An Injury to One is An Injury to All

And yet—

Refugees from the navies of a dozen dozen world powers, we have had no power, no rights, no privileges, no protections. We served under the lash, under a stranger sun, chained below decks and beaten above. So: the charter. Our roles and rules laid out in clear language any man Jack can understand, with strict limits on discipline; no tar may be subject to reprisal unless they have stood trial before a jury drawn by lots from among the crew, not the officers. Authority issues from the consent of the crew, and that consent may be withdrawn. Woe betide he who strikes one of us out of season; for him only one day’s share of water, one day’s share of food, and one bullet for his gun.

They hang us, when they take us, but the charter is immortal; for each of us they kill, a hundred more rush to fill our place. For every ship we take we already crew. Throw our lives away in defense of the order than dragged us from our home, our families, to fill the bellies and the purses of those already rich? Or draw our knives and declare ourselves free, bound together by choice, united under a common flag?

Our literature spreads through ports and markets, smuggled aboard and ashore with each landfall. We do not live by theft, for what we take was carved from out our sides in sweat and blood. Let those who wield the lash fear the turning of the tide.

Aliphatic Alkaline

Teeth, hair, fingernails, knucklebones.

Colleen swallows without chewing; it has been years since she’s used her teeth for anything except defense. Her throat is hard as granite, muscles grinding against each other like tectonic plates, like calcified slugs, crushing everything to powder and thence to atoms. Her stomach is a hole in the cosmos, a wound in space that shatters every bond. She bolts awake some nights to hear it singing to her, just below the edge of hearing, a slow and steady oscillation between tones.

Cold, she is always cold. She builds bonfires on the beach and sits among the blazing logs and feels nothing. Flames run along her fingers and up her arms like water from a showerhead, and she shivers against the wind. Her hair has fallen out and regrown half a dozen times, and every time it falls out she swallows it whole. She guzzles windex, tide pods, simple green, wd-40, drinks deep at the fuel pump, desperate for complex hydrocarbons and benzene rings.

She is never hungry, but nor is she ever full. The world builds and breaks itself faster than she can choke it down, but it’s not for lack of trying

Satan Met a Lady

Samuel Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting v under the more flexible v of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, v. His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal. The v motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down—from high flat temples—in a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond satan.

from The Maltese Falcon, D. Hammett

“They think they’re clever, with their guns and their plans and their money, but they’ve lost the plot. Hardboiled, they say, but what do they know about hardboiled. Little boys playacting at being men. They can’t bear the scrutiny of idleness or the focus of work.”

Satan he nods, noncommittal, yellow and red. He cocks his head to the side and yawns; he’s heard it before.

“Always half smart. I’d kill the president for someone who was smart all the way around the track.” She spits out a tooth, not hers. “With their hands, sculpted by an artist who worked big and liked veins—nuts to that. Big hands, small hands, what does it matter. Any hands is big enough if you’re close enough.”

He hands her the knife and she flicks it open and closed and open again. Tests it against the leather: sharp as needed.

“Now,” she says, and leans over the table, touches one narrow fingertip to the tongue held immobile in forceps, “the past is prologue. Let’s get to work.”

Apples Out of Season

When he dies, the family comes out of the woodwork by the hundreds. A firm believer in the virtue of his genetics, and, also, that he would, somehow, eventually, cheat death, he didn’t just have offspring, he seeded himself across the western hemisphere like a white Temujin. The immortality never came, of course, but the children do, drawn by the promise of his vast fortune and the human need to see him lying dead to know for sure, blood and bone, that he was truly gone and would not threaten to return.

In the high school auditorium the attorneys reserved for the reading of the will, they crowd the bleachers, eye each other warily, half-siblings all, with no connection save of blood. Which of them finally caught up with him? How had they done it? He wasn’t smart but he was paranoid. Had it been poison? A knife in the dark? A plausibly malfunctioning car? Had they bribed a servant, cozened his latest child bride into mixing something extra in with his pills? Speculation is rampant, a deep rumbling through the gym, loud enough to drown out the lawyer as he tries to take the stage.

When he has their attention at last, he coughs and reads a short statement: “Per the wishes of the deceased, the doors have been locked and the building wired to explode. There shall be no inheritance, nor heir; if I have gone, I will take you all with me.”

They howl, and howl, and, when the building fails to explode, turn on each other in fury. When the police arrive to unlock the doors, they wade through blood and viscera three feet deep to arrest the sole survivor.

In Transit

Days pass in the gentle glow of the monitor; there is evening and there is morning.

Streetlights flickers on amid the raucous calls of hundreds of crows; the setting sun catches her eyes and breaks the reverie just enough to reawaken Petra to her body. Lord, she aches, in every sinew and every member, eyes burning, throat scraped dry and raw, stomach hollow and bladder dangerously full. She stands and the room sways around her, starts to grow dim and iris in. Deep breaths, bend over, let the blood rush to her head and clear it. She grabs a juice pack on her way to the toilet, drains it in one long pull, desperate to get her blood sugar up.

What does she remember? Fragments only: mission statements, annual revenue and expenditures, cost of goods sold, desalinization figures, an outbreak of privatization somewhere down east, the latest season of The Chirurgeon’s Journal, an unexplained fishkill in the lake that left translucent shrimp corpses rotting along the shore, distant helicopters, the roar of traffic, synthetic gunfire from someone’s open window competing with authentic gunfire echoing from the trainyards, tits and ass, succulent food, sympathetic parents, love that never fades and sales that never end.

It’s too much for her waking mind to recall, so she doesn’t try. Cooks rice, slices eggs, chews on fruit, lets it ferment somewhere back of her conscious mind. It’ll be there when she needs it, or it won’t.