the last universal common omnipotent god, and Other Stories

this world's big enough for ghosts and planes and jars with brains

she's a big lady :) 

 

Here are three more modules for your steely-eyed missile-men in the world of and Other Stories . For these ones I leaned a little more into the mad science I've been doing on my body, the book of japanese ghost stories I've been reading, and the deep love of really tall really scary women that we all hold in our hearts.

 

7. The Last Universal Common Omnipotent God

(The City of Spirum) 

The Cast 

The People of the Slums of Spirum: the silliest people in the world and now the fattest and thinnest as well. 
desire to make each other laugh. 
The Leveler-Lizard: the gloatingest of all.

 desires the obliteration of the slums and the glory of his wife. 
The Lady Firetail: the most vainglorious and patriotic lizard who has ever lived. 

desires world domination and absolute authority. 
The Mayor's Son: the most pathetic boozer. desires to be treated like a prince. 
The Mayor of Spirum: the most infantilizing man in the world. everyone is like a little baby to him, including himself. 
desires his sweet boy back home. 

The City Council Assassins: twitchy and itchy as hell. desire to blow out the brains of the mayor's son.
The Doctor's Men: most fastidious. desire to clean and collect. 
The Doctor: entirely enraptured. desires a simpler existence. 
LUCOG: a most dutiful deity. desires everyone to feed and breed. 

 

the one who is fat today is thin tomorrow, and everyone is sleeping with everyone else's wife. everything is foul and rotten in the tenement houses in the slums of the city of Spirum, which all slump into one another in a shambling hillside of sheet metal and wet plaster and rotten wood. now for days derangement reigns and giggling six hundred pound men fall through the floor with their arms wrapped around skeletal twinks who could be no more than thirty pounds of sallow skin, burning eyes set far into the skull and alight with appetite, for tomorrow they shall be thirty times their present weight. everyone thinks everything is terrifically funny or terribly sad, everyone is fucking in the halls and breaking up in the bathrooms. 

 

a storm is blowing in, trees press in through the walls and everywhere vermin breed. huge hives of hornets are borne in through the windows by branches like bottles offered to a host. frogs and salamanders crawl in through the toilets and cling to the walls and fall on peoples faces. a wonderful woman holds a fat toad to her lip to cool a sting and a mock-solemn man eats the spiders out of his wriggling wife's hair. 

 

the trees and crawling things are the vengeful doing of the leveler-lizard, that duke of reptiles whose tail is so long and grows so thin that you cannot see its end, though if you'd walk along it, as its spiral course suggests you should, you would find yourself growing smaller and smaller with each step until his lengthy majesty could fit his jaws around you and than snap! so much for you.

 

he has crawled here to witness the end of the slum, heedlessly built on the bones of his life's love, the lady firetail, who could trace her ancestors back to royal dinosaurs, and did, on many exhausting occasions. to make sure of things, he has called in many favors he holds over the wasps and the trees and the frogs and all the rest, for only he among all creatures can reduce the mighty to the meek, and with his entrancing tail see justice meted out by those who were wronged themselves. 

 

the mayor's son is in all of this somewhere, whoring when it all began. he shat himself thin and then amused many by crawling into the walls, sticking his buck-toothed head out from the vents to catch crumbs of cake in his mouth. but now he is fat, and horribly trapped. his bellowing echoes out of the pipes. if he were wrested free by force, the whole room, and those beside it and those under it would all collapse like so much wet paper. 

 

there are assassins here too, and they are looking for him. all in brown leather like flight suits they are, with dark goggles and grey lips and chloroform rags and captive-bolt pistols. they have been sent by the city council in direct defiance of the boy's adoring father, who would flush it all down the toilet just to honk his son's big nose once more. 

 

and everywhere, the doctors men work terrifically hard to smoke out the hornets and hack away the tree limbs. they are crowding every doorway, intruding into every orgy in their hazmat suits with their hatchets and buckets and bellowed-bee smokers. but they are very polite and they never get upset with any of the wallowing humans, and they always close the door when they leave. when you enter, they will suit you up and insist you do the same. they swat and saw and stomp and smoke and clean, they clean up dutifully, vomit and cum swabbed with big brushes and mops. a little covertly, they squirt samples into glass jars with turkey basters. no one here is to be harmed or reprimanded. all must do as they please and be protected from any outside intrusion. 

