The Burning Tower

The Burning Tower

Graham Swanson

 

Severe ulcers of regret channel tragic outcomes to the fortune teller under the distant tent. Her smoke is in the

air, but no one dares cross the creeks and old roads covered in thorny branches coveted by the badgers and

nighthawks. The prince of sorrow stood petrified with his lance still in hand, the chipped blade covered in moss

and spider webs. He sent a mean text message, then another, and another, completely vindicated,  because right

before sunset over the horizon of his earliest lovedreams, the ire of poisonous rats infected the brains of the once

wise wizards in the castles of victimhood, and bred the greed of the vaultkeeper to enlist his rioters to loot the

secret catacombs for the lost master manuals. The prince offered warnings to his witches after these rioters

appeared in the night to demand ransom for the safety of the manuals, and he paid with blood, his lust, and by

taking on a curse never to sleep again. The rioters didn’t know that the naive prince knew nothing of these

manuals. 

Other elites rode stallions up mountain slopes past the peasants hauling barrows of filth, called themselves warriors because they witnessed some battle or another and knew an armbar or two, or they stayed in their estates practicing harpsichord and studying the poetry of the elder warriors who conquered the world 10000 moon cycles ago. This prince maintained an unspoken romance with the young nuns of the old convent, and the ancient witches of the blackwood coven while practicing his honor of lighting all 10000 candles of the glass cathedral.  The nuns listened to him chop wood from the other side of wooden doors, and the witches summon demons to bow before him. Orphans hidden under black hoods followed him through the trees to witness his cruel betrayal. The insane wizards rewarded them with droplets from the essence of smoking elixers.

Despite the falling leaves and brief daylight, the clouds scattered and kiddie pools evaporated. Wasps built cities within the doors of broken-down trucks. Limping garbage rodents fled the gunfire of blind old men on the higher porches of ghetto homes. Neon vested and protected in heavy boots, the oppressed peasants of the land sipped hot coffee and battled to move their dying vehicles from the bare patch on the lawn. It's all gone, the good things, the young beautiful witches masquerading with fruit in their laps, and the saintly maidens soon heard the war horn blow, and they went off to battle in the desert. Yet the prince took his impunity when the forbidden tomes fell into his lap to take the crumbling pages to the moonlight, and he stayed there until the peasant vehicle erupted in the morning sunrise and finally left. Fugitives from the alleyways reeking of crystal meth and propane peeked into windows and looked under a neighbor’s boat. 

Once he learned all that he thought he knew belonged to the minds of good lords who died back when paper money earned enough people a house to call their own, and how they created races of carnivorous monstrosities to roam the world on the book, how they rendered the civilization of the elves to smoldering ruins, and how they grew mighty speaking forests, and how the drug addict and the alcoholic created a spectrum between a depressed doomer who gets stabbed to death in an alley and dies huddled in trash, promiscuous ladies who travel all over the world but always end up either going back to their vineyards or being strangled with telephone wire in a motel, power hungry, resentful men who understand psychology and the weaknesses of power, and the hermit living in solitude on a mountain sanctuary. All those faerie tales about true love and defeating the dragon fell mute because the peasants received the benefits of association in relation to their lords, but few maintained the charms and splendors illustrated by warrior sainthoods. 

Books existed to help the peasant, but the peasants used visual language not written to communicate, so without alcohol the information interested too few, and most came away believing that any talk of helping peasants overthrow their lords came from the mouths of assholes who just wanted to strip religion from the land and let foreigners invade. They gladly worked in their lord’s field but grumbled every springtime when they had to give the lord an egg for the fertility festival. When gold rained from the sky, the smart peasants left for the college while the others birthed more children and beat each other over the heads with clubs. 

This made them fun sport for the knighthoods with no battles to claim for their ancestors. On misty mornings they hurled lances through the chests of peasants armed with wooden forks and butter knives. Those peasants were no match for the full suits of armor and storm bridled horses. The peasants wondered why the knights didn’t chase after the giants who stole their pigs, but their foolish fathers just made things worse every single time they tried to get the knights to stop attacking them and maybe do something about the monsters. Peasants really just need to work harder, because this land belongs to the honored ancestors of the conquered legions unrivaled to all the malcontents created by war and neglect. 

The prince closed the books, and called the witches to tell them what he read, but despite ancient wisdom of the zodiac, the information changed nothing to them, because they lived in the woods, and so what if they lived under the spell of relief from a turbulent home, they remained in their swamp covens. And since he read forbidden words, on the day the zodiac restarted all the knights died in the armor, and their castles crumbled. Prisoners trapped in the dungeons went free because rats carried keys to them from under the cages. The prince slowly, painfully turned to wood, then stone, and the saints still visited him to give the idol whiskey and kisses for good luck in the coming harvest.

Night Echo

 Night Echo

by Graham Swanson

Kale enjoyed the quiet hours of midnight in the village between time zones. She worked at the gas station between two village hotels and the abandoned theatre. She scrolled on her phone and made nasty remarks on social media until the censors banned her accounts. During the usual night, a few young cops might come in to use the bathroom, unless a bus stopped. Then she faced the nightwalkers, midnight drifters, and mystical gypsies as she rang up blue Gatorade and cigarettes coming in from smoking borders behind the darkened rails.

The magical woman asked Kale if she wanted to see the love of her future, the outcome of a journey, the wealth of gold. Astrology. Tarot cards. Crystal balls. Magic amulets. Kale watched them all shuffle back onto the bus and turn to steam under the currents of freezing rain and speeding bursts of light. On their way fast to nowhere. Sleeping like angels. 

