Tagged: JR Santos

Chapter Five

He found what he had expected in such a museum. Uniforms, sabers, guns. Plaques decorated these objects to instruct visitors on the history and meanings of devices and colors, what years they belonged to, and the materials these things were made of.

Despite the black and white pictures and oil paintings, they presented war cleaned, sterile. Numbers of the dead and dying created the effect opposite to what one would expect: a sleepiness, a boredom rather than sadness and outrage at the loss of life. The shameful displays referencing the book burnings, camps and the common valleys appeared to have been temporarily moved, leaving behind only these tame passing mentions. It was left to other museums to fully display these horrors; here more conservative interests had been served.

To some other places were confined the image of the people who sought only to live, to become themselves, to love and grow. At the time, it seemed that the war museum was no place for mourning, or anything that could curb the fever of the next batch of human fodder.  

Bard worked his way through recent centuries into distant eras. An open semi-circular area displayed the Teutonic relics of brass swords and wooden shields, crude spears and mantles of fur, and at the center of it all stood like a monolith, the statue to Wotan.

Runic symbols were carved on the brims of his starry mantle. In one hand he held a spear and in the other a horn from which water spouted into a fountain. Upon each horn of his heavy helmet sat a raven; his long hair and beard were as clouds in a storm. Bard touched his face to feel his five o’clock shadow. He had failed to grow anything more substantial but this much had been enough, until Angelo mocked him for it.

“You look like a teenager.”

Angelo played it off as a joke, but his eyes were ice shards that betrayed the warmth of his body. Bard wasn’t allowed to feel comfortable or relaxed, to lower his guard. There was something of the magician to the act, almost a hypnosis, the power of making Bard believe every sharp cut and piercing thorn was always his own fault, or his imagination.

 Bard rubbed his wrists, haunted by the memory of Angelo’s hands holding them too tight, leaving marks he could feel even after they were gone.

“I know you like it; how about making me feel good for once?

“You’re always so greedy. Why is everything about you?”

There weren’t enough pages in the world to contain the poison poured on Bard’s ear, day and night, driving him mad.

“What good are you,” Bard wondered out loud, “your one good eye turned away from us? All we do is suffer and drag ourselves through the glass shards and the mud.

“I tried to push him away before and always let him back. I’m all alone now, dependent on the kindness of others more than ever before.” Bard held back from spitting at the foot of the statue. “Now you’re coming after me too? Didn’t I bleed enough? Didn’t I shed enough flesh?

Poured my soul into those pages until my veins were dry. What else do you want from me? Spewing your shit on my books isn’t enough? I gave it all.” Tears stung Bard’s eyes. “Now you’re trying to kill me. Why? Because I was weak? Because I wasn’t enough?”

Bard’s voice echoed in the empty hall. Lights flickered and muted thunder sounded outside, lightning flashing its blue hue through the glass. It was like a great hand crushing the poet’s lungs. Bard gagged and released the words from within, shouting:

“Talk to me!”

Thunder exploded with such force it was as if an earthquake had threatened to shake down the museum. Bard’s back arched and he gasped in pain and ecstasy, his mind carried away from his body. On another continent, and across six countries, twelve-year-old boys were armed and made to kill or die. Bard choked on dust and smoke, deafened by screams and blinded by flames. They lived and died, the young soldiers killing and raping like their adult counterparts. Tyrants touched bloody hands to sweat-drenched foreheads and entombed with fake pride:

“You are now a man. My son and pride.”

The tyrant repeated this litany, and behind him came another tyrant, and another in endless succession, rewarding with blood those who survived, and throwing the rotting corpses of the fallen into a ditch, limbs spewing from within the crevice like drowning men desperate not to sink under the waves.

Standing above them, Wotan watched. The one-eyed bastard looked different, his skin darker, his hair longer, his beard beaded. The smoke of his cigar blended with the ashen cloud of war. In his right hand he held a rifle like a long club, or a spear, leaning on it as he grimly monitored the endless slaughter.

“Why are you smiling, you bastard?”

Wotan pointed, and Bard followed the direction of the accusing finger of God to meet a march of unarmed people. They waved white flags, and above them glowed a symbol of two hands holding each other in a sign of brotherhood. One-eye smiled as the flags became red with blood. Without warning, the peace marchers were torn apart under hails of bullets, like gazelles in the mouths of crocodiles, body parts picked mid-air by birds of prey.

And as Bard looked the old man in the eye, the old man simply pointed away again. The world rushed by, red dust, rust, and blood taking to the air as they formed an oceanic tide that smelled of copper. Canon fire made for thunderstorms, war engines like beating hearts illuminated by explosions. From the war marched mechanical hounds, bright burning eyes, scouts for a thousand-thousand armies.

War had no end.

Each time the skies cleared, Bard was allowed sight of the broken world and piled up dead. Trapped amongst them were the dying, their parched throats wheezing cries for help that went ignored. Bard could not look away, his eyes protected only by the unsettled dust; curtains that would part now and again to reveal greater horrors. Atop a hill stood Wotan transformed anew, like a shadow with the burning light of his cigar reflected off his one eye, parting the seas of bloodshed, holding a staff—no, a harpoon— with which he stabbed the ground and shouted:

“From the heart of Hel, I stab at thee!”

Mortally wounded, Gaia screamed and wept blood, that vital substance surging like a geyser, forming a tidal wave that rose so high it threatened to drown all of humanity. Bard wiped the blood from his eyes and saw Wotan changed yet again, a pale corpse-like man, naked but for his mantel decorated with runes and stars, wearing a conic magician’s hat, holding the caduceus in one hand and a small metal globe in the other.

