Custodiet Ipsos Custodes

            Paranormal, probably a short story. The main character finally falls in love with a girl, the first person that knows about his compulsion. One day, he receives a premonition that she is going to kill someone. The story hinges on his decision of whether or not to kill her. 

           The first round took the priest high in the chest, severing his aorta and sending a long spray of blood against the brick wall. I racked the bolt and aimed down the scope. His t-shirt soaked with wine-dark arterial blood as he staggered back. The groceries he was carrying smashed against the ground.

            I guess this is the part where I have to say that he was raping choirboys or trafficking cocaine. He wasn’t. He didn’t have any prior arrests. He didn’t have any prior crimes. He entered the clergy at fifteen in a Catholic school, trained for years.

            He was leaning against the wall then. His mouth was moving. Sacrements, perhaps. His own last rites. Can priests do that? Administer their own last rites?

            I squeezed the trigger again and his brains evacuated.

           

           

            You know how detectives will show up to a crime scene, do the dirty work, find the bad guy, and put him in jail? Then sometimes there’s vigilantes, who hunt people down that have slipped through the cracks. Well, I’m a little different.

            I see things before they happen. Not things. Crimes. Murders, specifically. It is always a one hundred percent chance that it will happen. This started when I was thirteen.

            The first one was my neighbor. She was older, maybe fifty. Sexy, for an older lady. She asked me to water her garden. Standing in the heat, hose gripped in my right hand, I had a sudden vision. I watched her in my mind’s eye as she straddled a man in her bed and wrapped a curtain cord around his neck. I chalked it up to hormonal fantasy. Two weeks later, she drove away in the back of a squad car; past the ambulance where paramedics loaded a faceless corpse on a gurney.

            The second time it happened, I tried to stop the murder. A neighborhood kid, maybe two years older. He went by the name of Chow, good kid. I saw him in that vision swinging a bicycle chain, leaving little chubby Danny Goodwin bleeding in the arroyo in our neighborhood          .

I walked Danny home every single day for two months. He didn’t understand why I carried a butterfly knife with me. My appendix ruptured one day and I went to the hospital. I saw Danny Goodwin’s body from a helicopter shot on the evening news.

The murders are unstoppable. They find a way, like weeds growing through a sidewalk. When I get the vision, it’s only a matter of time before every clue in the vision lines up like lock tumblers and the victim dies. There’s no way to stop it, so I kill the killer before he kills someone innocent.

The Chosen Two

I wanted to write the most cliché fantasy story possible as a writing exercise. The characters felt like they caught on a paragraph in. This actually has potential. 

            “The Vyrax have infiltrated four outposts at our southern border, my King.”

            The only sound in the room was the king’s heavy breathing and the sound of rattling swords here and there and the odd spell getting shot off in the wizard’s tower on the far side of the castle. The messenger stood for a moment before the mad king, waiting for his response. The throne room stood deathly silent, like a crypt or a church or a brothel on a Sunday.

            “How many knights remain in my employ?” The king rasped.

            “Only three, your highness,” the master at arms said. “Silver, Rhesus, and Mander.”

            “The rest?”

            The master-at-arms was quiet. “You had them executed for treason.”

            “I did no such thing!” The king leaped to his feet, face purple.

            “You said they were conspiring with the wizards to tame dragons and lay waste to your kingdom.”

            “That’s an absurd impossibility.” The king sat back down.

            “That’s what Vargas said when you had him executed.” The master-at-arms felt a little peevish. This was the third time someone—

            Without warning, there was a flash of light and the king’s head detonated, splattering gore across the throne room. The haggard courtiers, who had seen some pretty terrible things recently, reacted with amusement and boredom.

            “Well, this doesn’t solve our endemic problems,” the messenger said hesitantly.

            “Shut up, this isn’t all bad.” The Vizier was cleaning his nails, which were long and yellow and probably couldn’t be cleaned.

            “You shut up, you’re probably behind his assassination.”

            “I can’t do magic, you git.” The Vizier stood in a grand flourish of dark robes.

            “As if,” the master-at-arms scoffed, then suddenly looked terrified.

            “Well, we have only one choice for king.”

            “The chosen one!” The messenger looked proud.

            “Of course, the chosen one.” The master-at-arms was carefully trying to camouflage himself against a giant brocade tapestry with a female courtier’s wimple.

