These are 10 to 15 minute slices of life. Many are contest winners. What do you think?

Chanced to Be Found A-Rocking He, Poor, Poor Young Teddy Gore



Draped in a blanket of subliminality
I watched the stars dance, tonight to the beat of bullets with butterfly wings
And listened to acapella lullabies
Sung to the mid-October air
As dew drops laced the horizon
And I begged the Sun…..to rise

Fogged eyes and long-spoken goodbyes
Kiss the edge of tonight
And listen to the stars sing back.

Humbled by all around me
And taken back by what is still hidden
Times stands still
And nothing really matters because tonight
Is, by all accounts, my last. [Anonymous, Found on the Internet]


March 3, 1983: She calls it ‘rocking’, the thing I do just about every night----I have to. I’m on my back, in my bed, right next to a wall of my mom’s room----she’s lucky, nothing wakes her up, except maybe my rocking, I guess. IT…..does me, though, keeps me awake, from the hallway. I can hear IT, so I move my head, side to side, faster and faster so my ears get covered up and the noises go away if I keep going. The monkey’s noises, that is. I have to keep going and I do, she says, even in my sleep…..rocking keeps IT away from my bed.


September 21, 1984: I remember her telling me, sort of singing it to me when I was maybe 2 or so, over and over, different times: ‘monkeys jumping on the bed’, and, then, they fall off the bed and bump their heads….and, the doctor said……the doctor said, after there was one left, ‘put that monkey back in the bed’. Back in the bed, MY bed! And, she wasn’t even mad or upset that there was going to be that monkey thing in my bed…that scared me and made me think she thought it was OK for some wild thing to be in my bed……

November 13, 1984: She just doesn’t understand and I can’t tell her…..everything, that is; I can’t tell anyone, really. Not about the dreams, with her in them. They scare me; she scares me, like when she’s leaning hard on top of me, shaking me, sort of, then, I start shaking too and kind of wet the bed. I hear other boys talking about this, whispering sort of, but I hear them, so I know I’m not alone, but, still, they’re creepy, weird and I don’t want them to come back.

January 28, 1985: I read a story today at school that sort of reminded me of IT----it’s by Edgar A. Poe, about a monkey or something like it, starts with an ‘o’, can’t even spell or say it right; anyway, this thing kills these two women in Paris, France and no one can find out why they got killed because no money or anything else is stolen or anything like that and there’s a lot of gold coins left behind. IT made me think about how they must have felt, those women, before IT got them. IT tore them up pretty bad, stuffed one of them up a fireplace chimney!

February 3, 1985: I’m scared because my mom wakes me up after I finally get to sleeep and I always think it’s the monkey but it’s her face, right above mine, her hands on my chest, keeping me from rocking. And, then, she’ll invite me to sleep in her bed, and I want to but I don’t, really, I can’t cause she’ll know, when I get up that I wet my pants and the bed; it’s bad enough when she changes the sheets that I have to go through it all again, explaining so she won’t know the details, even though she should know, understand, she’s a grown up; I sometimes feel like my Dad must have, when she would get all mad and make him explain things he didn’t want to. I wish he were here, now, to help me with….her.

As he paused, a halting teardrop overwhelmed his eyes’ feeble ductile levy, lachrymose betrayal of a, now, ancient invisible scar of the mind, one which had marked two different victims deeply, him as his juvenile diaries struggled to document----a needful thing he had to let out, if only onto the prepubescent page.

It dripped onto the unread page below of the many private pages still in his head and caused the long-dried red ink of a schoolboy to blur, it seemed, in league with his watery onlookers.

How many youthful nights had he drawn out owing to fearful uninvited wilding thoughts and images until sleep had made its heavy ultimatum felt---how many such nights had he heard IT snorting with heaving wet breath, both like and unlike any dog he had ever known, lurking, drawing ever nearer his restless bed?

That tale of primal murder had brought it all alive again-----the lunging creature bent on his mutilation and then the brute’s desecration of his limp corpse laying there, in that blood-soaked bed of a grave to-be, there, in his mother’s house, with her just inches away, her house to be a reprise of what had happened in the Rue Morgue.

He gasped, his cold sweat mocking the warm evening’s air enveloping the front porch, his liminal protective space in the now of early adulthood’s first decade, seated on his mother’s antique carved rocker with the inlaid carved jade faces.

His mind’s ear replayed his dreamy urging, ‘more rouge’, as a too familiar succubus seemed to writhe commandingly, impending Jocasta to his confused, blind-sided Oedipus.
‘Enrouged, not enraged’-----a poignant bit of wordplay from an, at last, more playful inner voice he was summoning the best therapy he knew, his grimace slowly becoming an attempted smile. It felt good to feel good after having battled for so long so potent a battalion of peurile woes. Now, he was a witty young Hamlet, being cruel to his mother only to be kind, to himself.

Maybe the extended Freudian sessions he had endured wouldn’t need to go on----ten years was enough, especially when you’re not some hysterical Austrian hausfrau, he concluded, still feeling the after effects of the genuine grin that had finally taken hold of his long grim face. Dr. Pendergast had worked diligently, resorting to an entire glossary of clinical devices to draw Teddy Gore out of the extended childhood which had become his living purgatory. Even Dr. Pendergast sometimes, along with Leonard Bernstein, had wished that “Dr. Freud, Dr. Freud,…… had been differently employed”, quoting from the musical play he had renamed ‘Dark Side Story’, a left-handed compliment to murky old Sigmund.

Yet, through it all, Teddy had, it seemed to all, emerged from his too-long dark sleepless nightmare of the soul a stronger man----that was it, really: he had belatedly gotten a firmer grip on the hands of adult maleness. Dr. Pendergast had offically declared as much to Teddy’s insurer in the measured tone of the always ironically bloodless medical report: ‘Episodic remission of patient’s somnolescence dysfunction with acute aural hallucinatory complexes has now resolved overall nominally with low probability of recurrence, with prescribed regimen and Rx.’
In other words, ‘our sessions----and your medical benefits-----have run out.’

It was the zoological encounters Teddy had taken to, over time----- a strategy of ‘face your fear’ at its most graphic and tactile; Pendergast was sure there was a reality show producer somewhere who might want to exploit its potential for masochism, but he thought it well worth the risk.
Ultimately, while monitored remotely, yet close by, Teddy had spent time in isolation with an adult organgutan. Poe had, he found, held up the exceptional, abused captive ones of the species as fear’s very badge, all in the name of art. Its docile sweetness did, however, bring on a bout of melancholy in Teddy, struck as he was by the tragic irony embodied by this creature he had equated for so long with his younger personal extinction now, owing to indifferent human hands only technically connected to their hearts, approaching its own exit from this world.
And, still, IT did sometimes pursue him.
“You’re as healthy as science can make you” was the equivocal sendoff to what Teddy sensed was his first step on the primrose decorated lane to doom. His doctor of psychology----the very name of the so-called science had been dusted off history’s ancient shelf of wisdom-hoarding deities blamed for all mortal lack of understanding of what remained an unknown human Psyche----was often as stuck as Teddy was, maybe more so; at least Teddy could admit it. But the headshrinker, he was left to the only strategy he’d been taught by older disciples of quasi-scientific gospel: just wallpaper over the rough spots in the supporting walls of this rickety construct w’eve thrown together, stuffing the supports with all the hopeless confessionals from the leather couch, and be sure and insulate them with that pricey vellum stuff, also known as sheepskin. Call IT by its Latin name, ID, and just hope and pray that whatever the damnable ‘thing’ is takes on the properties of tame sheep; next patient, please.

She was dying, slowly and Teddy, her only child had stayed on through community college, taking time off to caretake from plans to move on toward the culminating steps into that adulthood whose door he had just, warily, opened. While her antiques business wasn’t much now, it was her, their sole asset and means of sustenance. It was important to maintain the business technically at least for health insurance needs they both had had in abundance.
In her heyday she had been a prominent antiquities dealer, the biggest on Cape Cod and second only to the NY houses on the East coast. One item had particular sentimental value for her, a hand-carved rocker said to have belonged to a tribal shaman of the Ivory Coast; it was at least 150 years old, she had confirmed. The jade was itself quite rare, and was carved with various stylized visages associated with the tribe’s primate deity, a god named ‘Idicombo’. What the white world called ghosts were very real entities to Alistare’s tribe-------Alistare had been the shrewd African purveyor, himself descended from mixed parents, one Arab, one African and even this seemingly benign fact, if true, he used to bargaining advantage, quipping: “I am best of both worlds, yes, master and servant, hmmm?!” He insisted on being known by just the one name, as though he were some dark Caesar in need of no other name to be recognized in his vaunted position throughout this realm of artful arcana.
Teddy recalled that he would puncuate his verbal display with a haunting rendition of Geoffrey Holder, laughing like the voodoo doctor in the cheezy Bond film, ‘Live and Let Die’, as though Holder the entity still lived, in him; these entitities, the ‘cadada’, he expounded, growing deadly serious, even pale, did not so much inhabit a place or thing as change it, alter its essence so thoroughly that it was in a fittingly ephemeral way new to the world of the ‘chendendi’, the material.

This rocker evinced such ornamental animism that the customarily prudent assessors of such objet d’art had certified in writing that the chair, when rocked, gave off an audible alive-sounding respiratory grunting.
“Romantic old-school cache” Teddy’s mother had scoffed, consigning this tall tale to the all-male ilk’s club, replete with mounted heads of wild beast adorning their otherwise seeming civilized lodges and dining halls; she mockingly added her own legend, that the thing rocked itself, doubtless in the thrall of its very own patron god. Teddy knew that this most uncommercial gesture was code for ‘I’m keeping it’.
And, now, almost habitually fighting off sleeep-----this time, for the pedestrian excuse that she needed her pain killers again, soon-----he felt, in that insubstantial middle no-place dividing waking and fullest slumber, a distinct impulse of gradually animated rocking……drousily opening one eye, he saw his feet where he had perched them, he thought----atop the porch railing. The chair was, however, not ‘grunting’, as he anticipated, having believed the male version of things animistic. Crickets sent their frantic calls without competition, human or….otherwise.
As Teddy decided to rise, his left foot fell to the ground, involuntarily, he was sure.
Coarse, ponderous, thumbless hands surrounded his throat powerfully preventing precious breath from attaining its hungry destination.
Teddy raised his, now, flailing arms to self-rescue, his hands grasping improbably small forearms, perfumed, and without the customary muskiness.
“Wake up, wake up, stop rocking!”
Pushing her away, as he had done so many desperate delirious times before, Teddy stood, adrenaline-overdosed.
IT was back.
His wristwatch caught his eyes, fresh from REM sleep----two hours had passed since he had ventured out onto this refuge of a porch. Teddy rushed to her bedroom-----empty, her bed made.
“Wake up, Teddy” this time it was the alarm inside his head bleeting in his own voice. He had set the clock radio in case he fell asleep, and now it loudly clicked on as instructed and issued a reminder of the lurking, subliminal reverie given voice in his desperate youth of the hallway hauntings, its effect that of a kind of mind-altering re-genesis, from Genesis: “I’m coming down, coming down like a monkey, but it’s alright…………..’No it isn’t’, his competing Teddy-voiced alarm objected……….you keep telling me I’ve got everything, you say I’ve got everything I want, you keep telling me you’re gonna help me, you’re gonna help me, but you don’t….but now I’m in too deep, it’s got me so that I just can’t sleep, get me out of here, please get me out of here, just help me I’ll do anything, anything if you’ll just help ……GET ME OUT OF HERE!
He needed to sit, sit down and clear his mind, just as Dr. Pendergast had taught him, but not…….on that rocker; where was it anyway, his pulse racing away from the shrink’s intended calming ritual’s results---- there was no rocker, anywhere. ‘Monkey mind’ he had said the eastern wisdom teachers had called it, a free-ranging jumble of thoughts all tied to words, to language and its hollow version of a neatly alphabetized reality, complete with proper spellings and pronunciations, so that we all got our experience from the same page. Wilding jumping from here to there, his brain was the primate he couldn’t awaken from…..or could he.
Teddy ran into the house, in search of the one real thing that could rid him of IT; where the Hell did she keep it. Think, think………………as he raced between cabinets and drawers full of nothing he wanted, needed, he remembered: at the shop, of course. He ran there, the two hundred yards or so to the shop around the corner from her townhouse; keys jangling, he spyed the area for any authorities, onlookers who might detain him from his purpose.
“There you are, you old friend” and, suddenly, Teddy recalled having helped his mother move it, ever so carefully, to its display case, a one of a kind novelty of another time, before modern life had kidnapped him, all of us, really, he mused, from our natural senses, from our own proper wildness. I’m coming down, coming down like a monkey, but it’s alright, like a load on your back that you can’t see but it’s alright, try to shake it loose, cut it free, let it go, but just get it away from me, cause tonight, tonight, tonight, maybe we’ll make it right, tonight, tonight, tonight…….please, get me out of here, someone get me out of here, just help me I’ll do anything, anything, if you’ll just help get me out of here, tonight I’m gonna make it right, tonight, tonight, TONIGHT!’
He found an antique school style desk and, finally, followed his doctor’s advice, to a point. Now it was time for self-healing, yes, the kind that you know is ‘right’, that’ll ‘make it right, tonight…’
He drew what felt like his first breath, unbated, for he didn’t know how long; whew, now how does this thing work…..Teddy felt the inversely divine heaviness of this thing of great value, and its greatest worth lay in its, now, perversely healing powers, its ability to kill the monkey once and for all time! As it sat there coldly filling his sweating, trembling hand, he meant to make his ultimate offering in defiance of what had proved a mediocre god of the human ; the primate god had been stronger, feistier.
Swooping down from what must have looked to Teddy like just another patch of dark nowhere, a hairy strong arm grabbed hold of the assassin hand, scoldingly warning Teddy:
“That is your last warning, Master Gore! You know the rules against bringing real-looking toys like the pistol in your hand onto these school grounds.” After a half eternity of mutually exchanged stern and startled looks, respectively from the teacher and Teddy, the diatribe of righteous sensibility continued: “Now, you know that we here at this school put great stock in the cultivation of God-given imaginative powers of the young, but, Teddy, yours has just gone much too far than would ever be called for for our little ‘show and tell’ exercise of oral essays about Mr. Poe’s story. I’m afraid I’ll have to schedule you for extended visits with our brand new school psychologist Dr. Pendergast…….now, I’m sure that your late mother would have wanted it that way.”
Although it was his fifth visit with the eager psychologist, Teddy seemed only able, to sit---and slowly rock---- in Pendergast’s comfortable leather chair, a well-worn chair whose occupants were rarely acquainted with even a basic notion of comfort. He seemed oblivious to even his nurse escort, a longtime acquaintance of his long-departed mother, and perhaps this latter fact had somehow eluded Teddy. Because his only verbal refrain-----other than that hummed instrumental melody, punctuated by just one particular passage of the lyrics, from his favorite Genesis song which accompanied his incessant rocking back and forth in tune with it-----was ‘is my mother coming?’
It, that song, had become the overshadowing backdrop to the ‘lull-a-bye’ Teddy now sometimes murmured to himself, peppering it with an endless spoken refrain, a crazed countdown of primates abed, abed in his bed: ‘………..ten wild monkeys jumping on my bed, one fell off and bumped his head, called the doctor and the doctor said, no more monkeys jumping on my bed’; Teddy’s eyes focusing on Dr. Pendergast only when the word ‘doctor’ fell from his tightly straining lips. This startled the psychologist as much because he was stumped---- he admitted as much to himself, in his notes----- as anything else ever had in his practice.
He wrote: “Teddy seems to have created his own narrow world, a kind of feedback loop, stuck in some autistic state, a state without any governor but himself. I fear for his long term prospects, as the complex of perceived, if not real, traumas his thinking mind has somehow manufactured or exaggerated has taken on the nature of a closed system; the genesis----pun intended----of these confluent hurts to his psyche may not be identifiable readily. More and more, it’s his exodus from the here and now which worries me the most, all apologies for the biblical terminology as it may give the impression that he is lulling me into his world instead of vice versa; it cannot simply be that lullaby, no, or even the all too common Oedipal thing, although the Genesis song he is obsessed with has become, so to say, strangely addictive lullaby of his man-childhood. More study, perhaps in collaboration with late onset autism researchers, is in order. There’s something deeply hidden, yet in plain view.”
As Pendergast closed his notebook, he was suddenly seized by a simple phrase of that latent, now predominant darker lullaby, the one he had heard countless times lately, so much so it had taken on the quality of so much white noise……..’it’s like a helter skelter, going down, and down, round and round, but just get it away from me’.
The doctor’s grip on his notebook unconsciously loosened just as his jaw seemed to drop, and as the book hit the floor, Pendergast audibly whispered, “Oh my God, another Manson?!”
For the first time, Dr. Pendergast feared for his life; he determined to keep a pistol locked in his left hand drawer, for his peace of mind, he rationalized.

