Tarot Creativity Challenge, Day #7

The Six of Pentacles

In addition to her moderately popular xeriscaping and much-ballyhooed water recycling initiatives, the mayor of San Diego instituted city sales taxes on meat products to counter federal subsidies, forcing San Diegans to pay upfront for the hidden costs of subsidized meat production, subsidized animal feed, water consumption by stock animals, and environmental degradation. “This is survival,” said the mayor. “It's us or the cows. They will eat and drink and crap us to death.” Beef prices skyrocketed to $200 a pound, pork $140, chicken $90. Black markets for unbonded Tijuana chicken and O.C. beef flourished. A city noteworthy for its restaurants dropped traditional fare from its menus and began serving untaxed meat substitutes such as squab (pigeon), chow (dog), and fish-chicken (seagull). Less reputable establishments began doing a brisk trade in long pork (human). Speakeasy barbecues and catering trucks swarmed the city, advertising their presence and drawing customers by the dozens with the scent of grilling meat and disassembling or driving away at the first sound of sirens. Small-scale riots and looting of restaurant freezers were endemic, as were violent scuffles between residents and city meat inspectors, resulting in multiple lynchings and impromptu auto-da-fes of inspectors. Acts of cannibalism at the burnings were not uncommon. The mayor's policies were in effect for all of seven months before she was assassinated. The interim city council vowed to repeal the mayor's “Stalinesque social engineering.”

Tarot Creativity Challenge, Day #6

The Two of Cups

(This is a variation on an old story; the preceding events are the established story, while the dialogue that follows is mostly my own. I came across this story as an African-American folktale from the slave era, although a cursory Internet search suggests that it, like the flood myth, might be one of those cultural near-universals.)

One day a man found a snake by the roadside. The snake had been in some kind of an accident or a fight. Its scales were torn away, and there were long gashes in its belly, back, and sides. Its eyes were dull and dusty. It was not moving.

“Please,” said the snake. “Help me.”

The man took pity on the snake. He picked it up, holding its body close to his own, lending the snake his warmth.

He took it home. He fed the snake with milk squeezed from a cloth. The snake's forked tongue would flick out and lick up each drop of milk as it fell from the cloth. Its eyes grew bright. Its wounds scarred over. It began to writhe around.

When the snake had made a full recovery, the man picked it up again. Again he held it close to his chest, sharing the warmth of his body with the creature. He took it outside, back to the place at the roadside where he had first found it. He took it out of his shirt and set it down. As he did so, the snake whipped around and delivered him a fatal bite on his hand.

“Why did you bite me?” asked the man.

The snake hissed. “You knew I was a snake when you picked me up.”

“I did,” said the man. “And yet I helped you anyway.”

“Fool,” said the snake. “Did you really expect me to go against my nature? I am a snake; I bite.”

“I don't deny you are a snake,” said the man. “But you speak, which means you think. Thinking is your nature. Making choices is your nature. It is your nature to choose what of nature you want to cultivate and what to repress.”

“Arrogant man,” said the snake. “Your kind and mine are enemies. All men have earned death by snakebite. Why should you be exempt from revenge?”

“It is in the nature of men to kill,” said the man. “I don't dispute that. Men kill a lot of snakes. But it's also in the nature of men to make friends. It is in the nature of men to hurt, but also to help. It is the nature of men to choose how they act, and this is the highest of man's nature, and I chose to be helpful and friendly even though you chose to be false and violent. My primary regret is that, in being helpful, I didn't plan for the proper contingencies and wear a pair of gloves.”

Angered, the snake bit the man again, and again. The man groaned and sat down, his blood on fire.

“And now I die,” said the man, “death being a part of my nature over which I have very little conscious control.”

And die he did.

Tarot Creativity Challenge, Day #5

The Nine of Swords.

My mother was never one to experience much worry, guilt, or anguish. I think she was largely free from those emotions. Certainly when she followed her brother/boss into that shopping mall and pulled an automatic handgun on him and his young son and made a series of incoherent demands concerning the family business while gesturing with the gun into the faces of the brother/boss and the son and screaming onlookers, she seemed to be free from worry, guilt, and anguish. She told me that divine voices expunged all doubt from her mind, that they urged her on, giving her confidence and courage. She told me she felt inspired. Perhaps she felt less inspired when the police stripped the gun from her hands and found it empty, and when her brother/boss howled in laughter, the hot breath of it singing her face. But on those few occasions that I've spoken to her about it, I detected no worry, guilt, or anguish in her voice, except perhaps over the fact that she failed to kill brother/boss, as the divine had told her to.

