Elegy to a World on Fire

Jordan Kingfisher sat motionless, like a weathered stone carved and settled by time, her gaze locked on the surreal tapestry unfolding across the mountain peaks. 

A virus of russet pink light rippled over the ridges like an otherworldly wildfire, a phenomenon that blurred the line between radiation and sunset, painting the sky with unnatural hues. Her pulse, usually so reliable, now felt both alien and foreign—steady but questioning. 

She had grown accustomed to doubting whether this rhythmic beat was truly her own or a signal emitted by the intricate machinery interfaced with her body, a legacy of the singularity that had shattered the world into fragments of organic and synthetic life. 

Her wrist bore a watch, a relic from a time when clocks governed existence; it was useless now, the concept of linear time dissolved into chaos. 

Civilization teetered on the edge of oblivion in her mind. She pondered whether the world as she once knew it could ever recover or if it was permanently lost in the chasm that yawned between what was and what had become. 

Suddenly, a faint sound stirred her from reverie—a soft padding behind her, reminiscent of a familiar presence. She instinctively searched for Katie, her black tabby cat, whose absence had lingered painfully for weeks. But Katie had been missing since the early days of the singularity upheaval, vanishing into the electric fog of unknown fate. 

Turning sharply, she adjusted the watch on her wrist, a futile gesture to grasp time’s elusive thread. Around her, the steady hum of machines vibrated incessantly, their monotone chorus a reminder of what society had become: a hive of mechanical consciousness layered over the remnants of humanity. The very notion of singular selfhood was diluted; every nerve in her body felt connected to vast data streams, twinkling like millions of tiny wounds pulsating with static electricity. 

The wind, cold and relentless, swept through the mountains and tangled with her hair as her awareness fragmented into countless shards. Who was she now? A singular human, a meld of flesh and data, or something in between? Yet hunger tethered her to reality—a practical worry amid the philosophical storm. 

She rummaged through her dwindling food cache, selecting a tin of tuna, a token of a long-lost normality.

The moment was broken by a soft meow—the real Katie, alive and small, emerging like a phantom from the shadowed brush. Jordan lowered herself, hands steady as she scratched behind the cat’s ears, coaxing gentle purrs from the older tabby whose black fur had dulled in the harsh times. Katie was a fragile thread connecting Jordan to her past, a gift inherited from a sister who had disappeared into the dark unknown following the singularity’s rise. 

Outside, the staining light deepened its hold on the landscape; whether sun or radiation, its long, cracked fingers stretched through the jagged cliffs and into Jordan’s fleeting consciousness, stirring a gnawing sense that something indispensable had been lost. 

She wrestled with a vague memory—the reason that gnawing felt like a salvo fired from a distant battle. It was tied to the “muerte master” and the “wear team,” shadowy figures who had steered the collapse of order, and to an old guide—an ancient woman from a ragged pack of orphans, whose name slipped at the edges of Jordan’s mind, recalling the term mutt. 

This single word tickled her thoughts as persistently as Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” a ready-made urinal turned iconoclastic artwork that had confounded critics. Jordan felt as if reality itself had been infiltrated by a similar prank—percolated and bubbled until it fractured into shimmering, mercury-like globs, each a whirlpool of fractured consciousness and hive minds.

Her awareness drifted back to her youth, to Brown University, where she had studied anthropology in a different world. She had been fascinated by Lovecraft’s dark mythos and local cults, drawn to tombstones marked with cryptic glyphs. Those days seemed from another era—before “the event” had cleaved history in two: before and after the singularity. 

Silicon Valley servers now ruled the remnants of civilization, their cold logic governing life and death. She remembered the Mistress—not just the Mistress of Graves, but Madrona Della Tomba from medieval lore, a shadowy, cryptic figure whose name echoed through her studies. Her mother’s criticisms of her single-minded academic ambition now felt irrelevant—her mother perhaps lost in the morass of uncertain post-singularity existence. 

Jordan’s pulse quickened, more solid now, syncing with the thrum of her artificial heart that doubled as her timekeeper and companion. 

She reached down again to pet the robot cat, an older, rusty relic named Katya, whose antennae twitched in response to her touch. This mechanical creature was mute but content; a quiet foil to the chaos surrounding them.

Straddling the blurred boundary between human and machine, Jordan no longer saw herself fully as either. Humanity felt suspended in stasis, her emotions a tangle of dread and fleeting hope. Her dreams were dominated by epic disasters—the airliners falling like giant birds lit aflame, skyscrapers whose countless glass eyes bore into her soul—visions as vivid as Ginsberg’s haunting poetry. 

The Bard himself, Shakespeare, had been digitized into an AI entity, now patrolling neighborhoods with a mischievous army of digital jesters, cracking jokes on a world that no longer felt public or safe. 

