Were there darker provinces of night he would have found them.

my booksie:/Frank Hirabara

[kingpyg]

Sonora

A cold darkness creapt up on them. They rode quietly as moon came along the small stones and the shimmering earthen citadels lying in the distance clothed in a celestial dress of dark sky and scarce twinkling starlight. Somewhere water trickled. They stopped when they heard wet thuds, the hooves of their tired and half blown mounts thudding against the wet stones caked in claylike sediment.

They came from their horses announced by the heavy splashes of their rawhide boots in the stream. Ankle deep and panting as their feet grew cold. They stood like dying men with arms slack against tawny flanks shuddering from exhaustion.


Somewhere far off the stream faltered.

Sparks against that celestial backdrop, suddenly. A bright yellow petard burst into life from their flints and what missed the deadwood they piled very quickly and desperately with hands wet from gorging themselves in the stream, went to be snuffed out in the cold. More followed. Their clashing stones echoed and ricocheted within the earthen city resounding off tower and turret like the sounds of a faint and distant gunfight, while they squatted in the dirt and braced themselves against the bitter cold.

Later, in the faint glow of a fire they coaxed to life, barely. They sat facing each other but neither said a word. One man was tall and haggard, a face etched deeper and more extensively with sharp ridges and creases of age. His eyes were wide and his mouth long and slack, such that he stared into the flames like a mad man. A chewed up brim of rawhide fashioned into a crude sombrero bisected crosswise his frenetic gaze. The fire was reflected back in pools in the deep blue American eyes. The other too stared into the flames, though his face was obscured by a weathered and pockmarked tricorn from which a red plume rose. Below its brim were faded white trousers and dirty spats and leather boots that had once been military spitshined, and the green jacket of the Cazadores a Caballo.

Long shadows went from their static forms as the light that begat them flickered and waned. From a pocket of rawhide that hung by a scant few stitches the American fished a bottle of murky whiskey, the name of which was scrawled upon a faded label in harsh and illegible Mexican. Along the wavering perimeter of the world straddled by the furthest spires they could see, lightning rippled within clouds fat with rain and they could hear the soft sounds of distant thunder. From the basin they heard a herd of bighorn sheep march along the barren plains, their hooves like the storm that was approaching and their pelts the same shade as the rippling starlight.





All the next day they rode single file, out the gates of the earthen city which gave way to a shimmering barrenness beclamoured by the thundering silence of desolation, the world beheld through eyes half dead and half crazed. Onward they rode. They saw nothing but the sharp distant stars of pronghorn bushes and yucca bordering the playa, and beyond that the shoulders of the Sierra Madre lay in unreachable distance. At mid day they crossed a salt plain that left them sucking desperately on tongues gone dry and white, half dreaming in their thirst of the stream they crossed the night before. Two shadows against a glazed and dried sea of rippling white they rode with squinted eyes fixed on the bajadas that curved gently towards to the great barren cobalt sky.

With the sky dimming they finally came to a narrow valley dusted with patches of grass, between two citadels atop which lay smatterings of creosote and the quick shadows of snakes and mountain lizards, and here they dismounted finally. The American came on his knees among the dried saltgrass and dirty white winterfat, a sliver of a knife blade in his left hand and the right combed through it. The Cazador stood with his back to the valley and his eyes toward the world that had turned to an inky and electric dark and the meridian plane that ran across it. The sheep were moving again and from where he stood he could also see the coyotes hurrying after them. The pursuit followed its own charter, commanded by only the most instinctual constitution. The coyotes would yap and follow the herd and wait for stragglers to fall behind. The whole herd was a prey beyond their grasp and it was in this way that they knew their place, as did the sheep that outran them and the ones that did not.

Goddamn.

The American sprang, suddenly, uncoiling and recoiling as if in one motion. He held in his free hand by the tail a rattlesnake, convulsing and writhing as its mouth sought purchase and he brought the knife and decapitated the creature and let it bleed. Then he lay the thing down and began to gut and skin it. The Cazador came from his watch with deadwood from a pouch of his mount and his flint and knife. They ate the snake over a fire as weak as the one from the night before. The Cazador shouldered his carbine again and took watch as the American slept. As the fire waned, so did he, and soon the both of them were deaf and blind.

Far off in the dark world, as they slept, and they did sleep, in a tight huddle with the earth as a slab and the sky as their blanket and the lances of dry Sonoran cold, a sheep fell from pace, and the coyotes sprang upon it, and in the light of a moon waxing gibbous that shone high in the sky they tore it and rent it and its bleats were soon drowned out by their howls.

In the evening of the next day they came upon baked clay walls in an oblong perimeter the color of the dusking sky and an uneven gap flanked by two wooden poles that served as its gate, and in the evening redness the hovels and huts that made up that desolate pueblocito seemed the same shade as the sky under which they lay. A wind came from the east and threw sand into the eyes and snouts of their horses, and the beasts shook and snorted indignant and indifferent beyond this small concern.

The Cazador crossed the thresh hold first with his carbine drawn and level at his waist and the American followed, with the oblong stock of a Harper rifle cradled in his arms and half of its barrel leading him on. Through an empty avenue they strode and around them the light cast strange shadows from the things that were left behind. The baked earth walls were dry and the buckets and cups and clay jugs sitting in the window sills were dry. Sand and the desiccated branches of dead shrubbery that perhaps had once grown in a viridescent abundance. Wooden troughs with the wood long since dead and pale in the hot son lay like open caskets in the dusty streets. They passed a well with the rawhide cover blown to into the desert and long since on its journey by the time they beheld it, and within the water was a murky brown.