I don't ever remember her exhibiting much worry, guilt, or anguish on her own part. On mine, yes. But that was different. When upon leaving our second grade talent show she pulled me aside in the dark parking lot and punched me twice, once on each side of my head and the diamond on her wedding ring breaking the skin on my scalp while my father looked on, for not being as pretty as the other girls in my dance group and for being the second best dancer and not the best, she was worried about me. She was guilty because of me, and she was anguished for me. But not for herself.

She didn't show much worry, guilt, or anguish when she rolled her eyes in that exaggerated way—the muscles of her entire face rolling with them and her head lolling on her neck like a broken thing—and flung her arms out and screamed at the ceiling when her daughter brought home a report card with a B and a C+ on it. That is to say that she showed a lot of anguish over my grades, yes. I don't dispute that. But did she show any worry about overgoing the melodramatic theatrics in a way that would embarrass even the most hysterical of her daytime dramas? I don't think she ever did.

She did feel some worry when she confronted me one day about the fact that I went to school with known terrorists and murderers, which was news to me. When she asked me if I was ready to do the right thing and defend our family if we were attacked, or to prevent our family from being attacked in the first place, I really got the sense that she was worried from the way her hands and voice were trembling. And when the disgust rose up in me and I shouted a refusal, and she slapped me to the ground, I know she did so because she was worried. Again, for me, not for herself.

When she woke me up in the middle of the night, pulling me from the covers and making me kneel next to the bed and pray for forgiveness for being ugly and lazy and stupid, because ugliness and laziness and stupidity were sins—it was right there in the book—and the divine hated me and I had to beg the voices for mercy, I do think she felt guilty about having given birth to me. I do think she felt worried about having a daughter who was such a failure, and about how she was going to have to deal with that fact for the rest of her life, and I think she felt anguished about everything that I was. Anguished would be a good word for it. Still, again, I would argue that that anguish was misplaced.

In any case, that anguish was a temporary thing. She got over it. She found a cure for her worry, guilt, and anguish. She was a bit anguished when, while taking me to my first day of college in the distant southern part of the state, she tried to drive the car into the center divider, screaming that I was utter shit and worthless and had done nothing, nothing, nothing with my life and promising she would destroy us both. I say she was anguished because I saw her crying, and I assume that action is indicative of anguish. But the anguish would end with our mutually assured destruction. Or it would have, if I hadn't grabbed the wheel away from her, barely able to see for my own fear and my own tears but somehow managing to steer the car back into the lane. Again, she might have experienced some anguish over her failure, and some guilt.

No, no “might have” about it, that time. That time I know. When she made her tearful apology a few days later, saying something about changing her meds and saying “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry” until the words had lost their meaning, I expect that was real guilt. Real anguish. I didn't quite know what to do with it at the time. I sat and listened, the muscles stiff and hot around my eyes saying “Yeah, I forgive you,” until the words had lost their meaning. Not that my words had much meaning in the first place. I felt guilty about lying. Not anguished, though. I felt a little anguished, maybe, about the fact that I didn't rip my mother open with my words, that I didn't make the air thick with accusations and drive her in that sobbing state to strangle herself or swallow all her pills at once out of overwhelming feelings of worry, guilt, and anguish. I felt a little anguished over my failure. But I got over that.

Now I go to see her and she is calm. No worry, anguish, or guilt. Whatever medication she is on is working well. It is as though the past never happened. She is still abrasive; she tells me how to interact with my boss, tells me how to do my work, tells me how I need to present myself in the office, how I need to dress. She feels no anguish over saying these things, though. It is as a light-hearted ribbing, the kind that men do, and it's not worth my feeling anguished over it, even though every time she tells me these things I feel like some vital organ inside of me is shriveling. She does not tell me how I should be with my husband, and for that I am thankful. Nor does she insist that the divine voices tell her that I am failing in my great purpose, a purpose which was only ever known to them and to her. The last time I went to see her to show her how my belly was swelling, she didn't offer me any mothering advice. That was good. If she had, I think I might've gone into the kitchen, got a knife, and cut her throat open.

