Came Back Wrong

A very long time ago:

You go away to war, you lose a leg, you lie in a religious hospital for years, first angry, then bitter, then rotting, then resigned. At home you have a wife, a child, an uncle. Maybe your mother is still alive, but it seems unlikely; she was old. Eventually you tire of the sermons from the hospitaller monks and so you drag yourself out of bed and onto your crutch and start the long walk home, a pilgrimage in reverse, shedding whatever faith you might have once followed on the way, left on the road like fluid from a popped blister.

War has not improved your temper.

When you arrive home, everyone flinches when they see you, first in bafflement, then in fear. Your neighbors never liked you. Your family, come to that, never liked you, either. But still: you have to close the loop of your life before you can do anything else, so you drag yourself to the house you left, the wife you only half-remember, the son whose face you have clean forgotten, even if the normal growth of years hadn’t changed him beyond all knowing.

You walk through the door without knocking.

Your wife looks up and recoils. “Martin…?” she says, and “Yes,” you say, but so too does the man sitting at the table. He looks like you, or like you used to look, but when he stands, he stands on two legs, and his face is unpuckered with disappointment.

Who Will Not Move Must Be Moved

The strike has been going on for months, for months, shingle workers against the bosses, against the cops, against the surly water rats who would turn no hand to an honest trade but were happy to smash noses, fingers, legs, or arms for a pittance. The Wobblies have been and gone, run out of town at the end of an axe handle around a wet November, leaving blood and teeth and flesh on the rails, but Wobblies are like feral cats that way; beat ’em, throw ’em in a sack, toss ’em in the Sound and by the time you turn around there are a dozen more, a hundred, choking the jails till they burst, making speeches, handing out pamphlets.

When the boat comes into harbor the sheriff and his bully boys are there, armed and hungry. “You can’t land here,” says McRae the bastard, and “The hell we can’t,” say the Wobblies, leaders all, as they march down the ramp to the docks.

By the time the smoke has cleared, more than thirty workers have been shot (by the cops) and more than twenty cops have been shot (also by the cops). In fair Verona the cops have planted almost two hundred bullets; passengers fled into the oily, wintry water in their panic, some shot, others just unlucky.

They will arrest the Wobblies, and brag about it until the election is over; not one is convicted. The striking workers return to work; the capitalists remain in power. The struggle goes on.

Congress of the Birds

All of the universe is a union meeting: five minutes into the reading of the proposed amendments and there has already been a motion from the floor, a contention so fierce that the doors have been locked and heads counted, fists raised, temperatures and humidity index alike both spiked sky high.

Sweltering, despite their technology, the air thick and muggy with the smell of the river, the distant sea, a heaving mass of life and breath and dander, shed hair and scales and hides and horns all borne aloft on the slightest breeze to hover threateningly in the uneasy glimmer of the afternoon sun, the bounce light from the LEDs, the soft fill of bioluminescence.

This is not the first time this has happened, nor the last, and yet: every gathering splinters so. What is united must dissolve, what is separate must join together. In the streets they riot, an unruly mob, tails thrash and rhizomes clash, seeking water, seeking soil, a centuries deep humus horizon with the fungal networks carrying messages between. A brick flies through the air, knocking a fascist from his horse; in the hot light of LA Harry Hay flees through the alleys to take shelter with the drag queens.

Trigona Necrophaga

Rain rattles against the windowpane and she is six feet deep in the bedding, moving inward and down. Outside the wind shakes the houses and the apartments and through the rain the sound of the freeway has dwindled to almost nothing.

The streets are not truly empty; there is never a time of day or night where something is not moving or just passed, and if the streets are still then a plane is passing overhead, a train is rolling in the distance, a siren is howling in the hills, a bell is ringing in the harbor.

But close enough.

Next to her someone snores quietly, two floors up and three units over someone coughs wetly. She may or not be the only one awake, but she is not alone, never alone, her sisters may never see her nor know her name, but they are bound together through walls and floors and the sound of the rain. The alchemy of the gut, the sour taste of the meat.

Tomorrow has a gravity like the edge of a cliff, drags at her bones like the tide. In the dark hours she staves off sleep, eyes clear and unblinking, legs and arms unresting, heart stuttering in her chest. Bones ache, teeth grind; time cannot be stopped but she tries. She cannot live past sunrise, and every minute clawed out of the night is a minute free of the dread beast of the future.

Hoarders and Wasters

You are patient and unkind as the grey light of a winter’s dawn among the canyons of downtown, anonymous, one more white face beneath a dark cap, bundled in a nylon jacket. No one notes your lack of breath hanging in the early morning air, not with the face mask digging into the waxy flesh of your ears.

You do not hunt merely to survive. True enough, you prefer the mist coiling into a room, and teeth white against bruised lips, a mouth pressed to your chest until it drinks; romance might be dead, but so are you, so. You have at your command all the tricks and tools of the common man, and all the patience and skill of four hundred years. Your hand does not quiver on the trigger, your breathing does not cause the barrel to weave.

He stops for coffee, as ever he has, and you are scant feet behind him when he emerges. The gun kicks in your hand, jams once, twice, but he is already falling. Sheer waste, the blood spreading over the sidewalk, but when meat has turned it must be discarded.