Here they stopped, perched on its rim, staring off into the sun sinking low beneath a wavering horizon dotted with the hills and the distant marching animals along the plain. In the middle distance they could see horses and their mounted riders emerge from the coming darkness, almost fantastical in that shimmering void, bobbing and trembling and announced by the plume of sand they threw behind them. A battalion of miserables with some clad in the colors of Mexico and others wore ponchos adorned with diamonds the color of the blazing noon sky and others were naked though their tanned and leather like hides made them seem clothed in a garb spun by the desert itself, spat out clothed in dry redness to sow havoc among men, and as they rode it was with a bristling of many barrels of muskets and some older arquebuses with match strings trailing long blue ribbons of gunsmoke.

They’d set their perimeter but between them both shot was light and aim was further lacking and the one thing they had in abundance was the fire they’d lit. It was in this small brightness they saw the banditos draw nearer and when they’d come to range for their rifles the frontmost man turned and dismounted and stood in the sand and his fellows stalled too. This one was in the bright azure of the Mexican soldados though it was marred by the signatures of ball and arrow alike, and what little remained hung loosely. He bore what was once perhaps a dog lock smoothbore, four feet of iron and wood formed long before he was, and he clung on to its much beaten stock and he would caress and work the lock as if the thing in his hands were his sole anchor to the world of man, and as if to let go were to submit to the amalgamation of what little remained of man and what was created in the silence and calamitous desolation.  

The Cazador wet his mouth that had gone dry during their approach and spat into the sand. The American kept his Harper level.

English?

Some. Enough.

The bandito spared the Cazador a quick glance.

Does he speak? Hables?

The Cazador answered with a motion smooth and practiced and his carbine was level.

He does not speak.

So it is. What is it you want here?

Shelter. For the night. We will move with dawn.

Men who move with dawn move from something.

We move at dawn to move fast. We move from nothing.

The bandito glanced away toward his riders and they gestured to him with their gun barrels and lances.

Supposing

He said, not believing

Whatever lies on yonder plain which pursues ye. Does it pursue me to?

The American looked to the Cazador and did not say anything. The Cazador looked at the bandito and his dirty brass buttons and torn alabaster sash and did not say anything. He nodded. The bandito made a sound in his throat that was an ugly middle distance between anger and despair.

You’d have a day’s start if ye left now.

The American offered but his Harper still beheld the bandito’s head, the greasy locks strewn about it more akin to mane than hair.

The bandito remounted and cried out toward his men in a tongue that was a part the very base of Mexican and the rest was a crude motley of language formed out of desperation by desperate men. With the sounding of their cries and whoops and the staccato thunder of their pieces to announce their exodus from that dark and dry place they rode till they were again but rippling phantasms apart from the tangible plain and then they were no more.

In the long days they rode westward. A single file across boundless sepias and a crimson meridian that ran forever far and wide. The sun was hot and they rode blinking sweat out of their eyes and soon they could sweat no more so they took to riding in darkness among the unbroken mustangs thundering for long hours. They came upon great stone monoliths in the bases and shallow caves of which they huddled in much like the men that came before. In the blazing day a pronghorn or somesuch creature would wonder by their merger trappings and the American or the Cazador would trade shots till one fell it and the other advanced snakelike stooped low to avoid gazing at the sun to drag it back to the cool dimness where they would begin to butcher it. They rode with long strips of the dead things hanging loosely on ropes fashioned form dried grass. They dried them in the day and would chew as they rode, tanned jaws rolling with the motions of rending the flesh. At night the wolves that pursued them howled intermittently and sometimes they would let off shots into the dark and when the shot and powder pouches were all emptied they took to howling back. They since abandoned the vestments of man and rode and dwelled in that great plain in near nakedness.

By the light of a tallow candle that was very much burdened they entered through the archway of a doorless saloon, clad in loincloths fashioned from what remained of what they’d worn clutching into axes of bone and stone with hair knotted and braided and the blood of a hundred butcherings upon their dirtied hands, and the brick walls were the first things they’d seen formed from the hands of men. A cold wind blew. They drank whiskey, or something that did a similar duty, from clay cups red like the walls and soon they left as the men inside drank and the candle burned itself down.

They were on a knoll, and yonder lay a smattering of starched military tents numbering close to sixty. By a twilight that came slowly and softly to be reflected along the wideness of the rio grande they traipsed and danced around tent pegs and dying fire pits like faustian ideations and they would stoop with bundled arms for the muted glints of sabres and shot shining in the distant star light, and the smooth and muscled flanks of cavalry horses, and soon they returned to their roost upon the knoll and to their backs was a full new moon and all around was the darkness and in the far distance they could hear the first of the wolves.

The end. Sonora was published in Volume 1 of the Ronin Express, on October 25th, 2016. It can be purchased here.

We would like to thank all those involved.

[know-what-youare]

When the lambs is lost in the mountain. They is cry. Sometime come the mother. Sometime the wolf.

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy (via trashman69)

[kingpyg]

Here Was a Man

I always felt that HBO’s Deadwood stands as the closest thing we can get to a visual adaption of a Cormac McCarthy novel, embodying that atmosphere predominant in Blood Meridian and all his works before (which I consider truer to his prose than anything subsequent). As such, here’s a scene from the series - a favorite of mine - that I’ve tried my damndest to present in something resembling his style.