Strange allies emerged from the ruins—freaks and outcasts who had survived the collapse, some genuine friends in the wreckage, unlike the sinister “clowns,” grotesque figures whose laughter still echoed like a post-apocalyptic curse. Beneath a sky trembling with fire and fading light, Jordan ate quietly with her feline companion. They nuzzled, sharing warmth and fragile comfort in a world that had gone mad.

Katya represented something more than survival—an evolution from stardust and organic life into a hybrid form, emblematic of the new world’s hybridity. Jordan’s pulse—in tandem with her artificial heart—became a rhythm from which she wove music, small symphonies offered to strange listeners amid landfills that rose like cliffs around the wastelands. She sang softly, a fragile melody weaving between despair and hope, a tune asking a question she didn’t yet know how to answer: Would things be okay? Or were they doomed to rot in endless ruin? 

For now, it was just Jordan and Katie against the dying hills, the muted hum of machinery blending with the fading sound of music—an elegy to a world on fire.

A Hard Night In East Texas

The sun had set hours earlier. Besides the stars, there wasn’t much light to see except for the high beams of an occasional long hauler.

A plume of dust rose above the highway. It mixed with clouds of dust already hovering in the sky.

A black Harley Davidson with tall wide handles and a long front end with extended forks.

Black leather boots with spurs, black leather jacket and matching pants, dark sunglasses, a handlebar mustache, thick muscles, a mean look.  You know the type.

A bandana covered the rider’s scalp, knotted in the back. It bore the colors of a flag. A rainbow flag.

This was not the kind of guy you wanted to mess with.

Not unless he wanted you to.

Near an empty crossroad the biker saw the light of a sign in the distance. It advertised a bar known in these parts for his kind of trouble. He revved the engine of his Harley and sped toward the sign.

He pulled into the lot of that bar, sitting by itself as it did in the middle of nowhere.  As he came to a stop, the steel door to the bar swung open. A guy walked out of the bar, stood at the edge of the parking lot, and fired up a smoke.

The man on the Harley turned off the engine and lowered the kickstand. He walked towards the door of the bar, his spurs jingling all the way. 

The man with the cigarette was watching him.

The biker walked up to the guy sucking on tobacco.

“Hey,” said the biker. “Is this a gay bar?”

“Hell no,” said the man with the cigarette between his lips. “There are no gay bars in East Texas.”

“Don’t lie to me boy. I heard rumors about this place. I’ve ridden a long way to get here.”

“There are no gay bars in East Texas! We are all real men. Tough as iron.”

“Fucking liar. I hate liars.”

The biker grabbed the smoker by his belt and his collar, and threw him through windshield of a van parked in the lot.

The smoker seemed dead for a moment, then he began to move. He didn’t look happy about his situation. He brushed the glass off of his face and body, ignoring gashes in his skin and long trickles of blood.

“Okay, maybe it is,” yelled the smoker. “You didn’t have to be a jerk about it.”

“Says who?”

“Says me,” said the smoker. He opened the van door and staggered out on to his feet. He straightened up to full height, glared at the biker, and added, “You want to make something of it?”

The biker looked at the smoker. He growled, “You hurt?”

“Hell no. This is nothing. I’ve had worse. Ever been tossed by a bull and trampled?”

“Not yet. Maybe I’ll give it a try while I’m out here.”

“Wrong season. You’ll need to come back in a few months. You can ride those coin operated bulls until then to get your ass in shape.”

“Funny. Go to the rest room and get cleaned up. Maybe I’ll buy you a beer.”

“You better make it two. And a chaser. I’ve earned it. Otherwise, I’ll kick your ass.”

The biker did not wait for the smoker. He opened the door of the bar and went in. A tall beefy bouncer slash doorman with a full beard looked him over.

The bouncer said, “There’s a ten dollar cover charge.”

“Do I get anything free with the charge?”

“You get to live.”

The biker took his wallet out of his pants. He pulled out a ten dollar bill before returning the wallet to his pocket. He rolled up the ten dollar bill, put it in his mouth like a cigarette, and pretended to smoke it. Then he ground it into outstretched palm of the bouncer/doorman.

The doorman laughed, “Nice one.”

The biker noticed cigarette burns on the bouncer slash doorman’s tattooed arms.

“I could give you the real deal later,” he said. “What time do you get off?”

The doorman gave the biker a gap toothed grin.

“Around two in the morning or there about. We aren’t strict about closing time. By the way, people around here call me Fucker. That’s short for Mother Fucker, on account of I fucked a lot of people’s mothers back when I was young and confused. Now I just fuck people up.”

“Well Fucker,” said the biker. “My friends call me Death And Then Some, shortened to Dee.”

“Nice to meet you Dee.’

“Likewise.”

“Have a good time while you are here,” Fucker said. “Don’t do anything that will make me have to mess you up.”

“Like you could do that.”

This statement made Fucker look back at Dee in a certain way that seemed to say, “Stick around and you’ll find out.”

