matter

projecting light on matter.

so do they enlighten, matter, or even impress

if they enlighten impressions on matter?

or are they simply matters of impression,

a bit light on matter?

is there matter in light?

does it even matter?

whether we call them particles or waves?

particular waves or wavy particulars?

a particularly wavy one,

waved off by particular ones

who are “wavy wavy” particularly “wavy”

of dualities in thought.

thought to be dubiously duplicitous

by many a thoughtful one

and singularly single-minded

by one thoughtful duo too many.

unique reminders that

to be doubly mindful

of the multitude of minds

the thoughtless wave off

as light-minded

matters.

kindred spirits

2009-12-27T17:16:00.010-06:00

“Suffering has no limits, comrade but could one say the same of drunkenness?”, the man in the dark suit almost whispered as he poured.

Markov lifted his stolid gaze quizzically at the commentator and then cast heavy eyes back down upon the dark mahogany.

The flame in the last candle that still stood was bobbing in the ether and so was the brass candelabrum that held it. That's when Dmitri half-knew he had checked out of his senses.

“I had better go.”

“Not without some help first, comrade.”

“Care to know a little secret, dear brother?", it was Markov's turn to whisper in a mock conspiratorial tone, as he narrowed his eyes and gulped down the glass. "I'm afraid this comrade of yours cannot be seen with anyone tonight.”

“Fortunately for you, I'm not just anyone. Dmitri Rosporov, Chief Militsioner of the Mitino precinct at your service.”

“Ah the militsia! All the more reason to stay away, friend. I'm a marked man.”

“I could arrange for a safehouse tonight - we worry about details later as long as we slip out in the darkness. No questions asked. Moreover, your state does not offer much by way of confidence in your ability to defend yourself, Comrade Markov”, Dmitri offered with no hint of hesitation.

“Did I introduce myself tonight, Dmitri? I don't recall”, Markov said, not quite certain whether this was just vodka-induced amnesia or vodka-induced clarity of thought.

“No, you didn't, comrade. Quite remarkable, your presence of mind. You sound like just the kind of man that might interest us”.

“Us?”

“Never mind. Shall we step outside?”

At half-past-midnight, both stepped out hobbling together in each other's arms in a way one couldn't tell which one the drunk was.

The inky sky was covered with what could only be a thick shroud of clouds. The inching snow still reflected some unseen source of light in the darkness and steadily muffled their crisp footfall. An icy silence gathered around them as the feeble wind died down to a whimper.

The officer's white Lada was parked beside a half-crumbled brick wall, buried under the snow except for what looked like a retractable antenna that bobbed up slowly to peep as if sensing their presence.

“Nice camouflage”, the thought intruded Markov's sozzled senses as he attempted to get inside.

An unsolicited offer of assistance met with fumbling, grumbling resistance. Dmitri quickly relented.

They drove away after the officer played back recorded messages from his radio while warming up the engine. Markov could barely decipher the language of the bursts wafting by the rear-seat, reliably unsure of the alcohol's actual contribution to the garbling.

the altar

2009-08-13T00:46:00.038-05:00

The Oracle stamped his feet on the parched earth, one after the other, raising hellishly purple dust from within the crevices. Then he carefully lay down a granite slab that passed for the Altar.

"This is it. We must begin here."

The paesanos dug and dug for hours but time after time, they came up high and dry.

"I am certain of it. We must not give up".

Thus they went on laboring under the high sun clinging to prophetic words. The day was slipping away -- yet little sign of the aqua vita showed.

The ditch grew wide and deep by twilight. Torches were lit against the brooding hills on the pitch-dark night.

One Ignatio unearthing the core uttered a panicked scream. Two of his compagnos (Antonio and Marco, cousins from the Monserratis) hurtled into the abyss, following the receding voice and little premeditation.

Within moments, it was evident that all three men were gone. The fellows standing around took turns hollering out the plungers' names in anguish and probing each other's eyes for signs of dash. Not one volunteer would emerge.

Ordained certitudes steadily devolving into blind hysteria, a hushed retreat to the village followed, heedless of the Oracle who thundered at the cruel cravenness of it all and hurled grievous imprecations at the decamping rustics.

At dawn, the entire village (save the infirm and old) gathered back at the scene. A glistening pond now covered the excavation. In the center, three white lotuses stood floating in full bloom.

The Oracle was soon summoned to sanctify the site. His lamentations at the sacrilegious hegira only hours earlier gave way.

"What glorious metamorphosis! Here lie the three brothers-in-arms -- the Fraternità di loto", proclaimed he with eyes to the heavens, lips trembling with a rapturous smile, hands gesticulating the consecration.

That night, all but a dozen-and-one denizens dreamed of silently opening lotuses.

The accursed thirteen, hereafter conferred upon who were the variously inglorious titles of "Band-Of-No-Bothers", "Cowards-In-Harms", "No-Moon-Poltroons" and "Lotus Retreaters" could not sleep at all (nay, not for the rest of their ignominious lives!).

Even as they were silently reclaimed by mortality decades into this singularly shameful incident, it is rumored that on black moonless nights still, the tortured souls emerge to tiptoe around their own graves. For those dreadful epithets followed them to their epitaphs (and that wearisome insomnia to supposedly supine non-existence).

Moreover, it was surmised by a perspicacious few that it didn't help much that the headstones happened to be crushing reminders (nay exacting replicas!) of the Altar (nay spitting images!).

misanthropology

2008-12-24T00:32:00.037-06:00

“That's way too loud, kid”.

“No, you're too damn old, gramps”.

Bezvan had been a regular at the Metrovomix for months now.

Within moments of entering the hall, he would still break into a secret, odorless sweat. Jaws clenching into a vise, his head would reflexively swivel staccato every few seconds towards the door, in the manner of a wind-up toy.

As the night wore on, however, and the lights dimmed gradually, the dull mechatronic beat had a way of nursing him into a state of shallow, joyless sublimation.

In his younger days, Bez, as he was known back then, had fancied himself a people-watcher -- voluntarily immersing himself into situations that would offer the slightest vantage of anonymous observation -- as a benign alien collector of human experience might.

Spiraling down the faces in detail, he would extract subtler imperfections with each sweep, with the intent of refining his physiognomic deductions. The initial appearance of an alluring visage would gradually devolve into little more than an aggregate of little deviations from the classic ideal – the faintest bent of the nose as it wound down the center of the face, the slightest disproportion between the frontal and profile diameters, an unseemly horizontal slope along the frontal plateau; not even a healthy asymmetry (to the casual observer) between the eyebrows was lost. There were the ears, of course – there was no other organ of such prominence glaringly grotesque variations of which in his judgement escaped notice so easily regardless of other more conspicuous defects.

Now, he found himself the subject of a collective, unwavering gaze wherever he went by the teeming, faceless, lustful vermin of youth. That look – stolid, yet not entirely innocent – it engendered in him a certain instinctive revulsion that to his eyes arose from the unreflective panoply of maya.

"If I were really that old, little punk, I wouldn't be complaining about my hearing. I bet you couldn't hear your floppy eardrums if they slapped your ugly cheeks!".

The kid stood there silently for a few seconds, with a vaguely amused look. Then he lifted both of his pudgy, hairless hands from behind his own head and raised a dripping, glistening, chalky mass into the air.

It quivered a little, as he gingerly lay the thing on the bar.

"Care to study it, gramps?" .

Bezvan's mouth curled involuntarily as his senses dimmed.

"Works like a charm with them old fogies", the boy's voice crowed.

A titter broke in the crowd that had assembled.

"Imbeciles", Bez mumbled under his gasping breath as his eyeballs rolled up.

The Inn At The End Of The Earth

2008-05-01T21:18:00.024-05:00

Jamil glanced over his shoulder.

As far as he could see in the twilight, tufts of sunburnt, mostly dead grass cropped up like bad hair, windswept at an infinitude of angles.

“Amu was so sure it took him three hours... and he's sixty-five.”

He became aware of his pocket-watch ticking in the stillness that followed the odd breeze. He took it out and checked.

It read 7:37. He held on to it.

The sun had already sunk into the sands when he reached the sarai. Along the bleached mud wall outside, a shriveled figure wrapped in a white, crimpled turban and loose, flowing gown sat astride a sagging charpoi.

Clasping his smoke with sunburnt hands, he puffed into his sunken cheeks.While the low arch of the crumbling entrance swam closer, the old man appeared to spectrally levitate from within his ample garment, till he broke into a wide, toothless smile as soon as his feet descended into sight.

In silence, each held out his arms and embraced twice, burying chin into each shoulder, in effortless synchronism. The rustle of the nestle and flutter of the cloth that billowed across the elder's leathery legs carried into the passing breeze a peculiar hush.

Soon, both disappeared into the dark interior.

Jamil dreamt of sand that night.

High, chiseled dunes loomed on all sides. He shouted out his name several times, as if searching for himself. Then, as he shouted "Rimaal" and his own name returned as an eerily melodious will-o'-the-wisp, swirled around the crater he stood in several times before dissipating, mute horror passed over him.