The windows at the modern hospital where Teddy now resided boasted their modernity; no bars or heavy locks were evident in its smart state of the art design. Instead, wireless laser devices simply alarmed the staff should a patient venture too close to freedom. The meds took care of the rest insuring passive patience among the population. That was the rub, as far as the authorities were concerned; just how did an average sized deeply disturbed young man manage to defeat these systems.

The newspapers allowed as how the offices of Dr. Pendergast had been neatly burgled, entry having been had through a second story window, itself without the glass having been broken. There was no evidence of a ladder or other means of scaling the wall nor was the front door in any way breached. Nothing of value had been taken, not a thing, not even a file, save one minor breach: the locked desk drawer appears to have been literally torn from its housing, contents unknown to anyone but Dr. Pendergast and he wasn’t talking. Not with his neck snapped, a crudely written note stapled to his chest: ‘One fell off and bumped his head’.
Teddy Gore was found sitting in the large leather chair, rocking slowly, back and forth, holding the pistol in his hand in such a way that it was clear he didn’t quite know what to do with it. In fact, he held his hands so that they seemed to hang down around his knees, his thumbs swollen and, the police physician reported, out of joint as if pulled by a very strong force.
While the police and forensic personnel were variously conferring amongst themselves and pursuing their grisly work, a faint voice, rather high-pitched and almost infantile voice, as though these were its source’s very first words, screeched: “We gow homme now, vay-rey tire-d…..”

Tech Noir @ Rainbow’s End


Lousy stock for fees in too many clients’ gizmo offerings, and all he had to show for it was the ‘I told-you-so’ sort of lesson taught, repeatedly, to flunking fools forced to enroll in yet another of Life’s perpetual summer school courses: that ‘intellectual property’ was one of those lofty-sounding legalisms that too often failed to give its wannabe Lord Protectors the sought after cushy, not to mention soft, landing in the Realm of Large Coinage, a deficit-ridden state of financial mind he now found himself living in, governed by the verb ‘crash’.
Finally, he was forced to ‘take stock’, and this time, of his life. While no angel, his mind’s gaze was definitely homeward, as in Manhattan. A mere three years prior to his now tabloidized life story, for which he limned the working title ‘Moribund in LA’, he had been a comer on Wall Street, until the future ex-Ms. Zigster had lured him with hype supplied by the ‘New Greeleys of Greed’, as she approvingly called her well-placed sources, to what they blithely called the ‘Mecca of Tech-a’, California.
Having now lost both that gold bug’s bite and its 130 pound bloodless cheerleader, that island home was looking uniquely superior. So dysfunctional was he that, feeling particularly fatigued, he found himself imagining being feted at his homecoming to a much-relieved New York by the descendants of Ms. Lazarus, ready to announce that he was emblematic of her statuary musing.

Zigster was technically broke, a virtual cashless society to the millions of cooperating, dutiful cells of the multicellular being he and the world-at-large, including his increasingly hostile ex-wife and creditors, knew as Clauson Zigster, Esquire. He felt he had let them down, at least his steadfast biological supporters, there through good and bad times, asking only the occasional steak, a few hours sleep and fairly regular dental hygiene.

No question about it, his psyche’s Department of Defense was arguing for Defcon 5; his once predatorily aggressive brain cells had suffered white collar’s version of PTSD, the battle damage assessment he gathered from his failing morale, due in no small part to his latest flop in the hi-tech world to which he once paid homage, an IPO startup which produces----- make that used to produce----combination cellular phone/remote digital personal genitalia vibrator re-chargers, pocket-sized for the misanthropic stay-late at the office workaholic crowd.

The fact that he was the titular President did not boost his social fortunes as he was now widely rumored to be possibly impotent in more ways than one; come to think of it, the word ‘titular’ only compounded the problematic nature of his publicly perceived gender preference, a very cruel outcome on the Street of Dreams indeed.

The upscale Tex-Mex bistro client where he still had freebies for services had been the destination he had in mind when, seeing that the day was a bust, he decided to grant, without hearing, his own motion for a change of venue from his depressingly inactive office. As he liberally taste-tested his favorite liquid drug, his cell phone parodied Beethoven’s Fifth, the rare ‘tin-can’ recording once believed
[intentionally left blank]





lost until rediscovered by those enterprising cellular phone makers he once prized as kultural icons, as in kitsch.

“Zigster”, he barked, noticing with great displeasure that his phone was flashing ‘low battery’ despite the fact that he had just recharged it with his complementary, well, you know.

“Meester Z, one of your colleagues gave me your number, said you were right man to see”, a Slavic voice boasted.

“Well, my battery is about gone, can you contact me at the office tomorrow?”

“Not good for my situation; is it possible could meet for drink in hour or so?” The caller, one Ivan Atrovsky, spoke good English, but with a Hollywood Russian accent.

“You caught me at a good time, you know Speedy G’s on Sunset?”

“Sure, see you there in 30; I am wearing double-breasted blazer…” they both heard the phone static off and headed for the Mexican joint, Claw wondering if there had been a performance bond posted by his client/manufacturer of this increasingly useless device; he would check with some of his more predatory classmates seen all over town on billboards in the morning, if he remembered, a major coup lately; it also occurred to him that he would have to make those calls from his landline phone due to the really shoddy product he had helped take to market, all these considerations succeeding in having put him below his previous personal ‘best’ on the depressometer that used to be a functioning brainpan.


The Russian economy resembled a barter system pretty much out of stuff to barter thanks to steroid capitalism, mainlined by the hungry opportunistic survivors of the old black market apparatchik system; the most popular pusher was the IMF, which these operators saw as the world’s largest ATM, in their opinion the best ‘fixer’ their own money could buy, the price being a mere couple of Slavic kisses on the cheek by a well-placed former Kremlin economic official turned capitalist entrepreneur-----they called it Karl’s Karma, complete with cases of Stoly and suddenly affordable Western mistresses. “From Russia, with love….” Was their standard cover note with each official-looking request for debt restructuring.

Ivan Atrovsky had grown up thinking America was full of cows and cowboys in funny hats. When he got there he realized it was just the Presidential class who wore them and that the cows had been long since replaced by hamburger joints stamping out barely edible cow parts, with assorted condiments of your choice.

But he also knew that P.T. Barnum and H.L. Mencken had been American and those pithy observations about their countrymen’s wits still held true. It was gonna be too easy.
He had a close pal from the old Soviet days, former KGB, now freelancing with shitty pirated computer game CDs and some very interesting high tech gadgetry they both wanted to push in the West in the latest growth industry: industrial espionage.
Stealing laptops loaded with secrets was okay for low level schmucks tired of purse-snatching; besides, the victims had wised up, making it a low percentage deal, the chubby wrists of fat-cats now donning Cartier-styled handcuffs, some fashionably weird industrial jewelry complete with titanium reinforcement, signaling the covetous world just how important they were and, for the even more egomaniacal, traveling with the corporate version of a mercenary Praetorian Guard to boot.

This spy stuff was best left to, well, the best, and the KGB had been kicking American ass for countless government fiscal years, before the capitalist virus had been contracted by their increasingly underpaid human assets, that is; now, their gear would be put to work in the service of individual Russian enterprise, for big profits in lieu of ‘Hero of the Soviet Union’ medallions stamped onto faux gold.


Zigster was sitting at the deserted bar when Atrovsky walked in with two younger stampings from the dream factory the Greeks knew as Eros, supplying, under some delightful exclusive output (or was it put-out?) contract, the staple-studded middle pages of Penthouse and Playboy, where the fasteners seemed to act-out your most private fantasies, seeming to grope through a self-created door, ajar, leading to barely hidden splendor (or, splendid hidden bareness, take your pick, really, the wordplay combinations are fun but the foreplay is far more promising, he mused).
He figured it was the seemingly endless supply of these broads who had helped to ruin the fortunes of his latest IPO and, in turn, his. Where did they all come from----wasn’t America supposed to be 50%+ obese? Maybe it was all to the good: he could possibly dispel that impotency rumor which had really thrown him into unprecedented personal depression by several orders of magnitude, and that would be a very good thing, he pretended to reason, given the already vulnerable reptilian sensibilities emanating from that multimillion-celled graying kingdom within, whose headquarters ran both his heads, it seemed; after all, it’s a scientific fact that your thoughts create neuropeptides throughout your body, the little bastards having either good or ill effect depending on your attitude when you’re ‘thinking’ thoughts; he stopped himself, realizing he had, according to that science, just needlessly furloughed several thousands of those cells, minimum, the ones involved with rational processes, now wanted at the business ‘front’. Fuck
it, rational neurons won’t bring me happiness, when I’m growing old, the now heavily-engaged Dean Martin part of his cerebellum told him, busy processing a previously imbibed Tequila of self-pitying provenance.
“Mr. Z, I presume…..” Ivan glided across he tiled floor with his two succubae prompting really wild fantasies of tireless undead maids sucking his tired blood----hey, why fight it: you get to sleep late and never die, advised Dean Martin.
“Yes, where is your blazer?” Clauson tried not to see through the see-through garment failing to pose as a halter top on the two identically dressed Sapphites (many of his rational faculties, having now joined the struggling-to-concentrate-on-business-agenda guerillas in pockets of resistance in his libidinous limbic system, thought it helped his ego and his composure if he nominated them as lesbians); neither that wasted classification nor such partizan ‘efforts’ were successful, his non-rational party-in-power having reminded him how much he enjoyed observing virtually nude hyperactive (attractive) lesbians.
“Felt overdressed, understand?!”