  Overall Kale enjoyed her job but the way some of the hooded men lurked in the parking lot looking into the windows without coming in made her wish that she had a co-worker there with her. She kept her cell phone at hand, leaving it on the charger, looking out at the sifting wind dragging strangers with the red wheat. Sometimes they waited in their cars outside the building, sometimes they walked out of the wheat fields and grouped together around burning barrels in the alley. Sometimes they turned up beaten and stabbed in a turned over boxcar not far from the gas station. Most soared away into the speeding oblivion of highway traffic and joined the blank faces on the wall. 

     Kale just turned 28. She hoped to resume classes at one of the small local schools along the riverfront for outcasts. She quit school the first time. Every single day she woke up and thought about finding a shotgun and shooting him in the face or smacking his skull with a baseball bat. He married a stripper from the dance club down the road. She didn’t like to think about it. She didn’t like to call it that. She just scrolled on her phone, tightened her mask around her ears, and looked out for tramps getting gas. 

At the flickering of lights, a stranger pressed against the fogged glass walls. This hooded figure didn’t wander off into the ether, he breathed into the glass and left bloody handprints on the condensation. He burst through the doors gasping, one arm missing, blood jetting onto the linoleum tiles and smearing across the glass, leaking down his jacket, pant legs. Buckets of blood splattered onto his boots as he hobbled over to Kale, blue faced, his eyes reddened and his pink mouth balking, soundless moaning for her to call for help. Kale reached for the store phone and pressed the emergency key but no tone rang on the other end. She dialed 911 on her cell phone just as the power went out and the man fell to the floor. 

Only his twitching boots made noise scraping on the floor, blood gushing out of his socks. A stick of bone still grinded on the tiles. Kale bowed over the counter to examine it under her flashlight. Little bite marks gnarled the wet joint bone. A heavy shadow fell over the gas station and even the lights outside the pumps went off, and then the cash computer went off, and the beer cooler shut off and melted under the door. 

Kale kept telling herself that a car is coming. A car will come and help will arrive. Something scraped at the ceiling over his head. It started with small scratching but then it turned into long deep raking sounds. The heater stopped working as the air conditioner and vents fell from the ceiling and crashed down on the coffee station she just finished restocking. Heavy breaks of thunder fluttered overhead, and the shadow lifted from the store. The ceiling pressed down as a tornado of cold air cycloned the building, shattered the glass and hurled the dumpster into the gas pumps. On the other end of her phone call, 911 emitted a tornado siren.  She kicked the lottery machine. Outside a fire started over the gas pumps.

Late January snowfall built up around the ditches. Kale stole a bunch of food and stuffed it in her jacket. She hurried out the door to find her car flipped upside down on top of one of the hotels. The clouds dropped lower and lower as horrendously warm winds thawed the frozen moisture on her cheeks. She hurried to reach the lobby of the hotel before whatever lurked above the clouds found her there. Once inside she began to eat the snacks she pulled from the shelf. Instead of a cool, lit up lobby with the night clerk she has a crush on waiting at the desk, she found wind blowing against curtains, and shattered fountains. No one around. A lamp lay broken on the floor. The paintings lay face down. Only one room light burned under the door. Kale finished her snack and left the garbage in a broken pot. She knocked. “It's an emergency. Let me in. Let me in.”

The door floated open and inside sat a pretty redhead at a table with a glass orb and desert crystals all around her bed. The magical woman from not long before. Kale saw her sometimes with a backpack asking for rides in the parking lot. The strange woman recognized Kale too but she never learned the face that went with the name.

 “I am the mistress Night Echo of Silverchair ,” she told Kale, and offered her a glass of bitter elixer next to the table amid a ring of candles. 

Kale shook her head. A shattered mirror lay on the table. A dagger buried in the hardwood sparkled in the candlelight. She thought she heard whispers from the tiny purple flames. The strange woman looked younger than her, yet tattoos covered her shoulders, fingers, and bare feet. A deep resentment fell over her face when she looked away from the light, like she was waiting for someone to die. 

“No, no." Kale said. "We need to get out of here. Something just wrecked the gas station. Someone is dead.”

“Yes, I know. You can leave if you want, but it won't go away. Yes, Kale. I've seen you around. Slip out of those terrible work clothes. You don't need them anymore. I have some nice comfortable robes in the drawer. You’re welcome to them.”

“We can’t stay here.”

“Why not? I've been waiting for you to come. That thing outside. I saw it. It won't be coming back for a long time.'' She touched the largest crystal with love and care. Inside, a heartbeat. “You see, I summoned him. I summoned him here, Kale.”

“That's not possible.”

“Not at first, but here, where the time zones never change, I find that there are many stars that don't shine in the rest of the world, there are places that don't appear on any map, and there are lost men and women who come and go like a bus stop.”

‘Why, why did you do that?”

“Sit down. It's 60 degrees outside. Soon tornados of ice will fall, and you’ll freeze to death before you can reach your… little home. That's right. That must really bother you. I see it in the crystal, Kale. Sit down, it's warm in here, there are two nice beds, and there’s me, the arms of Night Echo, the sorceress of doom.”

Kale looked into the crystal beyond on the center of the table, and she felt the dark rings around her eyes pull her under. The door slammed shut. The chair felt comfortable. She’d been standing all day. Warm too. Despite the frost growing on the window, the power lines down sparking in the parking lot, the fields of snow melting under the small fires, warm clouds blowing fog from empty field to empty field.