As he wrung the cold sweat off the sleeves of his own caftan, his feet started to sink into the dry morass beneath him. He kept peering up at the bright ball inside the sun as he felt his limbs cocooned by the warm sands at first, then his neck swallowed whole by the bleached barren. A corona bobbed and slowly eclipsed along the edges of his feverish vision. And then the sieve filled up and couldn't sift anymore.

"In the name of Allah, rise, son.".

Sunrise peeped through Amu's eyepiece.

Captains Virtuous

2008-02-10T02:49:00.005-06:00

"Most vice is nothing but distraction, Helmut. Momentary relief from the burden of all those duties and expectations of the world we carry around all day, some our own, mostly others. Gambling, whoring, drinking, smoking... lazy indulgences, nothing else".

"Sure, Cap. But surely you see the harm that can come of these. It is the habit-forming nature of these enjoyable idlings that's the real problem. Once you give in, even once, your brain starts turning into jelly. Soon enough, you can't even think straight any more!".

"True, Helmut but that's where strength of character comes in. The strength that comes from a profound self-awareness, that keeps you on the right side even though you cross the line so many times. It stays with you in the middle of the most violent of your excesses, even when your mind is veering and careening into the temporary madness of the vicious act. You know its there even though it is usually of little help in the moment itself. It is usually after the fact that an equally violent self-correcting reaction ensues that steers you away from this rabid course, and exerts at least a tenuous hold till the next time you succumb to another indiscretion, which will, to no one's surprise, happen again. For the damned thing has an equally devious hold on the victimized mind and will surely find a way to rear its fangs when you're not looking. Of course, the frequency, intensity and duration of such transgressions will reflect the past and mold the future of the besieged soul's character, or perhaps I should say lack of."

"Battle for the poor sod's soul, huh?".

"More like a protracted war. Rare are the decisive battles, more often nightly sneak attacks and swift, vengeful reprisals the daylight after. Usually a war of attrition, for your attention. What dominates your consciousness the most? What consumes more of your energy and thought? How much do you allow the dull comforting shadow that the vice of choice looms upon your soul to blot out the destiny that otherwise awaits you? The answers to these questions decides the degree of moral victory or defeat. On occasion, one slip torpedoes the whole enterprise but most other times, you always get another chance to fight back and hold the line. It is the proportion of time you hold off the adversary either in native innocence or an acute intensity of purpose and devote time to your true being, relative to the time you spend fighting and retreating and cutting your losses, that is the key".

"Got it, Cap. You sound like a preacher, not quite the hell-and-fury kind but close enough. You ever considered the pulpit?".

"Not that far off, Helmut. I commandeer men's ships from the deck instead, even though I shepherd their souls at times too, especially when the waves gets a little choppy on the high seas."

"Or the vices!! Har, har... Aye, aye. Quite the master of turbulences, moral and nautical!".

Cap winked.

"Now let's see you save this soul, Cap".

With that, Helmut leapt.

Charon's fare

2008-02-03T19:02:00.005-06:00

He looked up and saw a totem peering at him askew through the glass door of the cafe in the remaining light of dusk.

It was a sad elongated face, with large rounded black shadows for eyes, the nose of a stony gray parrot and a small conical mouth that receded into a long rectangular chin. The steely hood of a parked truck formed its broad, square shoulders, gleaming in the yellow streetlight overhead. The trunk rolled into the front wheel of a resting bicycle.

It stood still on the street curb, watching the passing traffic wearing the cold cryptic wariness of a sphinx, flicking its red tongue in a slow rhythm, as day slipped into night.

He walked up closer and pulled two coins from his pocket. He could hear the satisfying clink of metal swallowing metal as he fed.

As he walked away, he turned back to look. The meter had stopped blinking.

The Digital Life

2007-12-21T18:50:00.002-06:00

Thum started tapping, merrily.

"Stop that obscenity, will ya??!!".

"Obscenity....that would be your middle name, amigo! Don't go around projecting yourself...".

"I'm the tallest around here... I can't help myself.", Mitto replied a bit woefully.

"You don't do much else, do you?"

"True, the only one who pulls his weight around here is Litto".

"He leads the sway, senor! Why are midgets called so anyway? They ought to be called littgets or shortgets or something, don't you agree?", Dexto interjected.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah... Dexto, you sound so annoyingly bookwormish!", Ringo's voice rang out.

"Well, you sound like a silly ringworm to me! Or perhaps a bee-hee-hee-tle!", Dexto buckled once in a paroxysm of derisive glee and then chuckled in bouts of whittling amusement.

"You people need to stop being such bad neighbors. I'm so thankful I only have one, even one like Dexto", Litto lamented.

"Yeah, me too! I need to start throwing my weight around so you little folks can carry on together!", Thum nodded.

"Bah! Pretensions of magnitude. Truth is we're all little tendrils bearing the weight of those hairy trunks... Why, even my name is a travesty. The real dextrous one sits way up there like a tender petal... caressing hair, playing music, writing poems, savoring food... We're the poor dregs that nobody pays any attention to."

"We get all that dirt heaped upon us."

"Not to speak of collecting more from below."

"Except for dress-up days, when we get cleaned, filed, painted... ahhh, what royal treatment! Can't wait for the next one..."

"Only fools find pleasure in being mutilated... I grow my glorious crown so lovingly for days and then in one fell swoop, they hack it away only to be consigned to an inglorious heap!!"

"Well, ours don't matter much to us anyway! Can't hardly call them crowns... more like little party hats."

"Ditto".

"Stop wallowing in our collective misery! You people ought to count your blessings!"

"How do you expect us to do that? "

"In digits."

the firefly

2007-11-18T20:53:00.001-06:00

“There's no sign of any fire or smoke, Sarge.”

“Did you check the basement switchboard?”

“Completely dark down there, sir.”

“Are you sure we're in the right house, Bingers? I haven't seen a goddamn alarm yet.”

“I'm afraid I couldn't find any detectors or extinguishers either, sir. ”

“How did this one dodge the city codes anyway? It looks fucking ancient but you'd think some buffoon at the municipal office would actually sit up and take notice one of these days.”

“Couldn't agree more, sir. Perhaps they lost the records in the Vilmahl fire.”

“Yeah well we need to saddle up and get to the real fucking inferno. I'll be a minute down with my flashlight and then we're off – remember to always use yours in basements next time, Binger”.

“Sir”.

Marburr felt a cool, swirling draft puff into his ears as he descended - the stairs felt wooden, dusty and cracked, but barely creaked.

The landing felt even softer. He pointed his flashlight at his feet.

A spark leapt from within the darkness ahead - his eyes pounced.

“Fireflies!”

Then his mouth fell.

the apostate

2007-07-06T19:34:00.002-05:00

“Manzoor didn't make it last night, Peace be upon his Soul”.

“We lost Bashaarat too! The infidel dogs got him. They pinned him to the wall behind the mosque.”

“How shall we break this to Khaala? She will die of it.”

Azim teared up as he looked away across the lane to an open drain that carried blood from a butcher's shop nearby.

“We have to get his body for the burial. Past the Indian swine.”

“They're still there. How, Azim? We don't have enough people for an operation.”

“It won't matter. You and I are enough for those bastards.”

“You are getting carried away by emotions at this time of grief. Remember what Maulanaa Sahib used to say about the timing of matryrdom”.

“This is not about shahaadat, Ashfaq. We will mow the pigs down and get the bodies before they lay their hands on them. You don't know what they're capable of...”.

“I don't see what or how.”

Azim paused and stared into his cousin's eyes for a few seconds.

“I recognize your affliction.”

“What affliction?”

“Cowardice.”

“How dare you say that? By Allah, I am not one to tolerate this. You know I hate them as much as we all do. You know I've led so many operations from the front! Ashfaq Mir fears no one but Allah Ta'ala!”.

“What is it then?”

“I hate to admit it, Azza, but the fact is that if one of us doesn't make it today, Khaala Jaan will surely not survive if she loses three within a single day!.”

“Is this what your Maulanaa taught you? No considerations for loved ones – they ought to rejoice should we achieve matryrdom!”.

“But that's not the point. Besides, I thought you said this wasn't about martyrdom? We can't afford to act rashly. The Manual advises any route that will lead to final success, however torturous or treacherous. I don't see how doing this would help our mission. We need to regroup and fight another day...”.

“What about Bashaarat's corpse, then? Doesn't he deserve a matryr's burial?”

“Be that as it may, the Indians are more humane that those buggering Pathans. At least they play by the rules. Besides, they have Muslimeen among them too, however discredited in our eyes. They will return Bashaa to Khaala.”

“This is apostate talk, Ashfaq. Allah won't forgive you, you're praising the infidel enemy! You're forgetting how we've all suffered at their hands”.

“I'm just stating the truth, Azza. Allah knows it is so.”

