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.

Vehicular Manslaughter

Last night I almost murdered somebody. A young woman. It was dark, and I was not in full control of my actions.

I'd pulled up to the T intersection that feeds out from the parking structure back onto the street. I looked both ways--I swore I did--and saw nothing coming from the street and no pedestrians. I took my foot off the brake and let my car start to roll forward in anticipation of turning right on the red light. I looked ahead, and there was a young woman smack in front of my Explorer. I'd not seen her before, even though I'm sure I'd looked to my right (hadn't I?), but perhaps I'd not seen her because she'd been concealed by the pole supporting the traffic light or because she was wearing dark clothing and it was late at night and the lighting was poor at that intersection. I saw her turn to me, though, cuing in on the motion, and immediately tried to step on the brake. In my rush, the tip of my foot somehow got wedged underneath the brake pedal. I tried to pull my foot out, but it only shoved up against the underside of the brake. The car continued to roll forward. The woman was looking at me with an expression of horror and anger. The front of the car was only a few feet away from her and closing. I managed to extricate my foot and pushed down on the top of the brake pedal, stopping the car. She walked on, looking at me with complete contempt. I threw up my hands in a gesture of helpless apology. The whole incident had transpired in the course of maybe one or two seconds. I'd been possibly half a second away from mowing her down.

Now, the look she gave me was one of disgust and contempt. I know the look well; I've given it to any number of drivers in my time who didn't respect my right of way and didn't allow for the scant few seconds required for me to pass unhit in front of their anxious grilles. She saw a driver being careless and threatening her life, and she hated that driver. Does it matter that, during the whole exchange, I was desperately trying to stop my car and so not injure her? Not to her mind; she can't know that I was aware of her and doing my best to not hurt her, all she can know is that I very nearly struck her down. When she relates the experience to her friends, it will be of her walking innocent across the street with the right of way and some evil asshole of a driver almost killing her. If I'd been about half a second slower and had struck her, would it have mattered, in a legal context, that I'd been trying to stop? No; there would be the fact of one person getting hurt or killed, and the criminal repercussions to follow. I was half a second away from being a murderer. Would it have mattered, in a personal identity context, that I'd been trying to stop? No; I would have struck her down, and this act would have become the defining action of my life, and I would have spent a significant portion of the rest of my life paying for it either with jail time or trying to make remunerations that I know I never could make, and my consciousness of inflicting a horrible injury or death on another person would come to dominate my consciousness, and I'd feel that no helpful or kind action I could ever take would overrule or override that one heinous one, and if I didn't destroy myself out of guilt I'd spend the rest of my life trying to make reparations that I could never make, because I'd never be able to undo the death or injury.

Half a second away. Half a second away from all of this. Even though I was trying to stop it. Even though I would never deliberately hurt another person like that. I was half a second away from ruining somebody's life or killing somebody and most likely ruining my own. Any other aspects of character or mind I might have possessed--my writing, my desire to be ethical, my sense of humor, even, if not my life itself--would have been sacrificed on a fire of guilt.

But the fact of the matter is that we are only ever a second or three away from killing somebody when operating a car. Close your eyes for one second while driving at freeway speeds with vehicles drifting on either side of you, let the car drift in accordance with its poor alignment for one second, hesitate for one second in the decision as to whether or not it is necessary to brake, look to the left and not see the pedestrian who materializes out of the darkness to your right, and bam, you are a murderer. You've allowed a ton of metal and plastic operating at high speed to crush the life out of yourself or another human being. The opportunities to make such a mistake are manifold, even if you are careful. Even if you are careful, you are liable to make such a mistake over the course of your career as a driver of a motor vehicle, just because there are so many little things that can go wrong and eventually one of them will.

In any other context, this capacity for casual murder would be entirely untenable. Imagine a society where everybody is walking around all the time with a loaded shotgun. And we'll assume that most of these people have some baseline competency in operating a shotgun, at least enough to receive an operating permit (read "driver's license"), though many of these people nevertheless will not. And just having this permit or having a constant familiarity with this shotgun will nevertheless result in a wide array of behaviors with respect to this shotgun, some more responsible and some more risky. And even then, due to inexperience or carelessness brought on by years of repetitive habit, it is entirely possible that a person will forget to put the safety on his shotgun, and a slight toggle of the trigger could set it off, and maybe that just results in a bunch of buckshot lodged in the wall or maybe it vaporizes somebody's head. Alternately, imagine a society in which pedestrians walk down the street clad in clothing that is covered in an array of blades, spear points and sword points, and the slightest stumble could set two of these pedestrians impaled upon each other.