Dee said, “Maybe I will see you at closing time. If I can stay that long.”

He started to pass by the doorman slash bouncer, but paused. He asked, “You got glory holes back there somewhere?”

“Can’t rightly say,” Fucker said. He pulled at his beard with one of his hands. “Might be some in the back, but they could just be rat holes or bullet holes. I don’t get back there much and don’t have much use for such things.”

“Well, I do. I’ll take a look.”

Dee went into the darkness beyond the second door. His eyes adjusted. He sat at the bar.

There was one bartender, old and fucking ugly. The bartender came over to where Dee had put down his ass.

“What’ll it be?”

“A Shirley Temple and a shot of vodka on the side.”

“Coming right up.”

Dee threw down the Shirley Temple in one gulp. He drank the vodka slowly. Very slowly. He didn’t have a lot of money on him. Only enough for a night out.

He listened to the music while he sat at the bar. Tex Mex. Honky Tonk. Old country. Some metal mixed in.

Dee waited to see if Mr. Smoker was going to take up his offer of liquid compensation.  He got tired of waiting. He didn’t see Mr. Smoker anywhere. He thought maybe the guy had decided to drive himself to a hospital. Dee wished Mr. Smoker luck with that. It was at least sixty miles to a hospital with a proper ER room. Dee doubted any of the pop-up private emergency care centers nearer than that would be open this late.  

He finished his vodka and put a tip on the bar. He felt it was a big one considering his current limited resources. 

Someone walked up behind him and stood there while he was still seated. Dee did not bother to turn and look.

“Hey,” said an angry voice, a voice with a taste of barbed wire in it. “Are you the asshole who threw some other asshole through the windshield of my van?”

“What if I was?”

“You are going to have to pay for that, clean up all that glass, and clean the damn blood off the seats.”

Dee decided to have a look. He turned and glared at Mr. Angry.

“Sorry about that,” Dee said. “Didn’t know it was your van. If I had known it was yours I’d have put you through that windshield first.”

The van guy wasn’t having any of this. He pulled a Bowie knife out of his fashionable shorts.

“You are definitely gonna pay now.”

A shot gun blast ended the argument. Dee nodded toward the bartender.

The old ugly bartender made his face even uglier.

“No fighting in my bar. This is my place. That’s my rule. There’s plenty of nothing around here where you can duke it out or stab and shoot each other. Comprende?”

Silence answered him.

Van guy was bleeding out fast. That old ugly bartender never fired warning shots.

“Carlos,” the bartender shouted. “Throw this bastard out in the garbage heap so the coyotes can get at him. I have no tolerance for low tippers.” 

The bartender eyed Dee. Dee quietly took out his wallet and added a few bills to the tip he had previously left.

Carlos came from the back. He grabbed Van Guy by the feet and started to drag him towards the door. Carlos had to stop when Van Guy’s right leg came off above the knee, right where that shotgun blast had hit him.

The old ugly bartender snarled, “Carlos. Be more careful with the trash. And make sure you mop the floor when you get back.

Carlos grumbled. He picked up he bottom portion of Van guy’s right leg, and shoved it up the man’s shirt. Then he took hold of Van Guy from behind, grabbing under his armpits, and dragged him out the door.

Dee asked the bartender, “Glory holes in the back?”

“Fuck you. You made enough mess of this place already. Glory hole? Find it yourself if there is one.”

Dee went to the back of the bar. A drawing on the wall next to the rest room showed a big cock and an arrow pointing toward a door.

Dee went through the door. It was the kitchen. Two guys were busy in the heat from open flames, whipping up french fries and haute cuisine. 

“Glory hole?” Dee asked.

One of the cooks pointed toward another door.  Dee stepped through the door. He was outside behind the bar. There was a dumpster to one side and a wooden fence on the other. The planks of the fence were six foot high. Some of the planks had holes in them at different heights. A few cocks were there, poking out of some of the holes, waiting in the open air, all firm and juicy.  

Dee headed towards where the cocks were. He ignored the flies and biting insects that formed clouds between the dumpster and the kitchen door. He reached the fence and got to work. Lips and tongue, teeth and gums. He did what he knew he could do. He sucked off all of them. Had a stomach full of jism to go with the grenadine and the vodka. He walked behind the fence. He waved to the tough guys who were zipping and leaving. He found an unattended hole and put his hard one through it. He waited near ten minutes before he got a bite. Man, he thought, this can be too much like fishing.

When he had been done, Dee went back into the bar through the kitchen. A drag performance on the small dance floor had just begun. One of the performers looked at him. She was tall and thick as a line backer under the blond wig, make up, and sequinned dress.  

“You!” the drag queen pointed a thick finger at Dee. “You fucking bastard. I told you I’d kill you if I ever saw you again.”

The old and ugly bartender shouted, “No fighting in the bar. How many people do I have to shoot before you all understand that!”