Here was a Man

Here was a man in the doorway of the Number Ten saloon against the glaring sun outside. Tall man. Thin man. Dressed in faded army rags with his frame convulsing in fury. The men around the tables in their gunbelts and neat bowler hats saw him come and bade him no mind and stared back to the faded cards in their sweaty hands. Perhaps it was that in those caricatures of queens with the breasts draw on with a crude hand that more meaning lay for them and in their stupor they failed to see him draw near.

In the whore house the whore stood stiff against the wall while her man died.

In the market the morning’s butchery was coming to its end and cleavers were washed in dirty wooden pails.

A horse came unhitched and went buck wild and ran free. Obsidian fur stretched tight over the ridges and crevices of equine muscle, contracting in sharp shadowfolds in the bright Dakota sun.

In the street. Later. He ran with breath coming with fire and roasting the flesh of his lungs as the mud held tight to his wet feet as if the land itself were wrought with anger from his crime. He scrambled in blind fear through the din of the late morning around stinking bodies clothed in cheap cotton passing Union men with their rifles high in the midmorning sky like chimney stacks and suddenly he hands met the warm flanks of a horse. They went wild against the stiff leather from a saddle and his feet kicked at the stirrups and his stomach was beached against the saddle when hands from behind grasped at his back and he was thrown on to the mud. Hands and feet came down like rain and he was among a forest of thrashing limbs and spitting up blood and teeth into the mud.

In the midmorning sun two men within timber frames stood and stared as the crowds rushed inward. They saw, saw what? Danger? Perhaps it was the language spoken by the din and rushing bodies that came to their ears and bade them leave the shade and step into the muddy ground and blazing sun.

In a house with the children the woman looked down upon the rushing throngs and felt, she felt, she didn’t know what she felt. All at once she was weighed down and weightless and then she was among them.

From the gates of camp a cazador dirty from days of riding thundered in screaming and in his blackened hands was the head of an Indian chief.

Here was the girl in the doorway of the Number Ten with her frame shaking in the thick grip of anxiety as to the sight that lay upon the dirty floor in a pale beam of sun fighting its way through the murk of tobacco smoke and within that haze, up went a stark white ribbon of burnt sulphur. In the long minutes that ticked by she had emerged from that place already red faced and drunk and weeping and laughing and cajoling in ignorance to her terror. To see this were the crowd, stopped short and sweating as they waited for her to speak, and for a while they waited while she drained another bottle while the others had piled around her feet.

“They shot Wild Bill.” She laughed, and cried, and the noise she made was an ugly middle distance between the two.

“Cocksuckers.”

[kingpyg]

The Deluge 2

The envelope had been left for him on Friday, but by then he was in the woods and he emerged on Sunday clutching a bundle of squirrels and rabbits that had come out. That was in spring, when the winter was bidden to go but held on with wavering clutches of cold and damp in place of the crisp dryness so welcomed not two months before. Dead things during the white months thawed and stank and squelched underfoot, stomped into soup under torrential rainfall. During these first desperate months some would emerge from their hovels thick with blankets beginning to sag under the great weight of the damp. Limbs stiff and arthritic from the cold struggle to place numb hands on hoe and plow and a seed bag frozen solid with moisture is rattled for those last vestiges of autumn so long ago. Some would cleave rusted metal through mud and sod and sprinkle seeds futiley into the open wounds. Nothing would grow, not when the ground had been flooded and all the food of the land rendered like lard, rotten meat ground and watered until nothing wholesome remained.

Jeb had gone round the camps and tenements on Thursday last week with a sheet torn from his free almanac and a wax pencil that was ground down to a stub. He’d taken names and prices, and he’d pooled together money and walked from the shared lots that noon ten miles down a single road scratched into the carpet of sentinel pines and as he walked the woods and whispered sometimes and other times he’d hear thunder from all around.

He spent most of the first day skirting around trees and fallen logs, first on his legs then gradually he fell to his hands and knees peering and clawing into cracks trying to find fur and the first signs of life come spring. The first night he simply lay against a log with his broad coat over his frame and the blanket from his shack tied tightly around that. He shivered, but otherwise sleep soon came and with morning the air had sharpened and he awoke breathing needles and knives. He hunted on Saturday, mostly with snares he placed on well known spots and other times he crawled with his belly and chest cooling against the dew thick ground and all at once he would leap forward like some eel and cut through the morning haze and there would be a short squeal and if you listened closely, the soft crunch of bones against the whispering of the pines.