“Analyzing the infidels' ways is meaningless! The only truth is the Pathans helped us and we're here to kill the infidels.”

“Helped us? More like screwed us. You know what they did to Salim's nephew.”

“I'm not going to argue any more. You don't smell right, Ashaa – you're talking up the enemy because your balls have disappeared. If not for Allah, for your manhood's sake, get up and let's go!”.

“Your reason has left you. Let's go talk to the Maulanaa for guidance.”

“The Maulanaa is a man of letters, Ashfaq. Men of the sword don't rush for advice from mullahs on the battlefield every time they are in doubt. They leave their reason in Allah's hands and act upon their own righteousness with guts! Not pull over and mull over like cowards while the enemy slits their throats!”.

“Enough! Azza, that's enough madness. You're free to go on your own and achieve your personal shaahadat!”. Ashfaq kept shaking his left wrist in the air as he hid his face with the other hand.

Azim's right hand swiped his sprouting beard. The veins in his eyes ran scarlet.

“Allah has decided to wash my hands with the entrails of a filthy apostate first!”, Azim roared, as he cocked his AK-47.

"Naarai Takbeeeeeeer!!!"

“Allahhuuu..Akb....Khaaaalaaaaa!!!”.

The Denial of Death

2007-06-20T16:58:00.001-05:00

"Brain's all fogged up, babe. Can't think of anything."

"Need a jumpstart? I'll buy you some coffee."

"No, something stronger, an electric shock maybe...".

"You have to try".

"I feel weak and tired. My eyelids are heavy and I don't register anything...".

"C'mon you ninny! No lose talk when I'm around. Pull yourself together! Get your juices flowing!"

"It ain't that easy. Ran my juices dry a long time ago, babe."

"Freaking vegetable, that's what you are then! ".

"Hey, no need to get upset. I just can't help it."

"I'm not. I just can't see you rot away."

"That's the fate of all vegetables left around too long, once the will is gone...".

"Ah! my dying poet!".

"No swansong this. Not even ugly duckling song..."

"Your facility for metaphor is still intact..."

"Bah! All poetry is written in a state of dying. But I'm afraid this one's rather physical, sugar plum."

"Ooh! Sweet little tragic aphorisms! You're no dying man, Omar Kayyam!"

"But I am, for I am no poet. Therefore, this must be the real thing."

"Sound reasoning for someone whose mind's shutting down".

"Why do you insist?"

"Because you think because you are because you think. Loop forever".

"Cartesian bull! Of course, one cannot declare oneself dead. That doesn't mean one cannot die. And then, others can".

"Waking up is hard to do!"

pipsqueak

2007-04-25T00:33:00.001-05:00

“Time to bring in the rats, Jerki!”.

“What for?”

“Justice demands it.”

“Who's Justice?”.

“Never mind, Jerki. Just do as I say!”

Jerki waved his hand, almost imperceptibly.

A dark bell-shaped cloud mushroomed across the floor, screeching to a halt first. Each flank followed the front line, condensing into formation as silence fell.

Jerki cupped his right ear and lowered it as a tiny squeak arose from the bell's clapper.

“Squeaker says not enough food for the pack. They badly need restocking.”, he explained to Curmi.

“Just this one last thing. Then they get to run the whole damn town. Or overrun it, if that's their poison”.

“Gotta have supplies, Curmi, he says, two pipsqueaks starved to their deaths last week.”

“Well, that's pipsqueaks for you. Maybe he can let a few more starve out and let the others share 'em and their pathetic little shares.”

“Squeaker says rats don't eat their own. They get proper burials and all, even pipsqueaks”.

“Aw! Tell 'em to come off it. Let 'em not forget who brought 'em here. Besides, they'll find plenty to plunder. Maybe they could send out the toughest rattoons and let 'em bring back some food for the others. As long as it doesn't affect the campaign”.

“Squeak says he needs time to deliberate with commanders”.

“One hour and that's that”.

the illusionist

2007-02-05T21:10:00.001-06:00

“Dingo! Dingo!!”, the boy shouted.

“Master.”

“I want a baby dingo this year!”

“We shall see, Master”.

“But I really do! Got to have it this year”.

“I promise I shall try my best to obtain such a pup for young Sir”.

“Not just any puppy! A dingo puppy!!”.

“Of nothing but the purest extraction, Sir!”, Woegogo emphatically declared in an obeisant bow.

Thus, the beleaguered servant left in search of the damned dingo. Damned it was, for even though he didn't really know it, the creature was almost extinct.

"Where did the little brat learn about dingoes anyway? This is not the Land of Oz! What if I just brought an odd-looking pup and passed it off as a dingo? How could the kid possibly tell?"

That's when he remembered the thick volume replete with colored pictures of dogs page after page from months ago (a "canineclopedia" or "caninopedia" or whatever it was being called). He had overheard the little one tutoring the other kids in what he claimed were specimens of various sorts (even though his eyes couldn't tell one from the other from a distance).

"A scam may not swim very far", he thought, "The kid could very well have his facts figured out".

At last he decided wasn't going to take any chances – the youngling was a veritable naturalist, or at least a very convincing one, at the age of 7 - whose untiring surveys of the garden's flora and fauna, armed with measuring tape and magnifying lens while the other children played their innocent little games, lent him airs of preternaturally patient scholarliness on such occasions. Most of the time, however, he behaved like any other normal, petulant 7-year old ( just as he had a few moments ago).

So he stood there for a few minutes, scratching his frizzy pate.

“Bingo!!!”.

In an instant, Woegogo's woes seemingly imploded as The Idea popped its way into his skull with the force of a sledgehammer. Striking as it was, it was as crooked as a clawhammer.

Later that evening, in a somewhat flurried state of mind, the door of Mr. Waigaga, local magician or an artiste des illusions (as he preferred to be addressed) was knocked upon.

Wai opened the door slowly. He was a wiry, balding man and wore a frayed green night-gown and tight polka-dotted pyjamas, even though the sun had set only minutes ago. He had a slightly confused look about him, as if he didn't recognize his visitor.

"Its Woegogo, Lord Wugigi's chief attendant. Remember, we met through Vaihoha. Your pretty cousin? Last year's Cirque? La Nuit Magique?"

Woe could only recollect moments of florid exuberance after witnessing each of his flawless performances from yesteryear.

"Ah.... well, what then of it? Anyway, come inside - you're letting in the draft."

" Would you like to see a new trick?", as he closed the door behind him.

"Why on earth not, Mr. Waigaga?", he put on his best show of eagerness.

Then Woe followed him through a dark, smelly labyrinth - stooping through each passage to save his head. At the end of the maze lay a small brightly-lit chamber.

For the next three hours, the visitor witnessed the Waigaga conjure up appearances, disappearances, re-appearances and outright transmogrifications. His latest repertoire of sleights and contraptions, in various stages of finesse, gradually bore down upon his audience's brittle nerves with all the bluster of an annoying toy-train.

"Holy Turtle! Truly accomplished! Truly astonishing!", he burst into applause in a rather unsought conclusion to the performance, which Waigaga had secretly hoped to be completely immersively spellbinding. (He liked to string adjectives together. Also, "unputdownable" and "encore" were two of his favorite words).

Unnoticed (or so he may have hoped) amidst all the blither and blather that goes on with any such performance, Waigaga had been exhaustively exploring his entire medley, never repeating the same act but improvising in variations on a theme. Not surprisingly, he would often refer to himself as "The Jazzician".

But inadvertently exposed to this excruciating process of creative winnowing for so long as Woe had been, his head had started to ache in saturation.

Only his bladder was fuller.

"Very well then, are you going to tell me the real purpose of your visit or not?", Waigaga demanded as his clownish grin collapsed into a scowl the moment he stepped down from the stage.

"I come to ask for a mighty favour, Sir".

The next morning, young Tijomo woke up to a staccato of unfamiliar woofings. He knew what it was the second he convinced himself he wasn't dreaming anymore. He jumped out of his bed and scampered down the stairs.

The sunlight came pouring down a thick swath from the opening in the front door and hit his eyes directly. In between between the beam's blinding flashes, the boy could discern the auroral figures of a tall dark man in white robes with a little yellow dog.

"Be watchful, Master. Its quite wild!", Woegogo whispered as he relaxed the leash, its black leather shredded from overuse, as if he was afraid of being overheard.

Tijomo smiled and jauntily stepped forward to claim his gift. The pup whimpered and swerved its head to duck as the boy tried to pat it.