“Now, let me read you.”

art: The Sorceress, Jan Van De Velde II, engraving, 1626

Beyond the Web

Beyond the Web

Graham Swanson

 The knife killed the monsters that followed him to his home, killed the puppets with human faces 

waiting in his basement, and killed the things watching him in the attic. He still heard them mounting 

in the dark, slurping the cells from dead flesh, prying up floorboards, and seeking the smell of 

blood. They remained barging against the locked door. His daughter screamed and screamed as they bit 

off one of his fingers and broke his nose. The witch warned him this would happen but he didn’t listen 

to her wisdom, he just drank the elixir from her pot and brought her wood to burn.

Buford came far from his home. The witch somewhere out there laughed at him, her youthful skin swollen with moisture and vitamins, disintegrating to malnourished green cracks and pale red sagging flesh. She told him to find it there over the fencing where the wolves protect the forest.

Buford carried his knife to the well cover in a heaving hurry that pounded wind and pus against his eardrums. The hallow wind blew fog around blackened trees and covered animus tracks with fallen leaves. Creatures of the dark scampered in the thick trenches of garbage water, old men smiled from veils on unlit porches and clouds of smoke. He heard her screaming at him from the other room. The wall muffled her strained clamor of violent ponder, yet he still heard it from the moon and stars.

The cover lifted for him when the clouds circled the moon and the branches formed a lens through which the pale light beamed. It shined on Buford, colored the blood on his arms and cheeks a bright silver, and invoked a salt smoke to lift from the bottom of the well. He looked down to see if any faces of water awaited him, then he took one last look at the knife. The blade forged from the green blood of the last albino spider cut through the webs sealing the well. Strips fell down to the bottom of the well as spiders crawled up Burford’s arm.

The voices from the well mumbled as the opened became clearer with each strike of the knife. The temperature around the well dropped. Everywhere else the leaves dripped and fog rose from pools of sinking rainwater, but as the well opened more and more Burford felt his warm blood steam as it leaked from his ears and eyes. The mist froze around him like soft snow and turned the trees overhead white. His wrist ached and back locked up, enduring the grinding bones and muscles, and kept chopping at the webbing. Spiders crawled into his jacket for warmth. His knife cut through the thick blankets of web-like ropes.

The screams drowned by the wall vibrated as the ground froze to crystals. Buford's waders snapped the blades of grass. He tore out knots of web and tossed it down on the ground. The spiders bit his chest and neck. In the darkness, he barely saw them but felt them tingle the sores on his flesh, the tender scars, and the pus-filled blemishes and rip off pieces of his skin to devour. Tiny hairy legs trembled upwards into his nose and eyes. He smashed the spiders against his face but more climbed from the webbing strewn across his arms and hands back onto his clothes and balding head.

The way almost became clear enough for him to dip his head down, but in the freezing enchantment over the ancient stones, he saw only snow falling in and a whirling lash of dry fog. Buford heard the screaming wall grinding against the ground at wicked speeds. The naked bodies receded back into darkness. When the knife quite cutting the webbing he looked at it again, feeling its handle with frozen numb fingers, he found the blade bent and dulled by layers of oozing web. He screamed into the night under cyclones of blood drops and curtains of fog.

The pommel tassel blew over his wrist. The eye looking after him winked and he felt the witch’s hair against his knuckles and between his fingers. He opened his palm to let the knife drop and a fountain of spiders flowed from the holes in his glove to the ground. The naked faces burst into flame around the well, arranged in a circle, all went quiet as the mist front the well changed to bright green. Buford leaned against the well and breathed it in.

The fog turned to smoke, but it didn’t hurt his lungs like cigarettes. It smelled like warm soot and charred birch sap. He tore off his clothes and watched them crawl away under a million spider legs. The frozen air chipped off the blood on his body. He lowered one foot into the well, then the other. The heat of a radiator warm his bare feet. He lowered himself down then let go of the bricks. The well went down for miles underground, to a tunnel that he crawled under long enough to cover his body in dust. On the other side, he heard the stretching metal of a huge cover larger than a cloud overhead and a warm wooden floor that stretched for miles. He scampered through the dark leaving a trail of filth behind him towards the far light hanging high over the ceiling. He climbed over bails of dust and webs, heard spring rattle above him. He peeked from the high cover to see the light, see where he managed to get to, and it looked like a bedroom, but not his own. He lived in a crack hotel on the outskirts of the factory where he worked as a welder. Wooden panels covered everything, the stitches hanging from the giant bedside look handcrafted, and no power cords divided the room. Oil burned in the lamps and a fireplace on the other side heated the room.

He stepped out to see who slept on the massive bed but he heard an earthshaking scream. “daddy! There’s something scary in my room”

Buford watched a giant spider leap from its covers as a larger, louder spider burst into the room. He dove under a sock but they all saw him skid on the smooth open floor. He felt a million eyes on his back. He knew his only chance was to escape back under the bed but to his horror the tunnel he came in through no longer existed.

“Kill it, daddy! Kill it!”

Across town, Buford’s daughter pretended to sleep comfortably in a big bed surrounded by pillows and stuffed animals. She was too afraid to sleep because she thought she had a dream of her biological father living in the woods dragging her by the hair screaming at her to throw away the clutter of bathing soaps she left in the shower into an ancient well. She almost fell asleep, then awoke screaming into the peace of night and the troubled dream leaked from her memory, but she still heard his screams. It came from under the bed. She looked down and met a spider on the floor. She called on her stepdad to come in. He burst into the door soaking wet only wearing a golden bath towel.

