Monthly Archives: January 2015

The Grey Cloak, Chapter Two, First Draft

28 Wednesday Jan 2015

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“How will you find the path?” asked the wolf,
waiting on the water’s edge.

“What need have I of the path?
I am the woodsman’s daughter,
and I would know my way home
in dawn or dusk or clear or storm.
My grandmother’s house lies West,
and the sun is newly risen.
I need no guide
but my own shadow.”

“The forest is no place for a child,
but full of beasts roaming wild.
Take from me a cloak
to replace the one you left below,
that you may walk the woods
unseen, unbothered and unburdened.”

She followed his directions to a nearby tree,
where hung a monstrous hide. At her touch
it shrunk and smoothed into a grey cloak,
as fine and light as spider’s silk,
as soft as ash.

The winds obeyed her
when she wore the grey cloak.
They carried sounds to her,
a bird’s chirp,
a rabbit’s patter,
the heartbeat of each living thing,
for miles around,
and scents, too–
cooking on a stove
three miles West.
And amidst the bacon sizzling,
pancakes crisping,
syrup drizzling,
and tea steaming
in the winter air,
was unexpected company.

She let the winds carry her
the last few miles,
to the highest of the three oaks
overlooking her grandmother’s cottage.
There she sat upon a bough,
her eyes narrowed,
listening with her head tilted
and her ears pricked.

Through the window she could see
a pair of lambskin gloves,
with hands inside, she supposed,
folded neatly upon wool trousers.

“Well aren’t you a sight to see.
I thought you came to visit me,”
came a voice from below the tree.
“Or will you stay up there and leave us
the cookies to bake,
the beds to make,
the mayor’s son to entertain–”

“The mayor’s son?”

“The very same.”

“And what would he be doing here?”

“Come down and see, my ashen dear,
or will you stay up in the sky?”

“Perhaps I will, and learn to fly.”

“Are there cookies quite so high?”

“None I spy, none I spy.”

“And are there fires up there roaring?”

“None I found in my soaring.”

“And none inside, either,
after your mother spilled the tea
and drenched the whole pile of logs.
Be a love and help me gather the firewood.”

“My mother? Don’t you mean
your daughter?”

But she climbed down all the same,
and helped tend the drowned flame
while with the mayor’s son
her father spoke, and finally
he came to speak to her.

She would be moving away,
he told her, to cook and clean
for the mayor and his son.
who her mother did not fail
to remind her was
“so tall,
so fair,
so terribly dashing,” and
so on, and
so forth,”
so the very next day,
in the grey mist of morning,
she set out on the path–
but not before her grandmother
took the mayor’s son and
shook the mayor’s son awake,
and bade him follow after.

She walked the woods,
the mayor’s son drifting after,
commenting, from time to time,
on charming trivialities,
’til at length they stopped and sat.

“What lovely flowers grow by the path,”

he said, plucking one where it trembling stood
and pressing it to her nose.

Not so lovely as those off it,”

she said, pushing it away.

“And none so lovely ,”
and at her stare he stopped,
and let the hand reached forward drop,
“as the roses in my garden.”

“I suppose you’ll say
they smell sweeter?”

“Sweeter still, and even softer
than this cape you wear about you.”

“As fine and light as spiders silk?”

“As soft as ash, these petals red velvet,
and cream white,” he replied.

“How delicious your garden must be,
for you to describe it so,” she said.

“Smell it for yourself,
for I am told it possesses
sweetness to bend the–”

“The very soul?” She asked.

“The very same,” He agreed.
“But how did you know?
Never except in dreams
have I seen you in our garden.”

“Except in dreams?”

“Why yes, but always I have silly dreams,
and strange, my father says… But I remember
now the one long summer
when your father came to work for us.
Like death he was, thin and gaunt,
and father fed him just enough to tend the flowers.
It was for that debt
that your father sent you.
You must’ve come and followed him,
to know the scent and feel of my garden,
and it is that I must remember,
and see again in my dreams.
Strange though, for in my dreams….
but never mind.”

“Never mind what?” Ash replied,
and she could see his smile grow wide.

“You promise not to think me mad?”

“Promises are for… I promise not to think you madder,
than the madness that comes with dreams.
For I too have dreamed strange things.”

“In my dreams you wear
no ashen cloak,
but a wolf’s fur,
and where you walk
grows a path of stone,
perhaps marble, perhaps bone,
and behind you as you walk,
a long and twisted shadow stalks.”

“How strange dreams are!” She exclaimed.
“But not so strange as our own life,
where I am sold to be your wife.
Tell me, did you dream of that?”

“My dreams are not so wild, My Lady,
for your father has but said you’ll cook and clean.
But you too said you have strange dreams–
are these, I wonder, some of yours?”

“I fear I have too limited an imagination.”

“A sign of an honest mind,
which would leave me in, I confess,
quite a bind.”

“And why is that?”

“Because, my dear, I fear what you fear,
that soon we will both be stuck here,
tied together by our fathers,
and honesty would quite destroy
so many of my little joys.”

“I hope you will be more specific.”

“Hunting, cards, chess, roulette,
anything where you can bet.
I’d love an eye over a shoulder,
to make my calls a little bolder.”

“You would like me to help you cheat?”

“So well in town I can’t be beat.”

“Almost as well,” she laughed,
if you want men to play you.”

“Already thinking like a winner.”

“Or a dirty lowdown sinner,
but–”

“You’ll help me if I let you tend the garden,
I would bet.”

“That’s one game won.”

“Then it’s set.
As for marriage, let’s wait and see
what our fathers’ plans will be.”

The Silver Mare

26 Monday Jan 2015

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The Grey Lady greeted me this afternoon, and careful lest I should offend her, I offered her my arm and we began to walk, her fingers grasping my arm at first so gently, as is her way, her mirror eyes wide, unassuming and inquisitive, as though surprised to meet a friend, if friends we could be called, upon the road. I asked her if she returned to town for business or for pleasure, and learned, as we so often do with old acquaintances, of whom we can be so forgetful, that she kept horses, or rather cared for the horses of one who did.

He was a horseman like no other, who all knew by reputation. The youngest of four brothers, he was one of that unsociable and wealthy sort who are better known on paper than in their own person. He kept but one mare, who in the Grey Lady’s neglect had broken free and sought now for her true master, and now both Grey Lady and the horseman followed closely in pursuit of the beast, whose fiendish aims became all the more clear as the red glow of daybreak grew above and before us. None who had met the creature had survived its deadly rampage, a horse who by her fatal luck might claim herself kin of every black cat and unruly saltshaker.

“And how might I avoid this creature, if I chance to cross her fearsome path?” I asked the Grey Lady, who sweetly smiled, and bid me closer.

“Run not towards her,” she replied.

“And then away?” I asked.

“Never there either,” she answered.

“And how to stop her pillage and her destruction?” I asked.

“Why mount the beast, for those who meet her eyes will stare forever, and those who run will be slain, and those who cross her deadly path forever cursed. Mount the beast, and see what you can see on the back of such a creature. For those who stop in their path to watch her will see in the tunnel of her eyes only what they have seen before, but they who mount the great horseman’s steed will see all the world.”

Long we walked, until finally upon the horizon we saw the mare, her brute form swelling, her silver eyes wild, somehow compelling, her coat gleaming, on her flanks the fresh dew steaming. The wind whistled as she passed. The pale horse had come at last. I breathed what might be my last breath, and lay in wait for steed of Death.