They tried to slip it under his door but the wood had always been swollen from rains in the winter and so nothing but ants and mites could squeeze under it now. Two share croppers had skipped out on chores to find him, and after they’d spent that time in their own camps draining jars of whiskey his presence was not noted. Someone had nailed the note to his door and it went yellow and hard over the weekend’s rain.  Jeb came home with his creatures dangling from his waist in a skirt of cooling fur and gore and snatched it as he pushed the swollen wood open with one booted foot. The inside damp and chill greeted him and held his body tight and fingers of frost lanced through the spots of rain on the coat he wore. His hands were in mittens but the wool clung on strong to the damp and while he walked he clenched and opened his fists to keep blood going. He tossed the envelope onto his frozen mattress with a finger clogged through and through with the cement of damp numbness. The outside had a muffled din of people up but not awake, toiling to ward off the starvation that was inevitable. The thing had landed and was left untouched while Jeb shed his damp clothes and put on ones crisp and stiff from the cold and went from room, returning once the sun had dipped for three hours and the air outside grew sharp once more. Jeb came back home and sat on the floor, all the while his fists were still moving, slower now, and he moved one hand with some more urgency while the other shook and trembled through the act of preparing a fire. The envelope sat on his bed and stayed there while pale orange fingers came from the hearth and reached to the far corners of the shack and groped at the dark, and Jeb himself stared at the blaze from where they sprang from. Perhaps in that inferno lay reason to hold and not work his numbing fingers against the cold manila and tear it free and pry out the paper within. Were it that  he knew sounding the words scrawled upon there brought him some level of pain, for he found himself mouthing them anyway even as the envelope lay unopened.

[kingpyg]

The Deluge 1

A man on a horse. Rode till evening and as the sun dipped casting orange light along the evergreen sea the rider crested a hill and yonder lay a logging camp clothed in smoke. Behind and at all sides were the great rolling plains and high in the sky the clouds grayed and swelled. A stiff wind blew from the east and filled his eyes and mouth with thick sharp air and in his ears the pines were thundering.

He got himself off the horse and stood next to the animal with the neat rows of logs to his back. He moved methodically. Around him soon sprung up a canvas lean-to and as dark fell the night was punched by a flash and he sat among the flames of a waning fire burdened by the loud wind. Long shadows sprung from their static forms and danced into the night fading into the thick black. On his high perch with the wind coming off the hills and sweeping up the bluffs. It rushed between the trees came to him howling and whispering. He stared into the dimming blaze and the flames played behind his eyes.

He hitched the horse on a nail and ate and slept. When the sun rose he woke and ate once again before he descended the hill. He was walking cautionary and feeling the dirt with the tips of his feet and sometimes he would stand still and shift the weight from leg to leg and then would be moving slowly again. Later he was digging with shovel he’d brought in two pieces and held along the side of his horse. He dug for a good while, rested when his arms could no longer come above his head. Sitting in the dirt as the sun sat high in the sky. A tanned boulder sitting hunchbacked, he rose when gray clouds blotched that cobalt expanse. He stretched and swore and and squinted toward the clouds and whatever lay beyond in malice and cold contempt.

“Goddamn you.”

He was digging in the late afternoon gloom. Dull metallic blows sounded off and ricocheted off the low foothills and went to be rendered mute among the trees. He grunted and swore and the rough wood from his implement burned his palms. He cursed his arms for being in pain and he cursed the dirt for holding firm. This toil gave purchase suddenly; the planks gave way and the shovel carved an oblong and jagged wound in the putrid wood. The gunshot crack of rotted planks splintering flared and was swallowed by the wind. A hiss of putrefied air, and the snort of the horse indignantly breathing it in.

The shovel was dropped and the digger went down to a knee and peered in, shifting his head to find light in the gloom and when he found none he went on his belly. There he lay much like a dead man himself with the cold and damp surrounding him and his parody of a grave while his groped blindly alongside the coffin feeling for things in the dark his eye was failing to see as if somehow he would gain purchase. His jaw moved in weird motions sounding curses and prayers and in between an incomprehensible ramble sounding in some ancient and basal tongue.

There was dripping and shifting and the air was thick with must from the wood. It had swallowed up the damp from the earth and had frozen and expanded in the winter months and when spring came the boards would leak and putrefy. Some small insect twitched and crawled from dark tugging food within pitch dark pincers. Many like itself dwelt beyond the corners of his sight. It sprung and darted back to the safety of the gloom and its catch sprung from its jaws and rolled into sight, leaving a gray sludge. The eye straining in the dank and musty air flared with the skin pulling back on a dried pupil as the looker leapt forth from his grave and he rose like some thing that had been spat out of the earth and he turned and fell toward the damp grass prostrate before the swelling sky. In the thick pre-rain air the horse screamed and bucked wild on the stink of fear of its rider and its cries sounded off the hills with fresh thunder answering in reply from the fat clouds overhead rolling in like sea foam. In their fat and swollen folds lightning sparked. Tawny hair stretched tight over bulging muscle as the beast tried to tear itself free from its nail and its hooves dug deep gouges in the soft ground. Within the pit light crept along mottled wood and over the ragged hole. A chipped and battered blue iris stared vacantly at the sky the color of a dead man’s skin, bright blue petard sparking against the stinking mud.

[kingpyg]

Scraps: Evelyn

This was probably something I wrote when I was an angsty little shit. I dunno, I found it in an old school notebook

TW: domestic violence

Evelyn was crying when I finally came downstairs. I smelt amazing. I’d used the best perfume you could get at the drug store, and even slapped on a handful of Dad’s mousse. Evelyn was in a ball gown that wasn’t showing off nor had any design on it. I felt confident. I could do this. Step seventeen was all about self realization and now I was realizing myself. Take fate by the hand and grab it and make it your’s.

“My mother’s in ICU.” She sobbed but my hand was already on the way to her shoulder before the words came out. I squeezed and felt triumphant when she didn’t tense.

“We’ll go together.” Her face was beautiful in the dim light of the single lamp as it beamed shining under the dollar store makeup she splurged on.

“I got the best seats at the Garden.” It was the best place to eat out.

