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.

           

            

The Savants

I'll admit, this is dark. 

            They landed on Earth on a Tuesday, for some reason I remember that. So many decades of wondering; we had imagined golden bodies and tentacles, green dwarfs or scarlet gods. We wondered about their size, their metabolism, their lusts. When they came, though, they seemed quiet and reasonable, and both terrifyingly and disappointingly like us. They had translucent blue skin, eyes that glowed nebula orange or green or violet, depending on their mood. They spoke quiet, strangely accented languages, but limited themselves to English, French, Spanish, Arabic and Cantonese. We humans, trained by decades of alien movies, expected annihilation. Instead, the domination was short, minimal, and brutal. They had soldiers that we called Samurai who wore sleek black armor that shrugged off tank rounds like a leather jacket shrugs off hailstones. They were nearly invincible. News cameras captured footage of a single Samurai punching holes in tanks, catching armor piercing rounds like footballs and slinging them back. Twenty of them destroyed the human resistance in New York, seven took Berlin, only three strode into Paris. We hoped that was all they had but when one was slain, with a subnuclear ICBM outside Baltimore, thousands dropped out of the sky, falling from their worldship that anchored itself to our moon and disrupted tides. They quietly, almost apologetically, dragged world leaders into the streets and blew their brains out with weapons that shot glowing slugs. Several of their chieftains politely arranged a press conference and explained that Earth was no longer ours, and to avoid decimation and sterilization we would quietly resume our business and allow them to go about the business of extracting the minerals they needed from our core. Afterwards, they would allow us some measure of autonomy. Their name in their language was long and musical. “Call us Savants,” they said.

They didn’t mean any of it.

Millions died. Those who resisted the massive, gaping holes they tore in the surface of the earth were put down like rabid dogs. The skies were blackened with soot.

            I don’t know who discovered the properties their blood carried. No one ever knows these things. We called them Cannibals. A few fighters in Saint Petersburg managed to kill a Savant who had removed his armor and perhaps in some orgy of bloodlust, drank the blood. They became godlike. They moved nearly faster than people could follow, ran on walls, gained strength beyond natural abilities. They attacked six more Savants and tore them apart. They stole their weapons and assaulted a shuttle heading for the worldship.

            And then the effects wore off. They had assumed the effects lasted forever and hadn’t bothered to put on a samurai’s armor. They were slaughtered like animals when their reflexes slowed, their motor skills returned to normal. They weren’t able to raise the guns the Savants carried like pistols.

            More followed suit, stealing bodies of Savants and draining them of blood they then injected into their arm like heroin. The long-term effects became apparent. They went crazy. Cannibals craved Savant blood. They snapped and snarled. They became feral and would lose themselves in that place in their mind, the eternal ecstasy of the bloodrush. They would hurl themselves, naked and furious and totally without the protection of armor or bloodrush at an armored Samurai, leaving us to dejectedly hose them off the streets. If they had enough blood, though, they could be kept sane enough to keep fighting the way they had. We stole more weapons from them, because as it is with any species, the ones who know best how to kill them belong to their same species.

            I heard about the Cannibals and their fight to get the Savants’ God-King in the worldship, but I continued to hold to my strategy of remaining quiet and going about my business.

Everything changed when the Savants found my wife and daughter had a rare type of gene they wanted for their genetic museum back on their homeworld. They broke into my house at one in the afternoon, found my wife and child there with me, and while one of them smiled gently and held me back, dissected them on the living room floor and harvested them like cuttlefish. I still remember the Savant who did it tying his golden topknot back before surgically laying my still-living wife open from clavicle to pelvis, ignoring her screams as they snipped her organs from their places and sealed them in plastic. Then, my daughter, my child. I went away. I remembered holding her hand as she skipped to her first day of school. I remembered watching her blow out the candles on her fourth birthday. I remembered teaching her how to say her alphabet. And now, along with those, I remember a blue-skinned Savant snapping her ribs as he opened her like a box, taking out her tiny, perfect organs and hosing the blood off of them as she screamed for me, until he took her lungs too.

People ask me why I fight, why I am a Cannibal. I tell them it’s because I’m crazy.

Maybe I am.

Cactus

            Cactus

A story told about a man from many aspects of his own writing including letters, emails, texts, facebook posts, and more. All backstory is related through written accounts exampled above, all frontstory after finding the cactus and beginning to make a positive change in his life is chronicled purely through action and forward facing or present introspection. 

It was a stupid, stunted, weird little thing, but somehow Brandon Mosley knew it would be different. The cactus was about as tall as a bookmark, swollen at the top in a toadish bulge as though someone had planted a particularly unfriendly gourd bottom side up in a tacky yellow flowerpot. He found it outside the coffee shop before unlocking (precisely at 5 a.m.) sitting damply on the step in the indigo shade of a Nashville dawn.

            He hadn’t had much at all to own for himself. A dinky studio apartment kept his shabby belongings shouldered together on the fifth floor of an apartment that lacked even one positive aspect good real estate should possess.