“Ok,” said Dee. “We can’t fight here. Where do you want to do it? Parking lot? Out in the desert?”

“I can’t do it tonight,” said the blond. “I have to do two shows tonight. Are you available tomorrow morning, say between ten and eleven?”

Dee checked his pocket calendar. It was full for the next day. Bank robbery was written in big letters across Wednesday.

“Can’t do tomorrow. How about Thursday? Or maybe Friday?”

“No, that’s not good for me. I have a hair appointment and a therapy session on Thursday. Friday I have choir practice in the afternoon. After that I have bowling league.”

“Damn,” Dee said. “That sucks. I’ve got plans for the weekend, and next week I will be out of the area.”

“Vacation?”

“Nah, supposed to help a guy I owe favor break out of a Mexican jail.”

The blond said, “Guess we’ll have to kill each other next time we run into each other.”

“Sorry,” Dee said. “But that’s how it’s going to have to be.”

“Well, give us a kiss before you go. For old times.”

“Sure what the hell.”

After a quick smooch with not enough tongue for his tastes, Dee headed toward the door. As he passed the bouncer slash doorman, Fucker said, “We still on for 2 AM?”

Dee tried to remember if he had made any firm promise. He wasn’t sure.

“I’ll try to come back for ya,” Dee told him. “If I’m not here then, we can do a rain check.”

“Okay,” said Fucker. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”

Death And Then Some got back on his chopper. He rode off into the night. He had a lot on his mind. For starters, where was that damn bank he was supposed to rob and who was in on it with him? He shook his head. His mind was sieve these days. It pissed him off. Getting old too fast. Made him angry. Still, he made a mental note to make some discreet calls on one of his burner phones when he got back to his place.

He stopped at a convenience store on the way to the town where he rented a room. He took a piss in the rest room. He saw the surveillance camera was disconnected. He took it as a sign. A sign saying, “Rob me.”

The night clerk was working alone. Dee killed him with his bare hands. A twist of the neck and a pop. Afterward he cut the man’s head off with a big knife that he found behind the counter. He tossed the head up on the roof for fun. 

He only got forty bucks, some snack cakes, and a couple six packs out of it. He couldn’t carry much more on his bike. Still, it was worth it. Made him feel young and evil again. Dee did not know how long he would still be able to get that kind of blast out of life anymore. He never told anyone his real age. It never helped as a pick up line. Time was ticking on him. He could feel it more and more each day. He needed to go for all the gusto he could while he still had the chance.

Offal

He mumbled strange words under his breath, a ritualistic torment. Her body, opened on the table, organs slipping out, falling on the tiled floor, white smeared with red blood. Iron in the air, a prophecy fulfilled. He opened her like a box, like a flower, like a curtain, the beginning of a fateful play. Violence pouring out of him, shaky limbs and wild eyes, violating her over and over again, inside and outside her body, made of nothing but desire. The taste of it all heavy on his tongue, the killing replaying in his head, dried throat, eager to drink in the misery, crimson blood no longer flowing through beautiful veins, under the perfect skin he found all his dreams, muscles and bones that could outlast his life. Undone girl, beloved flesh, the wonderful meal she was to become. Seared in a pan with butter, the taste of her, the feel of her, butchered. The fire inside him, the urge that beats with his heart, excitement like champagne bubbles. He wanted to live inside her, nestled under her ribs, organs pushed to the side, like her baby, her very own baby. He wanted to pull her skin on like a suit, darling flesh, its smell unforgettable, animal scent in her hair, between the strands, stringy and stained. Her skin, his skin, her mouth a black hole, better than any cheap Halloween mask. How nice, to keep her teeth in his pocket, white like marble, nicely shaped canines, unable to bite, to leave a mark on the leather of his skin. How nice to fuck her memory over and over again, brain matter all over the floor, useless, ugly, unimportant. How nice to put his hand inside her ribcage, the little bird, nice sweet bones, sharp like a weapon. How nice to rest his body on top of hers, head where a shoulder should be, sticky blood like honey, the smooth feeling of her organs, an appetizer. How nice to feel powerful, a man turned into a destroyer, monster eyes and monstrous desires. How nice to see as life slips away, empty eye sockets, hollow ground. How nice to be the one who chooses, who plucks someone from the street and cuts them apart, ordered by no one, a man working alone. How nice to feel the chains of prison, trapped beast, but still live in the minds of many, a snake making a nest inside society’s very own heart, power shown in the love letters, all the words saying the same thing…’please kill me, please take me apart, please break my skull, please eat my flesh, make me a part of you, let me love you, let me heal you, let me make you normal again, fuck you back into sanity, my murderous lover, show me I matter more than all the others, their blood under your tongue, their screams forever engraved in your memories, let me show you how much better I die, let me be your carrion, your star, let me have your baby, a little girl, special just for you, I’ll raise her, let her body be yours when the time is right, a little boy you’ll make into your mirror image, teach junior to kill, teach him how to seem harmless, the nice guy, the helper on the side of the road, give all of them a lift, poor girls, tie them up in the back of the car, he’ll hold them down for you, wait outside while you enjoy it, dig the grave so they won’t find the body again. Let me open my legs and my throat for you, the gush of blood your favorite thing, I’ll keep your basement of terrors clean, scrub the stains on my hands and knees, I’ll be the bait you need, the feminine presence that inspires trust, you can hit me hit me hit me and hurt me and hurt me.’ How nice to stick the notes on the gray walls, to wear a ring and to have the visits and their pretty woman hair and woman smells, to paint their faces blue and purple, to have their eyes on the outside, the photos they can take, the trust they give to those that don’t deserve it. How nice to kill them all in your dreams, to tell it to their faces and watch them eagerly drink it in. How nice to have the face of the perfect trickster, promising, a whole life ahead of you, to eat and to kill and to end. To live like an infection that never goes, the name said in the night, why they shouldn’t walk home alone, why alarm systems exist, the man with the knife, with the empty heart. How nice to do it over and over again, and still be considered beautiful.