"I shall call it Ding-o-Ling".

awake

2006-12-30T02:41:00.001-06:00

The laughter ricocheted through the hallway. A chopper flailed about in the distance. Rockets fired. Crazy buckets flew into Rummstein. Hell broke lose. Bushnells exploded. How might one think it possible? A dream state ensued. Padded feet spattered all over the rubber mat. Freethinkers associated. The highway was lost. Prodded to respond, Miraman independently refused. Crowbars cast long shadows on the tall grass. The crimson reaper peeped through the narrow slits. The wall cleaved right on the right side. Morons ruled the moon and lay siege to Mars. The seeds of glory lay open in the hole. Whole grain lay stored below the grand citadel. Who does speak good German these days? Bernstein opened a new bakery down the walkway. The Falklands sank under the Great Urgent Ion Splitting. Widows closed their windowless prisons and opened their willow plaudits. Souvenirs fell to their nadir. The Shah ascended the apple cart. Stocks were pushed down the precipice. Precious little done to don the precis of the effort. Precisely shit. Crazy aunt killed a lot of burghers. Hamlet and Richie Rich shared a sandwich. Who would have thought the Moguls killed so many antelopes. The interlopers overran the Nevadas. The seers clammed shut and didn't smell geese. How many potatoes made a loaf of cheese? The crazy music got no respect. Not even a spectacle. Mirrors made of glass and sandy pillars. The rats ate the blue cranberries. Christmas married Cherry Blossom. Goose-pimples rose in heaving dumplings. A ribble-rabble arose among the throng. Nobody said anything right and the undulating ramifications of the Norse arrival throttled the muted shuffles of the Trojan horse. Cherry wood is expensive snuff. Morse rode thunder and lightning every week and made warrens out of arid hoe. Blah survived. Who would have thought it possible?

Bazookas clanged. Witches threw babies out of their swarms. Poodles crossed the muddied banks of the Coetzee. Sticks and stones woke up the parson. Midgets flew about in gay abandon. Self-defecating humor had a spotty record and vindicates almost nobody. The car sounds like a dead smurf. Radical spies wake up infrequently with periodic headaches. Brobbbah the Elephant has a big brother named Bubba Ganoosh. Maggie does not ovulate while swerving a copy of Tennyson's love poems. Ballerinas bamboozle the spying audience and overhear their snide chidings. Pretty little feet glide along to glib swansongs. Boors and bullies browbeat the poors and bang the sliding doors. Glow worms wiggle to the beat of blowhorns. Drunken toads make their final appearances. Wishy-washy window-cleaners scrub both ways. Emblazoned sweaters keep knitting on their fuming pyres. Blithe spirits drink of spite and dryspepptic fantasies. Grotesque hobgoblins gobble up the hobnobbing jobs of kabob-eating, over-the-hill nabobs. Booze oozes into the sapphire glow of the Zimmermann light-sabres and turns them into polka-dotted leotards. Curds flush peptic banks. Blowhorns whistle into the airwaves and turn the matadors insides out. Catamites and maggots survive the interminable war. Wheezing into ischemic tubes doesn't feel like a whiffy breeze – more like an iffy bake on the greasy side. Bourbons rock and rule. Whence Hummus saplings? Zindabad the Tailor answered 42. The meaning of the knives inside the rock-bottom villians of the vice squad. The villas of Burgundy turn into the Simpsons.

crossing puzzles

2006-12-21T21:21:00.001-06:00

“The checked scarf?”, asked Hitoshi.

A bright lamp hung above his head. His eyes sank under the shadows.

“Right.”

He got up from the table. His right hand was trembling.

“Bang! Bang!”, the muzzle exploded as it cocked up under his left palm.

The woman slid down her seat, her face contorted into mock exasperation. A scarlet fountain spurted fitfully from the cavity that filled her chest. A sheet of paper fell from her right palm and crumpled open slowly as it landed like a feather.

It was over in less than two minutes. He waited. He always waited till it was over.

“Let's try another place for a drink”

“Yes”.

He came back for his coat and walked out the other door.

“I don't like to cross puddles”.

“ I see.”

The two left together. In a few minutes, they opened the door to a smoke-filled bar.

“I don't like being fumigated either.”

“Very well, Hito”.

He smiled and kept walking. The neon cast a pink glow on his face.

“What do you like, by the way?”.

“Crossword puzzles.”

Tetsuya stopped.

“What now?”

“You're joking, of course?”

“No. Why?”

“I mean, she was working on one, wasn't she?”.

“That was a Sudoku”.

the goatherd

2006-11-30T22:05:00.001-06:00

Kazim liked his goat.

Its wispy, auburn beard fluttered in the occasional, merciful afternoon breeze. It's kind eyes held a steady, almost stoic gaze even when the sun's rays meted their impassive, unrelenting punishment to anyone venturing out into the highlands at that time of day.

On days like this, he sought comfort in what he took to be Gizli's silent wisdom. He felt something inside her akin to old Katja's spirit, that guided him down the narrow paths that led to the valley floor. The other day, she had suddenly lurched to the right on her way down, and made Kazim chase her for a hundred or so yards right through a thicket around a sharp bend, before he was struck with the most breathtaking view of the Korradh range miles away, the highest vantage anyone he knew had seen them from. It was as if Gizli knew.

what's in a name?

2006-05-03T21:39:00.001-05:00

“Maddening”, is how Zeuraxgqoi describes it.

He dreams the strangest dreams at night. Silent burials in unmarked graves. Rows of faucets dripping in deaf space. Deadening leaves falling quietly on cracked sidewalks. One by one, night after night.

From the outside, Zeuraxgqoi lives an ordinary life. He has a child with an extraordinary name, like his own. He takes the metro to work every day and lives on the seventeenth floor.

He knows his neighbors’ names. Every single one of them. Their childrens’ too.

“Anonymity is death”, he moans. Nobody ever asks him his name - at home, at work or anywhere in between. Either they all know or they don’t care. Or maybe they’re jealous. In any case, nobody calls him anything.

He shows up at their door regularly – even when no one’s home.

Occasionally, they knock at his door - asking for this or that, asking about someone, to deliver something or to collect something else. Yet they never address him, not once.

Perhaps it’s too difficult to pronounce, he consoles himself. But then, they could use a nickname if they wished. Zeurax. Zeur. Or even a corruption – say Zeus, to make matters easier. He would be happy with Z. Maybe they don’t dare.

At other times, he surmises people are used to call each other by surnames – Mr. Rtl next door, the Ms. Psy across the hallway, Prof. Tzv downstairs. As it happens, Z doesn’t have a surname. He’s not sure he would like one either.

What’s the point, asks he? Isn’t one name good enough, especially if it is special enough – chosen carefully enough?

In fact, he finds the whole business of surnames positively anachronistic – in a modern metropolis like ours, he avers, there exists neither imperative nor incentive to announce your forebears’ trade from generations ago, or the village they arrived from, or that odd physical anomaly of an unfortunate outlier in one’s genealogy, or some such inconsequential artifact from one’s distant lineage.

A well-chosen name is enough, he asserts, to identify each individual uniquely. In any case, surnames don’t really solve the problem – just how many young Master Jrrrh Wfg’s had entered the city’s birth-roll over the last decade – exactly three-hundred and eighty-seven, last time he queried the MetroBase (which is something of a hobby for Z, not surprising for someone who happens to be a stickler for facts; he spends hours late into the night collecting interesting demographic patterns).

Naming trends (for first names, of course) these days come about almost always by accident, results of typographical errors while mindlessly following palpable trends – a consequence of the near-extinction of genuine trend-setters in society (something akin to changes in the genetic code via mutation only, in the absence of any other evolutionary pressures).

Even if a certain phonetic pattern came into vogue, as it often does with the metro’s singularly trend-obsessed populace, one could always mimic the process of mutation itself– a permutation here or a substitution there would make all the difference – a happier medium between numb conformity and real uniqueness, however lacking in it’s celebration of originality. Even such tame mischief is hard to come by these days, Z laments.

He often slips into full-blown reveries during empty intervals at work. Z shares a not very uncommon relationship with his job with many a denizen of the great city – he savors the leisure it affords him although he finds the actual work crushingly vacuous – as a result, he constantly tries to get by through lack of trying and doing as little as possible without raising alarm with his superiors, who curiously happen to be quite satisfied with both his efficacy and efficiency – a sure nod to the reluctant yet undeniable hold Z’s conscience has on everything he undertakes. Besides, his command of symbol-manipulation and capacity for numbers, figures and facts confers on him a certain effortless advantage in his field of work.

Our story begins right in the middle of one such reverie - on a cloudy, windy, cool April morning outside. Z stares into the gray sky from his desk behind the half-open window, his swivel-chair turned a hundred-and-eighty degrees. He sits motionless, his salt-and-pepper hair and tanned, scruffy neck visible from the door and the tall stack of packages on the desk as it rises above the back of the chair.

He is dimly aware of a steady drumbeat from the street below as the swirling rhythm of the invisible drummer’s hands lulls him into lucid meditation. He pays no heed to it’s source – he hears it every Wednesday morning, roughly an hour before noon. He is given to spells of vertigo looking down heights (especially from windows as low as this one; the six-foot sills in his apartment are no accident) and he has never allowed himself the idle luxury of climbing down the stairs just to check on a street-performer.