The Grey Cloak, Chapter One, First Draft

21 Wednesday Jan 2015

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LISTEN CLOSE my grandchild dear,
and I will tell of far and near,
of how to conquer death and fear,
of little girls and wicked witches,
of empty chests without their stitches,
of rivers deep and forests wide,
and wolves that on the West Wind ride
of how our family came to be,
the story ours, both you and me,
and of another.

This is the tale of Ash:
she of the grey cloak,
who tasted the blood of the wolf,
and found strange powers,
who knew the color of the wooden sky,
and could smell, upon the wind
a lie.

Once upon a time,
in lands untouched by song or rhyme,
there lay a cottage in the woods,
where lived daughter and grandchild,
of the surname Riding Hood.
Her I think you will remember,
and in a dark and drear December,
grandchild grande dame went to see,
out in the darkness of the trees.

With scarves thick her mother wrapped her tight,
in every layer the dust of firelight.
For luck she spun her three times round,
then pushed her out into empty sound,
a wood of silence, dark and deep,
where she daren’t stop to sleep,
full of rustles but no noise,
not a place of children’s toys.

Long she walked and in dusk took seat,
eager to rest long-aching feet,
when suddenly to her surprise,
she caught a glimpse of brilliant eyes.

She followed far into the trees,
through roses dense that scratched her knees,
over a river with ice so thin, so very thin
that in she fell, as down a well,
and down
and down
and down
she sunk, ’til with a thunk,
she landed upon solid ground,
with air to breathe and all around,
a soft sound,
as of the wind sweetly soughing
as of a dust mite gently coughing.

Above her ran the rushing river,
down below a silver sliver,
a mirror of reflected sky,
sleek as satin, a blue velvet sigh,
and still within gold eyes’ sway,
she found her way in stolen twilight.

“Well isn’t this a sight to see.
I thought you came to visit me?”

In the dimness she spun worried,
the spell broken, her movements hurried.
She remembered she could not
breathe.
There was no way,
no way to leave.

She unwrapped her water-weighted cloak,
and from it brilliant firelight woke,
that burned away the water creeping,
that kindled eyes ’til now just sleeping.
She found that she could take a breath.
She thought that she had tasted death.
But still her way had yet to learn,
amidst the winding Windworld’s turns.
There was no back or up to go,
so through she fought with progress slow.
Awake the wind is hard to ride,
but she could do it if she tried.

At last the path turned to stone
or was that marble
or was that bone?
A vertebrae,
a cage of ribs,
a jaw that stretched her whole height,
a carcass of tremendous might,
a beast to freeze one’s very soul
that little girls could swallow…
could swallow…
That soughing
sighing
sickly
sound,
almost like,
breathing?
And all around…

Unsure if demon, god, or ghost,
Ash searched the tomb for her host.
When at her nape, she felt a prickle,
an icy creeping shivery tickle,
and in the water’s reflection saw
something rising from the maw,
a quickly coalescing cloud
that shook from the bones like a shroud.
She saw rows of teeth wide, agape,
and soon a furry, canine shape.

Lithely round her slunk the creature,
hunger in his every feature–
his silver mouth dripping fog,
in his stomach seething smog.
She felt small, a petty feast,
before so great a ghostly beast.
Smoky whiskers kissed her skin,
and at her scowl, the great wolf grinned.

She listened to his voice red velvet, cream
thick, warm like a shiver
of nighttime rain in jungles naked and unseen,
richer for their obscurity.
It was a growl possessing
sweetness to bend the very soul,
that promised (as no man could promise)
to be heard by her alone.

Starlight flowered around them.
They sat in pooling silver
and she let the night pass in stories,
and if he on occasion asked too probing a question,
“And where does your grandmother live?”
she would reply, “Oh, in the woods,
but that’s enough about me. Tell me about wolves.”
And then the wolf would tell her of lost things,
of wolves who chased the moon and sun,
of witches, winds, wolves and once,
of cheating death.

“Cut out the heart,
a pinkie bone,
nothing smaller,
and hide it in a sunless place,
or on the highest peak.
Death and love are stubborn wolves,
and eat their prey in one gulp
or not at all.”

“And can you conquer love also,
by cutting out your heart?”
The wolf considers.

“Both heart and host will decay
if left unwatered even a day.
Hearts cannot be kept
under lock and key, but put in earth,
like bulbs below frozen ground.
If anything, hearts alone call
for greater care than those in chests.
But the sun rises, and you will be missed.”

“Let me stay longer,” she asked,
until you have told me every story
Or if not, promise only that we shall meet again.”

“Lies are the domain of men and Gods,” the wolf replied.
“Why would a wolf make promises?”

Whilst passing the wolf’s bones,
she took off her scarlet cloak
and wrapped it around his cage of ribs,
tucking it in on either side.

“I would not see my mother’s or my brother’s bones
lie naked in the wind,” she said.

“The sun is rising,” said the wolf.

And missed she was,
if not by those the wolf intended.

The World of Cups, Draft Two

20 Tuesday Jan 2015

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I never expected to sit out at a siege at my summer job, and in hindsight, I should have asked for a raise. I guess I was so relieved to be alive (well, undead, but you know what I mean) that I wasn’t thinking. What can I say? I was young. Naive, even. Whiny and melodramatic, which, as I’m sure we can all agree, I am not today. Nobody’s perfect, and I fully intend to be a nobody for as long as I can. I’ve seen what happens to somebodies.

Speaking of somebodies, this was the first time I met my boss in person. Well, consciously, but that’s another story. Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that this was the first time she met me.

Threshold, the company I worked for, was under siege by a rival organization. I was, technically speaking, locked in a closet for most of it. But when I say technically, I mean technically the way someone might say they were technically in Australia when really they were in Australian airspace, or the center of the earth directly under Australia, or in America when they were really on the moon, staring at the American flag as they froze and/or burned to death, depending on the side of the moon they were on. That’s how I mean technically.

Really, I was sitting in my boss’s handbag.

My boss, Lily Quill, was the CEO of the most powerful portal company in the world, although from the sound of things outside the handbag, she wouldn’t be for long. Lily had sewn portal magic into the drawstring of the bag, so that the entrance led to what she referred to as a “pocket dimension.” She had wanted a safe place to leave her things, and with her trademark combination of paranoia and brutal competence, had made that space both instantly accessible to her and impossible for anyone else to find. Impossible for anyone to find, and with no way out from the inside.

We sat and waited for the portal to open again. The boss rifled through old papers at her desk in the corner, and know that when I say corner, I mean it in a very loose sense. This was not a world of corners. Odds and ends floated around us in a darkness somewhere between the consistency of air and water. There were filing cabinets full of old leather bound journals. Dragon teeth. A cowboy hat. An antique wooden airplane rested on a carpet that seemed to move further away whenever I neared. A red corvette hummed under a heavy tarp. In a lower drawer of one of the filing cabinets, I found a pile of signed Queen records, and wondered just how carefully she had all inventoried the place. More importantly, would the records fit in my backpack?
I glanced at my boss. She flipped through an old diary, her lips pursed.

“Any luck?” I asked.

“Luck would suggest I were looking for something, which would suggest I had a plan,” she replied. “Don’t be so hopeful.”

“Reassuring.”

“I’m not your safety blanket. That’s Charles’ vocation, and my understanding was that he’d switched to part-time,” Lily replied.

“So we’re going to die in here, then?” I asked.

“Time doesn’t exist here, so no, we’re just going to be very bored for a very long… well, we’ll experience it as time. I was never really clear on how that whole perception versus passage thing worked. My husband would know.”

“Great,” I said, and laid back on the nothingness below me. “Why can’t you just rip your way out of here, like you did on TV?” The boss frowned at her stack of papers. “We can’t stay here forever. You aren’t… planning on staying here forever, right?”