 

the doctor has set up shop in the clocktower of course, beneath the swinging pendulums. a maze of glass pipes filled with semen and shit, which he navigates like a drunken master, giddily surefooted. he is a huge man, a paragon of humble muscle, too big to fit in most chairs. his hair is blond and cropped close. his body obeys his every command; if he asked it, his eyes could snake out like periscopes on their optic nerve. through his belly, his coiled gut would punch you. 

 

 the pipes feed petri dishes the size coffee tables. he has molds that cover entire houses and then begin to build new, fuzz-grey rooms, mold that quickens your limbs so that you run like a madman from your own shadow with a trail of blossoming golden spores behind you, molds that cover the walls with little harlequin rubies that burst into an enchanting perfume you want to rub all over yourself. there are viruses that fill you with a desperate need to climb the highest you can and there, cough yourself empty until the clouds are seeded with your sickness, and viruses that swell your belly big and round, soft and delicious as peachflesh. he has grown bacteria big as your thumb, that will bite you so that you strip naked, oozing gobs of sweat as big as a fist that could fill a room for them to swim in, and bacteria like little arrows that will stick you and boil your spinal fluid till it pours in smoke out of your ears. 

 

but his most prized petri dish of all is the slums themselves, for it is in this mire of human material that his god will be re-formed. his god is your god too, is the god of all who live; or was, once. his god is LUCOG, the Last Universal Common Omnipotent God, and its worship and its warmth is remembered by your cells, if not by you. your body still hums its hymns in its tiniest components, generations of particulate knowledge kept safe in your genome. 

 

the storm rages louder, of course, and lightning obliterates rooftops and starts fires. in the tower, the doctor stands upright in a machine that is like a silver guillotine except that, of course, it is connected with countless looping cables to the lightning rod which, of course, scrapes the sky from the top of the clocktower. the doctor's men feed long tubes from the petri dishes into his flesh. 

 

he stands, resolute, glowing as though a flashlight were held beneath his skin. the tubes pulse and undulate, the lightning strikes, the guillotine comes down, and the doctor is severed clean in half from head to foot, his face and the front part of him peeling off to reveal the cross section beneath. his body is full of temples. glowing, yellow sunbeam blob-worlds of worship, his cells cascading between them, praying all the time, to LUCOG, who has come, whose time is now. 

 

everyone present pukes at once, and it is beautiful, bile flowing in flowering stars, and the doctor’s cells sing, and LUCOG is here, a glob of warmth and light and electrolytes, stellated pseudopods reaching, caressing. 

 

if you obey its tenets, eat copiously, reproduce as swiftly and vigorously as possible, it is pleased, and its touch may cause you to fruit another self from your body. 

 

if you seek to harm it, its touch can make you vomit like a fire hose, drawing all the microscopic life out of you until you are sterile and quite dead.   

 

if it does not know how to feel about you, or if you are dead, or sad, or cower, its touch will trap you in an incredibly bouncy jelly bubble where you will be healed, then devolved, slowly but steadily, until you are goopy soup and it may take you into itself and teach you how to live again.  As it drifts down the floors of the tenement, the buildings fill with monkeys and flopping fish things and slippery ooze.

 

Eventually, when it reaches the bottom, it will take up the bones of lady feathertail. she will spin embryonic back through the centuries, until, with a sovereign shriek, she will burst the bubble and erupt out into a rainbow feathered terror lizard, a gigantic raptor dinosaur with a blazing peacock tail of iridescent fire and teeth like oiled scimitars. her family's fire killed LUCOG once, before their nation fell to its scions, and she is the proudest patriot in the world.  

 

 

 

 8. The Earth Like Water

(the Feathered Mountains) 

how it feels etc etc

The Cast

The People of Hinan: the most nostalgic people in the world. nothing is as good as it once was. 

desire to feel like they made the right choice. 

The Ghosts of Hinan: so terribly homesick.

 desire to return to the Sword-Straight River and kill the Quill.
The Pale Giant: the most mournful creature in the world. desires to make love to the moon. 
The Earless Exorcist: the most pragmatic man in the world. desires to make sure the dead stay gone. 