Ivan laughed the laugh of those already-sexually-intimate-with-their companions, whom others, poor scintillated slobs, were left only to undress with their eyes, assuming, of course, that they were not impotent; no matter, there are certain non-clinical situations, this being one of them, which could effect a proverbial---- (as in Biblical)-----faith healing, the now reinforced cells in charge of hedonism fantasized. His scrotum, so used to a shrunken subsistence of late, largely due to that certain rumor associated with a certain stock offering, was experiencing double digit growth…unlike the stock offering catalyst to his recent quasi-eunuch status. Standing, erect, was not a safe option. He was bemused by his self-deprecating wordplay, promising himself to knock it off, as it took away from the energy-intensive work his eyes were engaged in.

“Call me Claw, everyone has since I was a kid” as he extended his hand to Atrovsky, the aforementioned bookends from the Eros, Inc. penthouse office suite simply tittered, posing for the imaginative x-ray camera his mind had briefly united to become.
“Like it, nice ring and easy to remember: ‘See-Law’, yes?” his speaking merging somehow with laughing.


The servile restaurant manager played along, bowing and scraping, it having been prearranged by Claw with him that he might be hosting a possible client with cash for a change, ushering them to a spacious semi-private booth.

“What should we talk about, then?” Claw wasted no time, his mind noticing his creditors seated with them like some pissed off ‘Banquo Brudders’ from Newark amidst the preliminaries. Besides, with his own ‘Lady MacZigster Doll’ gone, the only killing he was doing was self-inflicted, his hubris registering in the minus column.

“Technology, what else?” smirked Ivan.
Ivan motioned to one of the girls to return to his car to retrieve his briefcase. Claw was reminded that standing up was going to be an agonizing Groucho Marx parody for most of the evening.

“Not my favorite subject lately; what are the details?” Claw mouthed the words as he had so many times before, this time with hangdog effect.

“I am glad you asked”, Ivan placing his briefcase on a chair.

“Want to market North American rights, with your help” Ivan displayed a detailed mock up of what looked like communications equipment.

“This is lawyer client conference, correct, so you cannot tell about?” Ivan knew the answer, but his question paid perfunctory respect to his soon to be designated operative.

“Certainly” replied Claw; he was definitely curious.

“Can pick up space shuttle crew on this stuff” Ivan puffed.

“You mean track them?” Claw was still stuck in the 20th century, strictly gadgetry, slapped together in the Orient or Mexico.
“Mean hear if they fart!” Ivan proudly revealed the less attractive qualities of the merchandise.
“Where did you get this? You own this?” Claw was beyond curious now.
“Friend of mine owns; we only lease, you understand, with our technicians, nobody going to reverse engineer shit with our stuff” Ivan pronounced with the certainty that used to surround the failure of some of his old Commie gang’s Five Year Plans.
Claw looked to the place where his personalized Banquo ‘family’ had
been seated to find ‘them’ absent (he had, in a fit of Greek-inspired bathos, conjured a whole Scottish mafia-like organization from this growing group of debt-holders, headed by the dreaded---and pale---Don B. himself, who showed up every time he so much as tried to eat a bloody hamburger, a fitting description, as he sometimes saw himself as the bleeding burger; he needed to see his shrink soon, but he was now persuaded that even he, also owed, was probably working secretly with the Family); simultaneously, his left brain cells, specifically the ‘do the
[intentionally left blank]


math’ department, were doing it, the math; they would be well rewarded, he signaled them electro-chemically and their return message was pleasing even if it did not, directly, involve erectile function. Apparently his right brain could not be reached for purposes of pleasure unless given a strong override incentive by Ivan’s unbookish bookends.

“What about the White House?” Claw was into the deal already.

“Who cares, nothing but bullshit, off color remarks by hacks and arms merchants; ‘push button, not push button’, really tired Cold War shit, habit hard to break; no, real action is Wall Street related, for openers” Ivan postulated.

“How about a demonstration-----not here of course; say in my office, soon; when can you come in?” Claw was now living up to his sobriquet.

“Can do next week, no problema, want my technicians there. In meantime, prepare papers, blah, blah, blah, we meet next Tuesday, is acceptable?”

Claw remembered a basic question from the foggy ‘break glass in emergency’ part of his brain stamped ‘law school’, something about rights.

“What about the fundamental privacy concerns, have you done any legal interference on that potential deal killer?” He hoped the answer was yes.
“Law only broken if caught” was what his brain was feeding to his conscious mind----but had he actually heard that or was it the answer he was hoping not to hear? His consciousness came back into Speedy G’s time/space just in time to hear the real answer.
“Hey, only leasing technology: what Mr. X does with it, we don’t know, right?” Ivan must have gotten that one from some lawyer show on TV, but it was practically correct. “Guns don’t kill people, people kill people” he smirked, verbally.
“So your techs can operate it from anywhere for customers, never having contact with the customer except say electronically, arms’ length?” He thought he understood the potential now, with very little downside: after all, no one could hold you liable to prosecution for conspiracy, that sort of thing, if all you did was provide the generic means, without the specific intent to do harm to Mr. X; hey, nobody went after Ma Bell when some schmucks got together over her lines on an illegal plan. He made a mental note to get several outside hypothetical opinions until he found the one he liked among the ‘experts.’
“How can electron be prosecuted: what, Bill Gates is responsible for what some creep does with his programs?” Ivan smiled the invisible smile of a puppeteer. (What if I count that as one of the opinions, Claw wondered).
“I’ll have the preliminary papers drawn Tuesday” Claw heard himself saying, still aglow at the cellular level, as far as his brain could determine, anyway, at the undefined ‘top’ of the Mobius strip of his sensory input.

“Good; now, for celebration, is good luck in Motherland, but with real Vodka” Ivan insisted.

“Know of good Russian place” Ivan gave the signal for his dual harem to rise, followed by his new legal appendage. He handed a Franklin to the stunned Mexican proprietor. Claw just winked at him, feeling as though he had just had some major prediction confirmed.


Good………..maybe………..excited; happy……….stay alert……….more glucose…………..process alcohol…………too much…………..adrenaline released………………….blood to penis…………..shut down reasoning, overload………………

Electrochemical conversation was underway in a Russian doll universe only recently discovered and now known as the Clauson Zigster Nebula; it was the background white noise of his personal Big Bang, which had occurred nanoseconds before in his psychosomatic penthouse.

Like its tousle-haired larger cousin, its Einstein was busy divining its secrets, down to the always-mysterious black holes.

Just how Claw had arrived home was problematic, a strange experiment in time travel, somehow successful. His succubus had dematerialized while his frontal lobes were on blissful hiatus so there was no way to question one of nature’s most pleasant mysteries.

He had the distinct feeling that that remotely similar thing he had occasionally done with his ex-wife was confined to a vastly lesser universe------why, for that matter, wasn’t she? He’d have to work on that, maybe by recreational chemical frying of those unfortunate brain cells imprisoned by memory patterns of ‘her’. As he downloaded this mother lode of Dada-like data, he was certain he had encountered every incentive in this universe last night to pursue that happy microscopic suicide------- he looked forward to his next encounter with her expanding universal charms.




Zokcuf technologies, LLC had effectively, and stealthily, cornered the ‘nanotech’ research market and had plenty of appetite for a whole range of other high tech acquisitions. Certain analysts had wryly attributed this ‘below the radar’ ploy to some sort of Napoleonic complex affecting management.

They had a point: as far as anyone knew, they were all midgets and dwarves. The intentionally transparent name decrypted was FuckOZ and as they were a public company their trading symbol, the joke went, should be MWA----midgets with attitude.

Josef Diminutov, a Ukrainian national, was leader of a shadowy cartel consisting of the more sinister elements of the Yellow Brick Road Gang, a/k/a The Four & Under Group, a front holding company for a mixed bag of technology holdings, most of whose assets were on the cutting edge of 21st century high tech applications.

The FBI files read like tales from the dark side of the moon for the strangely misbegotten.

The gang were an assortment of escaped childhood circus performers and freaks, mostly from armpits in and around Soviet Eastern Europe, said to be descendants of bit-part extras used-up by Hollywood for weird perspective shots or freakish effects, convinced that the child-size tights they were forced to wear, not to mention the shocking absence of any real healthcare related union style benefits, had effectively compromised their physical development, compounded by the consequent overall negative impact upon any real prospects they might otherwise have had of ever sitting at the big people’s table at any potentially important dining experience. Privately, they rationalized this psychosocial slight, as they had long despaired of any real understanding of the fork, salad or entrée, pretending to pretend that it just didn’t matter, should they ever have had such an opportunity-----a kind of compensating justice that only made things worse when they were really hungry for anything other than fast food, their fallback option, especially the Drive-Thru window or, as they self-pityingly referred to it, the Equalizer Express. In their depths (which, let’s face it, is not all that deep) huge wrongs dwelt, wrongs that would be righted with wrongdoing, however right they may have been in feeling wronged by the tragic loss of their rights, right? Having grown tired of half-hearted half-measures from the full-bodied world, they would now remake the world in their image, insuring as their first step a mandatory metric system designed to inflate their ‘standing’ in society, one they would fiendishly manipulate to operate according to the rules of golf, where the lowest number is triumphant; it was going to be glorious, complete with a new Napoleonic perspective, calling it Waterloo Redux, invoking the childish ‘do over’ rule resorted to by all physical misfits who can’t cut it against the so-called normals.

The psychological profiles had identified one particular trauma, however, that made these guys and gals much more than half a handful; the cruel exploitation of their kind by the freak-of-the-month club-minded voyeurs of the movie industry; they regarded one film above all as their Bosch-like rendition of hellish doom, vowing to some day avenge their suffering brothers and sisters of the ghetto the world and MGM had shamelessly idealized as Munchkin-land.
Crucial to their plan of vengeance was the alleged deliberate placement by the Oz politicos----and their vertically challenged lackeys, of the Yellow Brick Road smack in the midst of this already oppressed and servile community, despite an abundance of data showing the projected traffic along this thoroughfare by pilgrims off to see you know who to be quite a lot, and indefinitely. Added insult was the landlord’s requirement that the inhabitants of that ghetto were to be present on a half-time basis based, of course, upon ‘normal’ man hours-----yielding the unintended though cruel result that every Munchkinite was on call virtually all the time. This, then, was the oppressive arithmetic of vertical Fascism, they its disregarded ‘digits’, doomed to a half-share in this American…NIGHTMARE! “Follow, follow, follow, follow the yellow”…OUR asses; they were half again as much oppressed and vowed to redouble, no re-redouble their efforts to achieve parity through whole dollars and the equality they brought.

The profiles somberly concluded, however, that the ultimate catalyst of the gang’s unpredictable wrath was the exclusion of access to that road by the Munchkinites in favor of inorganic beings without hearts, brains or balls enough to ensure the safety of what anyone could see were rather small, really hard to see (no street lighting was possible due to cost overruns at Emerald City Hall) pint-sized pedestrians, forced to stand in harm’s way, nonetheless.

The cowardly schmuck behind the curtain, and his co-conspirators, would pay dearly for this, especially for their arrogant admission to those who had traveled the needlessly congested ‘YBR’ that the trip was really unnecessary in the first place: it was really great seeing them, for a fee (hey, Emerald City carries with it heavy amortization), it was hoped they had enjoyed the elaborate theme park atmosphere created just for “them”-----so long as they didn’t have a street address ending with the numeral “1/2” [for this ‘dis’ the gang would exact some especially harsh retribution]---------but, you see, you don’t need anything, you’re terrific just the way you are, unless, of course, you’re one of those you-know-what’s.

The gang’s leadership had adopted as their outward symbol of defiant unity the elaborate costume of the ever-superior Dr. Loveless of ‘Wild Wild West’ infamy, a cult hero owing to both the obvious and his enmity to the American way, one that he and his huge little army would exploit as in the days of the Wild West, in their diabolic determination to create a new Wilder West where they would possess the high ground; it was just such a customized get-up that Josef Diminutov donned as he walked into the offices of Ivan Atrovsky……… for their, now, regular Monday meeting.




“I am sure, yes” Carlos Estrada whisperingly replied to the queries of his handler. “And the god dam Franklin he gave me was fake, mar icon!”
“Good work, and don’t worry, we’re on it” assured the agent at the other end.


“Josef, comrade!” the deep voice of the huge Ivan Atrovsky had been expelled from its mouth-like cavern with the relative force of a squall in the direction of his miniature visitor.
“Don’t get up,” squeaked the sensitive little man dressed in 19th century attire. “I like you where I can make eye contact” added the shrimp.
He was there to finalize the deal he had nursed for years: the ability to learn the kind of inside financial information only dreamt of by average crooks on Wall Street. He and his crew also had plans for every lottery in the world, and what they couldn’t divine from their taller adversaries conversations would be gotten by way of moles planted in their midst thanks to the ADA and equal fucking protection.
“How much” Diminutov demanded, having, he thought, been put off for too long with preliminaries.
“Please, please, these things take time; lawyer working on papers for license…” Atrovsky was interrupted by the sudden thump of the little visitor’s booted feet on his desk. Grabbing Ivan’s tie he screamed “How long have I known you and you’re giving me this crap!! I ought a put one of my guys in your girlfriend’s luggage when you’re not looking next time you shack up with one of them!” fumed the compact man as he seemed to dance back and forth on the desktop, deftly bypassing large photos of Atrovsky’s mistresses.
“Calm down, Joey. None of this is necessary!”
Climbing down from this relative Everest, he replied “You promised me first exclusive rights to this thing for North America; every week for the last three months its been delays; what, did Vegas get to you, that it?” Whined the half-man.
“Don’t be crazy, they will love it if you walk in with your new billions; no, like I told you, technical legal problems, being worked out as we… scream” Ivan smiled.
“Alright, but we want complete demonstrations, got it?” Diminutov was adamantine and Ivan knew not to say no, this guy had a reputation in the old Soviet days.
“Deal; will contact you later this week when we are ready, ok?”
Ivan realized he couldn’t see his guest any more. “Joey, where the hell are you?”
Ivan felt a metallic object poking him in the ass; Joey was under his chair. Then, the poking stopped.
The office door slammed; as Ivan got up to look around, a little man he hadn’t even seen plopped into his chair, trying to put up his boots on the desk without success, and then standing on the desk. “Just see that you do as you said, Atrovsky” he squealed, jumping onto the floor and exiting out the door before Ivan could answer him.