The witch, youthful again with silky black hair and red lips came to the door behind him wearing a fur bathrobe. “Did you have another nightmare?”

“No,” their step daughter whimpered. “I saw a spider. It was big and scary.”

“This old house.” the step dad looked out the window. It began to snow. “It must be the weather. The bugs are getting inside.”

the witch took the stepdad by the shoulder. “It’s gone now, wherever it was.”

“Try to get some rest, sweetheart.” the stepdad told his stepdaughter “Do you need some water or another blanket?”

“No, thanks. I’ll be okay.” He tried to hold back tears and terror. Her stepdad noticed the tense muscles in her face, but decided not to say anything.

“Good night. We’ll have oranges and bacon in the morning.”

“My favorite!”

“that’s right.” The witch smiled, and she brought the stepdad out of the room. “Sweet dreams. We love you.”

The stepdaughter looked out the window cuddling her stuffed animals and watched the snow build up outside. Somewhere out there her real father still looked for her. The scars on her arms and fingers from where his hunting knife slashed her muscles never healed right and still hurt on the night of the attack. Before she fell asleep she thought she saw a shadow at the window of a large spider. A dozen long legs, a hundred eyes, and a shape set of pinchers gleaming in the moonlight like a blade of hot steel.

art: "The Crying Spider" by Odilon Redon, 1881

The Spanish Horse

       

The Spanish Horse

by Graham Swanson

NOTE: A SPANISH HORSE WAS A MEDIEVAL TORTURE DEVICE.

        After the war ended, a wild judge from the rubble of what was once the Magnificent City declared the 

death penalty Null and Void and replaced it with the sentence of public torture. His royal interrogators 

built a great sawhorse in the middle of the ruins so that the survivors living in the destruction witnessed 

the operation. It appeared overnight like morning glory, the sharpened wedge gleamed like the sun on a 

smooth beach, fifteen sharp feet in the air, a puddle of blood already left black stains on the grass 

growing underneath its mighty legs. The judge hired the Grand  Inquisitor of Amaymon to oversee the 

process. 

       He entered court wearing a red tie and black cape. Oiled feathers covered his face and arms.

Under the Broken Cross of the Great Crusade, the Inquisitor took on the heavy suede of the red robes under a black hat. Every day he patrolled the prison and looked into each cell with his men. They stopped at the end of the hall, torches in hand, to pull a thin pale man from a flooded hole in the ground. He punched and kicked, bit and spat up mouthfuls of dirty water on their boots. The Inquisitor felt no remorse and smiled at the doomed man. The pit didn’t break his spirit. The “Math” class didn’t either. Nor did the back-breaking labor packing bullet into magazines.

        “I’m innocent. You’re killing an innocent man! A reasonable man! A human being!”

        “You were one of those conspirators who rioted against our great Fortress and spread subversion to our people, yes?”

        “Where is your compassion? Where is your heart?”

        The Inquisitor's men twisted his arms and beat him until he collapsed into their arms.

“Now I tried to help you and get you moved to the deadly disease testing ward, but the judge said he needs it to be dramatic. Perhaps If you went before a painting of His Honor, and confessed to trying to demoralize the good folk of our new order, tell the public you will plead for mercy even though you are trash, maybe we can get you stacking plague bodies in the catacombs under the city.”

        The Prisoner found no words in the bubbles of blood swelling in his mouth. Once a fearless orator known across broadcast towers, he’d been in prison so long without an audience or person to talk to that he forgot how to use words. Without seeing the sun in years, his eyes sunk into the back of his head. He forgo what the wind sounded like, and how the ground warmed up in the morning. Like a sailor prepared to die at sea, he spat on the floor and told them again, and mumbled under his breath. 

“Now, we want peace, and we want to restore all that was damaged. Look at it this way, you are on the brink of a new era. A lot is riding on your shoulders. More than there has ever been in your entire life. You’ll be up there for many days now, so meditate on this woe as you approach your death with dignity. The whole world will follow our testament soon, and you were the first to hear it.”

The Inquisitor’s men dragged the inmate by his feet across the loose stones of the under-dwelling to the platform that rose from the mushrooms and stagnant puddles to the bright pale overworld above. The light blinded the condemned. Once the glare wore away he opened his unswollen eye, he saw clearly the Spanish Horse erected above him with robes and stones ready. Deer lept from a broken wall to untamed bushes. Seabirds built nests in the sills of fractured silohs, and children played naked amid the cannons of wrecked tanks and emptied assault rifles.

The Inquisitor led the procesion. They escorted him to a platform of stairs, each one creaked and bent under his shrunken feet. His thin, atrophied legs trembled. Each creek made a horrible sound that burrowed into his spinal discs like a bad memory. In every blown-over building, he saw candles and cold, furious faces. Sunlight warmed his face. His guts turned to lead. His blood turned to mud. His heartbeat hardened as his feet moved faster. He kept singing lullabies to the rye fields blowing between sections of destroyed city, and to himself, a single spell as the Inquisitor's men ran a sharpener on the wedge of the Spanish Horse. A woman under a fowl mask blessed the blade with sacred well and asked him for last words.

“I'm not the only one bleeding here. The past is never done repeating. You know what I say is true.”

“Talmage the Deceiver, may you be purified and returned to the sacred well.”

    The Inquisitor, the Priestess, and the armed men all prayed out loud together. "Thank you for the strength to crush our enemies. Thank you for sending these heavenly devices down to us."