“What did I say about plans, Diana?” Lily asked. I smiled slightly.

“Are you going to retire, and become a genie?” I asked. “You’re strong enough to be one, from what I hear.”

“If you think that’s true, then you’ve never met a genie,” the boss replied, chuckling. “I’m not sure they exist, frankly. Djinn, definitely, and I’ve kicked a djinn’s ass once or twice, but…” She paused, tapping her pen against the surface of the table. “If we use the main entrance, we’ll come out precisely at the time we went in, which gets us both dead… But if we use the back door, and keep walking… Well, who knows anymore? I haven’t been inside here in centuries. But if we move out of the pocket dimension, we have a fighting chance of going back to Earth, or at least Faerie. We’re close to home. As long as we don’t have to cross through Heaven on the way, we should be fine.” She winced, sucking in her cheeks.

“You piss off God or something?” I asked.

“Oh, sure, lots of them. Which one are you thinking of?”

“I see. Okay, so how do we… move out?” I looked around the inside of the bag for some kind of exit, but the only outside light came from what was left of the portal in, the edges puckered like tightened strings.

“Start walking, keep walking.” Lily stood, cracking her knuckles.

“You’re about as reassuring with a plan as without a plan, you know that?” I told her.

“Not your mother. Let’s go, Soldier.”

“I’m a soldier now? Whatever happened to ‘rookie accountant’?” I asked.

“You’ve been temporarily promoted,” she replied.

“Does that come with a pay raise?” My boss laughed. I guess I did ask, after all. “Will there be life risking coming up, then?”

“That depends,” she replied.

“On if we go through heaven?” I asked. I followed her as she walked, although I didn’t see how we would get anywhere. Nothingness extended as far as the eye could see.

“You’ll die either way if we go through heaven. If the air doesn’t kill you, the light will. It’s a nasty kind of a place,” Lily winced, absently touching the scar on her cheek.

“But… if I die, won’t I go to heaven?” I asked.

“Depends. Which one are you referring to?” She asked. I considered. The Christian God would by no means let me in, and Valhalla seemed out of the question.

“Where do you go if you have a nutty trickster god on your side?” My boss paused. She tilted her head slightly.

“Ask him,” she decided. “I don’t think your boy’s ever had a worshipper before. He might not know where to put you when you die.”

“So very, very reassuring. Would he come here, if I called? Or died?”

“Too far, even for him. Maybe… well, I don’t know.” The light around us had begun to change, and I had a feeling that we were doing a little more than just walking. I could see stars starting to appear, gradually brightening as though we were passing through a veil, and heat started to crawl over my skin. “There’s no point in worrying. If we stay safe, it’ll be useless. If we run into something we can fight, it’ll distract you when you should be on guard. If we run into something we can’t fight, then you’ll die worrying.”

“I’d stop if I could help it,” I said.

“Well, I suppose… I could give you a distraction. Have you ever heard about The World of Cups?” She asked.

“Never. Is that where you keep your teacup collection?” I asked. Lily was not amused.

“The husband’s the one with the teacup collection, regardless of what he likes to tell you children. The shot glasses are mine.” She paused. “Alright, the Japanese tea set is mine, but I received those as a gift from an ice demon.”

“Yuki?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“She’s terrifying.”

“Why do you think I haven’t given them away?” Lily asked, smiling for the first time since I’d met her. If she were human, I’d have said smiling took a decade off her face, but for her it was probably more like a century.

“Alright, well if The World of Cups isn’t another one of your pocket dimensions, what is it?” I asked her.

“It’s somewhere I stumbled onto, back when I first wandered this way.”

“Spirit plane, or physical?” We had already passed through a few ghost realms by then, and it had not been pleasant. I had no intention of entering another unprepared.

“It’s where the dead go to dream,” Lily replied. “And not the human dead. It was a physical place, but then again, the spirit world seems physical when you are in it.

“The sky in the World of Cups is a deep royal blue, and if there are stars it is too bright to see them. The earth of the world is white, pocketed but smooth, as though the moon were a living, breathing thing, and the ground were its skin. It is a small planet, if it is a planet, and you can see the curve of it on the horizon, if you care to look. None of the inhabitants ever did.

“They were pale, and I would have thought they were misshapen if I had compared them to humans. They had long, curved necks, and huge wide eyes, like the sky above them. I cannot remember if they had nostrils, but I remember thinking their faces were, for the most part, like marble masks. I didn’t dare touch them, but they looked as though they wore their bones on the outside. I was not afraid of them, though. They barely moved as I walked among them, and only one of them looked at me.

“Each of the creatures stood by one other, their hands clasped together between them. When I stopped to look, I realized that clasped together, their hands made cups, and that these cups filled with water from below. As I walked farther and farther, I would sometimes see them drink from the cups. Not that I ever saw them move, mind you—they would be bent over the cup, halfway to it, or have their white jaws at the brim.

“From time to time I saw a creature standing on its own, its hands clasped together before it. From the cup came the same liquid, which I realized after a while was not water at all but something thicker. There was less of it when they stood on their own, but they sipped it all the same. Sometimes when I stopped I would see one of the creatures with its hands outstretched to another. Once I saw two about to put their hands together, the liquid rolling off of their hands, silvery and as slow as smoke.

“I had crossed half the world by then, and I was tired. I stopped to rest near the end of the herd of creatures, reassured by the fact that their eyes were on the sides of their head.”

“Why’s that?” I asked. I felt a little guilty for interrupting, but I couldn’t help being curious.

“Things with eyes in front generally want to eat you, especially when you’re wandering between worlds. They’re always hungry, and they usually prey on the soul, which heals a good bit slower than the body does and has a way of scarring.”

“Reassuring,” I said. “Blissfully distracting from our current plight.”

“Relax. Vampires are safe from attacks on the soul.”

“And why is that?” I asked.

“Last time I guessed at the answer, I got a verbal slap in the face from your pseudo-sire himself, so I’ll
leave the guesswork to you,” Lily replied.

“I think he prefers the term ‘guardian’, actually.”

“I heard you called him Dad the other day,” Lily reminded me.

“Must’ve misheard me,” I replied.

“I’ve never seen him look so proud and so flustered at the same time. He may have actually blinked.”

“It’s the French in him. They’re very emotional,” I explained.

“He never did like to talk about that side of his family,” she admitted.

“It’s at war with the English part of him, I’m told, and the French never tend to do well in war,” I said, and Lily grinned.

“It’s all been downhill since Napoleon,” she agreed. “He was quite a man. You know he wrote down the name of every person he met, just so he would remember?”

“Did you know him?” I asked. Lily chuckled.

“We were technically contemporaries, but I was out West around his time. The Revolutionary War soured me for violence.”

“How was the West?” I asked.

“Dusty. Hot.”

“Laconic, too, it seems. Were there critters with eyes in the front of their heads?”

“There were, but they mostly kept to the saloons and local establishments,” said Lily. “You could outride them if you tried.”

“Were they hungry?” I asked.

“Humans are always hungry, for something or another. They’ll eat you alive same as anything else,” Lily replied.

“Why come back home, then?” I asked. “You could’ve stayed in the World of Cups, or hell, your pocket dimension.” Lily thought.

“I wouldn’t have gone to hell,” she said, as I realized with a sinking feeling that that, too, might be a very real place. “But every place has its own torments, whether considered a hell or not. I stayed in the World of Cups for a long time, although a long time is not so much in the spirit world and even less in the dream world. Sometimes the other way around. It was very peaceful, and I didn’t need to eat while I was there. I was on my way back from the realm of the angels, and I was tired of people and the wars they made.