Agent Kitsch was pacing in their smallish office when the report came in.
Turning to the bearer of the startling tidings, he addressed his junior colleagues. “What the fuck is this?”
“Sir, it seems that the Russians have been after Diminutov for some time. They have reason to believe that he intends to bankrupt every lottery system in the world once he gets his hands on what he thinks is twenty second century gear that doesn’t exist” was the reply from Agent Dowdy. “According to their field operatives they’re using some unsuspecting IP lawyer to keep it real, for now” she added.
“Why the hell would be have believed them about this technology in the first place, he’s not stupid?” Was the question, wasn’t it? “Best we can tell, these two go back a long way, got Dimi’s family out of the gulag and forced labor camps for, well, undesirables” augmented Agent Swanson. “Add to that his all-consuming hard-on for Hollywood and the West and you get suspension of disbelief.”
“So what we have to do is go along with some sting-like setups like he’s actually succeeding, right?”
“That’s the part I don’t like; what if these Russians are in on it and freelancing?” offered Agent Dowdy.
“No problemo; we see to it that they get paid in counterfeit or marked currency!” emphasized Kitsch.
“No go, boss” Dowdy opined; “The Russians re-invented ersatz currency techniques, it won’t fly” was her closer.
“Got entrapment written all over it” Swanson piled on.
“Look, clear it through counsel if it makes ya happy; all I know is nobody walks away from this wrap, Russians or midgets, got it?” Kitsch stormed out of their neat freak office, reflecting upon how it
wasn’t like a real cop’s office should be, like in the old days, using their door to make his nonverbal exclamatory observation.


Tuesday, comeback day. Claw was two blocks from the office, running a little early for a change; better call the office, just to be safe, have everything set to go, his brain prompted when it countermanded that instruction based on a fairly new neural databank labeled “Lay off secretarial staff, immediately”, dated last week. No biggie, the dox were all on diskette from countless prior deals, his wet ware consoled from yet another set of neurons in the cliché department: “Nothing new under the sun, boy chick.” While the boy chick add-on did seem to be of hackneyed origin, it gave him momentary pause, quickly overcome by both his logic net-----it was associational, that’s all, ‘Ivan, remember, your new ticket to the Bigs?’------And the blinking red light on the phone he was about to use to call the staff he no longer had. ‘Get a real charger’ was the prevailing command and he found himself at the gadgetorium run by the oldster he sometimes popped in on to get the real scoop about the tech world’s next hit/flop. The guy had warned him about that last deal and Claw winced at the thought, emanating from the anxiety section of his ‘necktop’, of one more ‘told you so.’ Glancing at his now ridiculously expensive watch, he noticed that it, too, needed power, as in new battery: Jesus H!
“Sorry my friend, but nobody’s allowed behind the curtain----insurance, get it?” The wizened old-timer gushed, without any specific tone of alarm. “Here, I’ll bring it out for you; this one, right?” he pointed to a like-new recharger mate for the phone in Claw’s hand.
“Good choice, very compact, light” was the technical blurb applicable to the cellular phone from the front room Claw had seemed to have appropriated. The old man knew how to handle such delicate situations, especially when the potential lifter was so well dressed.
“Were you planning on me billing you, Prince Charles?” He quipped only hinting at condescension.
“I do need a new one, one that works” Claw managed this pitiful restatement of the obvious, at least to him, from the ‘what’s going on, anyway’ confused emotion bundle, hosted by what was really a second rate bunch of neurons----he needed new ones, ones that worked, his higher brain functions conspiringly mused.
“Need, shmeed,” chortled the old one; “it’s all about ‘want’ today, you hear me?” the old master now waxed shamanic.
“What do you truly ‘need’, eh---------your brain, the courage to trust in it, but not completely, no: it’s the ‘heart’ that sees you through, and you won’t find that in here, yes?” posited the gizmo guru.
“You know what you need, you need to hurry up and decide what you need, because I’m forced to close early today-----going ballooning today with my cockamamie nephew, in the desert, yet!” This breakout news seemed to have not registered with Claw at all, his skullstuff oscillating randomly between dazed and seriously confused.
“Look, you appear to be a nice fellow, what with your designer suit and tasteful watch------did you know it had stopped------tell you what, have a cup of coffee, on me and stop and smell some roses in the park across the street”; the coffee was strong, Turkish style, maybe, his yuppie know-it-all zero sum center observed. It seemed to bring him back to the inner solar system enough to begin processing the wisdom offerings of the old fellow who reminded him of someone from his childhood that his now overloaded CPU had put on the ‘later’ pile of afterthoughts.
“There’s a very comfortable bench over there and it’s a lovely day; at least you don’t incline to vertigo, eh, just think of me in that mishugina basket, going higher and higher; but, he is my only boy chick”; this reference helped, but Claw no longer knew why.
As Claw made for the door and the bench he had been advised to visit, the now disembodied old man’s comforting voice bade him farewell from the back room behind the sheer: “Remember, you already have what you really need: stop thinking with that overrated brain-----don’t get me wrong, still better than all these machines------use your heart, it has its own voice, but you can’t hear it unless that brain is quiet, it will help you find the courage to live a little, like me, in that crazy balloon!” and he was gone.

On the long old-fashioned bench was an older gent with a kind face, feeding the birds. Claw seemed enfolded by a warm breeze as he slowly lowered his weary load at the other end.
“What’s a young feller like you doing here in the middle of the work day-----leaving it to the other rats, are ya?” the kindly Clarence-like person at the opposite end submitted for Claw’s approval.
“Not really sure and, well, my watch has stopped, need a new batt….” Claw’s eyes, for the first time, were absorbing the large old-fashioned signage atop the doorway of the shop he had just exited.
“What line of work you in that’s making you so sad?” was the
$64,000 dollar question, now severely adjusted for inflation to the tune of several digits left of the decimal.
“Uh, lawyer, actually…and you?” was Claw’s desultory verbal reflex, now reduced to something only slightly superior to the preverbal gruntings of his long ago sapiens sapiens ancestors.
“Me, I’m obsolete and glad of it; no sir, don’t need me anymore” the old gent beamed.
“Why?” Claw uttered, sounding more like his distant forbears than ever.
“Well, ya see my line was moving houses-----that’s right, jacked those suckers up with hydraulic lifts, hand-cranked, hard work that, in my day, though it gave me strong hands for opening jars and such; had to give it up when-----and it really wasn’t our fault, no siree-----Act a God, insurance people called it, strong wind came up outta nowhere, tossed that house up in the air pritnear 30 foot or so. Just as well though, nobody needs that service no more, just tear the old things down, don’t you know.”
‘Ozzie’s Pawn, Loan & Emerald Dealers’ read the deep green sign he now wondered how he had not noticed on his billion trips down this street.
“Where’d you say you were in business?” came the query from the depths of his right brain, childhood mystery bureau.
“Didn’t------you alright, look a bit pale-------guess the sunshine’ll do you some good, eh------Manhattan…Manhattan, Kansas. Yeah, I like it alright out here, was real nice when I came out here, desert air, no more though; guess there’s no place like home.”
Claw’s eyes fell upon his feet, which he found in command of his slavish shoes clicking together, at the heels, in a reflexive dislodging of general detritus apparently garnered somewhere on the yellowing bricked park path.. As he faced Eastward, his heart, now audible, told him all would be well, even or, especially, without Russian clients.

Hothouse of the Black Orchid
J.B. Pravda ©

Frenchmen liken it to lightning, a coup de foudra.

Never sure of why or how, it didn’t seem to matter. Debts needed payment, Karma & Company, collector.

No clear memories clouded the scenery of floating people and events. Mostly self-delusion or illusion, with allusions to confusions of old standing. But they couldn’t persist. Prostrate was the condition without intermission.

Naive thinking and wise meanderings had brought about the present filled with empty things. Such a thing was she, darkest of the minions of his nature, manifesting in strange sinews of weakness on a street of reams to come. Clad in striped culpability hip to ankle, aging pulchritude’s shallow prison, Geisha pallor served to enthrall that part of dalliance makes for bloodless terror.

Booted though bootlessly bereft of soul he, at the corner of indecision and peril, poised to shed the faint glimmerings of poise itself.

‘Kept’, a sham of essential manhood, within a silken shroud, beclouded of mind, of sentience itself save carnality’s version----he would wear this mark willingly. Sterility knew contagion there, at the pulsing death of conscience.

“Actually, they’re Western boots” he corrected; the rock-steering siren had dared to consign his lizard-skin Eighties power footwear to some knockabout cowboy’s wardrobe.

“Oh, I stand corrected” she oozed, surveying him for potential potential. A chance encounter, she sauntering toward him and their mutual friend, his hostess, a matronly castoff from a former nightclub mogul gone to some government hotel for transgressions reminiscent of that favorite battering ram of the Sovereign, ‘the power to tax, the power to destroy’; apparently, he had given certain authorities particular relish in demonstrating its verity.

A pedestrian venture to the corner deli for milk had launched a brand of chaos theretofore unknown to mere disorder; he was to be librettist to her psyche’s cacophony.

Somehow surviving in a nuclear winter-like cloud he had carried with him ever since being overcome at Ground Zero by the Dissolution Bomb, Marsden found himself in Manhattan on some hopeless business his failing law practice held onto by sheer force of habit.

He was essentially broke, staying with a friend of his first-strike opposite. At 130 pounds, he was a wizened wanderer in the marginal territory known as anorexia, a self-imposed result of foolish guilt over the end of a relationship best described as having all the romance, and convenience, of incest. She, his latest experiment in self-delusion, he would learn on first glance at her cold hands and the scars seeming to attach them to her slender forearms, was mere days from her latest attempt at murder for one.

Two runaways, as in trains, sharing the same track.

In an ever-expanding universe, where degree and speed of seperation of material clusters within it seemed to continually grow, they were colliding, neither one seeming to regard ‘antimatter’ and its dramatic potential as anything other than their mutual agent of wished-for demise, an end that just didn’t ‘matter’.

Supernovas are so rare that they are history’s evidence of the Godforce’s effectuation of seeming major policy decisions, the subject of both, way beyond mortal ken. Personal histories aren’t too different among the willingly forgetful, major events keeping their faint glow.
Abandonment was the theme of theirs, differing only in its direction.

For Layana, if that was her name, it had begun with a refugee mother, living in the camps of Albania after Hitler’s suicide whose putative husband had disappeared, feared dead, officially; he had been a freedom fighter and the result of his alleged heroism had been squalor for his fellows.

No matter, she had found another, also a fighter, ‘Jimmy’. The child learned quickly and well about Mars’ progeny, his transience, especially while next to you, ‘loving you.’ Her philosopher stone was cold, strange alchemies having taken their fractal course in space-time; It came to rest in grateful substitution for what others called a heart.





“I’m very fond of you….” Was the refrain of Its keeper; no prizer of love and its trappings, amusement was her revenue and expenditure, and a ‘profit’ was always shown.

“That sounds a lot like how I feel about dogs and baby ducks….” Marsden riposted, feeling the sting of a rehearsed parry.

Damned by the faintest praise, a final thrust was called for.

“I suppose you’re right…..after all, it is a four-letter word” , a palpable strike, despite her having been very much en garde.

“Is my young stud angry with me, dar-ing?” She never used the ‘l’, like some failed Garbo impersonator; he concluded that it must have been those years in London, both as a child taught to haunt the enemy, and, later, on Half Moon Street.



The door closed automatically, in seeming emulation of its momentary, now departed passerby. Staring into the silvered-rectangle of glass suspended directly above him, like some Clarkean monolith for cosmic voyeurs, he was aware of his absurdity: a ‘kept’ man of a keeper of bipedal specimens, the sole attraction of a private zoological experiment in which the subject was both wild and docile, Barnum’s freakish permutation, extrapolated from all the blind alleys and detours for destructive work he loosely regarded as his----its-----life.

Six months since the electrical voltage from below had discharged and found him its target, he was feeling captivity with strange detachment. The reflective ceiling helped promote the sensation, the observer becoming the observed, only in a way that would cause Siddharta himself to adamantly declare Buddhism a fraud. Risking that conjured possibility, ‘I am the reflection of my reflection’ ran koan-like through his maddening brain. A neural storm regurgitated random phrases and images without any correlation except, maybe, that they lived, however briefly, in the same head. Dreaming. The necktop dreamtrack went as follows: ‘How can I observe my own dreams? There is no ‘I’, except the one ‘I’ have created……that’s right, so I=I proves this refractive theory’----a tautology that he was certain had occurred to him alone in all space-time.
“What the……!” Marsden screamed, head butting the silhouette hovering blurrily over him.
“Oh, sorry dar……” Layana started.
She rubbed her forehead routinely, he was strangely numb.
“Come join me in my bath, hmmmm?” was the one-size fits all reprise; he preferred to engage on dry land, shaking off the pale overture of appeasement.
“Where have you been?” was his complaint, treated by her as a greeting.
“Are you sure you won’t join me” she Dopplered her voice warping with departing distance en route to her elaborate inverted ablutionary altar.