            “But there is a major problem,” the Vizier sneered. He really didn’t need to sneer, he thought. There’s really no major point in the character development to be sneering all the time. Perhaps he could smile next time? Wait, teeth. Sharp, rotten teeth are such a hassle to maintain. He satisfied himself by winking, which still felt predatory. “There are two possible chosen ones.”

            “Chosen two.”

            They all looked at who spoke. The Grand Wizard was mostly senile. He was thirty-two and had set off too many spells next to his head. Something about the thaumatic energy had melted something important in there. They didn’t know what, don’t ask. They aren’t brain surgeons; bones of Christ you’re inquisitive. Read the book. He spent most of his time rolling his wheelchair down spiral staircases on accident and telling people his name was Toe, so that’s what they called him.

            “Chosen two?”

            “We must send them on a quest. Possibly together.”

            The Vizier, master-at-arms, and messenger glanced at each other, questioning his sudden lucidity.

            “A quest?”

            “If they can stop the Vyrax threat, then we will have a real winner.”

            “Wait, won’t we have to have two kings if they stop it together?” The master-at-arms was having trouble processing all this. He glanced at the steaming stump of the king’s neck.

            “We could vote…” the messenger suggested.

            “Democracy.” The Vizier shuddered.

            “But then we wouldn’t have the benefit of a fantasy buddy-comedy,” Toe said.

            “Who are the chosen two?” the messenger asked.

            “The first is Mander, the knight.” The throne room visibly relaxed. Mander was sexy, strong, capable, well-rounded.

            “The second?” The Vizier was leaning forward.

            “His name is Jack the Petard.”

            “Jack the Retard?”

            “The Petard,” Toe said forcefully.

            “He blows stuff up,” the master-at-arms said, checking the king’s wrist for a pulse.

            “Well, why bother with the quest then?” the messenger asked. “Mander is our man.”

            “Rules are rules,” Toe said, before emitting a streamer of drool and lapsing back into silence.

            “Well,” sighed the Vizier. “Those Vyrax aren’t going to vanquish themselves.”

Cilantro and Highway Robbery in the Form of Avocados

This is a somewhat mocking and satirical take on second person, post-modern and nihilistic novels about life and philosophy and masturbatory self-deprecation. It'll probably never go anywhere but is darkly funny and in way, kind of emotional. I'm in the throes of applying to grad school and this might get farther than what I'm submitting. Who knows?

            It is at moments like these where you find yourself amazed at your nihilistic existence, brought to tears by the sight of an earring back on your counter as you stand on a kitchen chair, pissing into your sink while the pest control guy blows up your upstairs bathroom. You didn’t fall in love with her until after she left, and she didn’t accept that love until she no longer wanted it. Specificity, you tell yourself. Specificity is what your life needs, not more of this ridiculous and unfocused existing you do an awful lot of.

            You bought yourself a cactus after she left. You named it too, but you forgot the name on three consecutive days of blind stupor courtesy of Ketel One and just called it Plant. It sat on your dresser and looked vaguely disapproving, if plants could look disapproving, and you remembered the Dmitri Martin bit about being less nurturing than a desert and tried to water the thing.

            You remember your mother, the poor fragile thing, throwing caution to the wind when she screamed at you. You told her you wanted to be a concert pianist, she said you might as well be a crack addict. “It’ll only be a matter of days,” she had muttered angrily at you, scrubbing her hands with surgical precision in a kitchen sink filled with tepid, chalkboard colored water. “It’ll only be a matter of days and you’ll be rolling bums for eight balls and stealing comforters out of Laundromats for warmth on the streets of Seattle.”

            “Why Seattle?” you always asked. She never answered. In her mind, Seattle may as well have been the world capital of squalor, the Timbuktu of downtrodden vagrants.

            She’d never been to Seattle but her uncle had choked to death on his own vomit outside Spokane in a heroin fugue after failing to sell even a single set of cutlery to an urban center of three million and a handful which I supposed in her mind was evidence enough for the validity of her prejudice. “You’ll be murmuring to yourself in the second person,” she said, “you’ll be fantasizing about strangling Anglican priests and trying to make some sense of life you’re Kierkegaard or Marx.”

            The closest my mother ever came to swearing was when she screamed tamales, very loudly and very seriously. The bus had broken down and she was on her way to an interview for a job putting stickers that said “grown in the USA” on oranges coming off Barbadian freighters. You were small and easily frightened and the word burned into your memories because in your New Jersey upbringing you hadn’t ever heard of a tamale and the first time you saw a roach coach helmed by a Mexican man named Salvador called “The Tamale Town” you sniggered to yourself in a worldly way.

