Madrigal of the Everett Clan

This might offend the residents of Washington, Indiana, or those whom the description matches. This is a ballad or an epic of an ironic nature, given the lack of travel in the story, and the drama coming purely from the friction of the huge Everett clan, from which the narrator has found himself estranged in a city full of his family. Somewhat inspired by The Beans of Egypt, Maine.

The city of Washington, Indiana lurks like a hunchbacked stepchild in the corner of the state. Taking the two lane highway into the loose collection of dirty, rundown houses and a few dying businesses perched on the edges of cracked and eroded parking lots haunted by starveling cats feels akin to suffocation. The town has two restaurants to speak of: one is a family pizzeria that stays afloat through monopoly and the popularity of pizza, and the other is a breakfast joint that exists in a perpetual haze of airborne grease. The only thing the twisted and forgotten town has to offer is the single two story motel, designed to look like Mount Vernon or the White House.

            It is here that I will watch my grandfather’s corpse get carefully boxed up and dropped into the earth. It is here that my mother, recently divorced, harrowed by stress, and seeking the comforts her girlhood offered her, will happily inform us we are going to live with our great aunt Samantha. It is here that I will wage my war against my future.

            I’ve never met my aunt Samantha Everett before today. She is wrinkled, sort of brown from her Indian mother, and hates the clan she has adopted as a survival tactic. The Everett clan is a sprawling mass of relationships, feuds, old grudges, dying relatives, squabbling children, land disputes, marriage disputes, ancient debts, more ancient relatives, dementia, cancer, heart disease, dissension, sedition, and death, carefully knotted through southern Indiana and burled in places where the history is so marinated into the land and culture they may as well have rights of nobility, replete with the noble obligation.

            Until today, the only things I’ve seen of Washington are all I’ve needed to see: the inside of the insipid Mount Vernon motel, where they keep cheap bottles of tainted water and an out-of-date collection of apple juice in the mini-fridge; the inside of the Gruccio Family Pizzeria, run by the decidedly not Gruccio Alsop family; the inside of two of the town’s three funeral homes, in which I wandered freely, seeking food and respite from the hordes of family I didn’t know and hunted by my haggard mother.

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.”

Shaman

Tribal post-apocalypse? I don't know.

Fir, a young shaman and magical guide of a dying tribe must help their new leader, his brother Feral, guide them to Pantheon, the flying world that they had been taught was the heaven where their gods resided. The other members, Rory the outsider and wanderer, Jara the huntress, and Liss the captive, help them commit the ultimate heresy to find that the Lode is not heaven, but a tiny world filled with warring clans and struggling kings. As the beasts that roam the frozen darkness below grow bolder and begin to mount their assaults, Fir finds himself torn between justice, loyalty, and survival.

Sharvas died early in the morning; quietly, without waking me. He slipped away the way our dogs had left to die when the food grew scarce. I found his head turned at an odd angle in my lap, cold and crooked like a frozen tree branch.

            Feral woke next and saw me leaning my head against the wood-clad wall of our cavern. I flicked my eyes to see him and he seemed to understand intrinsically, instinctively, the way he always knew what to do. He stayed quiet, those wild golden eyes of his glittering through the darkness like an animal’s might. Without making a sound he rose and gently pulled the husk of what had been Sharvas off of me. I brushed my thick woolen overcoat as if death by old age was something that one could catch.

            Rory was crouched at the mouth of the cavern, just outside the thick leathers and furs we draped to keep the nail-sharp wind out. A pike leaned against the mouth of the cave nearby. He’d carried it with him since we found him broken at the foot of a bloody spire some of the outer tribes worshiped as sacred during the months-long night. He didn’t speak much, but when he did it was strangely accented and usually vitally important. I sat next to him and didn’t say anything.

            The sun was a russet globe lingering at the horizon. It would stay there for the next seventeen days, I knew.  I couldn’t say how I knew, any more than Sharvas had known I knew. He had always known things like that, and he trained me in the ways of the others like us: traditions reaching deep into the arcane past. It didn’t seem like dawn, but there wasn’t much way to tell either way. It was either dark or it was light, and that was about all there was to it.

            Pantheon wasn’t visible on the horizon. It had been a few days ago; a blue-green globe of stone and trees wickered with tunnels that glittered when the dying sun hit it. Heaven, I’d been taught, but no one had ever visited it, and no one had ever come from it. It flew like a vagrant moon over the mountains and through the tall spires of stone that decorated the hostile terrain we lived in, seemingly at random. If we followed the teachings of Sha-Serah; if we were kind, obedient, brave, honorable, and just, we’d go there when we died. Sharvas was there. Or his spirit. He’d been kind of fuzzy on the details about it.

            “Hey. Breakfast.” Jara’s voice cut through the silvered light. I turned and looked at her. She was lean and long, a panther-like woman only a year or so older than me. We were all young. The older, weaker ones had been killed or starved long ago. The children weren’t quick enough to keep up and were torn apart or lost in the darkness in any of our countless flights from cavern to cavern when the Bromidae had discovered us. We were all that were left.

            Liss was pulling salted salmon out of the leather packs that wilted against the wall. The ale and mead had run out a few months after we’d found the last grotto, so now there was only the water that we had to crack the ice on top to sip slowly. I took the piece she gave me and tore into the dry, pink flesh. Liss watched me the way she watched everyon, with those eyes the deep violet of hyacinths. She rarely smiled, but then again, few of us did. We’d taken her from the burned out shell of a Karth village deep in the south, but even years later she seemed to view us all with distrust, except for the fanatic, animal loyalty she showed Feral.

            Feral wasn’t one for speeches but he spoke the most. My older brother was harnessed in muscle and stood taller than the rest of us. His shaggy black hair was bound back in hemp twine, the ends touching his shoulders, and his beard sometimes betrayed the sharp white flash of his teeth when he spoke, which was often, or laughed, which was seldom. My own hair was shorn close to my head and my face beardless, my arms lacked the strength his possessed and my eyes were the green of cave moss.

            “Sharvas, as you noticed, has left us.” Feral took a bite of the salmon

            Unbidden, we each glanced to where the body lay near the wall.

            “What now? Sharvas was the one keeping us here but we can’t stay. Night’s coming and when it does the Bromidae will move again.” I fiddled with the bone charms hanging from the end of my staff to avoid looking Feral in the eye. I felt Feral read the group.

            “You’re right, Fir. We can’t stay.”

            “We can’t go either,” Jara said. “We’ll starve. Fir said night’s coming, how can you think we should run into the world only to be slaughtered by Bromidae when night comes?”

            “Or starve here until the Bromidae find us?” Rory’s blue gaze was unblinking.

            “I have a plan.” Feral took a bite of his salmon in that irritatingly unbothered way he had.

            “Well?” Jara spat.

            “Fir won’t like it.”

            “If I stay alive, I’ll like it.”

            “Oh?” Feral’s eyes glittered with something like malice. “We’re going to invade Pantheon."

           

           

           

           

            

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.