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| my best friend forever |
i'm paying glaugust dues i'm playing elfin blues. these ones are fun I think, I'm particularly fond of the elfs and the depressed twerpling of the Dracula family. I hope that YOU are fond of all of them! there's always something to be said for a mad king, especially one surrounded by Health Influencers. Who could blame him?
1-6: the sun king's youngest daughter, and Other Stories
7-9: the last universal common omnipotent god, and Other Stories
10-12: the games of drowned children, and Other Stories
13. The Resurrectionist Dracula
(The Towns of Almaricia and Acheronta)
A Dracula for Purple, and a Strange Crop for Semiurge,
both made from the language of Roberto Juarroz.
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The Cast
the people of Almaricia: incredibly vivacious. desire to live fruitful and abundant.
the people of Acheronta: dour, silent. desire to forget both life and death.
the Crying Mandrakes: confused, bitter. desire to live human lives.
the Ressurectionist Dracula: ashamed, solitary. desires to preserve wealth and beauty.
When life draws a tree, death draws another one. Life draws a nest, and death copies it. life draws a bird to live in the nest, and right away, death draws another bird.
in Almaricia, life has drawn a town where everyone spills lavishly when they drink, every man goes about with eight happy children on his back and in his arms, and people shower outdoors and make love while they shower. the women here do not have to hammer nails to make them hold; they push them in with their thumb.
Acheronta is the town that death drew. they say that they kill children in this town. sometimes crying and calling from that place echo down to Almarcia from the black hills, and the very young and very old breathe out a long wheezing breath that harmonizes with the cries, as though they called the breath out of them for this purpose. in the morning they are dead, and their mothers and fathers gulp wine and pack pistols and set off to Acheronta to see what can be done, and they do not return. so the people of Almaricia are afraid, for the the more alive we are, the more we die.
halfway along the grey road to Acheronta there sits a man who is writing on his bones all the things he fears to lose when he dies. even if you have never seen a god, you know that this man looks like a god. and like a god he will help you. he will peel back your flesh and write what you ask on your bones and when you die that thing will not be lost.
there is something in this man's expression that is the same as the normality or the odor of suicide, an abyss or a silence that divides the universe into two precise and nocturnal parts. you know that when you pass him, you are crossing into death's country.
when you reach Acheronta, snow has turned it into a cemetery. or really, the town was already a cemetery, and the snow has come to announce it.
no one dies who is dead. so the people of Acheronta, in order not to die, prefer it. they cut little doors into their breasts, pull out their hearts, and plant them in the cold black furrows of the fields outside town. they go about with their breasts ajar. when they have children, this is done at the baptism. and their children do not cry then.
no, the dead children of Acheronta do not cry, but what grows from their hearts do. in the black soil of the fields grow the mandrakes, who look like children but are evil roots, blood-filled bodies that crack space like hard bread wounds a soft mouth, breaking it even as they fill it. their crying guarantees response, your breath leaving you like a large sad animal.
the people of Acheronta have no breath to give to the crying mandrakes. but the mandrakes they give to Dracula. not the Count, of course, not to that fallen and sinister Bolyar. An aged and forgotten grandchild keeps the house in the mountains. The Resurrectionist.
if you are wearing new shoes, you will not find the road to that house; your feet will direct you to a dance hall in Achertonta where, at all hours, dead people sway, some with their hand on their own shoulder, others with it on somebody else's shoulder. Only old shoes don't despise this road, although it wears them out from the first step, and in the end, you arrive barefoot. The dead of Achertonta walk this road with their baskets of weeping mandrakes, stepping on sharp stones without feeling.
the house of the Resurrectionist Dracula is black and thin, of slate and blackwood. In it are maps that mark with nails the tombs of queens and princesses. there is black tea and many, many photo albums of families who have all died. it sits on a plot of black, poor soil. to one side, there is a pile of dead women. great ladies, all of them, laid out in splendor in stiff silk and itchy lace that no longer vexes them, dripping in jewels their bodies could not have borne the weight of in life. around them, like a fence, a ring of silver shovels, planted in the earth.
the Resurrectionist Dracula digs their graves. He marks the graves with little grey trees; from their roots flow clean water. He is down in the dark soil; his spade flashes in the grey sun of death. He buries it all, the arms, the motion, and the spade, the passion, the banner of walking alone, that debt, wealth, the relic of a glance, that other. He sweats his thought. On his skin they are drawn; the moist contours of a thinner skin, the wake of a navigation without a ship. When he thinks light, he is illumined, when he thinks of death, he smoothes himself out, when he remembers someone, he takes on their features, when he falls into himself, he becomes dark like a well.