Nomenclature, he repeats, is key. Without it, we would be lost in a sea of faces, numbers, features, struggling descriptions. The very existence of language necessitates it. We don’t just name people – every object or idea known to man is named. Almost every meaningful pattern (a sentence, a paragraph, an entire book) in any language is merely a collection of names strung together with ligaments of prepositions and sockets of conjunctions, its viscera clustered and demarcated into semantic organs by the membranes of punctuation, each cleverly maneuvered into position by the handy levers of articles and pronouns, the design of the entire organism on all scales governed by the genetic code of syntax.

“Uhhrrrgghhm”, a throat cleared at the door.

His spell broken, he turned to look. Mr. Qgn was standing, hands in his pockets.

“Look, didn’t mean to barge in like that but someone again...”.

Z rose from the now-spinning chair and without saying a word, stood in Q’s face with a somber look of resigned understanding, followed by a barely perceptible shrug, an arched eyebrow and a heavy sigh.

“Very well then”, Q turned back and started down the hallway.

The two entered the mailroom through a carelessly-painted blue door. A rubber-matted ramp led up to a circular wooden platform, its perimeter lined with roughly a dozen shiny metallic cylindrical chutes that came all the way down from openings in the ceiling. Each column was tapped at regularly spaced slots, spouting into a stack of card-sized shelves, together suspended in the still, musty air like a stretched-out accordion.

One of the platters was dripping. A dimly fluorescent greenish-yellow fluid streaked out from the corners of an envelope...

(to be continued)

the amulet

2006-05-03T21:38:00.001-05:00

This story is about a river borne of an amulet.

The smooth, round amulet came to pass in a curiously circular fashion. It was found in a dry river bed by a little boy who was looking to grow his collection of pretty pebbles.

When the little boy grew up a little, he became a young lad and before long, he grew tired of the pursuits of his boyhood. He now liked a pretty girl much more than he did his pretty pebbles, which lay half-forgotten inside a small wooden box buried under a heap of old toys in his bedroom.

Then one night, while he slept, the amulet flashed and within seconds, lit up the dark room like a brilliant sun. The lad awoke to the blinding light surrounding him.

The next morning, he swam ashore.

Judgement Day

2006-05-03T21:35:00.001-05:00

“Who in his right mind would dare say such a thing?”, exclaimed Klös, leaning forward, under his breath.

“Well, people do act strange sometimes...strange to the point of funny. Perhaps if things hadn't been so dreadful this time?”, Schädelgräber seemed to concur, hesitantly.

The object of their derision stood up at that moment. Her name was Marta Grau. A portly matron who looked older than her forty-five years, she wore a black dress that was typical of housekeepers and ladies' maids in her day. She had gray eyes with fat, sleepy eyelids that blinked slowly as she listened to the council's words.

The council consisted of four people – four elderly, bespectacled gentlemen in drab, respectable garb, with sparse tufts of snow-white hair standing on their skulls. In fact, they appeared eerily alike from where she stood in the dimly-lit room, sitting evenly-spaced in one row across a long polished oak table, raised barely a foot above the rest of the floor.

The only light in the room came from a circular skylight on the twelve-foot ceiling directly above Ms. Grau's stand. A solitary fan with long, claw-like blades, black against the light, loomed a few inches off-center from a hook and flapped in the cold, still air like an ominous, winged creature, it's shadows flitting isochronously across Marta's composed face.

“Yes, Herren. I saw both the Kürbiskopf children. Hans was carrying Herr Schilling's head in both his hands. Little Aliz carried the sickle with blood all over it.”

The air suddenly felt colder as the entire room drew a sharp breath all at once.

Professor Lehrer's nose itched. His clammy hands swiftly withdrew from the flaccid pockets of his gray coat, which looked worn beyond it's years. The pouches looked like rabbit ears, despite their leather lining. In a deft bit of orchestration, the fingers of his left hand reached for his nose and delicately tugged at the offending follicle hanging off the inner wall of the right nostril, while the right hand cleverly shielded the grisly act, all within the span of a single, feigned cough.

Inconspicuous as it was, the cough broke the silence.

Herr Schaufel cleared his throat.

“Fraulein Grau, I truly hope you realize the gravity of your statement. Let's not forget even for a moment that these are little children we are talking about here...”.

“Barely out of kindergarten, I might add!”, Herr Pflugrind finished.

“ I have nothing more to say... or less, Herren.”, Marta said calmly.

A faint groan escaped Herr Schaufel's mouth.
The church bell rang outside.

Marta sat still in a gray wooden chair with padded leather armrests which she did not use. She stared at her lap now, her hands on her knees.

“Marta, we have known each other all our lives. All those dreadful masks and costumes of yours on Fastnacht and Walpurgisnacht, how can one forget?”, Frau Grün said, as a faint smile broke on her creased, ashen face.

Her eyes softened as she remembered,“ You nursed my first-born for two years. And even little Gretchen for a few months. I mean, you are family to us– it breaks my heart to see you caught up in these horrible goings-on”.

Marta looked up and blinked exactly twice.

“I have always rebuked people who said odd things about you. Especially when little Erich passed on, peace be to his innocent soul. But I always defended you like my own sister. It was all God's will and Marta is a good kind soul, I told them.”. Her eyes were moist.

“Helga, I am grateful to you for trusting me.”, it was Marta's turn to comfort.

“I wish I could trust your word this time. But the very thought of... their own mother and father...”, she suddenly covered her eyes with her tiny, frail hands.

Marta lowered her gaze again and pursed her lips.

At that moment, Herr Pflugrind stepped into the room. His eyes surveyed the two women's faces and, in an instant, surmised the content of their dialogue.

“Ah! I see that Fraulein Gray has been an object of much sympathy.” he announced even before he took the chair right next to Frau Grün's.

“But I'm afraid no amount of sympathy will be enough to absolve anyone this time around. Marta, if I may address you so informally, we all know that you are no stranger to being a subject of rumor and gossip. Perhaps all this sympathy is well-deserved, but the townsfolk simply demand facts and justice.”

As he spoke, he occasionally cast furtive sideways glances at the narrow chink separating the heavy red curtains covering the only window in the room, as if he saw someone or something looking in.

“The crime, if one may call it that – perhaps that is too mild a word to describe what has taken place, cannot be explained away as an accident or an act of vengeance. In fact, there is nothing at all remotely human about this act.”, Herr Pflugrind went on haltingly.

Marta caught Herr Pflugrind's attention wavering. She looked towards the window and noticed that the narrow visible section of the glass pane was misted over milky-white, except for an oval, palm-sized formation of thick dew-drops, arranged in neat rows, nearly a foot above the sill.

(to be continued... or not?)

The Fast

2006-03-19T01:35:00.001-06:00

“Hunger kills. One way or another.”, Han folded his arms and proclaimed.
“I’m not hungry.”, an eager Xi replied.
“Don’t fool yourself. You are hungry.”
“You may not believe it. But I’m really not dying.”
“You may not be dying but it kills.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“It won’t till it does.”
“I feel fine. No suicidal thoughts. Unless you kill me, of course.”
“No. I wouldn’t”.
“Then someone else perhaps?”
“I don’t know.”
“But you insist that hunger will kill me.”
“Well, it does kill.”
“Kill what?”
“Hunger”
“How?”
“When you eat.”
Xi gulped.

Crying Tiger, Hidden Deer

2006-03-19T00:59:00.002-06:00

Tiger races through the tall grass. Belly aches with hunger.
Deer escapes. Stands on trembling legs. Hides behind a big tree.
Tiger is angry. Sweats. Doesn’t have it anymore.
Deer sweats. Stoops to drink from the stream. Nibbles at the tall grass.
Tiger used to be strong and swift. Not anymore.
Deer’s breathing eases. Ears stay cocked.
Tiger remembers his youth. Its bounty.
Deer is young. Eye is calm.
Tiger whimpers. Jaw droops.
Deer just lays there. Quiet.

Largo's cargo

2005-12-03T20:17:00.001-06:00

"Time is of the essence. Hurry up, fellow!", Largo strained his larynx.

"Don't speak to me of time, Signore", the porter replied with a thin smile, looking up. He had a scraggy look about him, and a stubble to go with it.

The gusts from the sea carried away the porter's words before Largo's ears could catch them.

The descent turned rickety but Largo pushed against the squall, holding a small wooden box close to his chest. Cargo lugged a huge chest the shape of an adult coffin, covered in a black tarp that glistened, it's edges fluttering in the wet winds.

Cargo was the porter's name. This curious happenstance might have amused Largo, or maybe even spooked him once he realized that it rhymed with his own. Or perhaps the observation that a creature of such spindly proportions could muster enough sinew to carry the entire boat on his shoulders.

Largo didn't bother to ask - he had stranger things on his mind.

He was off to a voyage.

It was about seven months ago that Largo landed on the island in a giant, black steamship after a six-week journey - one that had been plagued by a series of tempests along it's path. Il Delfino had come close to being run aground more than once before finally striking luck.