She turned, blue eyes wide beneath thick mascara that I never cared for, dripping slimy rivulets of damp iron oxide. They used to use coal in that shit, so I was glad they didn’t any more.

“Really good seats.” I fought on. I was trying so fucking hard at this point. Step sixteen was about preparing yourself for adversity, all about facing your frustrations well I was fucking seeing it now.

“Right next to the window.” Really, right there. I didn’t understand why she had to go and do this and then my mousse was dripping down the sweaty hair melting and turning into sludge like wax from a candle under a bright flame.

--------------------------------

“I’d make a pretty corpse.”

“You’d make a dead corpse.”

“And how glamorous is death?”

“Nothing glamorous about decay.”

Evelyn had forsaken her meds that morning and I wish she told me before the drive.

“They’ll bury me in spring so I can fade away with the seasons. Paris, probably. Come winter I’ll be gone.”

“For god’s sake Evelyn.” We took a sharp left. Traffic. More fucking traffic. It wasn’t thinning, it wouldn’t for another three hours and my move only got us into the tail end of another jam.

“You’ve got no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.” I slammed the breaks on the Olds and it stuck to the spot. Evelyn thumped against the dash but she was too un-doped to care, or probably even feel it.

“Maybe they’ll bury me in a wedding gown. Wouldn’t that be something?” “Evey...”

“No, listen! Imagine what they’ll play!”

“Every, your-”

“It’ll be live, I’m sure. Mom wouldn’t let them play something recorded. You wouldn’t let them play anything recorded.”

And suddenly the car was way too small and the aircon was barely doing anything to fight the heat coming in from outside because the goddamn windows weren’t closing right again, and I was aware of how cheap my shoes were and how crap the shirt I had on was.

And then she was staring at me baby blues inflated in a look of shock and awe. My hand was still stinging from the impact of meeting her cheek.


[kingpyg]

Tracks

Personally I’m not too happy with how I ended this.

Prompt: old lady, buried her husband who she wasn’t a fan of, express her feelings using the landscape

Morning came dry and with a prickling heat unrelenting. Jedediah had gone in the night with a creak of the screen door and the dog’s barks and when the sun came up in the sky and the yellow light sparkled along the wet banks of the arroyo that ran alongside their farm she saw his truck’s footprints in the dew wet earth, but the beast had lumbered off somewhere far and away.

She came down ancient stairs the man had sawn and nailed, in a time that felt like life and day had gone by and left it in its dust. The boards creaked, so did she. Sometime in the dim past bathed in rose lenses and swing music, the legs and knees and swollen and knotted beneath the pale and dried wrinkly skin that looked the same as a rawhide left out too dry for a day too long. In the kitchen where the early sunlight came through dirty windows to rest on a tiled floor long past sweeping, she leant against the counter with one stalk of an arm and lit a Strike. Outside the stream sounded and birdsong followed suit.

It was gone noon when she went out but Jedediah hadn’t come back yet but she barely noticed. She crossed the dried and cracked earth bisected by a fence they’d put up as a couple and came to the stream and squatted in the soft earth and breathed softly. The sun sat fat and powerful in the middle of the sky and she was already sweating when she dipped her feet in. On days when they’d come out here like they had in the past he’d have an arm around her and another under her sundress as she stared into the distance at the mountain range and whitecaps of snow. When he’d be spent and done she’d still be staring. They’d came out here most recently on Tuesday when the air had been thick as it was during the summers and she’d stared at the sparse white dustings in the distance through a haze of humidity. You ain’t young no more, he’d said while his fingers were like snakes biting and writhing. You cain’t do what I needs done.

That’s fine, she said and stared. That’s fine.

In the warming afternoon she sat with her dress wet and dirtied by the riverside mud. The tracks the truck had dug were shallowing and would soon be gone. In the far distance she saw dark clouds rippling with thunder forming along the sierra that lay upon its side and regarded her small existence with its rocky gaze. The tracks remained and would stay for some time, but the beast was far and away.

That’s fine, she said and stared. That’s fine.

[kingpyg]

The Discussion

Prompts: A man, about to drive, young father, left the baby seat on the roof. Now his wife is yelling at him about it.

A man walking towards the chopping block, the electric chair, to a wooden post before a firing squad, is invariably thinking about executioner’s axe, gun, or needle, and never about the executioner themself. Be he in fetters or chains, he walks with a certain resolution and pride, resigned to the coming blow.

Unless he is Harold.

Harold couldn’t attest to a great many things in life good or bad, and so his execution was more unorthodox than most. Instead of thick rusted manacles holding his slim wrists tight against the rough metal, biting and scraping at the skin surely calloused from wearing such things for so long, Harold awaited his fate in a faded argyle bathrobe that was perhaps too open at the front. Also his wrists were pretty fat. Instead of a hallways along which ran the cells keeping the darkest souls from seeing the light of day, and the guards patrolling from gangways with shotguns and riot shields, Harold waited for his fate on a hard kitchen bar stool that was making the act of sitting as worse as the execution that was to come. And instead of being lashed to an electric chair or tied to a post with one last smoke and a parting shot, Harold was going to be executed in his own kitchen, in his own home, in his own bathrobe. That faded old thing was becoming soaked with sweat, even though its wearer sat in his hard chair staring at the clock on the wall they’d bought at Disneyland on a day when the lines were too long, and so they’d just skipped the whole mess and told the kid the giftshop was the cause of the whole fuss. Mickey Mouse had both his hands at the six o’clock position when the upstairs shower cut off and the bathroom door swung open. As his executioner came down the stairs with heavy ominous steps, Mickey had his said cartoon mouse eyes on Harold’s, as if saying: better you than me, you poor bastard.