As they lay there that night, their psyches inhabited variant universes: hers on a haj to mercenary Mecca, his a dead end designed by Mobeius himself, with a proposed exit under construction by Sartre & Co.

“If you leave me, I’ll die, you know” he heard her ultimatum clearly, though her overhead reflection was immobile and asleep. Was it a waking dream?
“Did you hear me, dar-ing?” ; he decided to reply in his head only: “Yes, yes, but what made you say such a thing?”
“After all I have given you, you would abandon me, just like that; I know I have not seemed too attentive but its only my function, you see-----most of them only want passive enjoyment, to view my petals” her eyes were now open, yet her mouth did not seem to move.
“We’re both dreaming the same dream” was his best surmise. “And, by the way, that’s a very colorful rationalization, ‘dare’-ing mine” he added sardonically.
Now her mouth was moving in the reflection: “Do you know about orchids, dar-ing? It is said that there are 25,000 natural species, prized all over the world for their beauty and variety more than any other flower, and the rarest of all is black….or, should I say, is thought black, no one’s even seen one in years” she was now sitting up, her naked too symmetrical breasts casting vibrating shadows across the bed as she spoke----her reflection above remained immobile.
Reason had failed him along with the usually unreliable data from his eyes----his pulse was way up.
He would try again to locate the time/space he used to know: “Where do you get all this?” his peripheral vision now confirming the disparity between the mirror and its subject.
“The botanical gardens in London are spectacular, dar-ing; the curator was a business friend, an admirer, you know, and taught me all about them, the orchids….the Greeks named them, they’re very life-enhancing, especially for the genitals…..” she informed, her reflection above only growing hazier, somehow darker.
“Does that include malakas like me?” he teased, trying to cut the tension with his reference to their word for queer.
“Dar-ing, you mock me; that’s was only when you angered me, silly boy. You see, the orchid’s male components------orchis means ‘testes’, my love---- are carefully enclosed so as to avoid self-pollination, unique among the flora of the world; no, w…..they guard their ‘man’ very closely, so as to spread their true essence everywhere among other partners, all in the name of beauty” was her latest trancelike offering, again, not reflected below, but only in her reflection.
“You’re starting to scare me” he blurted, seeking eye contact, having gently pressed her head against the pillow behind her; he found no dark pupils, only spaces where her eyes should be. “Are you alright….Layana….what’s happening?” he pleaded.

Moments passed; he glanced upward to see her ersatz reflection, a prodigious dark floral presentation, seemingly growing larger by the minute.
“You see, dar-ing, my ‘pollinius’, you must be with me, enclosed within my petaled structure, for beauty’s sake……..” her mouth had become a vortex of four petals unfolding. He looked again at the mirror above-----it had become somehow convex, with lattice-like architecture, encompassing now the entire space that used to be their bedroom suite. His body from his feet to his waist had become enshrouded by a cocoon-like casing; he struggled to move his legs and knew that he had none.

“We’ll awaken, together, now!” he urged upon her, now looking at her former head upon that pillow and seeing a shadow from above; the labellum of her floral display, now nearing the top of the warm greenhouse the room had become, cast a eerie headlike shadow.
“Come…..come into my bosom….” Her now disembodied dulcimer voice had become a high-pitched siren song.
The ‘room’ was now completely dark, or was it that he had no eyes with which to see; he ceased to perceive, only to sense his envelopment within something greater, something in charge.

The throng was growing for the annual orchid show in Her Majesty’s Royal Aboretum; of particular note this year was, for the first time in modern memory, on display an oversized orchid, a rare Black Orchid, more robust than any other species there evinced.

Alight in a Dark Room by JB Pravda©

Such ingenuity, he mused, passing through the Christie’s exhibition’s myriad of early photographic devices and their sepia-toned products of faces, places passed into time’s vast, unrepeating repository. Yes, there were ‘types’, but even misnamed ‘identical twins’ showed nuances of individuality, Frank reasoned and, thereby, added to his enthusiasm for these artifacts.

Of especial interest was the ‘camera obscura’ and its chiaroscuro, a painterly imagery seemingly lost in an overlit world of machine-driven virtuality in which the ersatz became the real, absent the meaning of the true, the original. The appeal of the realness of this ironic ‘brilliant darkness’ acted on his subconscious in a similar way, whatever light within his psyche only, just, revealing the essential truth about the dark, hidden ‘stuff’ of the surreal.

“And, now, for Lot #238899, the very camera utilized by Matthew Brady during most of his work during the American Civil War” the auctioneer announced.

The precious cargo was carefully stowed in the trunk of his car, complete with bubble wrap; he had even managed to successfully acquire the necessary glass plates and other accoutrements necessary to the camera’s use, albeit they were modern copies fashioned by a historicist friend who shared his passion for the genuine, the real.

“Now, Frank, don’t need to tell you, these plates are as close as we can make them today; I’ve even given them the most modern qualities while preserving the original look and feel” his friend had advised. “The important thing is that development will be a breeze, just think of them as the best of today and yesterday.”

There was a pause, a kind of reticence on the part of Frank’s friend, approaching fear so closely that Frank forced the matter. “What’s with the long face, you seem somehow disturbed by all this.”

“Well, you know, sometimes things carry a kind of pattern, field, almost like a habitual information with them; that fella Brady, he went bankrupt, nobody wanted his pictures, save the papers and they couldn’t print them, only used em for engravings and such” Morley confided.

“Is that all, for crying out loud, I’m not trying to make a living with this contraption, just amusement, for me and my friends. Thanks for everything, Mor, I’ll be in touch.” And Frank was off to his spacious home, now equipped with a studio, ‘atelier’ his wife insisted to their friends, all anxious to sit for this image-maker of renown, usually in period costume of Victorian vintage.

The Cuzzins’ had been his first subjects, showing up in costumes they had acquired at some fire sale of an old Hollywood costumer that Edith Head had put a curse on after a flap over deadlines; they had gotten a bargain for the whole lot, and wanted the entire antique collection, including Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, history’s luckless duo of chic clueless ness.

But the dark room was where the real fun occurred, seeing the now bizarrely histrionic faces of his growing circle of friends emerge through time’s chemical alchemy, thanks to his own personal ‘philosopher’s stone’, as he called it. The history of the instrument had a potent hold upon Frank’s mind; after all, he reflected, hadn’t it been the very one, the actual lens that had captured the likenesses of the greats of its era: Lincoln, Grant, Sherman, Beecher, so many who had graced the stage of history. And the photographer, he had studied under no less a luminary than Samuel F.B. Morse, who had single-handedly introduced the photographic art to America. Warned of both the physical and financial risks, he replied, mysteriously, ‘A spirit in my feet told me I had to go, and go I did’. Those feet trekked through the horrors of war’s ground, from first Bull Run to some of the bloodiest battles the world had ever known. But it was Brady’s vision, his sense of mission that Frank Moebius found so compelling; ever the innovator, Brady and his close associates endeavored to facilitate both the quality and quantity of their work in the field, using the then new carte-de-viste camera capable of large production of imagery. And it was this very camera, his first, that Frank now possessed. Possession was the correct term, as he had dreamed of getting his hands on it, using all his business contacts and sense to achieve his goal. And, now that he had it, he intended to create his own New York gallery, this time in mock homage to that of his hero. When warned of the superstition that history tends to repeat itself, he gave such advice the back of his hand, noting that his wife was in terrific health and that nostalgia and its spin-offs made for a lucrative and enjoyable return on his investment.

There they were, bedecked as the doomed royal couple……….what’s this! Frank’s heart and brain exclaimed silently….they’re sitting just where I shot them…….beheaded, blood gushing freely from their severed jugulars, covering their prized costumes like candle wax, mimicking their internal craggy venous architecture.

Gasping for air, he fled the room, noting the time, 2 a.m. What had been meant as a delightful avocation had become obsession, he reasoned, returning to the darkened chamber, seeing only a blank glass plate, awaiting its soberly scientific process.

‘7 a.m.’, the clock informed his one partially opened eye which attempted to behold its eternal insomniac face.

Frank’s sleep had been dreamless; who needs dreams, he self-critiqued, when his camera’s eye conjured more than nightmares. He determined to resume his photographic endeavors, now somewhat refreshed.

There, he comforted his agreeing eyes, heads and all. The plate was perfectly normal, that is except for the ridiculous image of his two very ordinary friends as larger than life dead royals. As he processed the hard copy prints, he smiled, bemused at his fatigue’s fanciful dramatic powers----he kept a copy for his planned collection of historical rogues for an ambitious gallery.

Returning to his still warm bed, now he dreamt of such a gallery, this one in New York’s cast iron district, now SoHo; he even felt himself smiling at the signage, inspired by his wife: ‘Atelier of Photographic Arts/M. Brady, Esq., proprietor’………his assistant, Alistare, a freed slave of industrious ways, had painted it for him, the literate fellow, but how did he learn……..he did have strong references, almost fawning over his ‘skilled mannerisms’, whatever that meant, Frank’s subconscious interjected its modern skepticism…….

“Alistare, what’ve you done with my ether?” Brady demanded; “Why, suh, I done nothing sept what you toll me ta do, and dats ta mix it up.”

“Ah, yes……..good, as we have many plates to process for the artists from the Atlantic Monthly, paying us handsomely; now, shall we…” and he walked to the dark room through black curtains giving the appearance, sublimated Frank, of those seen in elaborate mortuary hearses; finding the chemicals somehow leaking onto the floor, Brady burst into a rage… “You fool! See now what you’ve done! I’ll be ruined!” Alistare recoiled but without outward fear, only disgust at the white man’s lack of control, nothing like the public image he tried to portray. While Alistare knew it was the cats that were kept for rodent control in this shabby district of the City, he did not implicate them as he feared they would be destroyed or simply thrown into the street; cats were given special status in his ancestors’ traditions, still very much with Alistare, via an oral system of learning which had effectively endowed him with shamanic knowledge. “You, sir, are dismissed, now get out!” With those words Brady’s fate was sealed, sealed in a way no waxen vellumed parchment could ever encompass, for he now was the victim of the ‘wan cadada’, a hex reserved by the tribal seers for those who had done complete wrong, untempered by remorse or forethought.

What the white world called ghosts were very real entities to Alistare’s tribe; but these entitities, the ‘cadada’, did not so much inhabit a place or thing as change it, alter its essence so thoroughly that it was in a fittingly ephemeral way new to the world of the ‘chendendi’, the material.

“I don’t understand” cried Brady, as the plates, one by one, revealed what he thought to be overexposure ‘clouds’, obscuring or masking his images to the point of uselessness; on some of them, the especially gruesome corpses already racked with rigor mortis, Brady’s own face had been somehow engrafted-----he was the dead man in scores of his handiwork!

Frank’s arms and legs trembled, so that his covers were now overthrown, a seeming half Lazarus whose body’s tongue bespoke a plaintive shriek uttered to its mechanical savior with the coolly benumbered face.

Though the ‘how’ of it was unknowable, Frank wandered Bowery streets, stupored from drink and self-pity. Can I smell in my dreams, his faculties injected…… ‘What has happened, why, I am a man of substance, in demand….’ As he stumbled and fell, bumping his addled head into momentary blankness.

“Have you seen his latest work?” It is simply abhorrent, why, all the faces are his----do not ask me how or why----but he is under some sort of demonic influence, I can assure you of this!” Greeley was adamantine: Brady was finished, as was the War and its maudlin appeal. “The West, now, if only Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery had possessed cameras” exclaimed Greeley.

Now back at his studio at Broadway and Fulton, he found the door ajar, cats scurrying to and fro; of course, he thought beclouded though his brain was, they had upset the laboratory for which he had so berated Alistare………..but how could he set it right, there was no telling where Alistare had gone, what further damage he may have done……what was the use? The creditors, so lavish in their praise and support, would now descend upon me; his assistants in the field would emerge as those who had done the actual work of trudging through sodden battlefields, braving shell and shot, the stench, always the stench; I had seen it myself, at Bull Run, before my eyes began to desert me………called brave beyond soldiery, now that would be forgotten, the images reminders of that from which survivors sought reprieve, forever. Even the President was its sanguinary victim, he who had credited me, along with his Cooper Union address, with making him President……….

A shadowy figure, certainly not a cat, appeared in the peripheral view of Frank’s left eye…….. ‘Who is there?’ No reply; ‘I say, answer me, this is…..pr…private property, I can have you arrested.’

“Arrested….(laughter)…my friend, it seems that it may be you who is trespassing, yes? Did you think you could rid yourself of me so easily; no, my former friend, we are bound up together, my handiwork entwined with yours, across time…”

“Alistare, is that you? I’ve been wanting….”

“Want, you speak of want, and want it is that you now have, yes?”