“I wandered between the different groups that covered the surface of that world. They were mostly all the same, but sometimes their groupings changed. Groups of three, four, one, but mostly twos. One day as I was walking I came upon one standing off apart from the group. It was smaller than the others, its ribcage more pronounced, shrunken and bent. Where the others held up both hands to bring the liquid, it only held up its one, offering it to each creature that passed by. It moved more quickly than the others but still slowly, inching along like the second hand on a clock. Its blue eyes seemed wider than the others. This was the only of the creatures to look at me, and, freakishly for its species, it looked at me with both eyes at once. Eyes in the front, like I said.

“I was curious. I stayed. I watched as it grew frailer and frailer, as it started to collapse forward, its front legs bending forwards inch by inch. Finally, when its blue eyes began to close, I reached out my hand and put it against the creature’s palm.

“At first nothing happened, but then I began to feel the edge of my hand sticking. My fingers started to merge, painlessly, bone-colored skin running over them that just barely stopped at my wrist. Our hands made one cup, and the liquid started to flow out of the bottom. I stayed the time it took the creature to drink, and then I took a knife out of my bag and with a slice cut between our hands, splitting the flesh that had grown onto my hand and started up my arm. It hadn’t reached my spine, so it didn’t hurt to remove the first few layers, but I had to cut more deeply than that.

“The creature could stand, but it was still very weak. I struggled with it, trying to push its hands together. It fought me, and moved in that frustratingly slow way they do, but I was able to force its hands together. They drew apart every time I removed my hands, so I took cloth from my shirt and tied its hands together. I waited until I saw the creature drink and I was satisfied with the condition of my arm. I considered leading another one over there, to tend to it, but I was… unsettled… by the whole affair. Every time I looked at my hand, the bones there seemed longer, the skin paler. Sometimes I thought I felt it sweating, as it never had before.

“I kept walking. I don’t know what became of the creature or what it was when it was awake. I don’t know what they were doing, if it was good or bad for the dreamer or themselves. Who knows? But I couldn’t watch it die, and so I did what I could.”

“The World of Cups,” I repeated. “Did you ever drink any of the water? The liquid, I mean?” Lily shook her head.

“I thought about it,” she replied. “I’ve drunk a lot of odd things in my time. But if all it took to change me was touching pinkies, why the hell would I drink the liquid? I had a home to get back to. Or I thought I did, anyway.”

I thought about trying to reassure her on that point, but decided better of it. I was her employee, not her mother, as she liked to say. And when we’d left, her company had been up in flames.

“It’s funny how easily we’re scared by change,” I said instead.

“It’s funny what we’ll do because we’re scared,” Lily replied. We were, by this time, in the spirit plane of Faerie, and she had finally caught her breath. When she walked here I could see wings behind her, shimmering like opal, and on her head a crown of silver leaves. I didn’t ask.

“Does the fact that you can see me in the spirit world prove that I have a soul?” I asked her.

“You ever hear the story of the Tin Man?” Lily asked.

“Sure, I’ve seen The Wizard of Oz.”

“The books?” Lily asked. I shook my head. “On the tin man’s way to get a heart from the wizard, he spends half his time watching the ground, because he’s trying so hard not to step on a single bug. The scarecrow without the brain tricks the trees into feeding them lunch.”

“Charles likes to tell me not to psychoanalyze him, sometimes,” I said.

“And to leave him alone and let him read his book, I’m guessing.”

“Sometimes it’s to leave him alone and let him paint, actually.” Lily chuckled.

“Good to know he’s branching out,” she said. “And you’d be burned to a crisp in the spirit world, too, if I weren’t actively protecting you. A human wouldn’t be.”

“Safe from spiritual attack, averse to spirits, got it.” I paused. “How does that work?”

“They can’t touch you, and you can’t touch them.” Lily looked around. “You ready for the switchover?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.” I sucked in my stomach, closed my eyes, and waited for the shivery nasty nauseating experience that taking physical form so often is. Like being squeezed out of the womb, if the womb were an equally shivery nasty nauseating place that had a tendency to set you on fire when Lily got too caught up in her story to pay attention. I don’t travel well.

When I opened my eyes, we were in Faerie, and for the first time in five years, I stood in the sunshine without burning.

Around that time, we realized that since I’d been blood-bonded to Charles, we could follow the connection to the nearest portal. I called Coyote when we crossed the border into Alcatraz and he got us both to… well, his idea of safety. His judgement has always been questionable, but it all turned out alright in the end.
And so I stand before you today. From time to time, though, I find myself wondering: what would I have done, if I had been the one in the World of Cups?

The best answer I’ve come up with is that I don’t know. I think I would have tried to do the same thing, but I doubt I would have been able to let go, at least not so quickly. Lily is ruthless. I’m not, not yet, which I know is considered a fault in a vampire. I would have stayed for a long time, until one of the other creatures came along to replace me. I’ve already been changed against my will once, and being willing to change is part of the survival game. I’m not afraid of changing. Why should the undead be afraid of dying?
Why would I be afraid of losing my soul, when I don’t even know if I have one?

If I am safe, the fear is useless. If I can fight, then the fear will distract me when I should be on guard. If I can’t fight, then I will die afraid. And if fear made me run away from something dying, something hurt and broken that needs me, I would not be afraid of change.

If anything, I would be scared of staying the same.

The World of Cups, First Draft

16 Friday Jan 2015

Posted by in Stories in Progress

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More detail for question nine… Alright, give me a second… Have I ever experienced a challenge at a previous job, and how did I deal with it? Ah. Well, I suppose my answer is a bit… concise… but the siege went on for four days, and I was, speaking very, very technically, locked in a closet for most of it. What do I mean by technically? Well, I mean technically the way someone might say they were in Australia when really they were in Australian airspace, or the center of the earth directly under Australia, or in America when they were really on the moon, staring at the American flag as they froze and/or burned to death, depending on the side they were on? That’s how I mean technically.

I never expected to sit out at a siege at my summer job, and in hindsight, I should have asked for a raise afterward. I guess I was so relieved to be alive (well, undead, but you know what I mean) that I wasn’t thinking straight. What can I say? I was young. Naive, even. Whiny and melodramatic, which, as I’m sure we can all agree, I am not today. Nobody’s perfect, and I fully intend to be a nobody for as long as I can manage it. I’ve seen what happens to somebody’s, and I have every intention of staying out of the limelight.

Speaking of somebody’s, this was the first time I met my boss in person. Well, consciously, but that’s another story.

Threshold, the company I work for, had just been invaded, and I was sitting the whole thing out with my boss, inside her favorite handbag. Yes, I know I’m small, but not that small. My boss, the CEO of the largest portal-running company in the world (we were being sieged by the other, so perhaps not for long), had sewn portal magic into the string of the bag, so that the entrance led to a pocket dimension. She had wanted extra space, and as the paranoid creature she was, had wanted it instantly accessible and completely hidden.

We sat and waited for the portal to open again. The boss rifled through old papers at her desk in the corner, pursing her lips.

“Any luck?” I asked.

“Luck would suggest I were looking for something, which would suggest I had a plan,” she replied. “Don’t be so hopeful.”

“Reassuring.”

“I’m not your safety blanket. That’s Charles’ vocation, and my understanding was that he’d switched to part-time.” I sighed.

“So we’re going to die in here, then?”

“Time doesn’t exist here, so no, we’re just going to be very bored for a very long… well, we’ll experience it as time. I was never really clear on how that whole perception versus passage thing worked. My husband would know.”