She came through the kitchen archway with a blast of steam and plunged the whole room into a thick soup of tension inch thick, her head enveloped in red flames. Her own rombe was white and cinched tight and shone in the morning sun as she strode on long legs towards him with purpose and murder in her stride.

“Harold.”

“Marion.”

“You’re a fucking idiot, Harold.”

“I am a fucking idiot, Marion.”

She stood and stared down hard at him and he seemingly melted further onto the stool like a fat, pasty ice cream left on the cone for too long. Mickey kept ticking and tocking, and soon the hands read six fifty-five.

She moved first and fast, holding his head in her hands and finally he allowed himself to breathe. She held his hand to her chest and stroked his hair, the fingers moving strong and hard through thick brown hair, and she felt wetness from his cheek.

“You have to stop doing this.” She spoke with great effort to hold back the cracks forming deep in her voice and so it came out strained and stretched too thin.

“You have to stop putting taking that damn thing out of the garage every time you leave.”

“I keep forgetting, Marion,” He sobbed and whined like some wounded animal caught in a trap,

“I keep forgetting every day. I had to take her to school, and we were so late-”

“Harold,” She was whispering now, leaned close over each other as they were and so her mouth was right next his ear,

“She’s been dead for two years, honey.”

The clock hit seven. It chimes, and in the quiet morning that’s all they could hear.


[kingpyg]

I Shot a Man in Reno

Word count was too high for the class I submitted this piece in.

The streetlights in Reno came on at six sharp so when the sun went down the fat yellow orbs were already burning with that soft electric hum. They buzzed as the cars faded and the doors closed, and the last shopkeeper grasped the last shutter and his old and tired hands brought the shutter shuddering down. Soon they were the only things sounding in that thick dark. A cold wind fell upon the Sierra and wrapped its arms tight along the jagged brown mountains upon which lay the first dusting of snow. In that electric dark small things came from their hovels and danced and howled.

Small steps punched the still air. A small man, thin man, tall with long arms plunged deep into a pinstripe jacket with shoulders like proud wings tucked and coiled. His long shadow leapt ahead of him and fiddled as if to announce his wake. Somewhere a door opened. Light cut the inky black from a narrow doorway. Weak yellow from a dirty bulb that hung bare. Then another man. Thick and round with broad arms and heavy hands. He staggers and stumbles then stands deaf and dumb in the middle of the street. He steadies himself on a rusty lamp post and stands there and feels the metal’s electric hum for a while. Shadows from beyond the dim yellow haze play on his large stomach and up the heaving chest to the face broad and red. The thin man steps into the light and in his hands is the sparking petard of light coming announcing polished nickel moulded into a slender barrel. Thirty-two caliber. Six slim brass slugs rattle in their chambers. A click of the hammer sounded with the click of his feet.

The fat man staggers dumbly and soon is clasping a sharp and slim navaja in a loose grip that makes the blade tremble and the light comes off the pitted metal and glints in the dark like a fire burdened with heavy wind. Hey stop right there. You speaking English? Hey stop right there you dumb nigger. Don’t point that thing at me. He doesn’t listen and advances. Hand like a boa along the grip. The slim muscled snake is loose around the wood and nickled iron and all at once is coiled tight. Suddenly there is thunder and smoke and all around is the stench of sulfur. The fat man sinks to a knee and gurgles wordlessly to the star specked sky and is soon collapsed cold and around his head is his own meridian halo.

Later. Sirens. White sedans with fat black brush strokes along the sides and Reno stenciled in dirty white. They had him in the back after cornering him and breaking his leg and arm and cuffing the slim shattered wrists to a rail that ran along the inside of the car. They were along the road in the inky black and he watched the fat yellow lines fly by. Hey. Hey why’d you go and shoot that man? It was the driver who spoke and the sound came off the fogged windshield muffled and soft. You ain’t had no money. No one said he seen you have any quarrel with him. The thin man pressed his head against a cold window and closed his eyes and when the driver had lost the urge to keep talking he mouthed words that fogged the glass.

Just to watch him die.

[kingpyg]

Thunder on the Horizon - Chapter 1

This is part of a larger work, intended to be a commentary on the nature of freedom and servitude, set against the backdrop of the Cherokee-American wars. This is the first chapter, although that’s a very tentative title considering it probably isn’t even done.

1.

Burke had two things all men who sail the sea need, one being a steady mind and the other being steady legs. Burke could stand all day and all night and when all was said and done he could still walk home. His mind was clear, dull, but clear. For the man who stood dead at sex feet with his sunken eyes and wild hair and a nose that was broken when he was a child, there were certain truths to the world, and he abided by them, and that was enough. One truth was that God watched over all, and all were judged by his hand, and the second truth was that the only man more powerful than God was his captain. He was named Thorgood, and he owned the Lockheed. She was a twenty gun schooner under the flag of the Royal Navy and she was Burke's entire world.

His strong legs failed him now. He stood upon the deck of the Lockheed and stared at the fires from the shore and saw thunder on the horizon. His legs were shaking as was the rest of him. His frame was a leaf in a brutal wind that sought to tear it asunder.

"It is over." Thorgood placed his small hand on the broad back of his oldest sailor. It did not stay long.