His footprints anticipate their foot, preceding him. His mouth is like a long black tunnel, his voice is low and sonorous. Like all of his kin, he is always hungry, but so long as the dead of Acheronta grow their mandrakes he has no desire for other blood. He will kill to keep things this way. If his mouth cannot be stopped up, it will grow until you cannot walk anywhere that is not inside it, and your blood sweats through your skin and rolls down his tongue that is like a marble road.
If you dig down deep in the graves he makes, you discover that nothing is buried. This is because those buried by the Resurrectionist are restored to life. The people of Acheronta lift them from their tombs and bring them to him. So long as he continues his task, there is always a chance that a slain noblewoman returns to life. It is his atonement for his families crimes, and his own way of perpetuating them; the wealthy and beautiful will not die.
14. Echoes of the Elfen Fane
(The Village of Kircubo)
Appendix N jam
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The Cast
The Villagers of Kircubo: most affectionate. desire to keep their children and the memories of their own childhood safe.
Children of the Watercolor School: delightfully precocious. desire to keep secrets and feel special.
The Elfs: coy and kittenish. desire to burn the elf-apple tree and the memories of the past.
The Elf-Peddlers: frighteningly opportunistic. desire to use the elfs to become wealthy.
The Orcs: disgusting and debased. desire to ruin and humiliate themselves and others.
The Dark-Elf Prince: high and haughty. desires to slay the wicked and bring low all who oppose him.
the long haired hippie children of the Watercolor School of Kircubo love the elf-apple tree, which is tall as a church and wide as a temple and, for the first time in three hundred years, flowering. the flowers get caught in the long, curling hair of the children. when they return from sneaking out there between woodworking class and form drawing class or long after they have been put to bed the air around them smells sweet and heady and, if you are grown, makes you burst into tears all of a sudden, even if you are sleeping.
and nobody is truly angry with them, for everyone in Kircubo loves the elf-apple tree, and will love it until they cannot remember being children. they love the tree even more than the elfs do, for the elfs have come to burn it down.
the elfs are no taller than the children, and like the children their hair is long. it trails in a train behind them, tangled with flowers and clean cigarettes and apricots and money, for elf-hair is like a net that trawls the ground, catching only the good and somehow never growing dirty. their ears are two spans high, and hear many things that you do not; they laugh at tonal jokes you did not realize you had made. their skin is soft with invisible down and it feels like a tickly kittens belly, but it can feel like a burning electric nettle, if they wish it.
their eyes are wide and wonderful. seeing your own face in them makes you feel as light and small and playfully beautiful as they are, if the elf is pleased, or so untouchably pathetic and powerless and tiny that even a child seems a shining giant, if the elf is angry. and once you look into an elfs eyes, you must not look away before they do, for if you ever break an elf's gaze before they blink (and, like cats, unless startled, they will never blink before you do), you will have broken something inside you, something in your chest that sticks into your heart like an invisible bone. everything good to see and pleasant to hear and sweet to taste will be as shit and droning flies, and you will take pleasure only from being the lowest, foulest, most degraded thing that you can be, and you will be known as an orc forever.
there are quick and unkind peddlers who follow in the footsteps of the elfs, and snatch up the good things from their hair, and sell the fruit and the candy and the cigarettes to the children and their parents, and keep the money for themselves. they put on airs and wear porcelain elf-masks that make them look like overgrown toys. they claim to be the elf-stewards, and the elfs find that too funny to deny.
there is a man in Kircubo who is in love with the night sky, and every night, a few brandies in and feeling naughty, teeters from the tippy top of the church steeple. He is trying to suck on the milky tit of the heavenly body, which here hangs low, since Kircubo is far to the west, where the night rises to begin her long eurythmy. If he only had a hand up, he would be high enough to suck and swallow; and what then? to grow again, like his life as a man was one long childhood, to sprout silver fur to shield him from the cold of space, satellite bat ears, feet drawn tight as tiny needles for stepping on space dust. He'd get a real job too, and a long crook of white metal for herding the little stars that like to wander. If he ever became an orc it would be a nightmare, space rockets full of burning shit and semen.