(I guess such the gun scenario would actually be relatively true if you lived in Texas. Why anybody would want to live like that I don't really know. The spikes would be true in Sigil and that, gentle reader, is why Sigil is better off as a fantastic place than a real one. Like Texas.).

Driving is a fucking death game. Even if you're sober, which many people are not. Even if you try to be cautious and aware, which many people do not, and which behavior the repetitiveness and mechanical monotony of driving inhibits.

Is this right? I don't know that this is such a good setup, imbuing so many people with the power and responsibility over death, tested daily, where the failure of a moment can result in severe property damage, injury, or death for oneself and others. I am aware of this terrible power, and most of the time I say I do not want it. But I've come to a point in my life where I cannot now live without it.

I lived without it for a very long time. Twenty-six years, in fact; I didn't start driving a car until I was about twenty-six years old, although I got my license at eighteen and only put it into effect for its primary purpose one time in those intervening eight years. Part of this was due to the fact with the piddly-shit income I made up unto that point in my life that I'd never be able to afford to purchase a car, much less pay to fuel and maintain and insure one, unless I wanted to give over about half of my net income as a minimum wage slave to do so. And I resented the notion of having to pay about half of my income just for the sake of being able to get to and from my place of work, which is primarily what I would have done with a car. But at least as much of my lack of motorized mobility was due to the fact that this responsibility over death scared the god-damned fucking shit out of me.

I lived without a car in spite of the fact that the city where I lived, Irvine, presumes a car. The housing tracts are large and unbroken. When the city was conceived, walking must have been thought of as a source of recreation rather than a serious way of getting from point A to point B. To move out from my house at the center of the housing tract to the goods and services beyond was a trip of thirty minutes each way, at the very least; and that presumes that I was walking to the very nearest shopping center. If I wanted to so much as go out and buy a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of diet coke it was a trip that I'd have to plan my entire afternoon around. And then there was going beyond that point. Getting to work on the Irvine-Tustin border meant a walk of two and a half solid hours, or else a one and one half hour walk up to Jamboree and a fifteen minute wait for the bus and the payment of a dollar fifty for the privilege of taking a bus for another fifteen minutes over a stretch of road with no sidewalk where I could not walk (though I tried once, on my first day before I realized this, with the cars rushing by half a foot away from me) only to arrive at my crappy job; it meant that if it meant that I didn't bum a ride from a co-worker or a parent, which I most often did. Going to school at IVC was a commute of several miles and an hour and a half either way, and it was a long several miles in the hundred-degree heat of summer that wrung sweat out of my body until my clothes, when they dried, were caked with dried salt or else in rains so thick that my pants would get soaked and the detergent would come up of my jeans and get worked into a froth by the action of my one leg rubbing against the other. There was another bus that ran to IVC, but walking to the bus stop would've taken forty-five minutes and then there would have been more waiting and the payment and so it wouldn't hardly have been worth it.

I realize that when I did get a ride with somebody else, I was just outsourcing my own dread of the responsibility of driving to another person, although others never seemed to experience it as acutely as I did. And do.

But the greatest moral quandaries I ever got into as a pedestrian were when I heard the crush of a snail's shell beneath my foot--I always tried to step around them, I felt no need to end a life, even a snail's life, if I didn't have to--or when I would say hello to another pedestrian and he would only stare back at me as if I had said something offensive or when somebody would cross to the other side of the street so that she wouldn't have to walk near me in all of my hulking long-haired freakishness. Never was anybody's life on the line. I know I am a massive beast, but my ability to accelerate that mass into motion was limited without mechanical aid and so the overall force attendant on my person was always pretty low (scaled to human, rather than arthropod or annelid or gastropod, size), and I trusted my reaction time and my muscular responsiveness, unfiltered and uninterfaced through any mechanical impedimenta, to stop me in my walking before I crashed into somebody. I was a risk to snails and ants and lost earthworms, and believe me after killing dozens of such beings entirely incidentally it did play on my conscience, but I was no real risk to any other human, in spite of what the women who were terrified of my appearance might have thought.