My mother shows no worry, anguish, or guilt at all now. She picks up her cat, kisses it and talks baby talk to it. She watches the news and complains volubly at the daily betrayals of our nation. She waters the plants in her garden, and she smiles while doing so. These are the actions of a person with a clean conscience. These are the actions of a person who has been absolved. She meets each day—each day diminished now down to mere human scale—with courage and with confidence.
My mother shows no worry, anguish, or guilt at all. And that's fine. I have enough worry, anguish, or guilt for the both of us. Especially when I place my hand on my stomach and feel that small heart beating beneath my hand. The worry and anguish and guilt threaten to split me open.

Tarot Creativity Challenge, Day #4

(I feel like the character in this is the Hermit in another context).

The Devil

Hands red with dove’s blood, I waited. The aftertaste of the words was dirty in my mouth. My elbow was aching.

It took several tries for me to hear the ringing of the doorbell over the echo of the bell in my skull. I got up; the slight movement made the weightless dove down scatter over the floor. My heart was crashing in my chest.

The front door? Really? No smoke and stink of sulfur? No solidification of shadows at the unlit corners of the room? No reverberating voice or sinuous whispers?

I went to the front door and opened it. Dove’s blood got all on the doorknob.

The man standing at the door was of medium height, slightly paunched. I had the impression—I don’t know from where—that his height and weight and age were at the exact numerical average for the country. There was something about his face, though…but I couldn’t tell what. I couldn’t say that his hair or eyes; his skin was the color of skin. Even looking right at him, I was forgetting what he looked like. It was like the image of his face would enter my mind and slide right out again. It made you dizzy. He wore grey—a grey suit of no particular distinction, no particular make. I would have latched onto it and said that it was professional dress, but even then I couldn’t quite be sure if the coat and shirt were business or casual. The fact of the presence or absence of a tie refused to stay in my mind.

Shaking my head, the reverberating of the bell growing louder instead of softer, I said “You’re here.”

He said something—mumbled more than said. The words were a low blur of sound. I pieced out words and bits of words. Day you tract you legal vice you ay I in. Oh. May I come in?

“Yes, come in,” I said, sweeping my hand toward the interior of the apartment and spattering dove’s blood on the wood of the floor.

He walked in. He walked past the ritual circle on the floor of the living room, stepping around the smoldering black candles that cluttered the floor like fungus in a forest and stepping over the lines drawn in blood already drying to flakes of rust. He sat on one of the cheap wicker-bottom chairs that I had shoved to the side of the room. He breathed in the air thickened by wax smoke and the smell of the insides of doves. He took out a briefcase I hadn’t seen him carry in, placed it on his knees, and open it. He took a sheaf of papers from the opened case and straightened them by racking them against his thigh.

My heart had died for a few moments there when I had opened the door and saw nothing but the man standing there. But now it had resuscitated, and had a desperate life of its own. It was drowning inside of me and trying to claw its way out. I walked to him.

“I tried so hard to bring you here,” I said. “Real dove’s blood. White doves, not pigeons. I had all the candles. I rang the bell a full six-hundred and sixty-six times, not eighteen times like those pissant cowards do in their rituals. I guess I could have gone with child’s blood, but I’m sure even you think that’s a bit over the top.” At that moment I tripped over one of candles, catching myself before I went down onto the floor but sending several of the candles crashing in a chain reaction of flame and black wax. I recovered, stood over him with blooded hands.

“And now you’re here,” I said.

He buzzed something incomprehensible. Listening to him was like listening to radio static. He held the sheaf of paper in his hands—largish-smallish hands, wrinkled-smooth hands.

“And you know what that means,” I said.

He droned. His voice was sometimes rough and harsh, clicking or hitting against a consonant, but there was something in that blur of words that made you want to lie down and go to sleep. I shook my head and slapped myself on the cheek to keep myself awake. I bit the inside of my cheek to shock myself with pain.

“You’re here,” I said. “And that means it’s true. All of it is true. Heaven, Hell. God and you. I prayed for years—decades without any verification. But I knew you would listen to my prayers. You don’t require an act of faith. You’re pragmatic. Aren’t you?”

If he said something, I didn’t know what it was. Maybe the mumbling was nothing but sound.

“You’re here,” I said, “and that means that I have a soul. A soul for the selling and the buying.”

He held out the papers to me. They were thick with print.

“No,” I repeated. “Now that you’re here, now that I see you—fuck you.”

