Repent, If Ye Would Be Forgiven

O, to bite down just once! To sink teeth into flesh!

Cursed by his greed, Young Andrew has been reborn, a man in the shape of a myth. Long his legs and lupine his jaw, but in his eyes an all too human cruelty. Shunned by all, he wanders south, through mountains and forests, running, always running, and hungering, always hungering. He eats carrion, when he finds it, and mice, when he can catch them, and, best of all, true wolves, if he can catch them alone. His throat aches with thirst and his belly howls its hollowness.

Every hand turned against him, he seeks the high places, the jagged side of a shattered cliff, the shadowed woods where the snow never melts, even in these winters turned summers. He has been bandit, and cannibal, and in the shadows he practices speech until he can again command a human voice, or as close as sharp teeth and lolling tongue will allow.

Help, he cries, from the bottom of the canyon. Help me, please, o, I have fallen and broken my leg. Please, I have money, please, just a little bit farther. They come to him in the mists, the helpful, the trusting, but the mountains are old, and the nights are dark as ever they were, and Young Andrew is impatient with wanting.

Lanugo

The Devil has shrunk her down to a mote to sit on his shoulder as he tempts another poor starveling. It’s the first time Colleen’s been tapped for this particular duty, and she’s finding it an interesting novelty. She’s seen it from the other side, of course, but that doesn’t exactly signify. She struggles to remember what it was like, being hungry like that, but from the Devil’s lapel she sees the sunken cheeks of the girl, the pale hairs on her forearms, and she shudders invisibly. She may not remember, but her absent body does.

“Worship me,” the Devil says again, and the girl looks nothing but bored. “I will raise you up, I will give you power and command—”

“—you will never go hungry,” whispers Colleen, and the Devil weaves it in. The girl perks up as he continues, velvet voice a half beat behind Colleen’s minuscule piping, “I will spread before you an endless banquet, in a hall warm and lit, and you shall have but to reach forth your hand for whatever you crave. If these dishes do appall, merely say the name and it shall be brought.”

“I would—” She coughs, voice cracking from disuse. “I used to love lemon meringue pie. I haven’t had that in years and years…” The girl’s lip splits open as she talks, a drop of blood swallowed back by a flickering tongue. And the Devil is well-pleased.

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.”