(I suppose everybody who has ever walked anywhere has engaged in such small acts or murder incidental to his purpose. Walking in grass, it would be easy not to notice. Paved sidewalk, though, is like a canvas for the spatter of small-scale murder. Your crush a snail under your heel and you see the green of its gore sprayed out over the sidewalk, and you come back the same day the same way or even the next day and the selfsame corpse is still there, perhaps now with ants scavenging its guts and perhaps you end up stepping on those, too, although you think that most of them will fall between the ridges on the bottom of your shoe but you know that some of them will not.).

And my God, was it a chore sometimes, in the heat or the rain or when running a fever. It was a chore, too, to buy food for myself and then have to haul it back over two or three miles. Buy something so simple as a six pack of beer and it gets pretty damn heavy after the first five minutes or so. Your arm carrying the bag gets to aching, and you switch your package off from arm to arm but it's still painful and burdensome. Walking out to eat and coming back I would almost invariably get heat sick and diarrhetic by the time I got back. There were a lot of frantic clenched-cheek fast walks across the last few blocks back to home, and I hope you won't think less of me, gentle reader, if I were to tell you that your humble narrator didn't always make it in time, in spite of his best efforts.

(There were, of course, no public restroom facilities in that sprawl of private housing. Even if I could find a restroom in a public park, it was almost invariably locked. Let me tell you, gentle reader, that there are few things more distressing than knowing that you are half an hour out from a bathroom with absolutely no way to get closer other than to walk, which churns your bowels or your bladder up all the more. I was often tempted to knock on a nearby house's door and ask, as politely as I could, if I might use the bathroom and state that I would not impose if there were not a dire need, but in my mental extrapolations of this scenario there was no request, however kindly delivered, that produced the desired result. Many's the time when I was nearly seduced into the evil of going behind a bush in the landscaping, but I never did, gentle reader, I never did. I walked that line, and I walked it hard.).

But now I drive a car, and so that life of being at the mercy of distance is behind me. A trip that used to be an insurmountable obstacle, or else was a two-hour haul that was sufficient for me to make the comparison within my own mind of my own journey walking along a paved sidewalk in a suburb to the treks of epic heroes--Hey, take two hours in which you have no technology and no incessant demands of new stimuli to keep you from thinking and see how much of an inflated opinion *you* get of your own efforts--is now an eight minute drive. A chore, to be sure, especially when one has to get dressed and put one's shoes on for the occasion, but a chore, and not a true happening. Two hours of walking used to take me to the store and back, a journey of about six miles. Two hours of driving takes me now from central Orange County to eastern San Diego, a journey of about ninety miles.

And in driving a car, I see how perverse it is, how truly perverse and subversive, to walk. Everything in my home town, from the circuitous streets to the great tracts of houses, was designed around the presumption of people having cars, and wanting to walk only for recreation rather than having to walk out of necessity. Nobody intended for me to use the sidewalks in the way that I did. If everybody in Irvine had to walk for an hour to buy groceries and then bought only what he or she could comfortably carry, the city would shut down. If everybody in the city had to take the bus, walking to the infrequently-spaced bus stops that stay superficial, street-wise, and don't even penetrate into the core of most of the residential developments (because what good suburbanite wants to see poor people taking the bus and have to deal with that noise and diesel smell?), and then waiting fifteen minutes or half an hour or forty-five minutes for the infrequently-spaced buses to arrive but God knows you need to get there early because you sure as Hell don't want to be late, the city would shut down. On the street level, on the literal level of its streets, Irvine resents pedestrians. It resents poor people who have no engines but their own bodies to propel them across distances. And as much as I resent that resentment, there's no way, now that I have a car, that I would want to go back to being one of the resented, before whom all the city is arrayed as a punishment of distance and time and physical wear.

Yes, I do appreciate the lack of density and congestion that are attendant upon suburban sprawl, which I recognize as being the point of it all. I appreciate the increased amount of green space and landscaping. I'm not numb to these things. I couldn't be, having had such values inculcated in me by the buildings and by the streets themselves for so many years of my life, and also by the persons who would choose to live in such a community.