"Did we kill them all?"

"We did. We tried."

"They's had children? Women among them as well."

"It is over."

Thorgood was gone by the time his last words were swept by the wind. It was all he had to say and it was all there could have been said. For the great terror Burke had seen and that his mind failed to grasp had come and gone in the afternoon. The cannons were loaded early that morning and the cew had been given leave to pray after breakfast. Two hours later they had given fire for ten whole minutes by the count of the First Mate and then the affair was concluded. Inventory was taken; the ship's supply of grapeshot had been expended. Men were chosen and given torches, then were sent ashore with just that and their clothes. They left the boat and went ashore and thirty minutes later they came back and during that time the teepees started to burn. The smell in the air became thick as the afternoon went and Thorgood disappeared into his cabin and there he stayed. The anchor had been sunk and sentries were posted. It was late afternoon. It was cooler now than it had been that morning, when the heat came in a flash and Burke had woken on the deck stiff and sweating, blinking the stinging stuff out of his eyes. Burke was still on the deck as he had been for most of the day.

Then his legs came back to him and he set to work. He tried not to think and was fairly successful in that venture. The roar of the sea and the salt heavy in the air thundered away in his mind and was like the wind that sometimes swept his breath from his mouth. A sail had to be secured and then some cannon balls had rolled from their stack. It was dark when he was done. The stars were out this night, they were in the sky burning bright though Burke could never realize this. His world ended where the Lockheed ended and the stars were mere lights in the sky beyond his mind.

Tonight they burned as before but tonight Burke stopped and stared. The day was over now. Dinner had been prepared and consumed, and the men had received an extra ration of rum which pleased them. Burke was a large man and so the drink only served to loosen his mind some and while the rest of the crew slept upon the deck that was cooled by a gentle breeze, he stood and stared into the sky at the stars.

They were in the endless black sky shining bright and boring into his soul. They were a thousand eyes staring back and screaming. They would not quiet. He had seen them pleading with him with their eyes as the cannons let fly and he could still see them once the teepees started to burn. Burke believed in God, as much as be believed in the Lockheed and as much as he believed in his captain. He feared the judgement each man would face upon his final breath like every other good man that lived in this world, and tonight his fears were leaping in his chest, roasting his heart whole. As Burke stared up at the skies and the stars glared right back, the weight of God's hand crushed his shoulders, and the screams of the Cherokee would not quiet.

Thorgood considered himself a fine captain and would have been right in that regard. He commanded his Lockheed for many long years over many long voyages. From the New World and back, he had been three times, and had therefore spent near three years at sea. He had sea legs, those trunks that anchor a man to his ship. He was slight and was the slightest of his crew. The able-seaman who had served with him since the day the Lockheed sailed from home - Burke - easily dwarfed him despite the smaller man being the elder. Regardless, he liked Burke enough. Burke was among those men who were simple and straightforward and if you told them to do something they would do it. Thorgood was a bloodhound for such men, for there were plenty near the docks back home, and many more in the gutters that surrounded that dark place, and the only challenge was finding the right gutter. Thorgood would bring them on and make them kings for the last week that the Lockheed sat in her dock and when she finally struck her sails and ventured into the sun he would lock them on the deck among themselves.

For Thorgood was a good captain and a terrible man but such was the make of men in his role. Whether it drew such men or created them along the way was a matter he didn't think of. He chose to think he had always been this way, not a cruel man but practical in his own sense. He thought such a view valid and if his men disagreed they were not his men and if the Lockheed happened to be out at sea when such an affair arose he would return to dock seeking new crew.

It was in this instance that he had met Burke.

Burke's mother had said they were German, if not to earn praise from him then to earn that much more for her son. He had seen though that the dirty blonde hair - no doubt hastily dyed - and deep eyes branded them Slavs, and Slavs were of a price far lower than Germans. The mother would have had to starve, but she did have one less mouth to feed, Thorgood reasoned, and so the transaction was fair.

The man had been almost twenty when he was bought, and the man was simple, enough so that he had been bought for a single payment of however many pounds and had not been given the opportunity to discuss a wage! But for Thorgood the man had enough sense of mind for purposes of the Lockheed. He spoke decent English, could rig a sail, and had plowed enough fields that he could haul cannon balls all day with only one meal in the morning and rum in the evening. He had proven this many times, for the captain was more apt to spend on powder and shot than pork and salt, though rum was always in decent supply.

[kingpyg]

Night Rider - excerpt

This was some character establishment I was going to put in the beginning of Night Rider, but was left out.

Gla woke up.

His window had been left open but no breeze blew in. Screen shutters were flung to either side of the square carved into the rough concrete of his apartment block, almost too narrow to be called a window but at the price he paid he had no place to complain.

There was no bed. Gla lay on a single mattress in a room that was filled with only a dresser and the stale Thai air. The floor was tiled and spotless, almost as if he had restricted himself to the corner where his mat lay. A rice cooker and some school books were scattered around it and the stained bowl of his last meal still lay near his feet.

He sat up and sat still for a while. His alarm had not sounded; the cheap plastic child's toy he called a watch had not beeped. He had heard that beep many nights, many times. He knew it's call and could rouse of any sleep to it's sounding. While he sat now, there was only silence.

He considered himself a man.