            He picked up the cactus, enjoying the weight of the cool, damp ceramic against his palm. He gently touched a needle at the top, feeling the tiny sting. The bell rang as he shouldered the door open and stepped into the darkness.

            “That’s a good pet for you, Bran.” Alice was twenty-one, a graphic design major at Vanderbilt and weekend evening barista. The morning regulars had come and gone, the shop rich with the smell of French roasts and the rattle of mixers, the muted roar of the milk steamer. Now it was quiet, nearly dead, Brandon’s shift slowing to a close.

            “Why?” The cactus had drawn some glances, the occasional comment from patrons as it sat next to the cash register.

            “I dunno.” She flipped her highlighted hair and made herself a venti macchiato with extra caramel. Brandon studied the comment the way an archeologist might a new artifact: turning it this way and that in his head.

            “You should change the pot, though. It’s ugly.”

            “I don’t really know anything about plants,” Brandon admitted. It hadn’t occurred to him you could change a plant’s pot. It seemed an immutable aspect of the plant, like trying to change its root structure. As soon as he mentally admitted this, the thought seemed silly.

            “It’s a cactus,” Alice said, perching on the stool behind the counter. “How hard can it be?”

            At home Brandon booted his laptop. It was an old, stuttering, flickering antique of a thing, as much a relic of college as his spring rush t-shirt and dusty game console. Cactuses were hardy, he found, but not invincible. They needed some water, but not too much. Sunlight, but not an abundance of it. He placed the little thing on his windowsill and stared at it a moment before pulling a bottled water out of the fridge and pouring a little into the soil. After contemplating his new roommate a moment, he drank from the bottle.

            Elyse

            A Poem

            Brandon Mosley

            You, of golden skin and azure eye

            I, of darkened brow and shaded demeanor

            Rich with gloom but lightened

            By your elemental presence

            I knew nothing

            You touched my cringing skin

            Reeled me close

            Like a fish

            My emotions tight

            Bruises beneath purpled skin

            Then

            You left

            Moonheart

            Spoken Word

            Brandon Mosley

            You can race the moon two hundred miles across the sand, but we’ll never know the true impact of a compass against ocean waves. Brokenhearted people staring at the same celestial body night after night dreaming in tears of a world where the loneliness of a lunar goddess does not somehow mirror their own. The stillness of a dead pond, rotten wood torn straight from the heart of a stilled oak unbroken by the peaceful distraction of ten thousand souls breathing their last in an undiscovered unison. In this hope I draw my breath that some foggy morning the brassy lungs of portly Zephyr shall unstill my curtains and draw new light into the bleakness of a dying man’s unglazed eye.

            

Salazar the Wizard

Here's a story beginning in the myth-punk style of The Arabian Nights.

            Salazar stood quietly in the darkness, contemplating his sins. The manacles clattered around his feet as he shifted his weight. The grate high above remained impassive, like the heavens he had cried out to for help. The gods didn’t listen; no, they feasted on human suffering like vultures on rotting flesh. They were waiting for more of his suffering--it must be as sweet as mangos to them. Salazar refused them even that much pleasure and thus remained silent.

            The grate shifted high above with the deep scraping sound of stone on stone. Light sprayed down through the steam.

            “Have you repented, blasphemer?” The voice called. Salazar didn’t even deign to raise his face to the light as he remained silent.

            There was muttering above. Several of the elders must have been there, he thought.

            “Blasphemer, is breath yet in your body?”

            Let them wonder.

            A ladder spooled down, swinging gently near the place his chains had been bolted into the bedrock. There was grunting, far above. Salazar muttered strings of arcana into the moist air, feeling the words fall like pebbles, entirely bereft of the crackling energy he had once commanded. His rings had been stolen, his pendants destroyed, his staves burned.

            A fat, sweating man with a dirty beard woven with silver charms reached the bottom rung and shakily stepped off the ladder, brushing his silken shirt down over his ponderous belly before turning to regard Salazar imperiously.

            “Blasphemer, you answer me not.”

            “Burn in eternity.” Salazar murmured. The light was dim, but even so the man’s face visibly reddened.

            “You dog!” He shouted, his high voice ringing off the slick walls. “Even now you speak more blasphemies against your priests.”

            He produced a key that appeared to be more dagger than instrument and thrust it into the massive padlock at his feet as if he wished it were Salazar’s throat. The lock snapped open with a metallic scream. Salazar stepped away from the stone post as composedly as a cat, towering over the short man.

            “We have arrested your magics, you are without your potions and poisons and elixirs, you foul creature. Kill me and your death will take a thousand years. Up the ladder with you.”

            Salazar climbed the ladder, luxuriating in the pull at his once dormant muscles.

The Gnomes

Is there a way to make this story anything other than interesting or high-concept? It certainly doesn't seem to be very literary, more post-modern, genre-less and deconstructed Frank R. Stockton-esque prose. Enjoy what I have of it.