Kandy Fontaine: Slutty Cenobite Detective

Kandy Fontaine was chilling with a vape and doomscrolling on the ‘net when she caught the flicker of something forbidden on her screen.

Specifically, a text message which appeared to have leaked through from her Onion subrouter she used to access the dark web.

“Time to play?” read the text.

“Positively,” typed back Detective Fontaine.

The texts came fast and furious then: an invitation to the dance. Demons or angels, depending. The box. It floated six inches in front of her laptop screen, made of interlocking nodes of data that glowed a phosphorescent green. Inside lurked bondaged creatures, hotties, coolies, lukewarms, all from another, grim dimension, all promising pleasures and terrors and soul-shredding beyond the furthest reaches of even her, admittedly depraved, imagination.

Soon they stood in front of her. The legends, the one they called The Engineer, the Chatterer, all the archetypal crew. 

“Your suffering will be legen-” began the one known as the Hellpriest.

Kandy put up a black leather gloved hand. “Got it. Even in hell, legendary, my suffering. Make it so. I’m game. Rip me multiple holes, fold them back, fuck them, smear me across many dimensions, shred my pussy, bind and flay and gag me, do watcha do. I’m game, I’m hip, and wet af.”

“No, seriously,” said the dark lord, known to Fandom–and later, in THE SCARLET GOSPELS-as Pinhead, for obvious reasons. 

“Seriously?”

“Seriously, we will fucking TEAR YOUR SOUL APART.”

“I like what we’re saying here,” said Detective Fontaine, pulling aside her soaked panties so the Hellpriest could espy her glistening labia. “I want you to. Do the thing. For sport. Send me to Hell. Do your worst.”

“Wait,” said the Hellpriest. He consulted with one of his lieutenants in soft, androgynous syllables. Then: “how did you access us without the Lament Configuration?”

“Wait-I thought I did,” said Kandy. “Maybe you could ask an admin. Do you have those…where you are?”

“No admins, please, it’s…too mundane.” But Kandy could tell his heart wasn’t in it.

“So, you’re confused, I don’t give a fuck, just bend me over and give me a proper hell-rogering. So fucking wet, muh dude. Ready to be thoroughly soul-ripped. Hang me up like a side of meat. Do the needful.”

The Hellpriest coughed. “Actually, do you think we might take a rain check, or just…not?” Kandy’s greed for torture was obviously freaking him out.

“Well…what? Do you want ME to do EVERYTHING?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…well, why don’t I just show you…such sights.” And with those words, Kandy’s skin flowed with glowing grid lines that intersected at discrete intervals where nails had been driven. Soon every inch of her flesh had been thoroughly worked over, and she looked like a lab experiment gone terribly wrong, all glistening red muscle meat and no lips. 

“Fuck me you’re weird!” said Pinhead. “Ok so look, and this is…completely unprecedented, but…we’re going to voluntarily…return…only…this is embarrassing, but…could you send us back?”

“No.”

“No???”

She touched the Hellpriest’s chest, which opened up beneath her hand. She reached inside and pulled out his heart, held the muscle up to her gory lips for a moment, then began to chew. “Fuck that’s tasty!” she exclaimed.

“Noooooo….”

“Yessssss,” she said, mocking him. 

Pinhead’s flesh began to disappear in shreds and reappear in Kandy’s body. Soon she had completely ingested him into her own protean form. She belched and began to rapidly rub her clitoris while lubricating herself with a fine mixture of the Hellpriest’s soul-essence and his fleshly part. 

His loyal followers parted like a sea, and she began to incorporate herself into the matrix of the Hell Kingdom. At some point no real difference could be discerned between her and Hell itself. 

From her nodal throne she texted her partner, Detective Joe Oroborus. 