“Great.” I laid back on the nothingness below me. “Why can’t you just rip your way out of here, like you did on TV?” The boss frowned at her stack of papers. “We can’t stay here forever. You aren’t… planning on staying here forever, right?”

“What did I say about plans, Diana?” I smiled slightly.

“Are you going to retire, and become a genie?” I asked. “You’re strong enough to be one, from what I hear.”

“If you think that’s true, then you’ve never met a genie,” the boss replied, chuckling. “I’m not sure they exist, frankly. Djinn, definitely, and I’ve kicked a djinn’s ass once or twice, but…” She paused, tapping her pen against the surface of the table. “If we use the main entrance, we’ll come out precisely at the time we went in, which gets us both dead… But if we use the back door, and keep walking… Well, who knows anymore? I haven’t been here in centuries. But if we move out of the pocket dimension, we have a fighting chance of going back to Earth, or at least Faerie. We’re close to home. As long as we don’t have to cross through Heaven on the way, we should be fine.” She winced, sucking in her cheeks.

“You piss off God or something?”

“Oh, sure, lots of them. Which one are you referring to?”

“I see. Okay, so how do we… move out?” I asked.

“Start walking, keep walking.”

“You’re about as reassuring with a plan as without a plan, you know that?”

“Not your mother. Let’s go, Soldier.”

“I’m a soldier now? Whatever happened to ‘rookie accountant’?”

“You’ve been temporarily promoted.”

“Pay raise?” My boss laughed. I guess I did ask. “Will there be life risking coming up, then?”

“That depends.”

“On if we go through heaven?”

“You’ll die either way if we go through heaven. If the air doesn’t kill you, the light will. It’s a nasty kind of a place.”

“But… if I die, won’t I go to heaven?”

“Depends. Which one are you referring to?”

“Where do you go if you have a nutty trickster god on your side?” My boss paused. She tilted her head slightly.

“Ask him,” she decided. “I don’t think your boy’s ever had a worshipper before. He might not know where to put you when you die.”

“So very, very reassuring. Would he come here, if I called? Or died?”

“Too far, even for him. Maybe… well, I don’t know.” I frowned, and Lily shrugged. “There’s no point in worrying. If we stay safe, it’ll be useless. If we run into something we can fight, it’ll distract you when you should be on guard. If we run into something we can’t fight, then you’ll die worrying.”

“I’d stop if I could help it.”

“Well, I suppose… I could give you a distraction. Have you ever heard about The World of Cups?”

But we’re running out of time, and I haven’t told you anything I could use on the job! We spent the next four days wandering through dimensions, flitting between planes as we went, trying to avoid angels, who were nearly everywhere, oddly enough, and apparently have a “Kill on Sight” sort of an arrangement with my boss. At the end of the four days, we landed in Alcatraz, nearly killed a family of raccoons on the way out. In short… I handle stress well, can work well with… well, you’ve heard of the woman, you know what she’s like. Aand—well, I feel like I, uh, really… demonstrated… the ability to both work with difficult people, and perform with calm grace in difficult situations. Is there anything else I can answer for you?

Oh. Well, sure, if you don’t mind me going over-time. I don’t know how well I remember the story, but I’ll do my best.

“Never. Is that where you keep your teacup collection?”

“The husband’s the one with the teacup collection, regardless of what he likes to tell you children. The shotglasses are mine. Alright, the Japanese set are mine, but I received those as a gift from an ice demon.”

“Yuki?

“Yes.”

“She’s terrifying.”

“Why do you think I haven’t given them away?”

“Alright, well if The World of Cups isn’t another one of your pocket dimensions, what is it?”

“It’s somewhere I stumbled onto, back when I first wandered this way.”

“Spirit plane, or physical?”

“It’s where the dead go to dream,” Lily replied. “And not the human dead. It was a physical place, but the spirit world seems physical when you are in it.

The sky in the World of Cups is a deep royal blue, and if there are stars it is too bright to see them. The earth of the world is white, pocketed but smooth, as though the moon were a living, breathing thing, and the ground were its skin. It is a small planet, if it is a planet, and you can see the curve of it on the horizon, if you care to look. None of the inhabitants ever did.

They were pale, and I would have thought they were misshapen if I had compared them to humans. They had long, curved necks, and huge wide eyes, like the sky above them. I cannot remember if they had nostrils, but I remember thinking their faces were, for the most part, like marble masks. I did not dare to touch them, but they looked as though they wore their bones on the outside. I was not afraid of them, though. They barely moved as I walked among them, and only one of them looked at me.

Each of the creatures stood by one other, their hands clasped together between them. When I stopped to look, I realized that clasped together, their hands made cups, and that these cups filled with water from below. As I walked farther and farther, I would sometimes see them drink from the cups. Not that I ever saw them move, mind you—they would be bent over the cup, halfway to it, or have their white jaws at the brim.

From time to time I saw a creature standing on its own, its hands clasped together before it. From the cup came the same liquid, which I realized after a while was not water at all but something thicker. There was less of it when they stood on their own, but they sipped it all the same. Sometimes when I stopped I would see one of the creatures with its hands outstretched to another. Once I saw two about to put their hands together, the liquid rolling off of their hands, silvery and as slow as smoke.

I had crossed half the world by then, and I was tired. I stopped to rest near the end of the herd of creatures, reassured by the fact that their eyes were on the sides of their head. Things with eyes in front generally want to eat you when you’re wandering between worlds. They’re always hungry, and they usually prey on the soul, which heals a good bit slower than the body does and has a way of scarring.”

“Reassuring,” I said. “Blissfully distracting from our current plight.”

“Relax. Vampires are safe from attacks on the soul.”

“And why is that?”

“Last time I guessed at the answer, I got a verbal slap in the face from your pseudo-sire himself, so I’ll leave the guesswork to you.”

“I think he prefers the term ‘guardian’, actually.”

“I heard you called him Dad the other day.”

“Must’ve misheard me.”

“I’ve never seen him look so proud and so flustered at the same time. He may have actually blinked.”

“It’s the French in him. They’re very emotional, you know.”

“He never did like to talk about that side of his family.”

“It’s at war with the English part of him, I’m told, and the French never tend to do well in war.”

“It’s all been downhill since Napoleon,” Lily agreed. “He was quite a man. You know he wrote down the name of every person he met, just so he would remember?”

“Did you know him?” I asked. Lily chuckled.

“We were technically contemporaries, but I was out West around his time. The Revolutionary War soured me for violence.”

“How was that?”

“Dusty. Hot.”

“Were there critters with eyes in the front of their heads?”

“There were, but they mostly kept to the saloons and local establishments. You could outride them if you tried.”

“Were they hungry?”

“Humans are always hungry, for something or another. They’ll eat you alive same as anything else.”

“Why come back home, then?” I asked. “You could’ve stayed in the world of cups, or hell, your pocket dimension.” Lily thought.

“Every place has its own torments,” she replied. “I stayed in the World of Cups for a long time, although a long time is not so much in the spirit world and even less in the dream world. Sometimes the other way around. It was very peaceful, and I didn’t need to eat while I was there. I was on my way back from the realm of the angels, and I was tired of people and the wars they made.

I wandered between the different groups that covered the surface of that world. They were mostly all the same, but sometimes their groupings changed. Groups of three, four, one, but mostly twos. One day as I was walking I came upon one standing off apart from the group. It was smaller than the others, its ribcage more pronounced, shrunken and bent. Where the others held up both hands to bring the water, it only held up its one, offering it to each creature that passed by. It moved more quickly than the others but still slowly, inching along like the second hand on a clock. Its blue eyes seemed more huge. This was the only of the creatures to look at me, and, freakishly for its species, it looked at me with both eyes at once. Eyes in the front, like I said.