From aesthetics to perceptions of necessity, though. Given the way cities are constructed now, it seems to be necessary for a person who doesn't want to give over hours of his ever day to transportation (and the hectic demands of contemporary living make it necessary that we do no such thing) to drive. And on the one hand, this is fucked up. Because nothing that is technologically intensive and resource intensive and prohibitively expensive and carries such serious risks and responsibilities as driving *ought* to be necessary. On the other hand, how could we do without it? Operating without a car within cities that are designed to accommodate the needs of cars rather than people is brutal. As technology increases, so too does the expectation of intensity, of being able to get what one wants even if what one wants is fifty miles distant, or being able to maintain relationships or careers even if the persons and places involved are separated by distances that would be impossible without technological assistance. I don't know too many people who would be content only with experiencing what- and whomsoever is within walking distance; I know I wouldn't. Footbound as I was for so freakishly long, I wouldn't want to go back to it. On a social level, we cannot go back to that. The small community model is alright for some things, but it could not sustain the informationally-dense, highly complex and technical and global culture that we have come to expect (and that people partake of even in small communities, such as small mountain towns, in spite of their complaints about urbanization or corporatization or globalization). And that kind of culture is only possible with cars. Or it could be possible without cars, if we were to re-conceptualize our lives and our expectations of intensity such that a two-hour commute would be acceptable, or if we were to tear up our Southern California cities and re-construct them with the aim of having reasonable facilities within walking distance of residences at the probable costs of congestion and density. And everybody would have to live very proximal to his place of work, so given the frequent job changes that people undergo these days people would have to move every year or three to a neighborhood where housing values or crime rates might be entirely different from his previous expectations. And I would have to live next to SDSU, where every night there would be sorority girls attired only in lingere parading down the street near my window and the attendant shouts of drunken frat boys, all through the night. Yeah. Fuck that. Or I guess we could effect a mass exodus of car-centric Southern California and all go live in San Francisco or Portland or New York, where neighborhoods are designed without the expectation of driving and there are corner stores and public transportation or even walking from place to place aren't only for the utterly disenfranchised or the insane.

(Or we could develop teleportation technology. Gentle reader, there are few things I would like more in this world than for human beings to develop teleportation technology. I'd even settle for a magical flue teleportation network or the ability to apparate. I fantasize about it frequently, this magical technology that would enable us to move freely from place to place, but remove the terrible burden of potentially lethal operator error from everyone who gets behind the wheel of a car. Mr. Scott can take on that responsibility all for himself; I don't want it, and he usually does a good job with it, except in the first *original* _Star Trek_ movie that everybody seems to have forgotten now and I understand that because the script and direction are pretty abstruse and consequently kind of do suck and are unfun but the visuals are nevertheless pretty cool and worth watching. But I guess teleportation could go the other way and we'd all get our DNA fused with flies, which would be kind of shitty, except we could vomit all over each other and dissolve each other and slurp up the soupy mess of vomitus and enzymed flesh, and that would suck but also be pretty awesome).

But cars, man. Cars. We have become dependent upon what began as a luxury such that it is now a necessity. It's another one of those things, like eating large quantities of meat or having a household filled with cheap consumer goods manufactured in China, that is a relatively recent habit that would be alien even to our own ancestors four generations back in this country to say nothing of the many billions of people in this world even now who manage to get by from day to day without such things.

Do I want to hang up my keys such that I will never accidentally imperil another person's life ever again? Yes. I do. Absolutely. Do I want to go back to devoting an hour and a half to a five mile commute? Do I want to not be able to see my girlfriend on the weekends because she live in Orange County and I live in San Diego? No. Not at all. And when I think about the consequences of failure when driving, which are severe, my attachment to driving for the facilitating of my own schedule seems all the more self-indulgent. But unlike smoking, which is an addiction that only ever did harm to my own self, this is an addiction to a luxury drug that I don't know how to break. And unlike smoking, which is an ever more difficult habit to indulge, this is an addiction in which the entire world around you is literally engineered against the possibility of you breaking this habit.

So I'll get back in my car and drive to work again today, knowing full well that murder is a moment away. The Rolling Stones say it's just a shot away; it's far less than that. It's one foot stuck underneath the brake pedal away, a mechanical failure away, as little as a blink away. Pulling a trigger is a pretty intentional and deliberate act. If only all murder required such intention. Vehicular murder is a mere unintention away.

Hey hey.