The Boys are Back in Town
Peace of mind dictated I make another Afflicted Lands episode to recover from recent burnout over figuring out videos and YouTube. Basically this is an illustration accompanied by a brief written tale.
I haven’t numbered the episodes because I may not write them in order and am attempting to create short stories that hold up without exposition or context. Reading more stories might hint at a backstory and reveal world secrets. Depending on how good I am at this . . .
That said, read on for Literate Monsters!
Sometimes a new building would be built, and the distinction between it and the older buildings would be so impactful I would have to react. Not by asking questions but by going out, and finding out. I was no longer so young the explanation that the old buildings just grew into existence in the exact state they were in, satisfied me. There had to have been something here before, before me, before everyone.
An odd genre of fairytales attesting to a flat-faced people with fur atop their heads was so lore-heavy it occurred to me I might be looking at something that was, at least at some point, very real indeed. A good source for information had always been the old school, it was almost as if any record of anything had been carried in from the old neighborhoods and collected there.
Carried in by what, should have been obvious.
It was hard however, to see the powdery, luminescent, frilled things, with their tangled limbs and habit of not ever moving when it was possible to see them do it, as beings with any agency. I’d found the fishers so terrifying as a child that Father could end our arguments instantly by asking if I’d rather talk to them.
Other things out there in the world, were far more ornery but there was something about fishers that always sent me running home when a crowd of them blocked the lonely roads at dusk. Though they walked the halls of the school, I crept past them in search of books, files, DVDs, VHS, and unexpectedly - internet! They would cut the old building’s power eventually and drag me out of the mildewed offices after silently moving the furniture I’d piled in the doorways. That these old buildings had power did not seem odd at the time. I knew wires as dangerous weeds in need of control, not infrastructure to be manufactured and installed. As much as the thought of being caught and carried home by the things brought terror, there were secrets in the school I was sure were important.
The old ledgers with their facts and figures stored in bins made of plastic were the last thing I had investigated because they seemed so prestigiously dull, yet the effect of my inquiries that day were profound, for this was the first time any of the fisher had spoken, or rather written, to me. A piece of chalk met the old green board - a thing whose final lessons hadn’t been disturbed even by the winds blasting through broken windows - and wrote. “Come back when you’re older.”
After that, it had not been possible to return, not until I was well out of apprenticeship and had almost forgotten about my childhood haunts. I saw the words it had written were still on the board in the room where I had found the ledgers. Time was a very different thing in this place.
They gathered around me, one holding some ledgers. It seemed they had interpreted my boredom and nosiness decades ago for a deep care and interest in the ledgers, which they seemed to value highly. Assuming I hadn’t really cared that much about the old record books, it was with a very different mind that I looked at those words on the lichen covered green board in a room that was worse for wear but still had pipes humming and yellowed monitors glowing their strange un-death. The weight of my lived years crashed down. The fishers were patient, terrifyingly so, and there was something here they really, really, really wanted me to see.
York College hosted the art of Carol Prusa in the Cora Miller Gallery in Wolf Hall. Prusa is from Chicago originally but now lives in Southern Florida.
Prusa’s work takes about 80 hours for the small hemispheres and upwards of 700 hours on the large…