“Listen to me, I was….wrong, I know that…”

“Silence! The cadadas have been loosed, nothing can stop them; goodbye; I am already dead, as they show no mercy once summoned.”

Awake. Frank looked at the clock, only one hour having passed. Struggling to recall his dreamscape, he was supremely frustrated by the blank conscious canvas his hardened brush of a brain now refused to decorate with recollection; his comforter spread upon the floor, its fanciful name betrayed by the violence it had failed to contain. Dehydrated, he glanced at his night table, a half full wine glass his only suspect, released without questioning by an increasingly shrinking awareness of what might have been behind such a scene of kinesis on such a place of presumptive rest. Caffeine now overwhelmed his efforts at reconstruction, causing him to trip over the cat. “Alistare, do you mind!” Wait, cats, hadn’t they been in my dream…….and the name……that’s it, Scrooge must have been right, a morsel of beef, or cheese, and the strangest things can be conjured by the brain. Yes, that was all.

“Thanks, my feline friend, there’s a tasty treat in your near future.”


Weeks passed, and that gallery grew so that his avocation had now truly become a craft, overtaking his time like some sort of compulsion, passionately outpacing his original interest and, while it surprised him, that effect was only heightened by the news.

Fred and Ophelia Cuzzins, only casual acquaintances, had been killed in a freak roadside accident while on one of their escapes to Europe, both beheaded by the high speed impact of a tractor trailer. He had learned that they were the safest of drivers, never even reaching the speed limit under any circumstance anyone who knew them could conjure; they had traveled to France with the specific intent of retracing the steps of the famed doomed couple whose likenesses they had reveled in before Frank’s prized camera. So violent was the crash that the lorry which struck them had overturned, spilling its contents all over the roadside. Razorblades, manufactured by the same firm which had fashioned the various guillotine blades for the Revolution.

At the funeral, to which he felt drawn for ‘reasons’ of confirmation more than affinity for this unfortunate couple, Frank Moebius could not help but see that image, it had been there, on the glass plate----he replayed Morley’s words, and that was enough to cause him to find the whole damned business risible; enough, he thought, optical illusion…refracted ordinary images, it happened to photographers all the time, since the first elementary dark rooms-----Daguerre himself had written of it: ‘Trickery of light’, he had called it.


Months passed, and he had photographed several more persons, happily and without the freak accident of the Cuzzins’. Then, when he had all but forgotten the whole episode, he came across it, the phenomenon which would both explain and confound his experiences, waking and otherwise. He had read of the confluence of science and philosophy, their artificial walls erected by a reductionist worldview now in serious question; it unnerved him that with or without a high tech laboratory, the truth was accessible to the truly open mind.

His video club had sent him some tapes concerning animal instinctive behaviors, featuring the ideas of a man named Sheldrake; he thought they would be useful in understanding his dog’s penchant for detection of unseen things, forces or whatever. She would not go past the dark room door, that was certain, and her actions bordered on the spooky. Every time he went near it to develop some shots, she would lay down, tense with her paws over her eyes.


“Morphic resonance” Morley announced blithely.

Frank had contacted Morley after midnight he had been so flabbergasted by Sheldrake’s theories.

“Why didn’t you say something…….wait a minute, you did” Frank was in a daze.

“Look, it’s just theorizing, but……if he’s right, well, then material things, everything really, even so-called inanimate objects create some sort of lasting field of force that we call habit.” There was a pause, during which both men were somehow thinking the same thought.

“It’s cursed”, as he hung up the phone Frank mouthed the words he never imagined himself uttering.

We exist in a universe, the nature of each integral to one another, yet the who, what, why, even the when of it all is largely unknown to us, he mused; even consciousness is indefinable. Why wasn’t a ‘curse’ real, wasn’t it just thought, and thoughts were energy, emerging from somewhere…….my brain, my mind…..can I even define them, distinguish them? Energy, wasn’t it a basic law that nothing, even it, was ever destroyed, only transformed…………he recalled that electrons lasted for eons, maybe forever, and wasn’t this an electric world, electronic through and through? More than ever, he wanted to know, now reassured that Hamlet’s dilemma was soluble, with what we know today.

Two weeks later, Frank was found in his dark room, his stale blood having mixed together with development chemicals in a glossy pool round his shattered head, shattered by a gunshot to that head.

“Those wrongful death lawsuits must’ve been too much for him” the coroner mused.

“The thing I can’t figure is, who the Hell took that picture of him with the gun to his head” the detective said.

“His friend, Morley tells me that he prepared the glass plates, swears they were brand new, state of the art glass, the works” the forensic specialist added.

“Well, one thing’s for sure, that image, the one they found on all the plates, it’s a guy name of Brady, Matthew Brady, wearing what looks like a smirk or grimace on his face, in the background, with Frank Moebius aiming that same weapon at those 12 people.”

In the municipal morgue, the embalmer paused in his morbid practices, his ‘undertakings’, as he called them risibly on so many occasions whenever morticians numbered at least two. It had been an unusually busy time, as it seemed always to be around All Hallow’s Eve. He smiled bemusedly at the mindless paganism of its observance, its indulgents’ never even so much as reflecting upon its gruesomeness.

In that same room had been the bodies of some dozen gunshot victims, shot at close range, from the back, seemingly unawares, as if they had been surprised. And now these deaths were being blamed upon this, his latest subject, an apparent suicide, the bullets having entered the base of his skull.

This ‘subject’, as his profession referred to cadavers, was, then, of special importance; he would allow himself to enjoy a cigar, despite the flammable chemicals abounding. As he walked to his office desk in search of the tube of tobacco which symbolized for him relaxed repast, he looked up at the two old photographs on his wall, treasured heirlooms of his family for over a century. These sepia ovals bore the separate images of his great ancestor, known as a shaman in their native village of West Africa; the other, the image of his brief employer, one M. Brady of New York, whose resemblance to his extant subject the mortician found remarkable.

AT LONG LAST……
• © by JB Pravda




‘We’ are here; ‘here’ is called Earth; sometimes we capitalize it, like I just did. Other times we don’t, say when we just want to identify dirt, which is very strange and often confusing since books we call holy devote quite a lot of proverbial verses to basically reducing everything to dirt, which is sometimes-- especially in those books-- called ‘dust’, a thing we, they say, come from and go back to, also known as ‘ashes’, something we hope we won’t be reduced to before our time at the hands of….’others’.

We, all of us, would probably agree that it would be useful to carefully define some terms….here goes, this is the best ‘we’ve’ come up with:

It makes us (a number of ‘I’s that agree on things) nervous and somehow uneasy to not be able to use all the categorical words we’ve invented, after much thinking by some really smart-sounding people about the whole business, to describe others, a.k.a., ‘them’, made up of various worlds inhabited by entities which are at odds with us… ‘I’ worlders.

All these worlds, strangely enough, agree on one thing: we, sometimes known as us, have many, many names for ‘us’, and even ‘us’ or ‘we’ isn’t one of them unless it’s a world, sometimes with just two members, which is supposed to be different from another small or large world. This is confusing and sometimes exhausting for any world because it makes it spend a lot of time and energy thinking up things that only it has or does. By the way, the thing called ‘they’ or ‘them’ is never ‘us’ or ‘we’.

Back to Earth, with a capital ‘e’; it is inhabited by separate mini-worlds of entities (let’s call them ‘people’ for user-friendliness) whose ancestors decided, for one reason…(Note: this word can include things that are not at all reasonable, and often really means ‘excuse’, also a verb describing something we should not do when it’s a noun) or another, to call certain areas of earth (here, we use the lower case) countries or nations, where lots of those people get as far away from that earth as possible, ending up in what are called cities where, out of some kind of longing, these same people will do almost anything to have a small patch of it to grow things in, mostly flowers, to remind them of how beautiful and giving the big ‘e’ Earth is. Some of these people often feel sorry for ‘others’---those who live in a world named ‘second’ or ‘third’--- who have no choice and are forced to live close to the earth/dirt, eating whatever it, the dirt, will allow them to grow in it. Still, many people who live in the cities like their food grown only in dirt, without poisoning it with chemicals and things, calling it ‘organic’. Many people of big ‘e’ Earth like to use words like ‘organic’, which is used to both make them feel closer to the earth, little ‘e’--- although, they’d, still, rather not be around too much and let it get their hands ‘dirty’ (one of those few names that really gets to the point without beating around any kind of bush, also rooted in…..well, dirt)---unless it’s close by, with flowers and in a world known as ‘first’--- and to also make them feel smart and well-informed.

This feeling is what people from the world known as ‘first’ literately call irony which often makes them feel both clever and sad; this sadness is, ironically, mostly caused by these names themselves, things we call things so that we won’t get them mixed up with other things, even though, at the risk of being redundant and, well, preachy, our holy books say that in the end this is pretty pointless as they start out and end up the exact same thing (see your local holy man/woman for further details; see, also, any good physics textbook).




And, so, we consider ourselves (though, not necessarily ‘others’, especially ones without really high-tech machines) intelligent beings and pretty much expect other intelligent beings from other worlds… when they encounter us in one of several possible ways, including close ones of the third kind, to call us Earthlings. But, for some reason we can’t explain, except with words like ‘sovereign’ and ‘ancestors’, we never call ourselves that, even in science fiction stories---only the scary, hostile-intentioned aliens would use that word. Curiously enough, when a world or worlds on Earth can’t seem to get along with others, we call this ‘alienation’.



Nevertheless, we, on behalf of the inhabitants of Earth---okay, at least the ones with really advanced machines, wish to be very clear: we would be so very glad to meet other beings from other….worlds; then we could get to know them and they……….. ‘us.’


Then, finally, at long last, we would no longer be alone.

House of Bast Rising

By Joseph Baron Pravda©

She had always lain abreast of the refracted hypotenuse of prism-ed light which made its expected heat and light evident, some eight minutes from its solar source. Luxuriating in its basking, her frame limply, yet intentionally, soaked in the ancient warmth.

Joseph had no hint of what would take place, she being a creature of habitual routines in the art of relaxation and, yet, it did happen, the cause for his growing alarm.

"I was reading, by the pool, as I often do in the morning sun" he paused for breath, despite having been outwardly calm, even passive the moment before.

"Surely you're not frightened……are you?" was the sarcastic rejoinder of Dr. Sandhurst, a psychologist friend and neighbor.

"Yes, I suppose I am a bit spooked, Ok?; Jerry, look at this."

"This looks like a Rorschach reject" joked the friend.

"She must have gotten hold of an inkpad or something and made her way over to me, slinking along softly on her feet, stealthy rascal, and, out of nowhere plops down on my lap, book and all."

"Nothing unusual about that; you are her favorite, ,apparently."

"Here's the unusual topper, OK…..she props herself up with one limb on my chest, looks me right in the eyes…and then plants that ink spot onto my expensive book's cover page, like she knew it was blank, so there'd be no confusion" Joseph looked smugly at his, now, less flippant friend.

Jerry paused reflecting on this latest bit of data. “Look, all I can tell you is that, well, even their domesticators didn’t finish the job, couldn’t really, according to their myths and so forth; ended up worshipping the fool creatures.”

“That the best you have to offer? We’re looking at non-simian communication, for crying out loud, and you’re blasé about it. I have an idea: what say you to making this an experiment, protocols and all, Hell, might get you a Nobel or even a MacArthur.”

“Alright, if it’ll calm you down so we can go golfing, fine; we’ll begin next week, a vet friend of mine has access to the University labs and such, so we’ll ‘crack the code’, ooooohhhhhhooooohhhhhh!” Jerry was relieved to have diverted his friend’s attention from what he deemed twice-told tales about the mysterious feline species, the Oriental’s four-legged inscrutable counterpart.

That afternoon was what even a boring golfer would have described as ‘a beautiful walk, ruined’. Joseph certainly was in agreement with his subconscious Clemens. The twosome agreed to meet at the vet’s offices the following Saturday to lay out the protocols; Joseph was anxious in a way even he hadn’t expected. Maybe the old girl was preparing to die, she was rather old, but he wasn’t quite sure, having found her in a ditch near his office guarding her litter, a litter she had outlived, come to think of it.

Joseph returned home to his roomy home, it seeming then, for the first time, strangely welcoming, unknown to him since his wife’s untimely death of a massive stroke, at age 63. As he meandered through the kitchen to his master bedroom, he noticed the side table lamp was on, at highest brightness; funny, he had installed a ‘clap on’ device to amuse himself……maybe a passing car horn, or other loud noise had activated it; it certainly came on every time he sneezed.

There she was, Cleo, sprawled upon his oversized pillow, like some reincarnated feline version of her namesake.

The scientifically unexplained purring was loud, so loud, he speculated, that it had turned on the light? In a world where science claimed the ultimate priesthood’s spot, its telling silence was, somehow, appropriate. What the Hell did some lab rat dissector know about these creatures that the Egyptians didn’t? Better to emulate Poe, master of such arcana, and look upon her as the anima mundi of the sensitive soul…..of the world. He had read that Edgar Allan would often perch just such a creature upon his shoulder for muse-like inspiration, and here she was, where his shoulder met its routine repose.

Three a.m., the clock LED displayed; he reached out reflexively to the other side of the bed, finding nothing, not even Cleo in her usual place.

A chilling roar, much like the MGM lion’s rattled the lampshade and a nearby book shelf, but this was no mimetic salvo ‘for art’s sake’; the textbook dream state of Kansas could be ruled out, the pinch test and cold water to the face had settled that quandary. No, someone, something, was in the house.