            She choked back tears when you left and instead handed you a bundle of what turned out to be two hundred and forty-seven dollars in crumpled fives and ones and a hallmark card with a kitten on it that said “You’re a failure” and on the inside it said “Just Kitten” and she had written her name in careful, tight script. No “love”, no “best wishes” just “Just Kitten” and then “Elaine.” You pinned that card up on the mottled and broken wall when you reached Atlanta and cried so hard your throat hurt and your stomach roiled and then the first thing you did when you left your rank and musty room was to use some of that two hundred some-odd to buy a loaf of bread and some hard salami at a price your mother would have called piracy.

            

Il Paradiso

            We walked for hours without stop and every time I tried to slow down Belvedere shouted things at me in languages I didn’t understand and I felt alone and tired and misunderstood despite the knotted mass of us together but I kept walking.

            They carried guns and didn’t try to hide them even though we were walking through the most dangerous section of the pass and the tall camera-towers stood on either side and would have called the shadowy helicopters like flies to carrion should they have been seen or even paid attention to but no one did so we kept walking and they kept carrying their guns.

            The ground was flat and hard and broken in parts by large rocks too small to make the road impassable but too large to comfortably ride a cart or car or horse or ATV over so we didn’t seem to make much progress but there was still much progress to be made and if we slowed Belvedere and the rest continued to shout and the young ones marching in the front continued to cry and I continued to swear vengeance in the half-asleep manner of one who has lost his mind or his will aside from that consuming fury.

            (I have no patience) Belvedere would shout in that voice of his that should have belonged to a god or a statesman or someone who would have used it for something else besides that rage that seemed to boil like fire inside of him.

            There was a soothsayer named Salvador that once had sat and muttered by the fire and thrown tiger’s teeth that snapped and clicked together in the air and had scarred his hands as the spirits made the glyphs face up or down to tell us their twisted wills and he had sent the children into battle for us and we had listened to him but now he was walking with us and beside us as though he was one of us but he was not and when we stopped at one of the streams for a blessed break to drink water two of the young men one of whom had lost his brother in the blood and the war spent the precious seconds they could have spent drinking water they would not get again for hours drowning Salvador in the stream and letting his body float downstream.

            I remember Belvedere laughing and cradling his gun like a child as he watched the two young men drowning our soothsayer and letting his body float downstream and I remember hating him the way I had never hated anything or anyone else in my entire life but there was nothing I could do and that made me hate myself.

            They called it paradise but it didn’t look like paradise.

            They locked us in corrugated steel shacks that twelve of us stayed in per bunk and I remember catching Father’s eyes as he tried to get us together again but Belvedere saw our look and singled Father out and dragged him before the rest of us and chained him to the giant stump that stood in the middle of the compound and chained him to it and stripped him of his clothes so that we saw his tattoos and his scars and his shame and Belvedere told us that Father, but he didn’t use that name, was going to die but he would let the gods of nature do the killing and not waste a bullet and I remember the screams far into the night as the tigers that crept through the compound stripped him of flesh and organs.

            They came to me once during the day and they asked me, (do you know the old ways?) I told them I didn’t but they insisted and they told me they knew the scars on my arms and my hands and refused to let me alone until I allowed them that I knew the old ways but if Belvedere or the others found out they would pull my bones from my body like ribs from a pig and they let me alone but made me swear to assist when the day came.

            The day came and they struck at Belvedere but he knew the old ways too and before they could raise their machetes and strike him down he called fire and poison from the trees that surrounded us in Paradise and consumed them like leaves in a forest fire and he ordered their corpses which crunched like cooked pork to be thrown in the clear and blue ocean and I remember that I was carrying a girl named Annamaria but now she weighed no more than a rick of punk wood and when we threw them in the ocean they floated and Belvedere laughed and asked his men politely to shoot their bodies and they did and the bodies exploded across the water like cones from a pine tree and the fish came and ate the pieces.

            (Sic semper ignavus) I remember Belvedere saying which wasn’t right it should have been something else but I cannot think right now but he left and went back to the white and clean house he lived in and we were locked in our steel huts without light or food and in the middle of our filth and starvation two of the young men who had killed Salvador killed again and ate the bodies and descended to madness and the next day was Christmas but we did not celebrate though Belvedere commanded celebration.