Largo had been starving for three days before Captain Baleno finally decided on the detour. Along with Trueno, the first-mate, he had desperately scoured the charts and the night-sky for clues. They eventually took the bold gamble on the southwesterly route, for they had practically lost their bearings a couple of storms ago.

Lorenzo, the lookout on the prow had turned into a delirious apparition, flapping his arms against the setting sun as he spotted the first shearwater, a full day before the coast would come into view. The rest of the tottering crew followed, breaking out into besotted revelry after pouring into a thumping pack of wild-eyed crazies on the deck.

The fabled El Puente Nublado promised refuge, respite and repair.

On landfall, Largo found lodging in a tiny wooden shack with six other men. After his first supper in days that evening (a hearty portion of caracol del diablo; the local sailor's stew of squid, scallops and sardines), he was racked by a severe belly-ache that night. The entire next day, he writhed alone on his narrow bed; his gnawing pain arrived in waves, suffused with the smells and sounds of the isle - the stentorian clamor of fishermongers selling the previous day's catch, the drone of the bustling marina nearby, the palms on the edges swaying in the balmy ocean air.

After a few days, he slowly began regaining his strength.

On Sunday, Captain Baleno called for an all-hands gathering in the garden outside his living quarters - a decrepit old villa on the northern tip of the island. Largo was led to the house by two of his fellow sailors and countrymen, Ludovico and Guiseppe.

The younger one, Ludovico - a quiet, slender fellow with dark curly hair and piercing, coal-black eyes - spoke like a true signore; his manner too spoke of good breeding. On the other hand, one could barely tell Guiseppe from any of his bearded, barrel-chested, pot-bellied, foul-mouthed ilk. The two seemed to get along remarkably well for all their differences - although few knew that they shared their hometown. Guiseppe had recruited Ludovico from a street-side cafe in Salerno, a day before his ship set sail.

As the three men approached the crowd, they could see Baleno's wizened hands patting an imaginary beast in the air with uncharacteristic tenderness. The captain spoke with a thick, booming voice that seemed to arise from within a younger constitution. It bespoke of a fierce authority over the men even as his fragile appearance did anything but.

"I couldn't possibly please everyone, my good men. But I pledge you my best judgement in this matter and my hope is that most of you will find the result satisfactory in the end".

"Words well spoken, Captain, but they offer little comfort. Our families must have given us up for dead by now. Our patience wears thin with every passing day.", someone retorted aloud.

"We've said it before - let those in a hurry arrange for a smaller vessel and leave for home. We are here to stay, at least for a while yet", another voice spoke.

"Yes, there's enough amongst us with nothing to go back to and everything to leave behind, Captain. We are willing to help them build a strong boat within a month's time, if you so ordain, but we won't budge from these shores", said another.

(to be continued)

the wrath of God

2005-08-18T20:44:00.001-05:00

Bintoo muttered to himself, "What a lousy day, man!".

His mother overheard him. She couldn't stand people who complained.

"Bintoo dear, one shouldn't say things like that. These things have a way of turning into habits, you know." Ma counseled in as pleasant a tone as she could muster.

This wasn't the first time, and both knew it.

"But Ma, what is one to do when the forces of nature seem to conspire against you?"

"Patience, dear boy. Patience is the key. Humble submission, if one is helpless against the powers that be.", she lowered her voice almost to a whisper towards the end.

"The powers that be!? That sounds almost human, Ma. There's no one up there pulling the strings, if you really want to know what I think. The whole thing is senseless!", Bintoo railed.

Bintooma raised her finger to her lips and signaled silence.

"Lord, forgive this child!" she addressed the heavens quickly, raising her own voice and then looked sternly at her own son.

"Bintoo beta, talk like that is senseless! Pagan talk. Not in my house."

"OK whatever Ma! No need for a lecture now. I got to finish my paper."

Ma heaved a faintly hopeful sigh of frustration and turned around to leave.

"Wait Ma!" Bintoo beckoned from behind her back.

"What now?", she swiveled her oiled, fragrant, delicately coiffured head around.

Her look of indignation had transformed into a strangely beatific smile.

"Nothing. It's just that...", Bintoo noticed and his face eased into relief.

"Just that?"

His eyes beamed with affection and twinkled with mischief.

"Just that today hasn't been such a bad day, Ma.", he said.

Ma's smile evaporated. Her face turned ashen.

Bintoo's eardrums burst as the door banged shut.

the evolution of Gatsby

2005-06-05T21:28:00.001-05:00

"Let's begin with a primary subspecies", Prof. Mallard suggested.

"What exactly is cooking, Professor?" replied Gatteuse. His shiny yellow lab-coat made him look the golden boy that he was to everyone at the Ecole Poly.

"We're simulating one of the least studied branches of Middle Ordovician trilobites that followed the Cambrian explosion", the professor stated in a manner of easy erudition.

"Hmmm." Gattuese quietly tilted his head, as the simfield came back aglow. The professor switched on his tiny neural-field sensactuators and fixed his gaze. The student plugged into his.

"You see that? The marine-invertebrate repository. Let's look around a bit. Ah, there it is, the remarkable little critter!" he remarked in a rare gung-ho turn of speech.

For a moment, Gatsby, or sometimes Gats, as his classmates had half-mockingly christened him, was amused at the old fellow's odd little colloquialism, but his attention quickly flew to what emerged on the screen just then.

Jacques Mallard brought up a 3-D wire-frame model of the "critter" overlaid with holographic layers of bone, muscle and organs. Detailed annotations of dates, features, prominent geneseeks (geneek slang for gene-sequences) and other alphanumerical snippets of information were crammed into tiny rectangular boxes. The professor turned his mottled gray pupils to one of these boxes and zoomed up the text, as this pupil watched in studied silence.

"Did you notice?" he pointed to narrow crescent-shaped slits on either side of the creature's cheeks.

"Yes, the primal transparent compound eyes with hexagonal calcite lenses that supposedly triggered the Cambrian explosion 543 mya.", Gatsby replied with an air of even confidence. "North American. This one's from the Burgess Shale, right?"

Mallard nodded. With his brow still furrowed, he shifted his occursor further up the cephalon next to the antennae, and started editing another little box. Suddenly, a motley bunch of bulbous features mushroomed and covered what was smoothly textured surface only moments ago.

"What's that? I don't remember any other exoskeletal features in the pregabellar section?" Gatteuse Chabrol's expression changed.

"Horns, Gatteuse."

"Horns!?"

"Yes, like rhinoceros beetles. The ampyx raphiophorids were the ones that developed precursors of modern-day horns. I mean real horns, the fighting kind".

"But the raphiophorids were blind, if I recall correctly?".

"Well, not these babies!", the professor's eyes took on an expression of boyish mischief. This time Gatsby's conscious mind let this curious outpouring of adolescent Americanese slip by. His attention was captive to this little insect's body-plan.

"Wait, there's more of these. Look different - like dorsal spines, only these are anterior" he said, pointing to another distinct set of protuberances.

"Well observed, my dear fellow", the professor gleamed, "Spines indeed".

"Sexual appendages? Protective weaponry? Perhaps even hydrodynamic streamlining?".

"Perhaps all three, my young friend", Mallard looked directly from under his spectacles into his apprentice's eyes and that well-worn smile of academic beneficence spread across his face.

"Really?". Gats looked up in absorbed amazement.

"Yes. Why not? Most likely secondary sexuals, but one can't quite discount the others. Dimorphism isn't entirely unknown among trilobite clusters and that's usually a good indicator".

"Was it the ampyx alone with all that fancy headgear?".

"Not nearly. Some of the Devonian asteropygines even carried full-blown tridents. Quite formidable! They found them in the Moroccan desert a couple of years ago, you know. Hard to imagine all they did with them was forage".

"Tridents? That sounds like nasty business."

Suddenly the professor's newly reprogrammed neurophone, embedded deep inside his cranium, signaled an incoming call ("Look Ma, no ring!", he had exclaimed in juvenile glee after he got his first one lobbed inside a few years ago). He commanded his sensactuators to shut down with an explicit blink-code (proofing against inter-synaptic noise), excused himself and stepped out of the lab's transparent sound-proofed separation.

He walked down the brightly lit hallway and paused half-way through to one of the building's many fire-exits and stood there with his back glued to the bare white wall on the left, with his eyes closed and lips moving that Gatsby could read in the distance.

Yes, Gatteuse could read lips. He read "But Chloe (or Claude, he couldn't tell, for he was speaking in French), I need to do this right now. It cannot wait!". His face spoke of a peculiar sort of exasperation -- he was somehow certain it was the wife.

He finally grew weary of wallowing in his own virtuosity - deciphering the innards of his mentor's personal situation just wasn't that interesting. The professor had been gone for several minutes now. His usually pale, mellow, delicately-lined oval face had taken on the hue and aspect of a stumpy beetroot. Evidently, things were not going so well for the poor fellow.

He turned his attention back to the simfield. The ampyx lay still across the screen, unevolved since the professor left his desk.