As Joseph carefully retrieved his Smith & Wesson from his bureau drawer, she emerged.

“Cleo, you scared the sheiss out of me! How the Hell did you get in there?”

She seemed to comprehend not just his mental state but his very words, as she slinked around the dark corner to reveal, as he followed cautiously, a large crack in the rear of the dresser; slithering up and in, she then leapt from the now open drawer onto the floor, looking back for him to follow.

In the study the television, also equipped with a sonic device, was on, with the volume up, and an old Karloff movie set in a nondescript Egyptian locale was playing.

“I’ll be damned…….” Mumbled Joseph. “You shall be…” came Karloff’s too perfect rejoinder, and Joseph, and Boris, issued simultaneously eerie laughs, the close contest going to Karloff’s, for its echo effect.

“I’m not waiting up to see the lion, hearing it was enough, thank you” Joseph riposted in the direction of the dead actor, whose eyes seemed to meet his; “this is too spooky……, Cleo, don’t you agree?”

It was then that Joseph became truly dumbfounded: she applied her left paw, the one with the seven toes, to the remote control and clicked off the set.

Making a mental note to tell Jerry Sandhurst about this in every detail, he, led by Cleo, set off for bed.

Little is known about dreaming; arbitrarily named wave patterns with Greek letters for names do not a science make. And dreaming was that night’s tour de force for Joseph. The Jungian notion of a collective cosmic unconscious was not, to Joseph’s knowledge, meant to encompass cats’, but there it was……..he was a four legger, jaunting about the tall grasses, but not in the savannahs of Africa, but somewhere far to the North…….in Egypt! He approached an empty temple, through an open courtyard….seeing a desert rat, he was upon it’s throat so quickly he soon tasted its blood, warm and throbbing from the gaping hole he had blasted through its jugular vein from a lightning fast jaw motion; and then, fast forward into the adjoining crypt. There, on the brightly painted hieroglyphic wall his night-visioning eyesight spied it, the symbol!

“Ahhhhhh!” and he was again awake; Cleo, next to him this time, had not stirred, save for her limbs, which moved as though running, as he had done, away from the crypt before awakening. He sprang out of bed, went into the study and found it: the image Cleo had stamped onto his book flyleaf; stranger still, and until now, not collated by his linear brain’s functional worldview, the book’s title, ‘Hereafter’, a fictional work based on Poe’s writings, many unpublished, from his ‘Marginalia’.

Alright, he had the symbol, but what did it mean? He quickly sketched his recollections of the tomb and its grounds before doubt could issue from that rational seat which he still assumed, as did we all, contained our being-----more and more his heart/brain was persuading him that the brain was a mere slave organ of easily fooled physical senses, victim of the greatest of conflicts of interest whenever called upon to analyze its own conclusions.

A passage from the book came to mind, not just his increasingly suspect brain, but his ephemeral consciousness: ‘unmasking which also tears away the face’……what was the essence of this, these experiences?

Opening the book, he intuitively landed on a page whose footnotes held a clue: ‘Corvinus or Corvus, the prophetic messenger bird of Phoebus Apollo, served a prophetic function, also a notable constellation in the Hydra region of the sky (the largest and longest of all constellations), for its ‘ring tail’ appearance, actually two interacting galaxies; the bird’s wings were originally silver, but were turned to black when he delivered bad news to that god of wisdom, the arts and science. Poe was undoubtedly aware of this, avid scientist that he was and surely he had this one among those he ‘pondered over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore’.

Yes, and the Ptolemies had Hellenized Egypt, believing it to be to the good, he recalled from his readings of history…….the Raven, ‘nevermore’, his peculiar message of lost love. Cleopatra had been the last of them, the epitome of aphroditic love……and, and Cleo’s tail had the weird ring-like markings, her coat was silver! Rest, his thoughts counseled, rest and sleep on it. It was now 6 am and he obeyed.

Exhausted, Joseph had had no dreams that early morning, and awakened at noon on Sunday. While he took no particular note of it, Cleo was no where to be found; as this was not uncommon for her, he gave it little thought and spent the day and evening gardening. After returning from his evening run, he had decided to get to bed early, as he had a busy week ahead.

“Strange, she hasn’t touched her food” he muttered to himself, mildly concerned. As he searched the house, he grew ever more anxious, she was simply gone or hiding for some unprecedented cause of her own. Sitting in his study, doing some light reading for an upcoming business meeting, he heard a knocking sound at the study door.

“Who the…..” he mouthed as he slowly approached the little used side door. Knocking had become scratching and as he slowly cracked the door, in came Cleo, with a bird in her mouth, a black bird; she bolted from the study and bounded up onto a cabinet’s top, placing her prey at her feet, out of sight of Joseph.

“Just what are you up to, young lady?” Joseph scolded. “Where have you been, hmmm?” He stood there, staring at her, the stare returned plaintively, he felt. Joseph was a sober sort, open-minded, compassionate and kind, but this was too much for him.

“Look, you’ve been acting strangely ever since…..” he stopped himself as he was about to invoke his late wife’s name, when he…..knew he heard a raspy voice whisper ‘Evermore’. Just that one word. The TV, or the radio? He hadn’t turned them on……and a quick check of both proved him sane, at least on that score.

‘A little less Poe, and a lot more know’s what we need around here’ he mused; he determined that the veterinarian visit needed to be moved up, at least for the more mundane purpose of securing Cleo’s physical health, and, his peace of mind.

“Sorry to call so late, Jer, but, well, that vet friend of yours, any chance we, I mean, Cleo could get in to see him sooner than next weekend?”

“Joe, you sound positively panicked, what’s up?”

“Maybe it’s just me, but Cleo’s been not herself since you know what” Joseph conceded.

“You I can treat, the cat can wait, huh?”

“I honestly don’t know……you free for breakfast?” Joseph inquired.

“For you, sure, but early….how about Pallas’, that new Greek place, corner of….”

“I know it, yeah, sure” Joseph agreed, hanging up the phone feeling largely ignored. ‘Maybe I’ll take you to your usual vet when I’m through getting blown off officially by Jerry. Cleo had curled up, now asleep, as though bored or, he thought, simply worn out from her outdoor expedition. He headed for the bedroom, again checking to see if the appliances he had already checked were still not communicating; double bolting the side door, he wandered preoccupied, with what he scarcely knew, to the bathroom, popped a sleep tablet and went to bed.




Jerry was waiting for him as he entered the corner café, busy even at 7 am.

“Thanks, Jerry” was his best terse salutation, it failing miserably to hide his angst.


“Tell you what, let’s order, time’s short, then we’ll chat, Ok?” said Jerry Sandhurst.

“Sure, sure” said Joseph, as he opened the busy menu.

“NO!” Joseph shouted, somewhat reflexively.

What had triggered that reflex was an ad printed boldly at the bottom of the two-leaf menu: ‘EVERMORE Funeral Services……when your needs are of the eternal variety’.

“Joe, what is it!” Jerry grabbed for his arm across the small table, causing its contents to crash to the floor. The waitress came over to insure that there was no trouble, but Joseph was unresponsive. After Jerry had reassured her and the mess had been cleared away, Joseph finally snapped out of it, whatever, wherever ‘it’ was.

“The voice……that’s what I heard after the bird was brought…in….”

“You’re not making sense, what bird?” Jerry insisted.

“Cleo, the black bird she brought in…..there was a knocking sound against he study door…” Joseph replied, still in a seeming daze.

“Jesus, this Cleo has taken over your life and your house” Jerry was as surprised as angered by these new variations on what he saw as a disturbing theme---that Joseph was perhaps deeply disturbed and well beyond bereavement’s charted bounds.

Joseph blinked his eyes rapidly, his face flushing with blood overflow: “Christ, you’re the one who wanted to ‘treat’ me first…..and shabbily, at that!”

Jerry was now, finally, aware just how off-putting had been his banishment of the unexplained to some cosmic ostrich head’s sandy burial.

“Look, Joe, I’m so damned sorry; I’ve done the one thing I bash patients for----closing down of the mind, when its liberation it needs. I’m reaching out to my guy the vet for tonight, ok?”

Joseph sat there, staring at his old friend, and, after his lower lip managed to cease from quivering, whispered loudly: “I don’t know what’s happening, but I know it’s got to do with Eleanor; Cleo was very much her cat, you know.”

“We’re going to handle this, Joe, thoroughly and I mean from all angles, OK----count on me.”

That night, Jerry had sprung into action---he had told Joseph that he hadn’t felt so energized since graduate school days working with Dr. at Duke.

“She’s resting comfortably” Dr. Sobel spoke to both men about Cleo, putting Joseph in mind that Eleanor’s own doctors hadn’t been as gentling. Sobel suggested that Joseph and Jerry should do the same, as his test results would take a day or two and it was best that Cleo remain at the University lab for observation.

As she was heavily sedated, Joseph reluctantly acceded, returning home late, and heading straight for bed; even the absence of Cleo would not keep him from his inevitable trip to Theta’s dreamy realm.



“EVER-MORE……………..e-v-e-r-m-o-r-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee”…………………….

Joseph wasn’t sure if he was in a waking dream; but the voice, it was the same as when he was most definitely not dreaming, at least in the horizontal posture. A seeming gallon of cold water to the face later, he was as awake as he would ever be……..”EVER-MORE”, again, coming from the high-ceilinged vestibule between the study and the…….

Yes, he thought, the place where Cleo had placed the bird….but, it was dead………he rushed to the spot and hearing nothing further, relaxed, only to have his eyes engaged by a shadow grossly engorged by a night light whose geometric location provided the necessary ambience for ghostliness.

Fluttering, then a crash sent Joseph’s unsteady legs into dual avalanche, and his head strongly embraced the stiff Persian carpet. What’s this, his jangled central nervous system managed to associate from adrenal chaos…….two black feathers now dangled from his mop of grey hair. And then they drifted away, as if in mock of their immediate prior occupation, imbedded for that purpose in that aviary phantom.

The shattered glass was neatly piled below the sill of the small window of stained glass; the former image of a bird of peace, olive branch in beaked tow, had now been transformed to depict the headless seeming flowing robe of a winged angel, a neatly carved corvine hole now the halo.


He conjured many thoughts, among them that conjuring was certainly the proper verb to describe his recent existence, but who, what was the conjurer? All that reading derivative of Poe must hold the clue……he had it!


‘….vainly I had tried to borrow from my books surcease of sorrow---sorrow for the lost Lenore….’ Joseph vainly gasped for oxygen on reading those words from the very book from which he had sought such merciful loan, as whatever breath he gained was held, held suspended as he completed the stanza: ‘for the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore----nameless here for evermore’!!!

He had been right……a message about, perhaps from Eleanor! She had also loved Poe, especially this one work which gave him the universal fame he deserved; ‘universal’, Joseph puzzled at his use of the term; wasn’t it Poe who also loved science, detection of the unknown? ‘Nameless here’----the ‘here’ had to mean the world, as only supernatural beings, angels we misnamed them, called her ‘Lenore’.

Phone, ringing……..Joseph was jolted from his reverie.

“Mr. Bast, I’m afraid I have some bad news” were the proverbial words of doom he had heard from Dr. Sobel, knowing in his super-rational brains of heart and gut that Cleo was no more.

No consolation abided in the details, one having to do with the apparent ring-tail markings on her tail, the other with her advanced age. The lab would continue its analyses at Dr. Sandhurst’s request and Joseph would be kept informed of their now purely academic findings.

Her sign had caught his passive attention countless times before, but as he drove home from the University and Jerry’s futile consolations, Madame Selenka’s antique ‘Palmist, Tarot & Etc.’ signage read like Lazarus’ beacon-like poem to the emigrant soul, and his was badly in need of its eerie yet warming implications of resurrection in all its forms, for all his loves.



“Always a reader” confessed Madame Selenka, the jangling curtain of beads behind her a second-rate symbol of reassurance. She had developed a sort of litany of assurances usually triggered by the same inquiry she had only just half-listened to so many times.
This customer reading would be like most others’ who, for years uncounted, had found their way to her dimly-lit parlor seeking knowledge of the unknown; this one seemed especially anxious, needy.

“I imagine you’ve heard this before, but science is just another religion, and…..” Joseph began, cut off by the simple raising of her right hand.

“This is good………..” she uttered; Joseph was puzzled.

“Your use of the word ‘imagine’, very good; this not man made, only borrowed, yes?” she purred, with a familiar rasp in her delivery.

Joseph was caught between his rational stereotyping mechanism and his heart-brain; he had ‘reasoned’ that since the heart was precursor to the brain, all the latter’s assumptions were now out the window, he was ready to embrace what now presented itself in the opposite direction, from wherever, through that same portal.




“Please to give me right hand” she suggested in her best commanding voice, still rasping pleasantly. He complied.

“Goood, heart is in agreement……heart not some pump, has neurons, you know this?” she teased.

“Has what?” Joseph’s brain, seemingly offended by this presumptuous offering, made its last stand, its finger-like frontal lobes whitely clinging to the window sill now being frequented by Joseph’s psyche, in both directions.

“Check on internet, have websites for you , show pictures, whole ball of wax” she responded almost casually, sorting through her Tarot deck.

And then she was entranced……no longer with him so much as through Joseph, his unbounded mindscape, her territory for years uncounted, uncountable.