 The woman under the fowl mask uttered holding the hand of the prisoner. She gave the signal for the men to begin the torture. They tied a bag around his head and placed him on a slide to lower him onto the wedge. Once saddled, they held his legs down and strapped the cuffs to his ankles, and then dropped the stones. Each one weighed fifty pounds, and when they stopped midair, an unmistakable report of pain sent all the animals and children fleeing back into their hiding places.

The guards sat with their machine guns on top of the walls. If a foot broke off and he rolled over, their orders to shoot on sight earned them accolades among the Inquisitor’s office.

The first day he screamed and screamed and screamed until the sun rose again.

Then he sat there moaning, moaning, moaning.

By the third day, he sat still, and quiet. The children came back out to curiously loom over rooftops to see the shade of the Spanish Horse expand in the clouded sunlight.

On the fourth day, hawks arrived and packed at the mask over his face, and pulled tendons from his shoulders.

By the fifth day, a cloud of flies covered the man and chewed through the holes in his face bag.

By the sixth day, the wedge cut through half his body. The blade stopped at his ribs.

The children dared each other. Go over. Go there. The young girl with red hair kept telling them "no no", but they called her a coward and a witch, until she accepted the gang’s dare, and from the rooftop, she planned her route around the guards.

The girl crawled under fallen roads, jumped over pits full of lice and rotten clothing, climbed up the scaffolding of a windmill leaning from a building to jump over the heads of the armed guards quietly, then she crawled into the gutter pipe and rode it down to the bushes below. The guards heard the snapping of branches and flutter of alarmed cats. They carried their assault rifles around torn chain links and melted beams. The small girl huddled her body as small as she could make it, and crammed herself into a water hole where a brick used to be. They found nothing and went back to monitoring the condemned.

The girl broke free, scratching her knees and elbows, and creating a deep gash above her eye. The blood got in her hair and eyes, but she experienced far worse bruises playing in the foggy towers by the collapsed bridge. She rubbed dirt and sediment into the wound until the bleeding stopped. It burned like a cooking sheet, but she knew that once she found watershed clean it out and wear a proper headwrap and ice. She looked around wondering why the guards failed to notice her, and she realized that her fingers, neck, toes all covered in sheets, soot, and blood like everything else in the playground of ruins.

The man on the Spanish Horse loomed before her, hanging there like a black ribbon caught in the barbed wire. His head down, hands tied behind his back, ankles exposed and drenched in blood. Dogs carried off the slabs of meat from under the Spanish Horse. Flies the size of darts flew out of tears in his hood. Blood trickled to the ground below. Black birds swarmed overhead. Tender blue flowers grew on top of fallen roofs around him. The girl listened to the wind, to the flies, to the smoldering of the guards smoking, to the wheezing of their lungs, and she crawled over glass and broken wheels until she stood under the shadow of the Spanish Horse.

Nightshadows

Nightshadows

By Graham Swanson  

Shadows of windows, ripped awnings, the harvest pole in the middle of the street bent in the collapse of shrieking wind. The shadow stranger lurked in the strained light of midnight welcome. Innocent deaths occurred far away inside the homes beyond the sleeping, beyond the businesses streets, close to slick stones pressed into the ancient ground. Prisoners who rebelled astride war rats once reigned here as mighty kings, but once the storms passed mere stories exist alone.  Remains get dropped here sometimes in garbage bags or in coffins, other times hung from the power lines, even laid out in the middle sidewalk peacefully outstretched in the lamplight and decorated in lashes.  The shadow stranger comes here but never looks into the windows to rob the stores, nor does he drop off love notes to teenage runaways. He just stops and disappears as his shadow does as he enters the brightest part of the pavement.

The humming lamp eats him, and only his shoes are left in the morning found by the pointy-eared children harvesting aluminum to sell. The gray-skinned, yellow-haired kids flee into the alleys but they never get far. The light calls them back at night, and they are struck blind and disfigured. They swear at the sign of the fabulous monster, once the children are gone, the man in the shadow walks back from the same direction in the same clothes, concealed by darkness, never brightening even as he gets nearer. The light is quiet, but like a silent film, some linger around the green paint, touch the wet metal, and let the light warm them from the mist gales. They hear voices within.

The city shut off power after wildfires encroached electrical generators. The lamp still glowed like a platinum island in the darkness. The worms rose from the dirt and squirmed into the light and the dead bodies of the decomposed gathered to eat. The monster of the light growled in pleasure. Its children ate and danced until they joined the vapor.

A woman rolled her stroller by one night and bumped into the shadow stranger. At first, she acted embarrassed and cast a blanket over the half-empty whiskey bottle and plastic bags containing her possessions. He didn’t stare, he didn’t even try to talk, all he did was raise both hands to his face, and emitted a shallow howl as he pulled them away, and she beheld the smooth flesh and red cheeks of a smiling child. She hurried away as he tightened his color and put both hands on his shoulders to slump back into the lamplight. That night her godmother heard all about the encounter, and she advised her not to worry about the spirits of the city. All the lost souls find their way to that lamp corner, and the dark shadow who is only revealed when he wants to be, guides them to black castles in the afterlife. 

Touch of Death

 Touch of Death

written by Graham Swanson

Travis balanced a pool cue on the groove on his forearm where the flesh healed into a thick cuff hanging off the smooth scabs of his wrist stub. He still felt painful spams of a phantom hand 6 months after the accident and he still smelled his own blood searing against the hot blade of the spinning torch machine at the factory. Losing his hand made it hard to rest a pool cue, but the bridge of bone and scar tissue formed a convenient slot. He slid the cue into the fleshy slot, set his stub on the table, and took aim at the shots he needed to take. He nestled the cue deeper into the groove, and used the hanging layer of scab and scar tissue as a guide, and like a magic hand helped him, his shot tapped the cue ball into his target, and it nearly fell into the corner pocket but it clacked against another ball by just a sliver.