 

people are vanishing from the village of Hinan and everyone is tired all the time. something is always stirring out of the corner of your eye, and every empty room feels like someone has just left it and is only waiting, out of sight and around the corner, for your back to turn. 

 

nobody who lives here feels it is their home. long ago (though not so long), they lived in reed mansions floating on the Sword-Straight River, and hunted the red river whales with the long harpoons they made of the horns of those whales. there were two families in those times, the Quill and the Oar, fierce rivals in their whaling and their drinking and the lavishness of their weddings.

 

 So it was until the men of the Oar chanced to kill the only son of the king of red whales, who put a witch-fire on the harpoons of that Quill such that, from then on, those spears only struck and killed the men of the Oar and then their mothers and children and wives until they had to flee the Sword-Straight River and swear to never again look upon the water or be stricken from the earth entirely. 

 

the people here are what remain of the Oar. they make kites with what is left of their sailcloth and hunt boar with the same spears they once killed whales with and each home still holds the canoes in which they carried their dead across rough mountains to this place. those dead are buried in a ring of birch trees some distance from Hinan, and their graves are marked with spears hung with flowers. 

 

now in Hinan everyone speaks of the dead, and worries that they have done some wrong by burying them in the earth rather than sinking them with stones in the water (for the nearest lake is the Haloscon, high in hills of rough shale, and there are devil birds who eat your eyes), or by failing to avenge themselves upon the Quill. People vanish nightly, men keel over with exhaustion while pouring wine, there are muffled noises and hidden motion always, and children are being strangled in their beds and left unburied, for nobody will go to the graveyard. 

 

but at night, they do, all of them, sleepwalking there, and there among the spears and flowers they hold mock weddings and feasts, dance and fight, and the earth below their feet is clear as water. within it, the bones of their dead glow like stars. the souls of those dead desire bodies, and have grown unbearably homesick, and so without knowing it, they have called to their living kin, and nightly take the place of their living souls, and so it is that the people of Hinan are full of ghosts at night.  in those dead minds the palaces of reeds are once more made real, and the sleepwalkers the ghosts inhabit obey the invisible walls and passages as though they were real.

 

there are more of the dead than their are of the living, and those unhappy ghosts stand and watch the scene bitterly, while the disembodied souls of the living drift like weird fish through the air. white marrow-sucking moths creep out from the curtains and fly, the size of hawks and soft, drawn to the bone-light shining up through the transparent earth. they swoop into it and swim down to those skeletons to feed, for the earth is like water in more than just appearance, and the deeper you go, the more like water it is, and the more freely you can swim. 

 

deepest of all, far below the bones, there is a giant. she is huge and pale; her eyes are like black lakes and her mouth is beautiful and cold. she is in love with the moon, and each night, as the ghosts stir and the earth turns clear, she gazes at her beloved, and sings; softly, though her gigantic whispers shudder the soil, and weeps. by moonlight, her tears are fat diamonds; in the sun, they are tears.

 

 if the ghosts were laid to rest, the ground would no longer turn to water. she will do anything to stop this from happening. she will reach her long arms up and offer the treasures of the underworld; a cloak of pale worms which drink the blood of your enemies, a lens that can turn any light to a laser, a lamp that turn shadows to fruiting plants. if she cannot bribe you she will reach her arms further and squeeze you to pulp and pop your head off with her thumb like a child with a dandelion.

 

all this only takes place at night. the sleepers must not be awoken, by the sun or any other thing. if they are, the ghost will realize the body they are in is not their own, and will claw the flesh from its bones its effort to escape. so before day breaks, the dead drift back to sleep, and the souls of the villagers rejoin their bodies, and take their weary place in the waking world as the sun rises and the earth becomes once more solid and obscure. 

 

if all the dead were given bodies, the strength of their homesick hearts would call hidden rivers below the earth to surge and rise in mighty geysers, and this land would be flooded, and they would take up the spears that mark their graves and sail the canoes of Hinan down to the Sword-Straight River and butcher the descendants of the Quill. 

 

this is why the earless exorcist came here. long ago he deafened himself so he would never be swayed by the sorrows of the dead. he communicates by writing and carries countless curling scrolls of paper and pots of ink. he knows many sutras, is always writing them, and shares them gladly. the caste sutra, which makes a rich man consider himself lower than a poor one, the flower-eating sutra, which can make vegetarians out of tigers, the wanderer's sutra, which makes a home intolerable to its dweller; these are some of the sutras he will share. 