By all rights he may have been, at nineteen the line becomes blurry. He thought himself a man as he left the north down on a train that snaked it's way through his country for neat two days. He had slept on train seats and ate sticky rice and preserved pork. His father had called it a good strong meal, that could sustain anyone and anything. He had called his father the day he arrived in Bangkok, lost int he concrete jungle. The man listened, gave his regards, and never once called him a man.

So now he had attended school, one with an unimpressive name and harsh teachers. He lived in this single room in a concrete monolith that stood among ten others in a row that faced the dark, pockmarked with small holes you could barely call windows. The land around had not been developed. The school lay down a highway that led to an expressway. His monolith and its brothers were a slab of concrete surrounded by darkness and jungle. The only lights came from the street, pale orange dots whose glow failed to hit the upper floors that lay in darkness until the sun came up.

[girlcalledshotgun-deactivated20]

Taking your eye off the ball in Thailand is a national past time. Hours, days, nights, weeks and months roll by without anything more dramatic happening than coconut falling from a tree or a someone having to swim out to sea to retrieve a long tail boat that has slipped its not very securely tied...

[kingpyg]

It's somewhat bittersweet looking back. How we fell so fast from a seemingly democratic nation into a totalitarian regime that prides itself in desecrating human rights and who's followers are all too willing to lend a hand.

[smalljournalnews]

Thai Poll Date Uncertain as Protesters Disrupt Government Talks

BANGKOK — Thai authorities again delayed a final decision on the date of planned general elections when anti-government protesters disrupted a key meeting.

Earlier Thursday, a grenade and shooting attack killed at...

[kingpyg]

Quick reminder that the gunman responsible for endangering many innocent lives is held as a hero by the lunatics and depraved savages known as the PDRC.

[kingpyg]

On the Revolution

On the 22nd of May, 2014, a coup let by General Prayuth Chan-ocha toppled the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra. The coup began and ended on the same day, a systematic process perfected by years of use. This time there were no tanks, no shootouts between the Royal Thai Army and Redshirts in the streets of Bangkok. There was only a yellow tide, a cancer that had clogged the lifelines of Bangkok for six months, dismantling the democracy piece by piece till only its fragile heart remained. From there, the takeover was as efficient as it was absolute. Martial law was declared, the right of free speech all but revoked, key government officials of the previous government were arrested under the guise of reporting their presence, and two days later on the 24th of May, the junta released its hounds. They went, foaming at the mouth, rounding up all dissidents while the rest of the junta sank its teeth into the media of the nation while an interim constitution was enacted while officials - hand picked by the Beast Prayuth himself - were placed on their squares on the chessboard, effectively completing the junta's chokehold on the small south-east Asian nation. 

The entire constitution can be viewed here.

The prior six months of what was so innocently dubbed "anti-government protests" were instrumental in paving the road for such a smooth process of subjugation. The majority of the participants in these mass exercises of conformity were of the lower class, aspirations not exceeding a life on the farm and education gained at the nation’s most basic level. Far too few were part of the caste that was allowed to embrace higher thinking; indeed the nation is built upon retention, and the teacher must never be criticized. They even have their own day, their own prayer, and they actively enforce a curriculum that probably doesn’t even teach evolution, and what it does teach is horribly skewed. All this system works to do, and all it accomplishes, is "produce obedient and nationalistic citizens" On the "revolution", the same logic applies. The revolutionaries never questioned exactly what it was they were marching for. They simply rushed headlong into battle, destroying anything and everything that stood in their way, without the slightest regard for the years to come. They willingly blockaded polling stations, in an act that displayed the blatant hypocrisy of their movement, that we would not allow the citizens to vote as they feared the democratic process would interfere with their plans. In their defense, however, those who were actually on the ground were mere cannon fodder to those in charge. The movement was spearheaded by the diseased and corrupt institution known as the Thai upper class, that caste embodied by the nation's most powerful and the nation's most ignorant, firmly in bed with the royal family and the military leaders, two of the most - if not the most - corrupt institutions to ever hold power in the history of the country. In fact, the Thai army has fought only nine wars in its modern age, with minimal participation at best in Vietnam, Korea, and Iraq, and a laughable fight against the Japanese during World War Two, and yet, the Thai Army somehow found the time to appoint one thousand generals. It was this very same institution that led the Thai PDRC towards its subsequent dismantling of democracy within the country.

On the ground, the protests were a dazzling display of human ignorance and conformity. There were near a million people in the streets, a yellow sea that brought the nation to a standstill, and as the months dragged on those same people willingly and enthusiastically killed their own country. Seizing key government buildings were among their actions of self harm, and purposely disrupting the democratic process was another major blow. As usual, the leader of the movement, Suthep Thaungsuban, was on the scene following the illegal seizure of government buildings to assure foreign press that such actions were "a peaceful seizure by the people", displaying the sheer hypocrisy and ignorance of the entire movement. In any other country, among a more rational people, the entire movement would have been seen as an extreme threat to the rights of the people, the continued stability of the country, and the general wellbeing of every Thai person alive.

And yet, by the time all was said and done, and all pretenses of freedom lay flaming at the feet of a movement all to eager to keep the flames going, it was only February, and the nation's descent into totalitarianism had only begun.

[avocadohms]

http://chn.ge/1zEFh8w DON’T FUCKING SIGN THIS

Now that’s out of the way, let’s address the petition. This petition was undoubtedly written by a Royalist, for the flawed, statist logic it employs is one that faction of maniacal bootlickers loves to force on free people everywhere. It calls for...