Travis’s friends surrounded him and told him how close he came to winning the game. Beautiful women dressed in their best kept looking over at him from across the sticky floor, and he hid his gnarled stub behind his friends as he stood behind them in fear of being noticed. He wanted them to notice his eyes, how young he looked despite his age, flesh never scarred by acne, almost graduated with a degree in laser engineering, volunteered on weekends to clean litter from the park, but all people notice is the gnarled joint bone sticking out from purple layers of soft foamy crust. He still felt his hand crawling at their necks. The machine didn’t make a clean cut on his hand, it grabbed his hand and spun it around the center of a drill.

The girls at the bar laughed at him as the machine clamped around his hand twisted the wrist joint and tore veins from his arm until it left a string of blue and pink nerves coiled on the open safety guard. The tag lock hung on the ring splattered in blood. The engineer shouted at the supervisor, “I just drained its power!” As emergency whistles flashed and the machine shot out pieces of bone and sprays of blood at the people getting near. His blood covered the walls, the lights, the neighboring machines, and the entire workload nearby. The entire shop closed for calibration and cleaning, but that day never came because anyone who tried to get close to that machine or any other lost something or fell ill of a fatal disease.

At night he woke up from nightmares of his severed hand crawling up the bedside still beaten and bruised but dragging along tangles of vein and nerves in a tight blue rope. The pains in his missing hand shot up his arm and pulsed in his shoulder. He felt pockets of soreness throb in his neck and lungs. The factory blamed him for the accident. He never worked again because any time he stood before an appliance or piece of machinery, he felt his marrow exposed to the cold air, and the deep shame shadowing his sunken, marbled face.

The pretty girls knew it too. When they smiled and laughed with their friends, it was because they pondered about his condition, they called him a loser behind his back. Lots of people did. In Travis’s time, if you didn't get married at 18 or right out of college, you never got married. They wanted millionaires, lawyers, athletes, not amputees. Those available had hundreds of men available on their phones and dismissed anyone who couldn’t hold their attention every six seconds.

So Travis lived alone in an empty apartment in the run-down slums of town in the shadow of the abandoned factory that took his hand. The landlord lived in Florida, and let the apartment building fall into disrepair. Water didn’t run in the bathroom at all and only ran in the kitchen for two hours a day. Only the hall had a light. The smells of every bathroom in the building rose up into his sink. The stovetop melted when he lit the propane. He paid two thousand dollars a month for this pace. Rent rose again, beetles covered the windows, the heat didn’t come on and only one room had a window.

It took so much out of him that he bought a gun and tried to shoot himself with it in the bathtub but just before he pulled the trigger someone knocked at his door. He swung the door open. A little kid stood there. He held open a sack and asked for candy. He forgot that it was Halloween. He almost told the kid he didn’t have any candy when three men pushed their way through the door and backed each other up with pistols.

They demanded his car keys.

For the first time in his life, he used the phantasms to his advantage. He still felt his missing hand, but now on the cold steel grip of his own pistol. He told the invaders that he’d get the keys for them because he just changed after a shower. He put his hands up, they pressed their guns into his face.

“don't you scream, just tell us where the keys are, and we’ll be gone.” All three of them looked like teenagers, the oldest and biggest one did the talking while the other watched the hall and the third watched the door. Travis felt his phantom hand squeeze the handle, he left it in the bathroom.

“It’s on the sink, near the bathroom, in my jeans pocket.”

The older trespasser told his two accomplices to stay put, and he pounced into the hall and entered the bathroom. He saw no dirty clothes or wet towels, nor did he feel the humidity of trapped steam in the ventless bathroom, but Travis felt his finger clip the trigger. He flexed the muscles in his invisible hand, and gunshots exploded in the bathroom. The oldest trespasser fall against the hall wall under the only light bleeding from several wounds in his chest, neck, thigh, and jaw.

The teenagers panicked and started shooting at Travis who hurried into his bedroom. He pushed his dresser against the door, but it didn’t hold them for long. Hands pried open the door and reached inside. Travis took the mobile radiator that heated his bedroom and slammed it against one of the hands. Two fingers bent backward. The last land reached inside with a gun. Travis hid on the other side of the dresser as fiery shots lit up the room and shattered the TV. He forced his hips into the dresser and pinned the kid’s arm to the doorway with the door. He screamed in pain, but Travis went through his pillows searching for the knife he kept sheathed in bear leather. With the spearhead-shaped blade he sliced at the hand until fingers dropped of, and then he impaled it to the doorway, and let it there with the boy still crying for help.

Travis kicked out the screen and jumped out the only window and escaped to the neighboring building where he hid away for the night. As he dozed waiting for the police, he felt the phantom hand crawling up his chest, onto his shoulder, and against his mouth and eyes. In the morning no police arrived, but bloody handprints covered his face. The right stars aligned in the sky, and the fortune-tellers with rotten faces living in the gutter told him as much. The worlds far away, much different and obscure, gave him their light and turned the machines against him, but in turn, gave him the phantom hand. He still felt it when pains shook his arm.

After the attack, he left the city to live in his hometown. The phantom hand followed him on the bus ride back. He wandered the foggy streets after a heavy rain shook the leaves from the trees until he found a narrow path open up in the forest where there was no path before. There, trees there turned white among black misshapen branches. He smelled hot food and bells and followed the path until he lost sight of the town, crossed a bridge, and come across a red cottage surrounded by hay and brambles. An old man with yellow eyes and a long white beard opened the front door and beckoned him inside with a plate of cabbage and fish fried in vinegar. He also had only one hand.