He took the papers back. I had the impression that his eye-colored eyes were looking at me, although I couldn’t be certain. It made my skin want to slough off of my bones.

“Don’t you get it?” I said. I gave out a laugh, a brutal thing. “You fucking fool. That you’re here at all means I should never bargain with you. You’re proof of the scope of it, of the drama. You’re proof of it all. Eternity, all of it. “

He sat back. He listened.
“Don’t you get it?” I repeated. “Years of doubt, of gnawing doubt, of anxiety fit to split me open resolved.” I laughed again, and there was the high treble of hysteria in my voice. “Oh, you goddamned idiot. ”

“You don’t know what it’s like, do you? Doubt. You play on men’s doubts, prey on men’s doubts, but you’ve never doubted yourself. You always knew. You always knew that the impossible things that you can’t touch or see or hear or sense in any way were everything, in spite of all the reality all around you. You knew this was all trash, a dream, and that the truth was something you’d never experienced but only been told about and had no reason to believe in but that that nothingness meant so much more than all the everything you knew; you knew you were accountable to inscrutable rules that defied all logic and experience but that your living in accordance with these rules was the most important thing you could possibly do with your brief, brief time. You knew that everything that seemed good and pleasurable and sensible was a lie, and that attrition and self-punishment and the mutilation of your reason were what was required of you. You knew that everything that was false was true and true was false. You knew. Fuck you. Now you’re here, and now I know. Fuck you and fuck faith and now I will spend every second of my life ensuring that I live forever rather than wondering if I’m wasting every second of my life chasing figments and vapors.”

I knew I wasn’t making sense. I didn’t care. Nonsense was sense and sense was nonsense. That was what it meant.

He rose. His voice raised up until it was deafening, until I was drowning in sound. The buzzing hum of it filled my ears, the room, reality. It was the sound of every bee ever born droning its wings into a microphone. It was overpowering and awful—it made my bones hurt—and it put me straight to sleep.

And I forgot all about it.

That I remember now means what, exactly? I don’t know. It’s been years since that happened. Or has it? I’m not obsessed with black magic anymore, not obsessed with verifying the existence or non-existence of a soul within me. I’ve given up on all that. If I was ever into it at all. I remember eating bitter entheogens that made the shadows crawl and the walls waver but told me of nothing aside from the mind’s capacity for self-rape. I remember reading about the rituals, prepping them, going all out for the most elaborate and powerful one of all. But I don’t remember actually performing it. I don’t remember anything about it. You’d think I’d remember the hard, empirical fact of having to scrape black wax from six hundred and sixty-six candles off of the hardwood floor of my apartment, but there’s no memory of that. It’s just a blur, just a haze of words and long nights and doubt so acute it came as a physical pain in my guts that made me curl up and howl my lungs out until my howl became a breathy, spittled whisper.

And then there’s this. This memory that came back to me. Or was it a memory? A fever dream? A flashback? Wishful thinking?

I don’t know. I don’t know, I don’t know, and I never will.

God fucking damn it.

Tarot Creativity Challenge, Day #3

In faith, I wrote this last week, which is a bit of a violation of the term of the challenge which specifies that I should create a new work in response to the stimulus of the tarot card. However, thinking about the Juggler and its meaning of versatility, I could not do other than to put this selection up here. It's from the end of the second chapter of my current long-form work, _Chained_. I'm working on going forward rather than micromanaging my edits, and consequently I have already noticed a few errors in punctuation or unforgivable repetitions of vocabulary. But forgive me, just the same. The final product will be thoroughly edited, I assure you.

The Two of Pentacles

The warrior brought both of his fists up high over his head, even as the Dustman had done, and brought them down in one solid blow on the Dustman's skull. Magic leaked and sparked and vented; the skull caved in. Such a blow would've been mortal to any living creature, but that the Dustman was not. The remaining arm leapt at the warrior's throat, but he intercepted the two spear-sharp digits and grasped at them until he had torn them apart in a shock of shattered bone and ripped sinew. The Dustman was not dead, but the integrity of its magic was, and as the warrior ripped at the bones in the arm and stomped on the bones beneath the cloak they did not resist the impact as they once had. It took a long while to shatter all of the Dustman, but the warrior was determined and the warrior was thorough, crushing each rise of bone flat beneath his fists and his feet. He felt a tug at his waist and turned to see the slave threshing at the remains of the cloak and the bones with its umbilical chain, raising up the chain and dropping it and sending exaggerated waves along its length to tug at the warrior's plate-clad belt. The slave saw that the warrior had seen its actions; it stopped and dropped the chain. The folding-in of its arms and tuck of its head suggested a shame in being caught collaborating.