“Your love, she is…..beyond this place” she mused, not waiting for affirmations.

“Names, have lost essence, pale echoes of what once were, meant…..yours Bast” and this stirred Joseph’s heart and gut in primordial ways that were no echoes of something as artificial as human reckoning of time’s ‘passage’; he was instantly taken by the mere enunciation of that ancient nomination of a goddess he would now hear of for the first time, reader that he thought he was notwithstanding.

“Hers was greatest festival in the old river land, her temple surrounded by grove of tall trees, where many sacred creatures of the air perched” Selenka’s eyes were now rolling back in their mortal houses, her lids fluttering wildly.

“Twin sister, Sekhmet, head of lioness, darker side of All created, the Tearer she was called…..but sister of light, Bast-et, head of cat” and with this revelation, Joseph audibly gasped, as though hungry for its life-giving knowledge, not at all from that place of vacancy, fear.

“Cult it was, centered at city Pwr-Bast, alive in its cat worship for hundreds of years after the one called Christ; symbol, very strange symbol, was mark of this practice, like how you say today, ‘cat’s eye’, in elegant palm of goddess” she continued to the climactic point at which Joseph reached into his breast pocket, next to his perceptive heart, producing the folded flyleaf he had, for some reason, now carried with him for days: as he showed it to Selenka, she ‘saw’ it, eyelessly, in her mind’s envisioning.

“Yes, you know of this…..” she seemed to purr; “My cat, my wife’s cat, Cleo, made this……with her paw” he whispered.

“With her….palm, hmmm? Clever girl; she is…..also gone, yes” she knew.

As he drew his hand away in a reflexive pause, he saw, where he hadn’t before, or so he thought, there, in her palm, was the eye, the cat’s eye symbol.

“Cleo…….she was my, our special cat” Joseph stated longingly.

“Is very strong cat name, Cleo…..was powerful Greek woman; had favorite legend about Corvus, errand boy for Apollo, flung into sky, in Virgo I think, when piss off God” she jibed.

Joseph was stunned at her incisive commentary about something she couldn’t, or so his now eclipsed brain offered up, have known, the bird, the black bird Cleo had dragged into the house, his messenger of Evermore.

It was a week since he had departed the boundless world of Selenka, who had given him a silver ankh, having refused his payment with a burning smile of knowing.

The brochure had just arrived in the mail, ‘Archeological Ventures, Ltd. Offers A Unique window into the world of Egypt’s Little Known Treasures’ having caught his eye as if the sepia tone background were the glistening desert.

Everything was sold or stored, Jerry Sandhurst having been given Power of Attorney plenary for Joseph’s absence, of unlimited duration as far as either man knew.

Jerry pondered Joseph’s predicament, his now obsession for what the old woman had imparted to him; while he bemoaned his good friend’s entrancement by what he still regarded as junk science at best.

The phone: “Mr. Sandhurst, this is James’ grad assistant at the lab……he ran out asking me to get hold of Mr. Bast, thought maybe you could help me find him”.

“I wish I could; no, he’s off abroad, no phone by design, that sort of get away” Jerry replied, envisioning his version of Joseph of Arabia astride a mangy camel.

“Damn, well, maybe you could pass it along…..I’m still studying, but looks like the tests came back with some whack data…..” the assistant was cut off abruptly.

“What sort of data?” Jerry was anxious.

“OK, get this, the markings on the tail of his cat, Cleo, well, the lab guys say there are strong traces of mummy unguents and fragments of linen like material” the student related.

“What does it mean……uh, are they sure?”

“Never sure, but these tests are pretty controlled, conservative, but, still, the results say………3000 yrs” ….there, he had cut to the endless chase.

Jerry dropped the phone, recollecting that Joseph had summed up what the palmist had told him, that his name was that old, and…….how the cat and the crow had known each other, in the heavens……..

The telegram came as a shock; not just because it was only a month since Joseph’s departure.

“BAST DECEASED STOP MINISTRY OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS IN CAIRO IN NEED OF BODY DISPOSAL WISHES STOP”

Jerry arose the next day, is custom it was to leave the TV on as white noise.

What he heard sent chills to his now thoroughly horripilating flesh, accompanied by high alert adrenal messengers dispatched from his now overloading central nervous system.

“A new star, hugely bright, found for the first time by astronomers……..in Virgo, the constellation little known called Corvus…..” Jerry mouthed the words, somehow calmly.

As dusk came, Jerry was in his storage room, broadly smiling, eyes amist, preparing to set up his boyhood window to the universe; the telescope was now carefully aimed at Virgo, the Virgin.

A black bird suddenly perched itself atop the instrument; it cawed; glistening like two kaleidoscopic refractions, its eyes a frenzy of stained glass in the dying light of the Sun star. Had it said, ‘Evermore’, Jerry wondered.

Grimalkin
㦠J.B. Pravda

That I live, a freakish twist in my untrod peculiar path, known by mortal man to be Fate; that I, now, after these many years, may speak of the events of that evening, both a blessing and a curse----for I know not, nor any man, the nature of that fateful pathmaker, drawing, as I do, upon that which came to pass before my eyes aflood, then, as now, with lachrymose profusion.

If you have tears, do not waste them, as I, whose very own serve but as fluid reminders of the blind love their houses did offer Commander Strangways, my father.

British born, he had lived in ¡¥the provinces¡¦, as he derisively described them---America----for some twenty years, first as a Confederate officer of a brigade he financed, then as a blockade runner, from which he profited mightily, and finally as an even more prospering builder of the British invention he laid claim to, railroads.

There he had co-founded the Cosmos Club of Washington,
D.C. , the London branch of which he also brought into being, of which I am still the honorary Secretary.

Orphaned at a young age I found myself aboard one of his ships and, at a confluent intersecting of then presumed fortune and fear, had somehow saved the ship, his person aboard, from Union capture along with a kingly cargo of contraband. Adopted by him, I was brought back to England, he determined to make a crude, yet appreciatively worshipful, lad a proper ¡¥gentleman¡¦.

And, so it wqs, that I Jedidiah Daniel Strangways, Club Secretary and Director, both survived and perished that Saturday of December 16, 1899. For it was on that eve, in keeping with father¡¦s personal point of honor to graciously greet every new member into the Cosmos London and, that evening, he was in rare animated spirits, even at 80 years of age.

Said to have been scion of a wealthy Boer family of Pretoria, this new member had survived a savage man-eating lion¡¦s mauling at Tsavo River, Kenya only the year preceding. While he obviously had survived, it was with such a scathing that he required two heavy wooden walking sticks of ornate African design, often seen, according to father, in the possession only of very holy shamanic warriors; even with their aid, he walked at seeming right angles to his torso, as it were. And, his voice box had been put asunder, his surgeons, it was allowed by his laboriously wrought hand-written note, of course, awestruck that his jugular had been missed. All these details were unknown to father, by choice, and by club tradition.

Not known to miss an opportunity to practice opportunism, father proceeded to monopolize the otherwise customary dialogue, doubtless mockingly doing with his wagging tongue what the silence-bringing lion had to his captive audience. In a gesture of feigned courtesy so characteristic of the man, I was to be at the ready to interpret his signing language, acquired by me of necessity aboard many many-tongued ships in my seagoing youth.

He began: ¡§¡¦Tis good to have ye with ears intact, good sir; though our peoples may have been in enmity, you are welcomed, nonetheless, to the Cosmos: we, like the Greeks who coined the all-embracing term, welcome all, who¡Kwelcome ALL¡K¡K¡K.ideas, you see!¡¨

And, so it went, for some moments, the new member respectfully, as well as needfully, mute, but with eyes such as I cannot recall amongst the most savage of swabs at sea.

With the preliminaries done, fathe proceeded to ask for a slim volume from his proudly displayed, and locked, library acquired mostly in America. He opened its pages and began anew:

¡§Now, it is our custom, in keeping with our charter, to introduce new notions to our ken: here is one such----it has never been heard here or anywhere I know of, as it was unknown till I came upon it by chance, as it were: the fact that I had heard of it made Mr. Chance his very self all the more favorable, to me!¡¨ Wheezing laughter gushed forth, unjoined, by choice or otherwise, ere, it would have been the same.

His laughter was a fine, uproarious noise and he indulged it to the seeming relish of his solitary guest, as the latter breached his thin, rebuilt lips with a stoical, but very palpable smirk.

Father began to read: ¡§ An abbess of the ancient Order of Felicity dwelt within that cloister near enough to the environs of Prague and its teeming markets so as to see far too many mendicants. Her generous name knew the tongues---and their hungry, sparsely gated houses---of all these, and one especially piteous one, lower still than even their impoverished status. ¡§

¡§Find him a bit stilted, at times, do you not?¡¨ father asked his guest, not pausing even for a nod or shrug from his audience of one, preferring instead his own, known response.

¡§Best work is about or prominently features, as it were, wilding creatures----The Raven, his apex, really¡K¡K¡K.¡¨ He dismissed the author whose rare book, itself, he treasured, equally scornful of irony itself.

¡§Well, he goes on as he is wont to do with a long passage about feral cats----------oh yes, nearly left the bloody thing out--------although, wasn¡¦t really a cat, you see.¡¨ He then jumped ahead some ten pages or so.

¡§Where is it¡K¡K¡K..ah, here: ¡¥The pitiful shrunken creature was indeed unique among the throng of beggars who found way to the Abbey in no small measure, owing to the observable anguish supervening the usual----if be there such among the, per se, unusual----supply of that suffering, a byproduct of its probable longing to have, at least once, been of such a dimension as to have shrunk from it.¡¦

Now, there, I was moved, as was father, for he ceased his bloviations for a full term of a minute.

¡§My observation once again: this crippled, misshapen dwarf was a virtual animal.¡¨

It was then that the attentive Boer cleared his throat rather viscerally, doubtless owing to his internally disordered condition, I recall thinking; and his eyes beamed clear and bright as if through some unknowable optically foreign lens.

¡§At any rate, this small thing is taken in by Sister Katarina who, together wih the other nuns, create a feline costume as it were for her, er, it¡K¡K.complete with a rather elaborate head piece: he fails here to describe it adequately, in my view¡K¡K¡Know, this is due to the fact that she would not be permitted to stay, else; the Bishop¡¦s large mastiff, is a real nemesis; after a period of avoiding it and warming to her new-found sisters in suffering¡K.¡¨ Rolling his eyes, fathe made plain his contempt to such overt absence of contempt by these foolish women.

¡§Her name was called Grimalkin------their own private humor, referring to the ancient Saxon term for grey, lowly old woman---and, as she ate but little and gratefully from their meagerness, but for the mastiff, she could remain. To conclude, as the hour does not tarry, and your frailty, dear sir, is owed it, thusly confronted with death¡¦s reflection once again, how does the grimalkin behave? Well, the wildness of the creature prevails: the Bishop is garroted with her false tail and fed to the dog! It later becoming her guardian.¡¨

There followed a passive stretching out of the Boer¡¦s twisted limbs, while father digressed toward the Club¡¦s unusual charter, including quotes from Poe¡¦s equally unpublished ¡¥Marginalia¡¦, with accent upon its outstanding morsels: ¡¥imp of the perverse¡¦, a plot of God¡¦, and father¡¦s favorite, indeed, mine, ¡¥unmasking which also tears away the face.¡¦

Some moments later, father quoted from Poe¡¦s ¡¥Eureka¡¦, sections of the stunning vision¡¦s, also unpublished, musings on the Cosmos having become verbatim the essence of the Club¡¦s credo.

He then snatched up the extant copy of the London Times, mocking a story concerning the horrific rampage of man-eating lions at the railroad works in Kenya.

¡§Here, for one more moment indulge the griping of an old fool: this business at Tsavo river, at the railroad right of way, I am an old railroad man, and this is rubbish: this bloody cub reporter lionizes ¡K¡K¡K.¡¨ He paused then in self-amusement for his word play. ¡§One of the beasts who, it seems, had spared the life of an African tribal shaman in exchange for a spell of sorts; indeed, ¡¥shape-shifting¡¦, even the Greeks with their Proteus knew it to be a mere poetic metaphor, but these bloody Africans, fools, all¡K¡K.Poe might as leave have penned this! I say, ¡¥penned¡¦, quite¡K¡Kfitting for such wild things, hah!!¡¨

¡§There it is my good man.¡¨

Suddenly, I was summoned to read the Boer¡¦s signing: ¡§And, what of the so-called beast whose place, home, is invaded?¡¨

Father did not hesitate, as if he had baited the stranger: ¡§ Brother Darwin, old man--------the fittest survive, to tell the crimson tale, despite tooth and claw!¡¨

Father placed his thumb and middle finger together, forming the dismissive nonverbal punctuation mark of the triumphant, and, as those gnurled swirled ridges of those firm though aged digits issued their arrogant sound, his head, father¡¦s prideful head, was cleanly snapped away from the now spewing torsal stump it had sat atop.

The Boer, now dipped¡K¡K..its¡K¡Kfour legs with seeming purpose in the flood of hemaglobin now strangely complementing the crimson-colored carpet of Persia beneath it. A glance of its now horizontal gaze and it was gone.

My pen now at rest, I place my head on pillow, lightly, wondering what passes through the grey imperious head of my own grimalkin, a stray at my door some years ago, now, with her own remotely foreign intelligent stare.