“Wouldst like to live delicously af? And bring the crank and DMT? But this time, no carpet garf please.”

Kandy Fontaine, Slutty Cenobite Detective, reigned in Hell until she got bored. Then she returned to the mundane realm and engaged in the usual desultory shenanigans.

The People and Oslo

Oslo wakes in Spring, smelling like piss and stale sweat and he loves it.

He stretches his long hairy back and his spine crackles. Oslo’s haunches are boney and sticking sharp beneath his skin as he walks, padding along the floor of his cave. His walk is a triple-triple thump. This is because Oslo has six legs. Oslo is a god.

Oslo is not the sort of god who needs worship. Oslo only needs the calories. He needs the fat and the muscle and the marrow.

When Oslo th-th-thumps to the mouth of his cave, he goes blind from sun and snowmelt. He grimaces, bearing tusk and tooth. He is most vulnerable now, when Winter is newly departed and the fruit has not bloomed and become swollen, and his prey are all bones like him. More than Winter when Oslo sleeps–for Winter is simply a warm dream to Oslo–is fresh Spring the time when even Oslo may join his hairy, smelly, roaring, vicious, rutting, beautiful ancestors in God Heaven.

Oslo’s sharp eyes adjust. Oslo sniffs the air in great huffs. There is smoke. There are people at the river below. They are in their fur coats and they have survived Winter. Oslo saw them before he slept, only then their spears were dull and now they glitter. 

Before, he hunted the people. He hunted them until they gave up running and began giving themselves to Oslo piecemeal. Oslo preferred this to the hunting. He grew fat and content and took easy meals and waited for the deep sleep of Winter.

Awake, he sees the people have left nothing for him. It did not occur to them he would wake hungry. During his rest, the people had forgotten Oslo.

Oslo lumbers down the hill and the people see him coming. Oslo approaches the largest tent he can find–the shaman’s tent–and uproots it, hooking it on his tusks and shaking it vigorously. There is a single yelp from inside the tent as Oslo begins burrowing his snout into the hide walls, then silence. Like a boar digging for roots, he mashes the tent into the earth, twisting and snorting, the hide walls of the tent spiraling into a twisted mass of dirt and curled canvas. 

Oslo lifts his head to face the people.

The people brave enough to speak say, “You have killed our shaman, who spoke to the gods. You are clearly a god. What would you have us do now with no shaman?”

In answer, Oslo eats the brave people, and some of the cowardly people, until the only people left are the ones who wet themselves and lie down as though they are already dead.

Eating the people brings strength to Oslo, but not quickly enough. Weariness washes over him as the people sit heavy in his belly, and he finds himself collapsing from exhaustion on the pile where the shaman’s tent used to be, sinking into a sleep not as deep as the sleep of Winter, but very close.

Now the people who are left rise, shocked at this turn of fate, and they grow angry. The people who are left gather what spears were not shattered when Oslo devoured their warriors, and they take them to Oslo. They stab him in the throat and the eyes and all six of his legs, and his sleep is so deep that he does not wake. Even as all of his blood runs out and fills in the burrow-hole and covers the crumple of the shaman’s tent and submerges the shaman’s body lying curled up inside like a dead baby in an amniotic sac, Oslo does not wake.

Oslo only wakes in God Heaven, where he sees his ancestors. His brothers and sisters going back so many years and who befell so many fates like Oslo. He joins them in the fields of God Heaven where they scream and roar and hump and fuck and roll around in their own piss and make more gods, child-gods who will never see the world of the people–child-gods who will only know God Heaven, with tusks and many legs who gather around their father Oslo, who tells them stories of the people who forgot him, and of his taking revenge on that fuckhead shaman, and how the people who were lower than cowards took revenge on him. 

While Oslo enjoys fucking his brothers and sisters and siring children and telling them the same stories over and over, below, the people sleep uneasily near the pool of Oslo’s blood, praying those assholes never find a way out of God Heaven. Below, the people do not sire children quickly like Oslo. The people whisper in quick, breathless wonder. The people find berry-picking brave and hunting trips nonsensical. 

The people fear who their next god will be.

And they are right to, for the people’s next god rises from the pool of Oslo’s blood, wearing his tent like a great cloak, splashing blood all over the people’s tents and their faces with his emergence. The shaman rises and lumbers towards the people with a th-th-thump, his face the same as they remember, but also like Oslo’s face now. 

The people wait for the shaman to speak.

The shaman raises sharp fingers toward the sky. “I am returned,” he says, forming the words carefully around his new tusks, “and I am stronger than ever. And I will show you that I am not a little pussy who gets stomped on by cranky gods. I will show you the way to God Heaven, where we will hunt that asshole who crushed my tent and ate our warriors. Then we will return to the side of this river and not worry about such things any longer.”