“Who is the Dustman?” whatever was left asked one last time, and then the unmuted wind roared back with full force. Whorls of pale and bitter-smelling powdered bone joined the rest of the wind-tossed dust.

The warrior sank to the ground, exhausted. His iron collapsed as though there were no flesh and muscle inside to give it shape. A tug on the chain, and the slave was doing its damnedest to wrench the collar off from around its neck and pulling itself to the very limit of its leash, as though to strain the chain to the breaking point. The warrior allowed it to persist in its efforts for a moment or two, feeling the pull of the slave's exertion, before grabbing the chain and snapping a sidelong wave across it that knocked the slave flat. The two of them sat on the earth, the warrior with his legs spread out before him and another hand behind him for balance and the great engine of his chest rising and sinking, and the slave breathless and silent and so bruised that it could do no more than sprawl on the ground. They regarded one another.

The warrior took off his helmet. He rubbed at the brown dust that had come to coat his brow through the visor, and at the white dust that was the remains of the Dustman. He took a drink.

“How did...how did you know that would work?”

The warrior paused. His eyes, so small and sunken in all that brute musculature, fixed on the slave.

The slave swallowed and spoke again. “How did you know that you'd be able to hurt it, even after your axe bounced off?”

“I didn't know,” said the warrior. “But I had to try.”

“My mother says--my mother said that doing the same thing over again and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity.”

The orc coughed out a laugh as he slipped the axe back into its case. “Tell that to the wind that wears down the mountain. Sometimes doing the same thing over again is the only way to tear down an opponent's defenses. You persist, he gets fatigued and tired and bored, he makes a mistake, you win. It's not a bad strategy.” He paused, thought, chewed on nothing, chewed on the thought itself, spat at the dirt. “No, it's not a bad strategy. Except when it is.” He hauled on the chain, causing the slave to stumble up.

They moved on.

When the wind died down enough to permit it, the warrior spoke.

“You believe that flexibility is a virtue, yes?

The slave stared up at him with uncomprehending eyes, then glanced off into the hazed horizon.

“Adaptability. The ability to change. You'd think this was good, right? That this was a good quality for a person to possess.”

“Yes,” said the slave slowly, feeling for the trap behind the warrior's words. It shied a bit to the side, anticipating a blow if its answer proved incorrect. Wise child.

But no blow came. The warrior spoke on as he continued to slog against the wind. “Dedication. Determination. Resolve. The ability to hold fast to a value even in the face of challenge. These, too, are good things, right? Good qualities for a person to have?”

“Yes,” said the slave just as slowly.

“So which is good? Dedication or adaptability? They can't both be good, because they are oppositional. Can good be on both sides of a polarized duality?”

The slave said nothing. The wind offered trash noise for answers.

“Well?” said the orc. “Where is that vaunted human quickness of mind to grapple with my little question? Where is that adaptability of intellect for which your race is so justly known? I am but a humble orc, my head being all taken up by thick skull bone and hypertrophied jaw muscles and proportionately larger sinus cavities instead of brains; I can't be expected to figure this conundrum out for myself, can I?”

They said nothing more as full night came on.

The cool in the air calmed the wind. Its screamings subsided to pained-sounding whispers, bitter suggestions. The moving dust died down to mere tosses of substance in the air and small curled serpents of dirt winding across the ground. Stars manifested and shone their dumb lights down onto the moving and the still, the living and the slain.

There was no direct need to stop with the fall of darkness. The wastes were vast and all but empty, with only the rare sage scrub bush to trip over, and these were audible by the dry-toothed rattling sounds they made when their small leaves caught the subtle wind. There was little indeed to be moving towards, with nothing but nothingness visible unto the horizon. There were a few slope-shouldered boulders imprinting their shadows against the starlight here and there, boulders the size of beetles at any distance, and it was towards one of these boulders that the warrior seemed to be heading. He did not ask the slave if it required water or rest, and the slave did not ask of him. The warrior crushed the dry dirt into powder beneath his boots. The slave made an effort to walk outside of the warrior's defined footprints. It was a bit of an effort, as the warrior's feet chewed up great swaths of the baked ground and the slave's tether was not generous, but it was possible.