Travis went inside. Candles lit the rooms, and a coal furnace burned. Red sparks fluttered onto the dusty floor. The old man sat before an open book etched full of graphic scenes of ritual and sacrifice. Naked women kneeling before a two-legged behemoth with wings for arms and 9 appendages leaking from its stomach. Arms and legs hanging from racks cut off by tiny people with giant cleavers in an ancient city.

As the walls reddened with blood, the old man looked up at the Christmas tree in the corner and spoke as if wishing back on dear memories. The imagination he showed Travis depicted a crimson hand holding a candle over the moon as packs of hungry wolves drew near the halo of its light. “The stars will be up high for you. No matter how dark, they will find you through the clouds. There is no escape.” The pages flipped and turned carefully without the old man touching the book. The next page illustrated a hooded man with a crimson hand raising the dead from their catacombs.

In the news that night the town sighed in relief. The serial killer that stalked the town finally got buried, but to their shock, in the same cemetery as the town's founders. They all spat on the floor and felt sick knowing what he did, but no one spoke of it. The partially devoured victims still lived somewhere in town, and he swore vengeance on them all when the needles injected him with poison. Everyone wanted to forget, but too many still remembered him tapping on their windows late at night and asking for a phone to call help.

The killer murdered one entire family with four young kids, and 2 women living alone. Before the police arrested him, he tried to get into 12 other houses. He carried the bodies into the woods, butchered them on a stump in the middle of an ivy grove, and devoured the bones. He made sure to cut off each of his victim's hands and feet before he killed them.

Travis found work in a diner kitchen but thought about quitting every day. Some people he knew in High School came in one morning, with their spouses. These kids beat up on him back then while their girlfriends encouraged them. They moved away to the city once they graduated but still owned homes in the small town but only came back to collect on rent and deposit the money in the bank.

“Still living in town, Travis?” one asked in mock pity and they all pretended to care.

The phantom hand pulsed against their necks as they ate. Travis flexed it softly as if holding a little girl’s hand until it itched the back of a throat. He grabbed hard and raised his stub into the air, and one of them vomited all over the booth. He kept his hand raised and squeezed until they convulsed on the floor, grabbing at their neck blood and vomit oozed from their nose.

The others called for an ambulance but it never came. The snotty brat died on the diner floor covered in omelet, blood, and bile. The others ran outside but didn’t get too far. Large hounds guarded their cars and chased them out into the street with the other meat-eaters of the forest.

Travis spent the night watching young lovers kiss in the park, his hand tickling the back of their necks, and lifting each other's shirts. They giggled and acted innocent. They never knew Travis watched them and guided his phantom hand around their bodies. He felt the girl’s breasts and squeezed so hard that she slapped her boyfriend and stormed off. He felt sorry for them but decided to be more subtle next time.

Travis visited the graveyard and spent all night moving from grave to grave. They didn’t make it easy to find, but the stars shined for him, and the north wind blew, and there amid fluttering cloaks and ghost fog, glowed a halo around the grave of the infamous serial killer. The old man’s voice chanted with a coven of witches beneath underground tunnels. They rose their hands into the smoke of a thousand melting candles, as Travis rose his wrist into the waxy halo of light, and a new bone grew from the melting stub. A red flame burned where his hand once was as a new claw grew out from the newly formed flesh. The ground ripped open.  

Love Potion

 Love Potion

Graham Swanson 

4 of Wands

 Bring the exchange of ideas to ensure a universal need of approval and support. Seldom do the final wands turn on the heads of the illiterate against the unlearned. Too soon will the millennial find themselves widowed with the insufficient burden, as the oldest creep away to quiet catacombs. All will find the wash of fire turning the shiniest pink path to balms of bloody flowers where deer come to eat.

In these rings of destruction, after a hundred years or more, a special herb will grow from the charred ruins of temples of giants. The skeletons of iron towers bend towards the floodwaters, their shadows keep away the giant birds, and the pools created by silent stars nurture silver roots of a plant that hums in the night and fills the air with a narcotic haze. It’s a prize in the land of charcoal craters and giant cats. Burglars come from many villages and castles away to explore the haunted beds where the pedals erode. The rocks are coated in a fine dust of dead Lust Plant.

Regulators from insurance companies kept tabs on the collection and export of extract Lust plant and raw beds where it flourished. Eliza came from the islands of white beaches and open windows to investigate fraud in one of the offices in trembling black boxes in the middle of the New Capitol. She worked with former athletes in steel-colored suits, inexperienced yuppies straight out of college who collect music records from the 60s, and women from all over the world. The managers and people who ran the place averaged age 100. All of them former lawyers reached their substantial ages by a diet of red meat from endangered cows treated with enriched GMOs.

Eliza only liked a few of the people and felt that she had the most depressing life since she found the New Capitol unlike her home in the sunny islands. The streets turned white with frost in the morning and torrential downpours flooded the streets at night. Strange villages of weird folk of the fields surrounded the city and its cluster of counties. She would’ve stayed in the islands but the doctors told her that her body rejected the vitamin D from the sunlight, that her organs failed to digest seafood and rice, and that the problem is exacerbated by salty climates like ocean adjacent shores.