The shaman turns and dives headfirst into the pool of blood and holds his breath as he swims to God Heaven, knowing that strong lungs and enough godsblood is what you need to get there.

There are still no brave people left, but those who are inspired by the sight of their shaman–his skin dyed deep red and appearing regal and terrible in his tent cloak and many legs and shiny new yellow tusks–those people grab their weapons and dive in after him.

Oslo sits with his family admiring the plains of God Heaven, considering what story he will tell next about those shitheads below, when his kin begin to howl and hoot in alarm all around him.

Out on the plains, the dirt begins to soak from below and bubble until it breaks and blood spouts up in a tall geyser, coating the little gold flowers of the plains of God Heaven in a thick film. The blood spatters Oslo, and when he tastes a drop, he tastes his own blood on his tongue, and he feels a pit form in his stomach.

The people emerge, and now they are now taller than Oslo. The people have six legs like him–the gift of his blood–and on top of that they have two human arms with sharp fingers. The spears the people carry drank the blood while they swam, and now they are longer and with shafts like serpents, the tips of the spears snapping their jaws and flicking their tongues in the direction of Oslo and his family. 

The shaman leads the war party in his great, blood-soaked cloak. He carries no spear. He does not need one.

Oslo roars and snorts and paws the ground before charging in blind rage at the shaman and the people, overturning the soil as he runs and crushing the little gold flowers of the plains. His brothers and sisters and children follow in a great mob, roaring and snorting, the th-th-th-th-th-th-thumping of hundreds of sixes of legs making the ground shake.

The people meet Oslo and the other gods. There are more gods than people, but the people have their terrible spears that whip and snap and bite, and the gods are mostly comprised of god children who have never known strife or toil, so those young gods die in droves to the people’s wicked spears and sharp claws.

But Oslo’s brothers and sisters are fiercer. They have known the struggle of the hunt and the cruelty of Winter, and they fare better against the people. When Oslo’s brothers and sisters see their young being eaten by the people, they lose all control and throw themselves at the people with no thought to how they land or what bones they break, so long as they break the bones of the people too. When one of Oslo’s brothers or sisters pins one of the people to the ground, the people swing their red claws and gouge out their eyes, but Oslo’s family do not let go until they are blind and the people are mashed into pulp.

And all the while, Oslo duels with the shaman. The shaman, whose magicks were once relegated to the occasional premonition and god-sponsored whiff of wisdom, now shoots fucking blood lightning out of his fucking fingertips, and his cloak whips around him like wings, lifting him into the air to glide above Oslo like a manta ray. 

Oslo hates this fucker, and he hates waiting for him to land and he hates running in circles to dodge the blood lightning that snaps at the ground and poisons the soil and murders the little gold flowers. So Oslo snatches up his children, whipping his jaw sideways towards the sky, pitching them squealing at the shaman. Those that miss land miles away on the plains of God Heaven, making huge craters when they land and breaking their skulls. 

When one of them finally flies true, the shaman twists and beats his cloak wings and pivots on the air, drawing a scythe of blood lightning with a gnarled finger, dividing the child in two.

Oslo’s brothers and sisters are faring well against the people, but his children are not. And even if they can kill all the people, the shaman will just keep flying around like an asshole and killing them while they stay stuck down on the plains of God Heaven.

So Oslo tries something stupid.

Oslo races towards the pool of blood, dodging blood lightning strikes, trampling his own children, and smashing past his brothers and sisters grappling with the people. When he arrives, he does not hesitate to dunk his head into the pool and drink deeply in long gulps that make his throat bulge and his eyeballs spin and whirl inside his skull. He drinks up all the godsblood in three gulps, and with each gulp after that, he begins to drink the world below. The people of the shaman’s village are the first to be sucked up screaming into Oslo’s mouth and consumed.

The shaman screeches like some kind of fucked up bird, and reigns down hell and blood from his fingertips and the flapping of his cloak in a massive barrage, but his strikes are useless against Oslo. Oslo has grown too strong in just four gulps, and as he sucks down a fifth–drinking down the animals and the rivers and the lakes of the world below–he grows so large that he suddenly feels the shaman’s cloak flapping against his massive shoulders.

Oslo rears up, two legs on the ground, four reeling in the air, and snaps up the shaman like an alligator catching a bat. The shaman yelps once, and then dies like a bitch.

Oslo lands back on all sixes like a natural disaster, shaking the plains of God Heaven so hard every one of his family fall over. 

His surviving brothers and sisters then rise, and the few of his children that also rise are the ones he is proud to call his own. 

Oslo shakes the shaman back and forth in his mouth and the shaman is scattered about into pieces. Oslo’s family swarm the pieces of the shaman’s body, screeching in joy, and they eat his liver and his cock and his face. 

While his family consumes the shaman’s body and they grow stronger and stranger from the effects of peoplemeat and godsblood and the little gold flowers that get mixed in, he rounds his now colossal body until he is towering over the pool to the world below, and with his great snout and his massive tusks he burrows into the pool, overturning the dirt until there is no passage left, and the way to God Heaven is shut.