At length the warrior drew up to one of the wind-carved rocks. How he had known which rock to pick out of the dozens of scattered sentinels who threw their shadows over the wastes was unclear, or perhaps his coming had been pure luck. But he approached the boulder deliberately, loosing his axe and falling into a half-crouch to minimize his exposed profile. The slave imitated the warrior's stance, shook violently and stood full upright, shifted quickly through a range of emotions that were visible upon its expressive face but none lasting long enough to be parsed out, and then crouched again after the warrior. The warrior watched it all and said nothing.

The warrior drew closer to the boulder. His heavy boots crushed softly through the baked dirt, making no more noise than a beetle might have done. He sighted something and then stood up, slipping his axe back into its holster. The slave stood by, attentive, unnerved. Some quality in the air--a lingering electricity from the wind, perhaps--had its pale hair standing stiff on its scalp.

The warrior went forward and prodded at something in the darkness with the toe of his boot. “You can come over here,” he said. The slave obeyed, and found itself staring down a rigid body.

The eyes of the body were frozen open. Blood stained its cheeks and teeth, and small bits of dried blood flaked off from its chin to be picked up by the wind, more new dust. Death had set in when the muscles of the face and neck were still drawn taut, and the body was locked in an expression of fierce, tight pain. It was a woman's body, a relatively young woman, neither a girl nor old. Her hair was brown and short. Loose sags of skin hung from her skeleton, implying that she had recently and dramatically lost weight, which had left her gaunt rather than thin. She was dressed in rough rags that had been stripped of color by the sun and shape by the wind until they had the appearance of sacking. Her hands were bound before her, with coils of chain binding her palms and wrists together in a perversion of prayer and then sinking into the ground to anchor on to some buried object. A rock, most likely. The woman had scratched at the dirt in an attempt to unearth the anchor, but it was buried too deep and the earth packed down too hard, and all her excavations had made but a shallow crater with the chain emerging from its center like the worming limb of some alien beast grabbing her to drag her down. Several shattered fingernails like the discarded husks of insects but with bits of flesh still attached at their backings drifted around in the pit, played with by the wind.

The woman's body was mutilated. Mouthfuls of flesh were missing from her forearms, just behind the bindings. The wounds were round with ragged edges. Dust had mixed with the blood to make a kind of mud that had dried red-grey around the injury, the color muted in the starlight. Bites of flesh were taken out of her biceps, too, and from the tops of her breasts. The bites were so deep in places as to have exposed the bone, which itself showed signs of being gnawed and cracked open to the marrow.

The warrior toed the body. He knelt down next to it and produced one of the small axes from the bandolier that hung across his chest. He took the axe and planted it deep in the woman's abdomen, drawing it up until it hit the hook of her ribs. He wrenched the axe out, shaking away the few drops of dark, dense blood that had gathered on the blade. Then he reached into the incision and rummaged wetly inside of the woman's chest cavity before plucking out a small, brown, withered object like a baked apple. This he inspected, turning over in his hands, before setting back atop the woman's chest, outside now when it should have been inside. The warrior unslung his pack and rummaged around inside of it, in turn, and produced a small square steel box. This he unlatched and opened, exposing clusters of coarse grey salt. He placed the woman's heart inside of the salt box, sealed the box back up, and placed it once again in his pack. He sat back.

“You understand what happened here?” said the warrior. He waved a gauntleted hand at the woman's red teeth and at the rips in her skin, at her defleshed breasts, at the new mouths that her mouth had birthed in her body.

“'Even slaves who have no other power can find the power to die. We have to find reasons not to make that choice,'” the slave said.

“Wise child,” said the warrior, chuckling. “Wise child. Keep it up with the wisdom, and you'll fare better than she did.”

The slave stared at those awful open eyes, brown eyes, bloodshot eyes, very expressive eyes, for as long as it could and then looked away.

“You captured her, too?” it asked.

“Yes,” said the warrior. “In a village about three days southeast of here. Pioso. You know it?”

The slave shook its head. Its chain collar rattled.

“You killed her family, too?” asked the slave.

“Yes,” said the warrior.

The slave tilted its head up at the stars, as though to scan the sky for some familiar and reassuring pattern. They had not traveled so far in one afternoon that the constellations would have changed from what the slave had been used to, but whether there was any familiarity and reassurance in the same arrangements of stars as there had been the night before could not be known.