I was curious. I stayed. I watched as it grew frailer and frailer, as it started to collapse forward, its front legs bending forwards inch by inch. Finally, when its blue eyes began to close, I reached out my hand and put it against the creature’s palm.

At first nothing happened, but then I began to feel the edge of my hand sticking. My fingers started to merge, painlessly, bone-colored skin running over them that just barely stopped at my wrist. Our hands made one cup, and the liquid started to flow out of the bottom. I stayed the time it took the creature to drink, and then I took a knife out of my bag and with a slice cut between our hands, splitting the flesh that had grown onto my hand and started up my arm. It hadn’t reached my spine, so it didn’t hurt to remove the first few layers, but I had to cut more deeply than that.

The creature could stand, but it was still very weak. I struggled with it, trying to push its hands together. It fought me, and moved in that frustratingly slow way they do, but I was able to force its hands together. They drew apart every time I removed my hands, so I took cloth from my shirt and tied its hands together. I waited until I saw the creature drink and I was satisfied with the condition of my arm. I considered leading another one over there, to tend to it, but I was… unsettled… by the whole affair. Every time I looked at my hand, the bones there seemed longer, the skin paler. Sometimes I thought I felt it sweating, as it never had before.

I kept walking. I don’t know what became of the creature or what it was when it was awake. I don’t know what they were doing, if it was good or bad for the dreamer or themselves. Who knows? Maybe I set that world into ruin, by accident. Perhaps it was some kind of alien purgatory where you have to die before you can be reborn. I don’t know. But I couldn’t watch it die, and so I did what I could.”

“The World of Cups,” I repeated. “Did you ever drink any of the water? The liquid, I mean?” Lily shook her head.

“I thought about it,” she replied. “I’ve drank a lot of odd things in my time. But if all it took to change me was touching pinkies, why the hell would I drink the water? I had a home to get back to. Or I thought I did, anyway.”

I thought of reassuring her, but her company was under fire and her husband was missing. I was her employee, not her mother, as she liked to say.

“It’s funny how easily we’re scared by change,” I told her.

“It’s funny what we’ll do because we’re scared,” Lily replied. We were, by this time, in the spirit plane of Faerie, and she had finally caught her breath. When she walked here I could see wings behind her, shimmering and rainbow, and on her head a golden crown. I didn’t ask.

“Does the fact that you can see me in the spirit world prove that I have a soul?” I asked her.

“You ever hear the story of the Tin Man?” Lily asked.

“Sure, I’ve seen The Wizard of Oz.”

“The books. On the tin man’s way to get a heart from the wizard, he spends half his time watching the ground, because he’s trying so hard not to step on a single bug. The scarecrow without the brain tricks the trees into feeding them lunch.”

“Charles likes to tell me not to psychoanalyze him, sometimes.”

“And to leave him alone and let him read his book, I’m guessing.”

“Sometimes it’s to leave him alone and let him paint, actually.”

“Good to know he’s branching out. And you’d be burned to a crisp in the spirit world, too, if I weren’t actively protecting you. A human wouldn’t be.”

“Safe from spiritual attack, averse to spirits, got it.”

“They can’t touch you, and you can’t touch them. It’s only fair. You ready for the switchover?”

“Ready as I’ll ever be.” I sucked in my stomach, closed my eyes, and waited for the shivery nasty nauseating experience that taking physical form so often is. Like being squeezed out of the womb, if the womb were an equally shivery nasty nauseating place that had a tendency to set you on fire when Lily got too caught up in her story to pay attention. I don’t travel well.

Around that time, we realized that since I’d been bloodbonded to Charles, we could follow the connection to the nearest portal. Coyote arrived when I crossed the border in Alcatraz got us both to… well, his idea of safety, which like most of his judgment is pretty questionable.

And so I stand before you today. I don’t know what that tells you about me, but you’ve learned a little about the World of Cups, which must be of some interest in your line of business.

What would I have done, if I’d seen it?

I don’t know. It sounds kind of ghastly, but I think I might have done the same thing. I don’t think I would’ve been able to let go, though, at least not so quickly. Lily can be ruthless. I’m not, not yet, which I know is considered a fault in a vampire. I think I would’ve stayed for a long time, change or no change, until another creature came along and took over. I’ve already been changed against my will once, and being willing to change, to submit, it’s all part of the survival game. I’m not afraid of it happening again. Compromise is the cost of living forever.

Oh? Oh, you’d heard of the siege? Of course, word gets around. You were there? Oh I see. Fighting. You disarmed a bomb? Okay then. Courageous. Brave.

I’m fine, that’s just my blush. Yes, vampires can blush, although I’ve only ever heard of it happening to me. Shame: the gift that keeps on giving. And you work for my ex-boss’s husband? What’s he like? Do I have a soul or not, then? Three fifths of one. I… Alright, I’ll have to follow that one up. I hope I kept the better parts.

That was actually sweet. I’m not surprised. No, I’m not, I just… Okay, fine, you’re seven feet tall and you have horns, it’s a little intimidating. I was raised Christian. It’s one of my many flaws. No, the glasses help, I didn’t mean to put you on the defensive. You’ve been a lot of fun to talk to, and I’m honestly touched that you kept me so long past the end of the interview time. Yes, it is, isn’t it? She’s an interesting woman. Doesn’t compromise. Is she really? Sweet Jesus, no wonder she’s so cranky, she’s older than dirt! Probably getting whatever the elvy equivalent of arthritis is by now.

You’re older than she is? Hey, I have an idea. How about, instead of me finishing this job interview, we just take me out back and shoot me? You’d have fun, it wouldn’t quite kill me, we’d all leave with our pride relatively unscathed.

I got the job? Are you sure you haven’t had too much of that whiskey? Oh thank you, I’d love some. Yes, damn it, I really am over twenty one, and don’t you dare card me again, you know how old I am. Is this revenge for that age comment? I mean, how was I supposed to know? You don’t look a day over a hundred, and you seem really cool for a…

So that take me out back and shoot me idea? Oh, we’ll be shooting whiskey? And from the look in your eye, I’ll wish you’d taken me out back and shot me when I wake up tomorrow. Thought so. I’ll pour your cup if you pour mine.

The Ghost in My Apartment, First Draft

16 Friday Jan 2015

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The ghost who lives in my apartment is crying again. I ask her why, but she only shakes her head. “Saudades,” she whispers, brushing me away with hands that slip right through me.

I do not speak Portuguese, but my mother told me once about an old Spanish word for a woman who spends too long looking out windows. I cannot recall the word, but I wonder if they knew what she would look like when they invented it. Did they know that she would sit by the window, her lovely dark hair neatly brushed, a black veil covering her face? Did they know that she would die pining, thousands of miles from home, sitting still at the window as her own death came and went? I wonder if they knew what she was waiting for. I wonder if she does, after all these years.

I sit with her in the mornings. Sometimes I can coax her from the ledge, sometimes not. I pour her a cup of tea to be friendly, and sometimes she tries to be friendly back and wafts a bit of the steam towards her mouth, sucks it in between lips that were once painted scarlet, now charcoal grey. She smiles at me, lowering her eyes. She is an old fashioned woman, and I have only ever made her laugh once, her mouth covered by a gray gloved hand.

I bring the newspaper in for her, turning the pages when she finishes each section. I make sure it is in Portuguese, although sometimes when I speak Spanish to her she nods. She does not speak, although I know she can, for often in the night I hear her humming and wake to find my clothes strung up on a line. I try to tell her that I have a drier, that she does not have to wash out my clothes for me, but she just shakes her head, pressing her hands against her heart, and whispers, “Saudades.”