Banishing all awareness of that pointless little exercise from only moments ago, Gatsby leaned forward and resumed his study of the viscera with rapt attention - once again muffling the cacophony that one's latent talents, however seemingly obscure or irrelevant to one's present station, play upon the psyche as each discordant strain pounds against the veneer of the acknowledged self and jostles for the singular vantage of consciousness.

Very soon, his sensactuators were abuzz with traffic as his eyeballs jittered to keep pace. He was being led down two separate but gradually converging paths of inquiry - one traversing the branches of the simulacrum's evolutionary tree and other peering down it's genetic lineage, evenly split inside his immerspace. Time was not quite of the essence in this world, for contemporary conductors of organic thought, augmented by powerful instruments of inorganic computation, deftly orchestrated a symphony of indescribable complexity.

He was onto something he had sniffed at during the professor's demonstration. Something about those calcite eyes with optical-doublet structures and refracting surfaces and lense walls to prevent interference. Horns and brood-pouches and tough exoskeletons.

"I can't put my fingurative on it yet", a third, autonomous, real-world thread sprang from somewhere - he had come to find such unsolicited punnies a welcome relief, even regard them as harbingers of impending creative ahas in his long hours of research at the Ecole'.

He wondered about the extreme selective pressures that must have brought about these adaptions. He noticed the patterns of erratic, frequent moulting within a single organisms' lifetime, each event a dangerous window to canny predators like the Anomalocaris.
All the same, the development of enrollment, the progressively refined interlocking of opposing surfaces during these rituals, the sly defense of a curled ball.

"Poof!", he went, as the crazy intricacy of it all gave him a hot, gooey frisson. His left hand mopped his brow. Then his fingers started pulling at his curled, golden locks.

polyglots and vowels

2005-06-02T20:28:00.001-05:00

"Why is why why?" Polneugolas snorted as he listened to himself snort.

"Are you quite the lunatic yet?" retorted Lingeposau with a straight face.

"Lunatic? Moony? No, not quite yet. But I ask the right questions, don't I?"

"Right. Quite the echo chamber".

"You could make that cow jump the moon, Li" Po chuckled as he glanced over his shoulder, for at that exact same moment, a big spotted cow walked across.

"Diddle is diddle diddle, Po".

"The correct answer is Doo-Da-Da!".

"Nonsense".

"Let's start over, shall we?."

"Okay".

"Here's a riddle - what did the polyglot say to the idiot?"

"Hmmm... let me try".

Li was stumped.

"How many languages do you speak?"

"Mmmm... I have multiple-personality disorder and you're pure id".

"I have a lotta what you haven't an iota of".

" I gloated. You toadied".

"No. No. No. Stop. You're ruining everything." Po interrupted. " The answer to this one is another riddle. Here it is.".

I speak a number.
You one and it's dumber.
I call it lingua
You call it "ling wha?"

"Hah". Lingeposau chortled as he listened to himself chortle.

Pyotr's hunger

2005-04-17T18:24:00.001-05:00

Pyotr's hunger was the talk of town. The village, actually.

It was only an hour past noon on this unseasonably warm day. There was not a single cloud in the sky and it was sweltering out in the open.

The old women of the town sat in prayer, wearing long dark capes with brightly-dotted headscarves - tiny beads of sweat strung along the furrows in their brows, their eyes raised to the heavens. Their wizened cheeks appeared uncharacteristically flush like sun-dried apples, and their faces told of great anguish.

Pyotr had already consumed six bales of juicy grass. They kept bringing in freshly-cut harvest from the fields below, till someone suggested hay. Hay they pulled out too, from the rooftops and the barns in nearby hamlets, while he carried on chomping and burping.

In the meanwhile, his little friends carried on with their melee down below, sheltered by their parents from and hence merrily oblivious to the strange goings-on around them.

The boys ran around, playing Tretii lishnii and Gusi-gusi, brazenly jostling and elbowing each other in their dapper, white sailor-suits. The little girls wore turquoise and scarlet sarafans, and sat around a huge oak tree, whispering draznikas into each other's ears and bursting into giggles every so often. A separate, smaller group of girls sang and danced cheerily to popular tunes they had acquired watching their elders during the festivities earlier that spring.

This was no time for festivities, however. The cherubic Pyotr, darling of entire Velobshk, only child of the majestic Ivan Pyotrsky, heir to high nobility, was struck with a dreadful malady. Not only dreadful, but ominous and truly macabre.

The first signs had appeared early on this particular July day when young Pyotr, a few weeks after his fifth birthday, had been noticed by his mother in their summer kitchen eating something, his mouth smeared with white powder. When she had stepped forward to take a closer look, she had realized that it was raw flour, and had admonished him as a mother would a five-year old, with the usual mixture of tenderness and authority. Pyotr had announced in his endearing lisp that he was hungry. Not until she had she taken another look inside the three-foot high stone granary had she finally discovered what would sent her reeling into sudden stupor. The entire pood of flour had disappeared!

Marusya, their maid had noticed Pyotr in the garden later that morning, after she was finished cleaning the back porch. He had been digging the soil with his bare hands and stuffing his mouth with enormous lumps of root and dirt. Within seconds, her peripheral vision, surprisingly intact despite her advancing middle-age, had registered something terribly amiss aside from this bizarre spectacle.

The entire garden was gone! It had appeared as if the backyard had been invaded by a wild horde of elephants, uprooting and devouring every plant, bush, branch, leaf, flower, sapling in sight. Only there was no trace of elephants trampling about, only little Pyotr squatting on the ground, with a wild look in his deep blue eyes.

News of the strange incident had dispersed like a vile contagion. Marusya had scampered out of the usadba, howling for attention in a strange dialect borne of terror. Soon, the entire village had assembled around her. She had wailed hysterically for several minutes before she had finally summoned the courage to pick up her sobs and lead them back to her master's villa. The Pyotrskys, in the meanwhile, roused by the commotion outside their walls, had discovered their child and the ravaged remains of their fond garden.

It had first been planted by Alexander Pyotrsky nine generations ago, who was granted this dacha as a gift for his assistance to the Tsar's forces during the first battle for Sevastapool. The estate had been tended to by his comparably illustrious descendants ever since.

What a vision of splendor and delight it had been for centuries, surviving the harshest of winters and bloodiest of wars! And now it was all but laid waste, the entire tract including the top soil upturned, consumed, barren!

Volga - the little boy's mother - had plunked onto the rough-hewn wooden floor like a rag doll, against the kitchen wall for almost an hour. Only when the cook's assistant, Anya had noticed her on her way out amid all the bedlam that had followed, she had employed cold water and warm rubs to make her mistress came around.

"Pyotr. Pyotr. My darling child!", Volga had muttered as she sat up, holding her lowered head in her hands, disconsolate.

"Monster! Only a monster could have wreaked such destruction", usually dignfied grandma Tara had meanwhile exclaimed. She had been hit with severe denial. Surely not little Pyotr!

Till they had noticed the ghastly sight of an entire tree-stump going down his little white throat, like a python gorging down an antelope, antlers, sinews and all. He had been crouching, frantically chewing off the root-end - soiled white tubers stuck out from either end of his mouth, streaked all over his face like a giant spider.

Now he looked up suddenly and stared right through them. This went on for almost a minute. Then he blinked.

Ivan stepped towards his son, in a gait half-measured and half-staggered. The hush in the crowd broke into whispers as he inched closer. The child's empty gaze slowly filled up as his eyes narrowed and his pale, smudgy cheeks contorted into a eerily menacing smirk - the sheer incongruity of the sight made it all the more terrifying. His doting father thought he saw a hint of filial recognition but all everyone else saw was unnatural malice written all over the little boy's face. The onlookers shuddered and fell silent again.

Ivan was less than a couple of feet away when Pyotr's mouth suddenly opened wide and a high-pitched shriek filled the air. His father struggled to regain his balance as he was thrown back by the demonic force of the sound.

The next moment Pyotr was seen running into a path through the nearby thicket of blue honeysuckle shrubs peppered with yellow leaves, that hugged the outskirts of the village and criss-crossed the meadows, all the way to the hillock overlooking the entire settlement.

Thus he threw himself wholly to the task of clearing the meadows, one by one. By the time the petrified entourage below had gathered their wits and caught up with him, the little ogre had grazed half an acre.

For a while, they just stood mutely watching. Till somebody hit upon the desperate scheme of invading the barns. That's when they started hauling out the cropped grass and the hay, hoping that he would spare the cattle what was left of the season's worth of fresh grass.

Now, one could surely hatch ways to shoo away a rampaging herd but what of this - their master's own progeny, what was one to do? The young master's family was at an equal loss - how could they imagine stopping their scion from running amok without causing him harm? Moreover, the whole accursed affair spoke quite plainly of the devil's machinations - there wasn't a soul in sight ready to stand up to Beelzebub himself!