In the New Capitol, the sun seldom shined and night lasted for days. She took five-mile walks every night in costumes she created. She carried food prepared at home with her. The strange folk provoked her suspicions because they didn’t make as much money as her and they mostly worked what she saw as shitty jobs in food, cleaning, manufacturing, writing. However, the wealthy lawmakers of the ancient fields offered her a job in one of the most important offices in the New Capitol. She hated the entire place and wished she lived back on the islands. Her mission there was to monitor the insurance claims on the Lust Plant beds of the "Charming".

On the night of the grand musical Eliza went on a date with a young wealthy lawyer and met with her co-workers who traveled the world a little. They all agreed that the poor peasants are moot because most people are shit anyhow, and since the pandemic already killed off millions of people, what's the point of helping them? In other words, it’s as imperative as a medicine cocktail for the clinically ill, that they show no mercy for anyone trying to steal the Lust Plant, especially among the fields of strange folk surrounding the New Capital. Anything they create, music, literature, art, is inherently inferior to the comics parched together back in her beloved islands. She wanted no lovers. She didn’t like having her handheld in the snow. She didn’t want children, and couldn’t have them anyhow. She pursued a career instead and loved catching frauds and thieves.

Smoke stacks pumped purple fumes as tubes ad machines processed Lust Plant into potions. In the times after the Great Summer reduced crops to ashes, spread disease, incited the Balkanization of the content, and killed millions, the Lust Plant potion skyrocketed in demand. For men, it gave them both sexual vigor and incredible enthusiasm. Not only did it engorge their love flesh with blood, keeping their veins strong and stiff for hours, but it also prevented other sexual dysfunctions like premature ejaculation, STDS, and post coital anxiety. With that, it also made the moment of passion incredibly powerful, like teenagers or soap opera actors. For women, it made the most frigid person orgasm several times in one night only after a few minutes and made the most infertile three times more breedable, so that even one-time contact resulted in pregnancy. The average family consisted of eleven children. The refineries refined more and more Lust Potion to repopulate the humanity lost in the Great Summer. The Lust Plant was seen as vital. The most important substance in the land, and it only grew out of these beds of the most destroyed places.

The beds of destruction nurture the roots, and entire fields of these flowers grow where once towns and forests stood. These heavy vintages grow together to assemble a jungle of forbidden purple flowers. The wind carries their haze into the land and intoxicates wildlife with its effects. However, anything caught in the violet fog of the Lust Plant will not only be infatuated by its potent effects, but the haze will be so strong that someone will shortly fall into a coma that lasts for five days, and then kills them. As the plants die, they break apart and blow away, spreading seeds and haze as new ones grew on top.

Trailer villages popped up around these untamed masses of fuming flowers. People wore masks and kept thermometers on their phones that read the Lust Plant content in the air. Businesses arose that drove trucks, fixed tools, and sold parts for machines. Huge twelve-house silos rose to the sky. Banks and insurance companies arose to track the flowers and the trucks. Legends spread of gems hidden among the fatal coils of purple flowers.

The peasants of these villages survived the heavy haze. Some even ventured into the thickets to explore the flowery volcanoes of musk and came back out alive. They relished the extreme effects rumored to cause secret openings to appear behind the thorns and dead plants that unleashed their inner desires. Forbidden was the way, as the flowers nurtured moss that coated the ruins of the old world, so did the commissioners of its dearest earnings.

Eliza heard of the villages of strange peasants living among and worshiping the Lust Flower in her criminal profile orientation. One of the men who wandered into the flowers and returned. He immediately burst into flames. The peasants then watched in horror as he survived the fire with precious stones glowing in his hands.

The company sent their detective to the village to investigate and find out what they had in the flowers that they didn’t report on their insurance. She tightened a gas mask over her face and walked only in the moonlit roads because the sun hurt her skin. She found the village deserted, but bells rang in the flowers and staffs pounded the ground. Despite her investigation, she found no people, only empty buildings and trailer homes with food still on the table.

The flowers grew over the roofs and out of the well. Jewel encrusted skeletons littered the ground. Midnight drew near, so Eliza moved to her car to sleep for the night. She typed up her report and looked forward to escaping back to the New Capitol when she realized the moon grew larger under the haze drifting in the wind. A tap came at her window, and she put her work down to see one of the skeletons walking by his one hand guiding along the window as it knocked off the mirror.

Eliza stayed shocked in her seat, caught in disbelief as the dead walked out of their trailers, sat up from their seats, covered in moss, grass, and purple flowers. They wandered into the border of Lust Flower. She left her car and followed after them with her gas mask tight, and stockings high. Her boots mashed mud and snail shells. Fog obscured her lenses and the plant debris filled her respirator.

Bony hands took her by the skirt and tried to guide her along, but she twisted around to run back. She tasted the Lust dander on her tongue. It burned her throat and made her rest against the single wall of a fallen tower. The pain in her stomach went away, and the scars left by the sun went away.

The skeletons sank into the mud, but something else rose from the vines on the ground. The high plants blocked the moon and the stars, and she saw the shadow of a stone casket arise. The markings, the picture, all tonsured by plant slurry and erosion of time. She pushed open the lid. Beneath the bed of spiders and fungus, she found a skull attached to a spinal cord with no ribs, hips, or arms.

The tops of the flowers parted and the moonlight flooded through several arches to shine on her. She lifted the head up to see it closer and brought it into the light. Slowly it grew moist flesh and became soggy with warmth in her palms. Blood trickled down her arms as eyeballs rolled in its sockets and a tongue lashed against its teeth. Its muscles tightened as lymph nodes and sinuses sank into rivets. Blue lips appeared and eyelids slid over.  

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.