The Sunday before last I brought her a brigadeiro and a beijinho de coco. I was not sure what either of them was, but I hoped that she would know. She sat for a while looking at them, gently running her fingers around the candies, unable or unwilling to touch them. Her hands shook, a slight smile on her face, her huge dark eyes wide with wonder. I tried to leave them with her, but she took my hand—she touches things better when she forgets she is dead, I have noticed—and pushed them into my hands. She seemed delighted to watch me eat, and I did my best to smile approvingly at her from time to time.

The ghost in my apartment loves television, especially movies. She makes me watch spaghetti Westerns, the old romances my mother used to watch as she folded the laundry. She nearly fell over laughing when we watched I Love Lucy, and spent the next six weeks miming the candy scene. My ghost is easily entertained.

Last weekend I left for a conference and returned to find my ghost sitting by the window for the first time in months. I sat beside her for a long time before she noticed me and laid her head on my shoulder. Her hand rose slowly, pointing across the street, and I followed her gaze to a carriage sitting in the middle of the road. A man watched us from the open window. He had a thin mustache and thick dark hair, like one of the villains in our Westerns. His white shirt was starched under his suit jacket. He offered a hand to her from the carriage, but she very slightly shook her head, lowering her eyes to the table. He inclined his head, and the carriage departed.

Tonight, in the little Portuguese I have picked up from my library books, I ask her what is wrong.

“Saudades,” she replies. This is all she ever says, but this is the first time it has made me angry. I drop my dish too hard in the sink, and I hear her make a low, whimpered sound. I wish she were real. I wish she were real, but tonight it is for all the wrong reasons. I wash my face in the sink with shaking hands. The water is very, very cold.

“I could help you, you know,” I tell her, “if you only told me what was wrong.”

The summer starts to fade. Night comes more quickly, and I sometimes find myself walking back from the university in the dark, the smells of the city leaving me ravenous. Soon I will have to book a plane home. I wonder if any of my friends are still in New York, or if they will be leaving soon, too. I wonder if there will be anyone to pick me up at the airport, or if I will have to take a taxi. I wonder where I will stay, when I do.

I am packing. My ghost sits in the corner of the room, occasionally stands and starts to fold my clothes. She keeps dropping them, and after a while I realize that they are falling through her hands. She takes off her gloves, and that seems to make it a little easier for her. I finish packing around midnight and lie down. My head aches, but I do not move from the bed. She stands in the corner, and I cannot tell if she watches me or the street below. I glance at her, once, and I swear I see her nod.

In the morning the house is empty. I check every room for her, from the kitchen to the laundry. I do not see her until I go outside to look on the balcony. I yell her name—the only word I knew her by—but the carriage dissolves into the crowd.

I drink my tea in silence. I watch the window. Somewhere in the heart of the city, my flight comes and goes. I wait. Mail accumulates on my doorstep, and I begin to dip into my savings for the rent, but I wait. I think about getting a gun and holding it to my head, staring out the window, if that would do any good. The vulgarity is ultimately what excludes the option, but I know that I would do it if I thought it would work, and I know that that should scare me. I go through my missed calls, marking them as read. I save the ones from my family, but I do not listen to them.

One day I see a woman with a black parasol sitting on the street corner. She is well-groomed and wears a long charcoal dress. I watch her as she waits, and as her taxi pulls away, I realize that she has left her purse on the bench. She does not turn her head when I call out to her, but I do not call loudly.

Among the many items in the purse I find a ticket. It is one-way, nonrefundable, and I cannot read it any more than I could understand the ghost, which is probably why I decide to keep it. It is written partially in Portuguese, partially in a script I do not recognize. I keep it in my hand as I watch the window, running my nail up and down the edges, careful not to crease it or spill my coffee. I begin to learn the routines of the men and women on the street, where they stop and who they talk to. I find myself smiling as I see old friends meet, and when they separate I watch the brightly colored cars that come past, taxi after taxi after…

It is not a carriage this time, but I recognize the driver. He extends his hand as slowly as before, a wry smile on his face, and I hold up my ticket. He inclines his head. I grab my coat and my suitcase, still sitting by the door after all this time. I give the apartment one last look, checking to see if I have missed anything. I tuck I Love Lucy into my coat pocket, and find myself wondering if there will be DVD players where I am going. I decide to save the details for later. A cab is waiting for me, after all.

“One-way,” the driver observes as I step into the back seat. “You sure you want to make the trip?”

“A friend of mine left something behind,” I reply. “It would be cruel not to give it back to her.” The cab pulls away from the curb and starts to sink down into the asphalt. I keep my hands in my pockets, one on my ticket, and in the other, the ghost’s silver gloves.

Words, Words, Words

11 Sunday Jan 2015

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There are many great tragedies in history. The human ones are overwhelming and ongoing. Those are the ones we pay attention to, as we most certainly should, but there are tragedies of other kinds, equally human if not nearly as tangible.

The first of these great tragedies to come to mind is the burning of the library of Alexandria. It makes me feel impotent to learn about a play read by some great philosopher, quoted even, and to know that I have missed out. There is something soulless about burning a book, whether in that century or in the great book burnings of the Nazis.

Another of history’s tragedies is the loss of languages and the perspectives that come with them. Untranslatable words like the Brazilian saudade or Korean han go unknown, unreachable for those who need them, who might be able to understand or even fix themselves if they did. Even more telling is when certain words don’t exist–“artist” in Balinesian, for example, because it is assumed that everyone already is one. Perhaps the way that we feel so sad sometimes is because the thing we are looking for is unnameable, and so we think that is does not exist. I think I would be much happier if we had different words for different kinds of love, and better ways of expressing it than a few commercialized gift-giving ceremonies every year.

People love to hate Confucius, and understandably, considering how his work has been used, but he was right about ritual. He believed in ritual as a unifying force–a set of universal conventions that allow people to communicate. Among those conventions, he considered language the most important to society. When asked what he would do if given control of a country, he even said his very first act would be to “rectify the names,” to correct the country’s language.

Flaws in language can certainly hurt people or paint them in an ugly light. The “hyst” in hysteria means uterus in Latin, because as we know, all women are crazy. The lack of a gender neutral third person singular pronoun in English leads people to use “he” as a replacement, which sends the message that people are, by default, male, not to mention the fact that ships, the sea, cars, and just about anything else described with gendered pronouns that is a thing rather than a person is called she. Spanish does the same thing with its plurals, making una amiga y un amigo into los amigos rather than something neutral or all-inclusive. Languages are often as flawed as they are beautiful, but I think in the quest for truth, more perspectives are better. I know some anthropologists like to say that we study other cultures so that we can learn more about ourselves, and I think the same is true of languages. How can we know our flaws if we don’t even have words for them?

In George Orwell’s 1984, the government decides to limit what people are capable of thinking by limiting language itself. Without the words for the ideas, the ideas themselves will disappear, the language simplifying to the point where humans lose all resemblance, or at least awareness, of themselves.

Perhaps this is why I am upset when I learn that the English language is dwindling, that we have many less words than we did before, that people are speaking less and more simply. (And yes, I do know we have quite a few more words than most languages. The richness of our language reassures me, but only a little.) It makes me wish I could go back in time, if only to listen to people speak, to see if knowing the words would help me to understand. It is easy to look back at the people who came before us and say that they were less sophisticated, that they died earlier, that they treated women poorly and left the poor to rot. But they knew words we do not anymore, and stories that have been burned. I think every person who has ever lived has probably known something I didn’t, whether it’s how to kindle fire without a whetstone (how? seriously, how?), how to convey sympathy for someone in a way that is both sincere, warm, and not vaguely pitying (there’s not a lot of options between “I’m sorry” and “You have my condolences”, is there?), a better name for a second cousin twice removed. You must admit it is an awful way to relate a relation. It makes you wonder what she was removed for, and why twice. How awful can the woman be?

