What is a warrior angel? A defender of the human spirit. Over the years, I have encountered demons and angels. The demons always say the same thing: “You are a factory for the manufacture of excrement. You are a pylorus of endless hunger. I know you, you world of multiplying bacteria. Awe of maggots.” The […]
Bright Moment
You are deep in a northern forest covenanting with spirits that lift into mist from an ancient tarn. They show you a treasure. Buried in the rock-flour milled by a Pleistocene glacier, a duck egg fossilized black fits your sling perfectly. (It’s a dream; you have a sling!) It flies through the forest gleaming like […]
Pearl
[My fan fic about Pearl Prynne, a fey character from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel The Scarlet Letter.] 1650 – 1662 Rain furled in gray auroras through the afternoon sky when Pearl, in her eighth year, first arrived at Derring-on-the-Wolds. Mist ran like young colts across toiled fields, and sheep huddled against the wet wind on the […]
Billy the Kidded
Through our tears, we see rainbows. — Mescalero Apache saying See the scrawny kid with gimpy leg and cross-eyes shoveling bull manure into that rusty wheelbarrow? His name is Billy Roto. Other kids have mercilessly ridiculed his deformity since kindergarten. And early on, some classroom clown called him Billy the Kidded and it stuck. Billy’s […]
Domesday Earth
We will know what humankind was when the last person has spoken. – Wm James In the end, humanity became a sack of crickets emptied into a reptile cage. That’s how Jazzbo Barbosa summed up the Rupture, which had cut electrical power across the entire planet. Tawnee preferred to look on the bright side, adamant […]
Blood Creed
First Tenet Blood is the oath of dark nothing. Second Tenet Appalled witness of life, blood invents death. Third Tenet Blood is the strength of death. Fourth Tenet Dreams dissolve in blood, blood dissolves in dreams. Author’s Note: [The Blood Creed came to me in a lucid dream years ago. Since then, a story has […]