Forethought the Firestealer

Flensed, he yet lives; breathes, moves, poses in wet and bloody glory. Cobbled together from sawdust and stage makeup.

Thus:

Pirates along the Levantine coast, and a beautiful dark-eyed boy. Leopards on the foredeck, ivy on the oars. Dolphins roll in the wake, eyes dark and inhuman and rapacious. Tethys, world-girdling Tethys, is dark and deep, bitter as herbs.

or

Abandoned by god and his maker, a collection of corpses, he crouches in a woodshed, teaches himself English (how) and reading (why) from a half-used catalog from Sears and Roebuck. Shoes are expensive this year; there’s a slimming machine, a complicated bit of deadly nonsense jerryrigged together much as he is, all leather belts and sharp edges and ungrounded electricity. Outside a Christian and a Muslim are planning an elopement, but inside he dreams of capitalism.

and

Westward, from the cities to the plains to the mountains to the cities. Once the notional roads swallowed armies whole in mud deep enough to drown an elephant. A future president broke his back, cursing, hauling a truck through the mud, dreamt of a vast network of tar black as the sea, crushed rock knitting the ruins of empire together like the veins god put inside him, thick, slow, and inescapably seen.

Only the Rich Get Rich

You got turned sometime in 1913, 1914, and at first it seemed like a good deal, eternal life, eternal youth, the blood-red music of the night, all that late night glamour, but the guy who turned you got bored real quick and dropped you in Spokane five years later and it’s been rough ever since.

Like, you don’t need to eat, or anyway not food you have to buy, but you still need a place to park the old corpse come sunrise, and that’s just been harder and harder to come by over the years. Ain’t like you get alimony, and there ain’t a lot of jobs that fit your hours. Forget climbing the ladder, too; no one schmoozes with the night owl shift, and a promotion inevitably means sunlight.

You work in the mines for decades, another sunless, miserable face coming out of the gloom, but no one swinging a pick ever got rich that way, and you sure didn’t. You sold stolen weed for a while, using those keen extra-human senses to sniff out free ditch weed along the highway before the cops could burn it, but they’ve legalized the damn stuff now and nobody’s buying from a clammy weirdo squatting in an abandoned warehouse anymore, not when there’s a clean white store with everyone in a collared shirt every three miles.

Murder’s fun and all but it doesn’t pay the bills. Nobody even carries cash anymore.

Zero

While I work, he sleeps with his feet against mine, warms me in the icy room with the heat of his body. I can feel him dreaming, running down some impossible hallway, skimming the top of a rolling green hill on a sunswept day in March, walking beside the lake in November.

We spend too much time together.

We stifle in this too-small apartment, rub each other raw with proximity. On bad days I close the door and clench myself against his incoherent yelling a fierce wordless sound as he screams at people passing our door toward the elevator, walking by on the sidewalk. Other days I rage myself hoarse and he runs away, huddles himself small in the bedroom.

We have been hurt before, know we will be hurt again.

Overcaring, we touch too much, comfort too aggressively. He pushes his face into mine as I cry, I hold him still when he shakes with fury. We do not want to touch, or be touched, but most of all we long for stillness.

Beyond Reasonable Doubt

He made good on his promise: he said he’d return before the current generation had died and he meant it. That was, what, fifteen, maybe twenty years? A lot of the old gang had gotten killed by then, admittedly—life’s rough out there for a revolutionary schismatic—but many were in exile or prison, and that he could do something about.

All prisoners freed, all bonds released; for a moment everything seemed and was possible.

But time wears on and one by one they die and he is alone. The empire endureth, human misery seems constant; he watches his words taken up by the Romans and weaponized against his people. The crucifixions continue. He gets martyred himself a dozen more times, renamed into various saints, it’s fairly dispiriting.

Centuries later, he’s made his way south past the desert to where no one knows his name, no one has even heard of the Romans, when an old man comes trudging down the road, hair wild and clothes ragged, and it’s a piece of his old home so potent that it takes his breath clean away.

The old man squints at him, says in an Aramaic he hasn’t heard in generations, let alone spoken, “Don’t I know you?”

“I don’t think so,” says Jesus, and Ahasuerus shrugs and continues down the road.

Fungible

The spells are cast, the circle is inscriped; at the seven theologically significant points are, respectively, a feather, a coin, a dish of oil, a piece of fruit, a bone, an old shoe, and a new one. The stars, such as they are, are right.

A billow of sulfurous smoke, like the air over a hot spring, and a voice unlike any human sound.

YOU HAVE SUMMONED ME AND SO AM I HERE
SPEAK YOUR EVERY EARTHLY DESIRE AND I SHALL GRANT IT

Much excitement from the assembly. One steps forth and casts back his hood. He has a babyish face, round and unlovely, a tangled mop of curly hair and a moustache struggling to find purchase on his lip. “Servant!” he cries; his voice cracks a little with excitement. “We have summoned you to teach us your dark and esoteric arts! Give us—”

YES

“Give us—”

YES

“Give us dominance in the crypto sphere!”

SO IS THE CONTRACT STRUCK

Things go great for a year and a half and then the roof falls in when they start embezzeling from their suckers. Demoniacal knowledge is nothing compared to the patience of a determined auditor.