 

there is one sutra he will not share however, and it is the one which he writes on the bodies of the sleeping villagers, swiftly as he can, before they are called to the graveyard. it is the sutra of perfect wisdom, and whatever it is written on will vanish and be as nothing, leaving not even the soul. but many times he is not able to completely cover the body of a villager before they stir in their sleep, and he does not dare wake them. 

 

and so hands, or mouths, or eyes are left behind, and without a soul. having tasted annihilation, they are terrified of it, but all that is material is loathsome to them, and they are both transfixed and repulsed by it. so eyes roll and leer, mouths lick flesh raw, hands throttle, and the town is haunted by flesh as much as ghosts. 

 

 

 

 9. The Resurrection Bombs

(the Black Tundra)

body TEA

The Cast 

The People of Lyolye: the people of Lyolye are the most accepting in the world, and soon will be the most decrepit. there is nothing that surprises them. they desire to live, die and be reborn without thinking too hard.

The Organ Pirates of Paz: the most shameless men in the world. 

desire total control over everyone's body and to punish the people of Lyolye.

The Amazons of the Feathered Mountains: the most sadistic women in the world. 

desire to find new ways to hurt people and to live free of guilt. 

The Gentle Queen of the Amazons: the most sensitive woman alive.

desires a world where nobody is ever harmed.     

 

there is a city of tents and trailers on a tundra of cold black sand and stinging flies. the city is Lyolye, and it is the place where the organ pirates of Paz send the kidneys, hearts, lungs and livers of butchered men and women to be catalogued, stored, and eventually sold. none of the profit goes to the people of the city: they exist only as a link in a rusted charnel chain. 

 

they drink harsh whiskey in Lyolye, and take each other to pieces with hatchets for sport before sewing each other back together, for the people of Lyolye are like empty leather bags, and have no blood nor vital organs. the pirates took them when they first entered into business with the people of the city and so too stole their deaths, to save the trouble of negotiating anew with generations to come. stolen too were their pussies and pricks, and so when these empty people make love they do it with their long sharp nails, and with their teeth 

 

there is a woman in Lyolye with teeth as white as snow, and all full of spiders is she. if there is some part of you that will not move when it should, she can put a spider in you too, and with its many legs it will work what is broken in you and ask only that you eat insects in return.  

 

there is a woman in Lyolye who whistles a single low note while she paints faces on hundred dollar bills with paint that she holds in her throat. if someone comes to you with a bill that bears your face, you are bound to do what they pay you for, or all your bones will bear a mark that certifies them as coin to devils, and that mark will seep through and stain your skin, and you will be hounded without mercy by the desperate and wicked.  

 

when the organ pirates arrive, they come on snowmobiles and sledges pulled by huge wolves with hunched shoulders. they are big men, and they lie about everything; they will cut off your nose and then stand there and tell you it did not happen. they chew a menthol resin which reddens their teeth, and carve the stocks of their guns and the hilts of their knives to resemble women, and take them as lovers. under their gloves, their hands are immaculately clean and soft. they carry flasks of ethanol that they use to sterilize their hands and anything they touch, before and after they touch it. 

 

they are excellent surgeons. from them, you can buy lungs that can breath smoke and water, a larynx that will let your voice shatter glass and crack stone. they will sell you a heart that turns your blood to gasoline, or enchants those who drink it to adore you. if you would wish it, they will sell you a heart without mercy, or a child's brain, joyful and foolish. 

 

if you have the organ of some magnificent creature, perhaps they will buy it from you. otherwise, if you wish to sell, they will smile their red smiles, and tell you to find them later, and drink with them. when you do, they will do a shot with you, and yours will be rohypnol and you will wake gutted like a fish. it is a point of pride for them. 

 

the people of Lyolye will tend to you, if you are empty. they will shelter you in a home, and no matter your age, treat you like a child, and feed you with milk and whisky and rough rye bread.  

 

though the people of Lyolye cannot die, they can still age, and without their vitals they do so swiftly, growing more and more bent with pain and worn with use, until after a month they seem truly ancient. it is to this end that they struck a deal with the women of the Feathered Mountains. 

