Giallo

Pulp: cheap paper and tissue plots; blood on the roses. Poshlost. Square jaws, bared breasts, punk music and broken glass. Don’t drink the water, don’t breathe the air.

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.

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 Authority issues from the consent of the crew, and that consent may be withdrawn.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.

Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender

We would have been so happy together, I know it. That spark of connection, the way my heart leapt to see her, the sound of her laughter when I’d made some particular joke or other: that’s the basis of a real relationship. What could Escamillo offer her? Fleeting, fading. Physical chemistry, cheap economics. I offered love, pure love, and that wasn’t enough. Should I have simply swallowed her insults? Accepted her abuse? Did I not have the right to defend my honor?

We were worried for our lives, the fourteen of us, a wall of fragile human meat surrounding a four thousand pound truck. The look in her eyes when the brake lights went off… there was fury there, and madness. Bloodlust. We had to protect ourselves. Make it home again tonight safe, that’s what they tell us; whatever else happens, make it home safe. Should we have stood there and let ourselves be run over? She thought we weren’t serious and we had to show her.

We have been so kind, so restrained; we have lethal weapons, but we never use them, are not allowed to use them. And what thanks do we get? Rubber bullets may smash the occasional eye, but you can live without an eye. Tear gas may have been banned in war, but this isn’t a war. They say it is, but if it is, we’ll win it. They think we’re a joke, and we have to show them we mean business. There is no hunting like the hunting of men. We didn’t make them come here. We didn’t make them poison the city against us. They did that on their own.

What choice did we have? Were we not within our rights?

Hugger-Mugger

Hot nights prick dreams of blood out of their panting, heaving sides, tongues grown too big for their mouths, chins wet with slobber. In the warehouses, the revolutionaries stockpile guns, toys against tanks, the pitiful arsenal of the civilian, but in Dallas paw hits pavement and sizzles as they run. A wild, airless night, humid and heavy, full of frogcall and the thrum of cicadas, the night sky pressing against the city like wet rope, and they hunt.

They have carved names into the leather they wear around their necks, their wrists, their ankles, crisscrossed over the almost human curve of their chests: fascists, bootlickers, scabs, all the doomsday men in ill-fitting suits and ugly haircuts that have gathered to chant and wave torches. They circle the crowds, picking off stragglers, the slow moving, the drunk, the fat hunters with Wyoming tickets in their pockets, the Saturday warriors in their polyester camo. The alleys grow slick and sticky.

In the morning there will be empty seats, abandoned hotel rooms, empty book depositories. The air will roil with copper, iron, the black bodies of flies, the hope of a storm on the verge of breaking. They will return to work, collars peeking coquettishly from beneath apron straps, but tonight they are free, and roused, and revenged.

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.