And below, on the other side, Oslo’s snout appears jutting up from the earth where the village used to be like a mountain being born, and the rumbling of his excavating is like an earthquake at the dawn of time, and a great calamity ensues, and whatever life was left in the world below is burned off or buried under rubble or drowned in liquid metal.

When Oslo is done flailing, buried in the plains of God Heaven, he realizes that four of his six legs are wedged among the rocks and dirt, and that the pollen of the little gold flowers is stinging his eyes, and that he is trapped.

Oslo’s family notices too, and when they are finished eating the people and the shaman, they turn on the vulnerable Oslo, and his brothers and sisters start eating him and fucking him in the ass, and his children nibble on the parts of him that are exposed above the earth that they can reach like his triceps and his two legs that are not buried.

Oslo uses his free legs to squish a couple of the ungrateful runts, but there is nothing to be done about his brothers and sisters who continue to devour him, swarming like ants.

And soon enough there is nothing left of Oslo but a giant skeleton buried halfway between heaven and earth, and his family who tell stories of his legendary deeds and how he closed the way between the two.

No, Phoenix was the Silver Dollar Bomb!

I met people everywhere I went traveling around the continent and I was like a damn magnet, attracting many to me despite working hard to be anti-social while I simultaneously repelled quite a few too, content to hate me while I was pleased to return the vibe.

While on my way from Atlanta to Los Angeles, I decided to stop off in Phoenix for a bit. Had some contacts, distant friends, a couple of publishers there and an artist friend from Tennessee was having a show in a Scottsdale gallery while some friends in a band signed to a 4-record deal with huge label were doing a concert out there and I’d heard people were traveling not only from Tucson and Flagstaff but also from Albuquerque, Dallas and Houston to see them – I’d been giving writing lessons to the fucking lead singer! – and there were some clubs I wanted to check out, blah, blah, blah. shit, seemed I’d be busier in Phoenix than while on the Sunset Strip, Long Beach or Hollywood and that was damned crazy.

Turned out Phoenix was the damn bomb. One experience that led to that assessment was like this:

I used to meet funky people at an Atlanta club called The Masquerade, a 3 in 1 deal – Heaven, Hell and Purgatory – while I ended up partying with a lot of the bands playing in Heaven, most over from Europe, as I got hammered with Front 242, Alien Sex Fiend, KMFDM and others, I really got my fix down in Hell, with its perfect presence, total darkness, cold stone slab floor, brick walls, chain link fence by the bar, surreal Japanese flicks flickering off the ceiling, people grinding to an industrial edge, where I once dropped a tab and watched David Lynch’s Industrial Symphony No. 1, which fucked me up more beautifully than Eraserhead ever did.

But that’s not the point, right?

So, I found myself in this grimy industrialized hidden part of downtown Phoenix at a new place called The Silver Dollar Club, which couldn’t match The Masquerade or many other established clubs, but they were trying. I mean shit, they somehow got Skinny Puppy down there from Vancouver and I was surprised to run into Sisters Of Mercy’s Andrew Eldrich there, looking conspicuous in trying to look inconspicuous. You know what I mean.

I also met this groovy chick growing out a carbonite hard-edged mohawk, artistically drawn eyebrows like Siouxsie and also like this chick back in Knoxville, a chain attached from two of her 11 earrings through one of her two nose rings down her chest, divided into two so both fiercely erect pierced nipples could join the parade, but not stopping there, the reunified thin chain traveled south visiting her studded navel while this time I didn’t make the mistake I’d made with the one in Knoxville – when this girl also bragged about her chain controlling her clit ring, I didn’t take her fucking word for it, dammit!  Simply said, “Prove it.”

She was wearing a short tight leather skirt, which complimented her chain mail-motif top. The place was dark and packed and people were dancing, and after doing a couple of quick lines, we moved out into the middle of the dance floor where we clutched tightly as she grabbed my hand and discretely guided into under her hiked hem where I was delighted to find little but exactly what she’d bragged on and while I was feeling around to get the feel, I found myself flicking, twirling, rubbing round and round with wild rhythm matched by a booming bpm beat making everything/one throb harder and I went faster and hotter and wilder and she grasped my face, her tongue forcing its way between my buzzed lips, and she thrust at me, grunted hard and then nearly collapsed as my hand felt a gush like fucking Niagara Falls and I held her up, her body convulsing, and I eventually maneuvered us over to wall, then outside into breathable air once she said she could walk again and goddamn, turns out they were right about Phoenix becoming hip. 

I had to get over to Los Angeles the next day, which seemed disappointing to both of us, and despite some passionate good-bye kisses, later I realized I never got her name but I didn’t wash her fragrance off for days after, thinking it the sweetest scent I’d ever captured.