 

these women are the amazons, with iron breasts, who stand seven feet high and live, clothed by only their hair (which they wear to their bare heels) in the frigid concrete castles and moldering bunkers that dot those peaks of shale and splintered stone. and so it is that every so often, a caravan of motorcycles heads for those treacherous hills, and each riders body packed is full as full can be of all the viscera that makes a human being, so that on their stone tables, the amazons may assemble more of their kind. 

 

there is a witch who sleeps in a black box beneath one of the crumbling hills. once, an angel took pity on her, and cracked the lid of her cage, and she wrung its neck and pulled it inside with her. now she gnaws its dry bones, and dreams of blood. her breath goes out of the box and it blows through the world and sometimes when a baby is born, or someone grows close to death, a wind like a knife slides through the shutters and severs their soul from their body. and the body dies, and the witch breathes in, and the wind goes rushing back with the soul inside it. if you reached into that wind and your fingers were not severed, you could catch that soul, and the amazons know this. they stand on the mountaintops and weave nets of their hair and steel wire, and snatch that soul to give life to their sisters. 

 

so those are the amazons, and here is what the people of Lyolye buy from them. each month, when all the people of the city are little more than crumpled paper, and the pirates have gone, there is a white raven that flies overhead. this day is coming soon. 

 

then the people of Lyolye will go and bury their freezer trunks deep in the earth. they will take down their tents and drive their trailers miles distant, and then they will return, and they sit, and wait for the amazons come screaming down from the mountains in their silver-winged jets and bomb them until their bones and the sand of the tundra have turned to black glass. 

 

when it is done, a few of the superwomen will un-couple from their planes and fall to earth to walk among the crystal ruins. they will nurse the glass skeletons from their iron tits, until the black glass cracks like an egg, and inside will be a child, already half grown, wide eyed and empty as a doll.

 

so the people of Lyolye are reborn, and the amazons will leave, and the children will walk, and grow as they walk, shedding their skins as they outgrow them, until they come to where they have left their city, and begin the work of putting it all back together. the people of Lyolye treasure their child-skins, and keep them safe in perfumed chests, and write their family histories, such as they are, upon them.

 

but soon they will take them out, and look upon them, and compare the soft strength of that skin to the wrinkled fragility of their own and weep with confusion.

 

for they are cunning, the pirates of Paz, and though the ebb and flow of youth in Lyolye does not concern them, they know when they are being robbed, and they are vengeful. and once they have proof, when they return, they will see that next batch of organs sent to the amazons contains two treasures, carefully selected: a heart of perfect kindness, and eyes of perfect innocence. 

 

whoever possess that heart will be the most sensitive of all creatures, who cannot bear to see even an insect hurt for a single instant. and those who meet the gaze of the eyes of innocence would sooner kill themselves than do any harm to the one they belong to, even if it was only to make them unhappy. 

 

and so it is that the young queen of the amazons is the most gentle of creatures, and though her sisters pace and fret in their desolate forts, they cannot bring themselves to fly forth with their resurrection bombs, for they have seen the horror in the queens eyes when she learned of the promise her own creation was purchased with. 

 

and the people of Lyolye will grow old, older than they have ever been, and the white raven will not come. the pirates of Paz will curse their doddering age, and fling them bodily about, and laugh red and long. 

 

even if your heart were hard enough to kill the queen — and it is not — the Feathered Mountains are unforgiving. eye-eaters nest there; long beaked devil-birds, and in many places the flaky stone is sharp as razors. in many places too are charges placed by the amazons which can trigger landslides if wires are tripped, and there are canyons rigged to collapse in blasts of jagged shrapnel. 

 

once you reach them, if you do, the fortresses of the amazons are all but impregnable. the warrior women are few in number, but their battlements are studded with machine gun nests as though they housed a garrison, and with a word, napalm pours from the gutters. in their halls and weapon laboratories are long swords flexible as whips, smoothbore shot pistols loaded with metal barbs and cyanide crystals, pistols that fire rays that turn all moisture in a man to burning steam, rifles that shoot steel flowers that blossom into crazed tangled of razor wire, nets which ooze a burning glue when their victim struggles against them, spears with heads of invisible fire.

 

though it drives them almost mad, the amazons will not see a hair on the queen's head harmed. your own eyes are far less innocent.  

 

you can leave the light on when you go <3

hey im writing something