Everlasting Dystopia

 Everlasting Dystopia

Graham Swanson

                                                                          5 of Pentacles

A bright rainbow cut across the blackened sky. Its colorful blades sliced apart the murky clouds and evaporated the dewy gloom settling over the spike atop Dougar City’s greatest towers. Clean water flowed under the cramped bridges and down ravines where the homeless slept and fought with daggers and shards of glass. Lovers with arms outstretched held each other in a muddy field before the arena shining like a musical chalice. Boys and girls got out of their mom’s trucks and frolicked among the shops, t shirt stands, and beer gardens. Smoke from pens scented the air with spiced fruits and candied tarts plumed between every young man in a black hat and lady with tattoos. Everyone shared links of sausage and silver flasks of moonshine.

The mother drove her son Hans and his friend Stomp to the concert because he just turned 15 and he begged her for a chance to get out of their small town for his birthday, and share his celebration with the reckless resolve of the city. She took no joy finding a place to drop him off because she saw no one his age around. At her age, water pipes were made of lead, the paint was made of lead, and kids smoked cigarettes, pointed knives at each other, and met up with men far older than them. She stopped the car, and let him know. “If anything happens to you, I will throw myself off a bridge. You stay safe, keep your phone on you, and come right home when this is over. Get into no one’s car. Go to no one’s house. Please obey your mother.”

The field of people slowly marched inside of the arena. Rainbows splintered and shocked the birds. Despite the late season, bugs crawled up light posts. Ice cold puddles steamed over warm air. Flooded lots turned to curtains of ice and fog. The wind blew it over the heads of the 20,000 revelers and they hailed the starry lights and magnetic worlds revealed by the rainbow of ever changing colors.

The boys felt hungry and thirsty once they smelled the grills and Styrofoam. People happily fed them from plates with no charge, and gave them drinks from pop bottles. Their shoes stuck to the floor of the arena. The deafening blasts from the sound system shook the ground. Three pink pyramids gleamed from the neon stage. Steel cables and hovering platforms swung overhead like guillotine blades. Everyone held a wand in their hand.

These wands emitted a pale light, showed them maps, answers to riddles, naked people, whatever they wished, with the tap of their fingers. Pink mist and cyan feathers blew in cyclones around their wands. With magic lenses they recorded everything happening. Under the spell of the event they awaited, they never wanted to lose the blast of serotonin and sweet smells, pretty people, and contagious invisible germs.

In the crowd arrived all kinds of people. Men fresh out of jail at the bottom of society. Former celebrities who lost their fame and fortune. Women living in buses who dreamed of having an Onlyfans for their own. Outcasts who just found silver coins on the street. They pooled their money together for tickets and rides, gifts, and apartments along the river. They kept each other warm with body heat as snowflakes climbed on their shoulders.

The singer arrived singing into a candlestick and seduced the crowd with synthronics and electric mirages. Women undressed and hurled their clothes on stage as men spat at him in envy. With each splatter that touched his face, the singer pointed and called on the crowd to destroy them. With each call, he danced the robot, and drew them closer, surging onto the cusp of the state where bodyguards struggled to keep them out from their bunker. Photographers snapped photos and listened to the wind howl. The furious crowd closed in more and more, and they only made phone calls before the hypnotic dance moves drove the peaceful people into a blood-thirsty craze.

An Uber driver named Shift took the wheel in the depressing gloom of Dougar City listening to weather reports of snow in the early morning. Body counts climbed high. 88 people dead within two hours. From the parking lot in which he awaited the boy who hailed his car the huge arena parking lot lit up under an orb of pale gas. The stranger wore a motley gown and leather belts. Rain dripped from the bells on the tails of his funny hat. He gave the driver forty dollars to keep waiting.

In the meantime, the medic police beat the crown of 20,000 back with electric batons and fireproof shields as paramedics fought to resuscitate some of the wounded. Many screamed and rose their hands but most fell into the wash of eyes and sweaty backs. The dying person struggled to gasp as blood filled his mouth. Boot heels stamped his shirt and cracked his skull. Neck veins strained and whistles blew but fell limp under the curtains of joyous screams, rescue workers storming the stage, falling away from a rising platform as the singer moved like a robot as the throbbing blood bath of weary and masked fans took their revenge on the night.

The singer’s shirt gleamed like diamonds under starless night between a beam of white violet and pink lasers. He did the moves he learned to summon great magic. In the modern eyes of the secular youth, he carried on some relic from the previous generation by pretending to move like a machine, not a man. In the wiser minds he practiced the Ai Sa ritual taught to him by the lost children who employed his contract. His men charged the rescue workers and swept them from the stage as police ordered the show be halted. They tried to cut the power, they tried to disperse the crowd with poison, yet the power stayed on, the three pyramids changed color, the droning choruses of music stayed on, and the singer remained on his platform dancing the robot, the forsaken Ai Sa known merely to old dead priests of a long forbidden brotherhood.