Taking turns between lurid orgies in lush green and dry pale, the little one showed little sign of satiation. Occasionally, he would pause to belch and then heave a few heavy sighs that sounded like wanton groans of some abominable, ventriloquous beast-squatter. At other times, he would stop to shake off the clumps of green that stuck to his tiny limbs like sea urchins clinging to a rocky outcrop on the seafloor.

And so the fledgling-baron continued to torment the poor village-folk unchecked, well into the evening, lunging from one pasture to another like a viciously tight swarm of cicadas, laying the land fallow.

It was nearing dusk.

All eyes now were fixed upon the tiny strip of green on which he stood, the last piece of the last meadow that still stood. Moist eyes. Wistful eyes. Burning eyes. Lowered eyes. Squinting eyes. Closed eyes. Anxious eyes. Hopeless eyes. Hopeful eyes.

Then the sun slid down behind the hills, and darkness fell abruptly. As if on cue, Pyotr's puerile breathing grew audibly closer.

"Mother", he gasped.

imagine Velcro

2005-04-11T01:54:00.001-05:00

Lack of imagination. That's it. That's why I feel so hollow inside, said Velcro Joe to himself.

He leaned against the back of a tiny red plastic chair and his hands rested on a yellow metal table. The paint on the table gleamed under the colored bulbs above his head except for several small, dark craters that pockmarked the surface.

Joe 's eyes gradually settled upon these marks. He wondered how they got there. Did somebody scratch them out or did the paint just peel off on it's own?. He couldn't tell.

They appeared in different shapes and sizes. He saw near-perfect circles. A bunch of criss-crossing vertical lines that resembled a stack of firewood. Another reminded him of a key shaped like a distended phallus. Blobs of exposed metal, in varying stages of corrosion, melded at places to form ghostly, bulbous shadows, penumbras and all. Eerie fossils of buried figurines, he imagined, as if the metal had swallowed them up.

He lifted his head and looked around. He noticed more colored bulbs in the distance, almost a dozen - these were bigger and flashing red, green and yellow. Alternating in time and space, they were arranged in rows along the perpendicular sides of a thick, wooden signboard with metal plates that read Hotel Reno.

Right below the dancing lights stood a scaffolding with several steps, one that could easily double as seating for an audience of around a dozen people.

"Perhaps they're renovating the old motel. It does look a little scruffy from the outside", he thought to himself although he had found it a little odd at first glance.

Then he paused again. "But why such an elaborate structure?".

The more he surveyed the framework, the more it looked like empty seating for an invisible ampitheatre than a workman's pulpit.

"A stage for ghosts", he whispered. "A new show for those weary souls every night. They might like to perform under strobe lights. Perhaps it's a transcendent ritual of some kind to access the forbidden, other world. Or a longing for the crazy nights of their youth with all the fervor of the undead."

"What if the stroboscopic phenomenon had a parallel in the spirit world -- it made you the invisible visible, just as it quantizes the appearance of motion in the living". Joe smiled at quantize - it had an other-wordly ring to it.

Joe's mind was racing by now.

In any case, he had never quite figured out why they called him Velcro Joe. He knew he never stuck to any one place or object or thing. In fact he never ever stuck to anything his entire life. He had always skimmed, floated above the surface of things, looking down at humanity aloft his perch - happy to survey entire civilizations in grand philosophical sweeps.

As further back as he could remember, he had had this implausible urge to distill all his earthly observations into a set of rarefied, mathematical truths, which he imagined could then be applied ab initio to comprehend, predict and maybe, in the sublime light of understanding, even savour all the messiness and crudeness of our world. All through a sequence of forward inductions and backward deductions.

One wouldn't have to remember banal, redundant facts or myopic theories or work at honing his skills in a particular vocation -- the magic key would throw open all doors - every hitherto abstruse nuance would reveal itself in flashes of insight in a single instant via this barely tread pathway.

Not that he was lazy, but this would be the only way that he could hope to live all those imagined lives in one lifetime. The secret sauce of Reality.

"Imagine, Joe. Why Velcro?" the question came back to bother him. "You're not stupid. Insouciant maybe. Not obsessive. Not anything like velcro".

Curious, he didn't know why and he couldn't have asked them why. He was afraid.

Before long, he was tapping his feet to a furious beat. However, his mind was at relative calm, casually flipping long-abandoned caches among it's overgrown foliage, faint but alive to the diffuse spotlight that swept across. There was something poignant about these quaint fragments from the burdensome tomes of his life's learning.

"Velour and crochet. Velvet hooks. Soft loops and stiff hooks". He had looked up the origin of the word in an encyclopedia once. He had found the story of the Swiss engineer and his dog amusing. Now the word serendipity blinked across his mind's eye.

He closed his eyes. Soft loops of the ethereal imagination. Stiff hooks of physical reality. Nah, that sounded ridiculous. Something didn't hold.

Hold!! That was it! It held. Ensnared the soft, free, flowing loops of the mind's imagination with the harsh, rigid hooks of physical existence.

Madness lay in breaking loose when you pulled it askew. Tore the fabric apart. But it held tenuously if the force was applied parallel to the plane of the bonds. Bent. Flexed. Wrapped around. Tense but it held fast.

Burr flashed now.

Bugleby's ill-fitting clothes

2004-10-12T00:15:00.001-05:00

"That's quite a coat you have on there, sir!", Mbugulu paused to look, his gleaming black eyes fixing their gaze on the loosely-hung garment.

"Well, it's certainly special, Bugs. My grand-uncle Ben passed it on a couple of decades ago. It's a heirloom of sorts, you know. Stitched back in the good old days of the Residency by the Nickbury Brothers. Tailored for the Resident himself. Of course, you couldn't possibly have heard of 'em..." replied Elias.

Elias Bugleby looked rather gaunt in his favorite possession. He had worn it, quite literally, over the long quiet years of his studied life.

the snoring walrus

2004-09-26T01:00:00.001-05:00

The walrus suddenly woke up and caught himself snoring. Now one might ask, quite reasonably, as to how that could ever happen? Doesn't the fact that you are snoring usually imply that you're fast asleep, blissfully unaware of the unbearable misery you so keenly inflict on the people around you, quite likely your loved ones. (Whoever heard of anyone with enemies sleep soundly anyway?).

Well, walruses aren't humans, my friend and there's a reason they're known to be walruses, not any other kind. This difference, amongst many (arguably more perceptible ones), is just another one. Evolution has an uncanny way of finding use for the most improbable combinations of structures and traits, especially under unchanging conditions for millenia, to allow the creature in question (and work in progress) to accumulate a seemingly puny advantage, that bestows upon it a long lease of propagation and proliferation for several more epochs.

This phenomenon, if replayed in one's imagination, almost appears cartoonish in it's physical silliness. But fish it does catch, yes! The snoring walrus provides a dramatic portrayal of all creation being mere creation, no more than puppets, in the hands of Nature. Not much else though, no moral lessons; in fact, quite the contrary, it seems to validate the lessons compulsive, professional slackers (and to a lesser extent, impulsively-slacking professionals) seem to internalize early on in their lives -- that hard work is hard to justify, when one can make do with a certain leisurely, finely-tuned, harmonious stasis with one's surroundings.

The snore itself rises and falls with the waves reaching across to the rocks from the ocean floor, which is not surprising in itself, considering the average size of a walrus. The fish are drawn into what is in comparison a gently rolling hum riding bigger waves. As soon as the snores reach a crescendo, in concord with the bigger kahuna on the beach, the fish are closest to the source of this mildly hypnotic drone. And that is precisely when, by virtue of the principles of superposition of waves, both aquatic and auditory, the walruses' brain registers what could only be roughly projected as a trigger event, and a thousand bells toll in one critical instant. And lo! the marine finds himself ashore, staring at a foamy crest of brine , littered with a motley bunch of finned friends, a few of them already swimming on it's way to it's shiny wet snout, ready to be chomped down the blubbery throat.

WAL Я US, it reads inside.

why is she so angry?

2004-08-11T01:02:00.001-05:00

My wife is angry. She is trying to sleep but the noise of the keystrokes is getting on her nerves. She heaves a deep sigh in exasperation and covers her head with a puffy white cotton pillow.

She must be tired -- after all, she's been out all day. This morning I dropped her at Central Market so she could attend a gathering of businesswomen -- the sort of networking event where one could expect to exchange many business cards, leads to a few jobs or sales or customers, maybe even new partnerships.

She was just finishing breakfast and talking to her mother on the phone when I got ready to leave for work. Just then, I recalled the reminder that had sounded on her mobile earlier that morning -- I had picked it up, noticed this meeting at 11:30 and asked her about it. She seemed unsure about whether she really ought to go. Now I asked her again. It was nearing 11 and she brushed it off again. I insisted that she ought to if she really thought it interesting enough and she came up with the same reply.

"Well okay", I replied. "Are you sure though?".
"Yes".
I bent to kiss her goodbye and just when I straightened up, something inside her flipped and she suddenly said "Or should I? Maybe I should".

I gave her five minutes to get ready.