This is a story about garden gnomes, about love, and about a yellow cravat that fastens with a dolphin brooch. I'm not sure it will make much sense. It didn't to me when it happened.
I used to be a contract killer, a wetworker. I guess this is the part when I'm supposed to say that I've done a lot of things I regret, and that I've changed. The truth is that I'm proud of everything that I've done, and I only quit because my body was slowly betraying me. It was only a matter of time before I wrenched my back and got left on a hill overlooking a Columbian mansion with only a Barrett M82 and a burner phone in the pouring rain, so I quit.
Respectable? Maybe. I live in a housing subdivision, surrounded by McMansions and pretentious CPAs. They send me information about the latest victims of their fascistic housing organization: forced repaint jobs, removed yard flags and window decorations brought down through the militaristic fist of a neighborhood. I've toppled wings of governments less domineering than these white-collar Stalins. The gated community offers peace and some normality, an ironic end to a strange life, so I put up with their shenanigans.
I first met Alexander Ozymandias "call me Oz" Bright on an April day that turned fudgesicles into war paint on the faces of the kids howling after the ice-cream trucks. I was trimming my own lawn with an electric weed-eater, liking the sweeping motion of my torso as I trimmed the grass to a velvety flattop. A convertible white Maserati GranTurismo MC growled into the driveway next to mine, top down. The glare hid the occupants from me, and then they got out. One of them was wearing a skirt the width of a weight belt and a blue top made of material only slightly more concealing than tinted Saran Wrap. She held my attention longer than her companion, a balding man wearing an open white shirt with some sort of gold Chinese brocade pattern and ripped jeans over stoner flip-flops. He shaded his face with a hand, and I saw that he was wearing round glasses, tinted blue.
"Lawnmower break?" He asked. The consort strutted to his side on wedge heels as tall as my hand.
"I like doing it this way." I said. He gave me a thoughtful look.
"In Asia they do it with scissors and a ruler."
"Enlightening." I revved the weed-eater.
"You live here?" He pointed at my house.
"Yes."
"Ah." He pulled the girl closer. What was she? Model? Prostitute? She couldn't have been less than fifteen years younger than him. Hell, me for that matter, and I'm five shy of forty.
"I'm Alexander Ozymandias Bright, but call me Oz." He walked across my freshly mown yard, hand outstretched, and I gritted my teeth. The reason I mow with a weedeater is to avoid tire tracks on my yard, and I didn't want his footprints in my grass. I killed the weedeater and slung it over my bare shoulder, shaking his hand.
"I'm Ward Maxwell."
He shot me a smile. "This a nice neighborhood?"
"Close enough." I examined him. He stood in my yard a moment longer.
"Well, I'll go check out my new pad." He said at last, slightly uncomfortable looking.
"Have fun." I watched him until he left my property, and then resumed weedeating.


I like precision. I always have. When I was nine I spent hours after school at my grandfather's sporting goods store, watching as he showed the rifles and pistols to the customers, liking how the metal parts clicked and slid against each other. The sound of someone racking a shotgun slug into the chamber sent a quiver down my spine; dozens of carefully fashioned metal parts working together in perfect unison to create a weapon of immense power.
I used to make paper airplanes in sheafs, throwing them and marking how far they went. I kept the best ones and destroyed the worst ones with the staple remover, pretending it was eating them. Each new design I would carefully fold making razor-edge folds with an old gift card. After three years I couldn't make them any better, so I boxed them up.
When I entered the Marine Corps their standards of rigid cleanliness I'd already kept since I was thirteen. While other marines got constantly pushed for not shining their boots, leaving out their laundry, not making the bed neatly, the drill sergeants struggled to find something wrong with my area. I pushed for attitude more often than other guys pushed for their mess kits. Silence was seen as a challenge.

The first garden gnome was of epic proportions. I didn't see Oz put it out, but there it sat in the middle of his manicured lawn. It must have been nearly three feet tall, a pot-bellied, boil-nosed monstrosity clad in a diarrhea-green jacket and wearing a pointed cap the chipped color of coagulating blood. It was so profoundly ugly that it must have been intentional. There wasn't another way to explain it.  It stood in the middle of the yard, clutching a hoe and sporting a grin that leaked psychopathy.
There was a knock on my door around nine a.m. I left my MP5 field stripped on the kitchen table and answered the door.
"Hey there, Ward," It was Luke Branson, the head of the Housing Committee. He was blond and broad, the kind of man who wore Armani and Versace to work and Nike and Reebok at home, without exception. He was wearing running shorts, an UnderArmor tank top and shoes so orange they seared my retinas and left a floating afterimage.
"Hello, Branson."
"Have you seen that thing in Alexander Bright's yard?"
"Yes."
He sighed and ran a hand through his fashionably messy hair. "I gotta tell you, man. That's causing housing values to plummet."
"It's a garden gnome, Branson. Give it a rest."
"Ward, come on. Come on, now." He somehow managed to roll his eyes and look condescendingly at me at the same time. "We need him to move that."
"It's his right to decorate."
"It's an affront to humanity," Branson said.
Part of me agreed, and part of me was viciously pleased that the die-cast lives of the suburbanites was being so straightforwardly mocked.
"So look, man. Could you talk to him?"
"Why don't you?"
"You're his neighbor, and I live around the corner. He might be more inclined to listen to you."