Fans hurled severed legs into the air.

The surge trapped police and sucked them into the chaos as large men fought behind aluminum batons to carry dying boys and women on their backs to the ambulances on the other side of the arena. Often they came too late, and the victims died on their shoulders, on the stretcher, or on the threshold of the ambulance door. Still the singer danced the robot as his shoes soaked in the blood of nearly a hundred. He left these tracks from platform to platform.

As the uber driver spun his wheel, his back tires skidded off, the singer felt a cable break. He kept dancing the robot over a crowd of fans pressing on with the pyramids gleaming in their eyes. Red tails whipped in the air as golden ribbons fell from the clouds. The eye of ISIS closed, and the rainbow changed direction. The platform dropped into the crowd, and the singer fell with the candlestick in his grasp. He dangled from the cable for a short time but the cold wetness slid down his wrist, and he dropped from the top of the arena onto the pointed top of the pyramid.

In his final gasps of life, high above the masses crushing, stomping, suffocating each other, as his blood poured down the sides of the pyramid and evaporate to smoke, he kept doing the robot. The anger dissipated as everyone looked at the blood on their hands. One by one, weeping in sorrow and regret, they climbed up the glowing pyramids to pry the sacred candlestick from his dead hand, then venture out to take their sorrow into the streets. It got colder, dustier, and they felt exhausted from their injuries, from the late hour, and from the plagues they breathed in. Hundreds of dead bodies lay beaten to pulps like ruby jelly.

The two teenagers waited outside. Their money lost, their phones lost, bruised, and left in the cold. Hans worried about his mother as his friend Stomp went back inside to recover their items. Hans stood there alone in the cold in the echos of the violent night. The music continued, people started to leave, turning down the parking lot and joining the distant catacombs of light. The vampires came out to stand over burning barrels of diamonds and beckon the furloughed to come join them.

Hans waited and waited, but Stomp never came out. He thought about what his mother told him and feared he’d never see her again. He took off down the highway, into the frozen casino parking lots, past abandoned restaurants towards salty hotels. Then from the darkness of a curved road, a yellow car appeared. It stopped, and inside Hans saw a driver and a man in motley in the back. The back door opened, the man in motley held out a wand and smiled through the dark mask over his face. His eyes leaked like an overflowing cup. “Need a ride home?”

The snow numbed his ears and he felt the sweat cool on his back turn to ice. He looked around but didn’t see Stomp or anyone else for miles except for the shady men waiting outside capsized boxcars by the rails. At close to, 4am he just wanted to eat junk food and be home. He got into the yellow car and relaxed at once under the spray of hot air. He listened to the bells on the motley man’s hat as the car hit the highway and sped out of town. Under the jacket and belts, he saw the man wearing a golden dagger with a crossguard shaped like the head of a lion.

"Did you kill him? Why?" Hans asked.

The man in motley shrugged and shook his head so the bells made music. He contorted his hands to create the Eye of Isis and snickered. "Didn't you enjoy the show?" The car left the lights of the city and entered the foggy darkness. The road curved under bridges and across the river to the place where trees don't lose leaves and the moon devours rainbows. Hans thought they passed the road home, but when he tried to speak up the car sped up.

Bells jingled all night long.  

Victory in Deceit

Victory in Deceit 

by Graham Swanson

The first memory I have is the sight of a dozen greenhouses behind our lovely cabin home back in the 

 mountains of shattered opal tables. A heavy tarp over each one sneezed the wind. I must’ve been two 

years old when I first asked father and older brother why there were so many masked caretakers 

moving between the tarps. Older Brother looked at Father with fear in his eyes, and Father leaned 

down to take my shoulder. He pointed across the slopes and over the grass at the greenhouses, and

 told me, “We are tomato growers, my son. They are helping me because it's too cold for tomatoes to 

grow by themselves. So I’ve brought many here. Yes or no, do their suits frighten you?”

“Yes, father. I don’t like them.”

The caretakers looked like Beekeepers. Their shadows lurched behind the transparent flaps. Heavy hoods covered their heads and shoulders, and black mesh and breathing tubes disguised their faces. When my father spoke to them, they bowed like the dragon heads on a king’s throne. Silver gripped pistols hung from the same spots on their bodies as I kept my lunchbox.

“They are not human, my son. They are from the world of magic where the awake meet the sleeping. They are to be feared, but they are also my friends and they listen to me, so they won’t hurt us. But my power has its limits, and you must never go to the greenhouses. You must never bother them.”

In all my years searching for this place where the sleeping dreamers meet the awoken disappointment, I never once smelled a tomato or saw one leaving the greenhouse. The caretakers hauled wheel barrels, carried gas tanks, and drove trucks, but not one time did I see their suits stained with the red blood of a tomato seed. I didn’t see a tomato vine until years later while visiting the city of frost and rain. There in the cracked sidewalks along towers lost in the murky clouds, between crumbling buildings covered in plywood, in the spot against the stoop of a brothel where the dogs pissed, I saw a green vine with little leaves and tiny buds. Then a storm brought more rain than ever before and washed it away.