some of the villagers have become orcs already, and they throw bottles at old ladies and puke on babies and follow little girls home from school as it grows dark and the bubbles from the elf-pipes drift through the blackness.
but watch out! here is a whir of whirling wheels and in a flash a greasy head is rolling down the cobbled hill and you turn too late for all you can see is the back of a boy on blue bicycle, shirtless, his dark hair nearly blue itself, riding one handed, the other arm stretched to flick the blood from his giant golden shears.
and the elf-stewards are not safe; here ones mask splits in half and slides away even as the two halfs of his head slide away from each other.
and the children are not safe, for a bully presses her bleeding wrists together as though one could staunch the other.
and elfs are not safe either, for now the bike comes tilting around the corner nearly parallel to the earth and with a swinging snap their hair is shorn, and the elf cries as though they had lost a limb and the other elfs puff their bubble pipes and pretend they cannot hear them and will no longer be their kin.
the people of Kircubo do not know what to do. the elfs are sacred to them, but they are strangers, and their own children are known to them, and so is the elf-apple tree. there is a boy with a blue bicycle who looks just like the orc-killer, but his mother swears that someone has stolen the bike, that her son has not left his room since the first head was lopped, and he ties himself to his bedposts for fear he does it in his sleep.
some children are afraid of him, but others clamor at his window and beg for him to ride and cut the elfin hair and drive the strangers out. parents demand justice for their maimed children. the elf-stewards rage and demand that the boy be turned in, and they pass gold to desperate men and whisper to orcs to do terrible things in the night.
the elfs will take no vengeance, nor will they raise a hand against the children who chain their arms around the elf-apple tree. their hearts hold no capacity for harm, only for joy and sorrow. even against their shorn kin they will not harbor anger, even when those spurned and wounded elfs join hands with the children and spit in the wide and wonderful eyes of their former friends.
but it was not always thus. the elfs of old had hair that wreathed them in raging manes of dark fire and fought with claws and shears and long darts of burning gold. the people of Kircubo do not remember them. but the elfs do. they remember the dark elf-fire, and how it did not only gather the good, as their hair does, but that it burned the wicked, and would not be put out even once all the truly evil had been slain. they remember that all men carry some small wickedness in them.
they remember, and the elf-tree does too. it remembers, and it thinks on those terrible heroes, and it thinks of the children who come to visit it. inside of itself, it is growing them; a twin for every child in the village, filled with the soul of an elfin warrior. each night, the elf-apples grow bigger. the elfs know it is happening, but they know the villagers will never allow the children inside to burn.
soon they will fall, and inside will be little girls with golden claws as long as swords, and little boys with darts that can burn through stone. they will descend upon the orcs and the elf-peddlers, and they will ruin the elfs, and then they will turn and pursue lethal justice with a child's sense of right and wrong. one has fallen already, big as a barrel, split open from where the dark-haired boy's twin broke free and drew the shining shears from his shining heart. he is the dark-elf prince reborn, and he will humble his childish descendants as they humbled him, even if he wears the body of a child.
15. The King, Who Must Not Die
(The Island of Venus)
A printing press adventure for Loch
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| " he certainly had a penchant for depicting naked women" i sure hope so!!!!!!!!!! |
The Cast
the People of Faitour: incredibly gullible, rendered hopelessly bipolar by heavy metal poisoning and improper nutrition. desire to be your best friend or to kill you for betraying them.
the Press Operators: extremely tortured and tragic.
desire to honor the truth even when it doesn't make sense, and to retain their sanity.
The King of Faitour: incredibly open and naive. often manic. becoming increasingly confused and forgetful from lead poisoning. desires to be an example and savior to his people.
Doctor Weiss: alllways talking behind someone's back. desires to get one over on everyone.
Doctor Gelb: has always got a theory and it usually relates to piss. desires respect and publication.
Doctor Rot: loves to tell you what's wrong with you. desires masculine bonding.