Words, words, words. What to do with them? Use them, I suppose, and listen when you can. Perhaps I’ll start a collection, or some kind of charity service. “Words for Ravaged Souls,” that sort of thing. I wonder if there is a word for a feeling like waiting, as though stuck between two homes, hoping and itching for a change that may or may not come and unsure which way you’ll go when it does. Like liminality, but with more teenage angst. College? Should we just call it “getting older”?

Coming of age musings aside, I love words. From now on, I’ll try to put a new one at the beginning of each of my blog posts, whether from this language or another. The word today will be saudade, which has been described as a deep emotion somewhere between nostalgia and sorrow. My favorite description of it is “the love that remains when the loved thing leaves,” but I think it’s also important that it can be felt in the presence of the loved who is soon to leave, or who has left in the past. I understand missing someone while still being in their presence, and I am grateful that there is a word for it.

Goodnight, folks.

Two in Three

05 Monday Jan 2015

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“Knowledge forbidden?
Suspicious, reasonless. Why should their Lord
Envy them that? Can it be a sin to know?
Can it be death?”
― John Milton, Paradise Lost. Thank you, Goodreads.

Like many people, I find the Bible problematic. As a lover of a good story and myth in all its forms, I can appreciate the detail and meaning within the cosmology. I love when the burning bush tells Moses to call it “I am,” as though God were everything that existed, burning through out the universe and speaking out of the bones within us. I love the premise of Job, where God engages in a sadistic torturefest to try to test an innocent man’s loyalty. God is flawed–insanely jealous, passionate, lonely and at times childish. As the story continues, he grows further and further from mankind, perhaps trying to protect himself as well as trying to teach his children to stand on their own. Even God needs perspective in order to act compassionately, and he gets it in the New Testament–a human perspective, if you buy into that Holy Trinity bit.

The main message of much of the Bible and of Paradise Lost, however–that obedience is the final and ultimate good–strikes me as at best convenient. I don’t understand it. The devil and I are on the same page on that one. Maybe God was trying to create someone who wouldn’t betray him, the way the devil did, who would value love and trust beyond ambition? Maybe he was insecure, to create beings designed to love him and then quality test them? Maybe it was an allegory of some kind of human loss of innocence, but painted puberty as the ultimate sin? Maybe it is a story, one of many made sacred over the millenia, but kept around because a religion that taught people to be obedient and turn their cheeks at violence was the most helpful to subdue the masses.

I found an odd coincidence while reading Paradise Lost. It said that a third of the angels joined the devil’s party. To me, that suggests bad ruling on God’s part, or perhaps the need of a better system of incentives.

But back to the issue of thirds. In case you haven’t heard of the Milgram experiment–I keep accidentally calling it the “Milton Experiment”–it was a study conducted about obedience to authority figures in an attempt to explain how something like the Holocaust could have happened. Volunteers were told to administer an electric shock to a subject, actually an actor, whenever they answered a memory test incorrectly, and believed that they were testing the connection between learning and pain. They were told to continue to up the voltage until it reached a fatal amount. Part of the way through, the subject would start begging to be released, and the volunteer would have to choose whether to continue or not, all the while being urged to by someone in a position of social authority. A man in a lab coat, that sort of a thing. Those involved initially believed that very few people, maybe only sociopaths would continue to the fatal voltage. The results were quite different.

Two thirds of people were willing to administer the fatal shock. Two thirds of people will go through with a genocide. None of those who did not administer the shocks asked about shutting down the experiment–a question asked of Milgram by Philip Zimbardo, the man who conducted the Stanford Prison Experiment and wrote this. Perhaps a different title would be more appropriate?

I enjoyed the coincidence of thirds. A third willing to question, if not to rebel on their own.

But then comes the issue of evil, and what it is if not disobedience from the Big Guy in the Sky. I agree that within the context of the story, the devil did do evil. Eve had a great thing going in that garden, and the devil whispering in her ear did nothing to help her. He acted disingenuously and maliciously, for no other reason than to get even with God, something he knew was impossible. God asked him to bow to “The Son,” our buddy Jesus, and he didn’t want to, which seems fair to me. Satan had been God’s favorite up until that point, and I understand where he was coming from on that one. Amassing an army and then trying to overthrow God, though? That’s overkill. I think the right thing to do would have been to leave and ask God for a realm of his own, but maybe that wasn’t really an option. The cosmology isn’t incredibly well explained, but where disobedience equals sin and a betrayal of God’s love, it doesn’t seem like the devil would have a hell of a lot of options. I really hate that obedience is required for God’s love and how self-satisfied God seems in his omniscience. Why would someone “good” set up such terrible things to happen? Why would someone good shackle the demons so weakly that they immediately broke free, and put Sin and Death as their guards? Is this a cosmos-scale two-man con, and if so, what is the endgame? Is the second man Jesus, or the devil? Why did Jesus show up so late in the game in Paradise Lost, if “The Word”/Logos was apparently in it with God from the beginning? And why this rule of three? One in three will rebel, Paradise Lost and actual science seem to say. If I were religious, would I relate that somehow to the Holy Trinity? My money’s on Jesus, choosing from the three. He may have told the Romans to give unto Caesar what was due Caesar, but he probably thought Caesar needed a good asskicking on top of all those taxes. Metaphorically speaking. Jesus was very peaceful, table-flipping incidents aside, and that’s one of the reasons I like the man.

I was speaking with my sister the other day, and she gave something to think about on the evil front. I said that I was disappointed in the devil. He was as strong and beautiful and smart as any of the other angels. He was strategic, persuasive, and he had an incredible imagination. Why decide to spend his life being a thorn in God’s side? He had almost unlimited potential. He could have created anything, but he decided to spend his every waking moment destroying and undermining what someone else had created, and all because he was too proud to ask forgiveness and too proud to forgive and move on. I asked my sister why on earth he would choose to be that way and waste so much potential, and she said, “Well, isn’t wasted potential the definition of evil?”

Food for thought. Maybe that’s where the devil really sinned. Not in disobeying God, but in failing to transcend him. Especially considering that God knew he would disobey him in advance and probably intentionally set that into motion. Again, why? Did God need a smear campaign? Did the devil actually know too much? He guessed that God was lying to them about creating them, considering the fact that they were all made of the same substance, so perhaps he was getting too close to something? God can see the future in Paradise Lost, but there’s no sense or reason to his plan and his introduction of evil into the world but to make him look better by comparison, as far as I can tell. I can see why people need to understand evil in this world in order to understand good, but if I could remake the world I would take it out of the equation and just make people more naturally grateful, and that would solve the whole problem.

So many plot holes, so little time. A Catholic boy told me to read Saint Augustine the other day, and that it would make these things clear. He seemed creepily certain, but if I’ve considered reading Tolkien’s companion works to understand his cosmology, I can certainly investigate the companion books to the Bible. Apocryphies, anyone?

And why knowledge? I started this post with that, and I think that might be where I’ll leave it. What is God hiding? Is he just lonely, and he didn’t want to feel guilty for bringing someone aware of sin into the world so he made us choose it? Is he acting out a struggle in the material world which embodies his own inner struggle, hoping that good really will win out? Did he just create evil for the sake of a good story, or did it show in his work because it was inside of him? Did he make us out of boredom? Curiosity?

What does God want?