One night a strange truck stopped in front of our home. Its engine tapped the windows as its huge beams flooded our rooms with light. Father stumbled out bleeding from his neck and bicep. He stormed into the house and hurled his clothes to the floor. Glistening crimson pools soaked each garment.

In the bathroom, I heard Father scream as Mother ushered my siblings back. I saw Father through the razor light in the darkness splash rubbing alcohol into his foaming wounds. He swore booming vengeance and filled the house with the chatter of curses. His fist banged the walls and broke mirrors. “Your father has been in an accident and can’t afford a doctor,” she told us as she pushed us back into the dark of our bedrooms. Strange men in black suits stood guard around him, holding heavy machine guns, they kept guard at the windows at door.

Later just as I neared my 12^th birthday a soaring wind swept the house. The blades of a helicopter flew overhead. Police sirens filled the air as a dozen or more cars appeared. In the chaos Mother pulled me away from the window as Father locked himself in the vault. The police tore down the front door.

With armor and flashlights, they searched every hall and room until they found my oldest brother hiding in the bathroom. They dragged him away in the night and took him into the sky on the helicopter, and I haven’t seen him since. Sometimes I wonder what happened or if it just became another secret, but mostly I blamed Father who hid. To this day I have nightmares about my brother leaving the house and entering the forbidden greenhouses never to return.

I asked Mother and Father but they never explained to me what happened. We all loved him, but he must’ve done something to upset the police, yet they remained silent and pretended the entire incident never occurred. As his birthdays came and went, my mother and father, found solace sitting in the bedroom with needles in their arms. They told me that my oldest brother never even existed. So I declared to them that I’d leave to a foreign land and never see them again.

With the moon full and bright, I left the comforts of home and ventured beyond the gate of fences around the greenhouses. I followed the secret ways around he showed me to see if he left any evidence behind. The places he and I spent time together now crumbled and sank into cracks in the mountain. Dead trees, fallen forts, rusted cars. Even the tape around the greenhouses blew in the wind as the tarps ripped and animals scampered out.

Before I lifted the tarp to step inside I heard the heavy breathing of a caretaker. He stood at the threshold waiting for me with a filter in his mouth and a net of vines and webs over his face. He shooed me away but I didn't move, so he removed his helmet and mask. He was the oldest man I’d ever seen, balding, missing teeth, so shy that he only looked at my shoes. Instead of asking me to leave, he asked me if I needed a ride back home.

I stole one of my brother's guns out of his room and shot the caretaker with it. Then I went inside the greenhouse while he bled on the cold ground. Pale lights kept watery pipes warm and pollen gas floated in the air. In glass boxes of purple soil and black liquid huge roots curled into tight rocks. I followed the roots from greenhouse to greenhouse as the caretaker screamed at me to return.

Each Greenhouse nurtured another set of roots thick as a drainage duct. I heard something like crying, so I continued into the darkness, running from ruined to ruined tarp. Strange men rose from the dirt and lurched forward. They all asked if my father had returned. The living material in the glass boxes overgrew and spilled out to the floor, planted sprouts in the rock and squeezed until water pooled from plates of slate.

In the heart of the greenhouses, a wicked tree emerged from a wreath of blue thorns. It held several faces and echoed with the vibrations of a thousand furious ghosts. When I touched it, I lost my hearing and sight in one eye. I never forgot how important this discovery was to me. Never again did I look into the greenhouses, because I cut off water to the entire system, broke every pipe, and shot all the wrinkly caretakers.

Once the tree died, I saw a woman and her little girl crying on the beach. Around them lay wreckage that sprawled out for miles. I went down to meet them, and they told me about the great battle that happened here years ago, around the same time as my brother was taken. They said they searched for the swords of their lost loved ones. I offered help but I never had any intention.

I learned wisdom from the dead caretakers, and from the withering tree of bad dreams that in deceit therein lies victory. In its dying gasp in my blindness, I saw empires greater than the ones my father imagined, and though most people wouldn't like it, I’d be successful in my ambitions. I’d use human meat to flow the nerves of my corporation, as I used the blood they spill to funnel fuel to a rocket. The moon shined bright for me that night, and I knew my ship could reach the stars. Earth receded into the memory banks of the age as mankind migrated as it always has to new worlds beyond the stars, and I was destined to lead them to this glorious fate.

As the woman and her child mourned over the rusted armor and broken swords bobbing in the waves, I turned over sheet metal and crashed drones. Broken factory machines, car parts, cash registers, amid broken masts, salt-soaked doors, and blades of broken glass. As they looked over the waves beating against the hauls of enemy ships flying black flags towards some distant shore, I took every sword for myself and fled without them noticing.