“Yes,” resumed the warrior. “I killed her family and took her as a slave. So also you. She didn't take very well to life as a slave, though. She didn't last but four days in my keeping, and as soon as I left her alone she seized upon the opportunity to bite herself until she bled to death. I show you this as an object lesson, and I tell you this to provide you with a negative exemplar of slave behavior. He nudged the corpse's head with his boot, and pulled down the woman's lip with the toe of his boot. “Next time you think about effecting your own death, think on the shreds of flesh drying between this woman's teeth.”

“So was this dedication or adaptability?” asked the slave.

The warrior's laugh erupted from the depths of his armor and echoed within the steel cavern that encased his skull. His ears were still damaged by the Dustman's keenings, and the echo caused him to clap his hands to the sides of his helmet in pain, which only caused him to laugh more.

“Ah, wise child. You will make someone a good slave, assuming he doesn't waste you on rape or brute labor,” said the orc. “It was both, I think.”

The warrior stripped off his helmet and gauntlets and set them aside, along with his pack. He moved to lean his back against the boulder. The corpse was only a few yards away, heartless and staring. The warrior paid it no mind and closed his eyes.

The slave pulled off to the edge of its tether, to be as far away from the warrior and the corpse as it could. It stood on the bare earth, with gusts of cold wind singing an idiot whistle all around it. The wind plucked at its clothes and plucked at its flesh. The slave stood out there exposed for a good while before coming back and hunkering down in the shelter of the rock, with no other comfort for the night. The dark bulk of the orc was right there beside it, another boulder. The slave looked at the orc and saw the dull red reflections of his open eyes, the only visible light in all that darkness.

In the windshadow of the rock they slept.

Tarot Creativity Challenge, Day #2

The Hermit

I listened to the autumn wind. It spoke songs to me. It drew me on.

I thought I could hear a sense in the speech, in the song. I thought I could hear the variance in pitch and rhythm combined with a repetition that had the hallmark of sense.

I followed the sound, the song, the speech into a deep place, a place of leaves and red shadows. There are darknesses here that last all through the day; the acute angles of sunlight at dawn and dusk or the full blare of noon are never sufficient to pierce through the canopy, leaving patches of shadow that have not been dispelled in a hundred, a thousand years. It is a place fit for listening to the speech of the wind.

The more I listen, the more I am sure that there is a secret in the speech of the wind. They trees know it. They dance in time to it. They strip themselves bare before it. And if I listen hard enough, if I listen with aperated ears, if I listen with ears older than new and mewling forms of speech, I will know it, too.

The more I listen, the more I am certain that the secret in the song, the sound, the speech is that there is no secret at all.

How long has it been?

Yesterday I saw a woman, a wanderer who had lost her way. She saw me. She opened her mouth. Speech fell out, but all I heard was wind.

Tarot Creativity Challenge

My friend John is doing this thing whereby he picks out random tarot cards from the deck and then encourages people to respond to them in some way. He describes his project here:

http://networkedblogs.com/p29731415

I don't know much about tarot. I am fantastically ambivalent about magic in all its forms, respecting its power to channel psychic energies but being very scornful about its capacity to affect objective reality or reveal future events or communicate with entities whose existence is empirically unverifiable, et cetera (and by psychic energies I mean emotions and ideas, rather than any kind of spoon-bending telekinesis). But I do know I like prompts. They channel my psychic energies, focusing that great haze of vague, undifferentiated impulses and half-formed narratives that floats ever at the back of my brain, routing that cloud into a useful condensation. Prompts, for me, are a kind of magic. And so, and because John is my friend, I am participating in this project, even if I definitely feel like the odd person out in the Mind on Fire community. And here is my first day's result.

The Knight of Swords

The battle fought, the battle lost, the death birds outnumbering now the living men, he arrives. The only struggle now is that of the feeble injured, limbs twitching and mouths making empty sounds as enemy men in orange doublets raise up pale throats for the cutting.
He observes. He draws his sword. He makes his sword naked. He wants to wrap his sword in red robes to hide its shame.
He hopes for the hopeless fight. Let there still be time to die. The universe could not be so cruel as to deny a man his chance to be transubstantiated into tragedy.
The horse exhibits a sane fear of death. The man does not. Its eyes roll back as though its body could follow. He spurs the beast on. Come carrion, come carnage, come corpses.