Doctor Blau: always asking someone what's going on. desires to prove lead really is a miracle cure.
the Euthanasia Officers: incredibly community minded. know everyone in their neighborhood.
desire to kill all of them and then themselves.
the people of Faitour are making themselves sick and crazy. the country around the city-state crawls with mercury poisoned soldiers fighting one-man wars against dangerous enemies like school busses and merchant caravans. they are butchering people and breaking down, crawling across long miles to the family of their victims to repent before suspecting a trap and setting the house on fire.
teachers are leaving nails on the seats of suspected cheaters and the students are too numb and sleep deprived to feel the wounds. Everyone is bathing in quicksilver and drinking arsenic and urine. they are eating nothing but meat, they are eating nothing but algae, they are eating nothing but bones, they are eating nothing at all.
they have read about all of these things in the newspaper, for the people of Faitour believe everything they read in the news. after all, why would they not? after centuries of lying dictators, this king, this beloved king, was willingly lobotomized to tell nothing but the truth. and so that his citizens could trust the news, he wired his brain to the great printing press that produces the papers, to the cameras and the microphones of the reporters who pry into everything here.
above the streets of the city state stretch miles of wire, all feeding back to the wire crown of the king. the sounds and images become like his memories, and he unfailingly directs them down the thick cables that lead to the printing press.
it is housed in his palace, hidden in a richly curtained chamber the size of a concert hall. the newprint spills endlessly from behind the curtains, gathered and folded by masked and shrouded press attendants. with things being as they are, sometimes a stray comment begins a fight that ends with a bone folder in the eye; everyone tries to avoid this. the slippered feet of the dead sometimes stick out from under heaps of paper.
behind the curtains, relics of the old regime; colossal heads, mechanical giants with lead letter plate teeth, forever churning out the truth. these were the propaganda machines of the old dictators; now, their heads are wired to the kings own. and the king is well informed, and he knows the truth, and he tells the truth. his people read that he is letting fire ants crawl down his throat and up his urethra, he is sleeping with a lead coin under his tongue, and that he feels he will never be sick again. and it seems he never will be.
he alone in Faitour is sound of mind and hale of body. the plague of madness and infirmity among his people drives him to despair; he cannot understand what is happening to them. each day he publishes more cures, recommended by experts, tested by himself, and his people follow them and go insane and die. and the more this happens, the more they adore him in his perfect honestly and devoted loyalty to them. his life, his health, makes their death and disease worthwhile.
and now he tells his people that the time has come: he will liquidate his entire fortune, melt all the gold to his name, and drink the boiling metal, for it means nothing to him if his people cannot be saved. it is his most radical cure yet; if it succeeds, he will become immortal, and his body will become a panacea. even now the furnaces roar and crucibles bubble. the wealthy of their city add their gold to the cause; what higher cause could there be? insane little girls fight like panthers on the street to steal gold earrings from one another just so they can have the honor of casting them into the cauldrons.
understand that he is not a madman, or a despot. the gates to his palace stand open in all weather; he sweats in the summer. dead leaves pile up in his throne room come autumn; snow drifts line his halls in the winter. his subjects dine and drink and sleep with him. he feels each of their deaths passionately; he pays for funerals and attends burials. he is an easy man to reach, and endlessly curious; this is how the doctors entered into his confidence.
doctor weiss draws him baths of gallium and tells him it is mercury; doctor gelb gives dissolves sugar pills in urine and tells him it is arsenic, drink it and be well, doctor rot injects raw steak with nutritional supplements and cocaine and tells him a diet of raw meat is why he feels invigorated. doctor blau really is giving him lead poisoning though, and it is the king's own slightly softened, very confused and guilty mind that gave rise to this gold theory. he will not be dissuaded from it by even these trusted friends. it would take a scientific miracle they are not capable of performing to persuade him otherwise.
the king is not a superman. if he drinks boiling gold, he will die. and if he dies, so too will his city, for there is no one in Faitour willing to live without their king.
he did not ask this of them; neighborhoods appointed their own euthanasia officers, armed with heavy swords and pistols, cyanide capsules pouched in their cheeks. in three days time, there will be one in every home, standing by, waiting for the morning newspaper.
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| walker kinda creating she/theys from base principles here |
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