“Bodies are but corn,

One must harvest, scythe in hand.

Within me is the season of reaping.”

“Shut up,” Bard demanded, recognizing the words. He had many more such poems in his anti-war book. A book co-opted by those who exalted war and understood not the mockery, saluting the work, stealing it from its context, denying its author his identity.

“I am a maestro,

And this, my symphony of blood.”

“I was mocking you,” Bard shouted at the apparition. “Everything you represent; I never meant for any of this.”

Splashing in the blood, descending to Bard until they were at eye level, Wotan pushed the sphere through the air. This held itself suspended facing Bard. Not a globe, the world, but a demon core.

The following blast devoured sight and sound in a white flash. By the time Bard had recovered and he stood again, his sight and hearing recovered, he found himself back at the museum. The statue had been crushed to rubble, the glass ceiling had caved in, and the rain and wind threatened to drag him asunder. Wotan himself stood unarmed, wearing only his cloak, two dark figures circling the air.

“Enough, enough!” Bard spewed bile and spit. “I’m going to fucking kill you!”

Wotan keened madly and ran to Bard, in a room so briefly ago filled with weapons from wall to wall, Bard found himself lacking for weapons. He slipped and fell to the ground as the mad god threw himself on top of Bard, hands clawing at Bard’s neck and face.

Bard pushed Wotan from him but could not dislodge the god from atop him. They scrambled across the rain-sodden floor, and cutting himself on something sharp, Bard screamed and hit Wotan across the face with a bloodied hand. Wotan recoiled, more surprised than hurt, and in a flash of a moment, Bard realized what he had cut himself on. He drew it quickly to himself, unthinkingly. A great shard of glass, jagged, the point as sharp as a spear’s.

Bard stabbed upwards just as Wotan redoubled his attack, descending on him. That piece of glass as long as a grown man’s hand slid right under a rib, piercing a lung.

With the glass stuck in him, Wotan gasped—breathless—then clasped Bard’s hand in his. Bard hissed as the glass cut into his palm. Wotan on his knees, Bard half lying down, the god had the shard pulled out just enough that he could make Bard drag the impromptu blade to cut an upturned halfmoon-shaped wound under his breast. Before Bard could understand what was happening, Wotan guided Bard’s hand further. He plucked the glass out from his left breast to draw another such cut under his right. To Bard’s horror, with nothing but a small grunt, Wotan finished the grim task, releasing Bard’s hand to stand over him, his cloak gone. The old wretch swayed on his feet, blood pouring down his sides.

Wotan waited patiently like a statue and Bard, shaking and sweating, could only utter, “Why?” The old god worked his lips and his jaw, chewing for a long half minute. It was as if Wotan would speak for the first time in centuries, crunching pebbles long lodged between his teeth.

“In his body,” he recited, “holy, hides the knowledge. Heavenly alchemy, transmutation.

“Spirit made man. God in flesh.”

Bard was stunned and continued where Wotan had stopped: “Woman, man. Within my body, I’m simply becoming.

“I wrote that,” Bard said in disbelief. Of all the things God could have said to him, never had Bard dreamt of having his own words recited. He continued, “They think I was born another. One nearly wished it so. All-father, inhabit your son.”

Bard fitted the pieces. Terrible parallels were drawn, reflections that could never be dispelled once scried in the dark glass of the world’s suffering.

“Hold not your secrets,” Bard recalled out loud, “I bleed at the foot of the tree.”  Bard turned the bloody shard on himself. “Half-blind.”

The pain was horrible beyond what he had imagined. The glass felt so cold it burned against the mush of Bard’s left eye, pale liquid and blood flowing out of his socket. Bard screamed as he dug with the glass and pulled out the mangled piece of himself. Before it hit the ground, a raven plucked the eye in its beak, mid-flight, and separated the thing from Bard completely.

Kindly, careful, Wotan took the glass from Bard’s hands, and caressed his wounded face. The bleed eased and the pain was numbed a bit. Man and God looked upon each other. Only time separated them as one became the other, one twilight closing its final chapter so the next could begin.

“I should have called her while I had the chance,” Bard said, tired and sad.

Wotan nodded, and held the back of Bard’s neck, and drew him nearer until their foreheads touched. The raven returned with a friend, and the pair flew in circles around the scene.

Once upon a time, Bard could have written a scene like this. He preferred poetry to prose, but his one dive into a novel had not been a complete failure. He had called it Your Body in Mine, and it had been full of dreams that blended with reality. 

He wondered if he was dreaming then.

Chapter Four

The wind carried the smell of rain, and far away he could hear a familiar rumbling. Bard picked a direction at random, walking until he recognized the part of town he had been left at. It was the old downtown; familiar homes, many of which falling to ruin, announced it long before Bard found a market square he hadn’t visited in years. There was a water fountain at the center, the source spraying from the bodies of pagan deities. Semi-naked figures held each other in a deep embrace, legs and arms wrapped in angles hard to follow.

Bard admired the one figure he recognized, Hermes, standing atop it, holding aloft his iconic staff. The symbol of alchemy and medicine, of knowledge brought from the gods. Fat water droplets began to fall the mark of rain, and in a flash of lightning, Bard blinked, and found the head of Hermes had moved to stare him down.

“No,” he laughed, uncaring of a couple passersby who rushed out of the coming rain. “It’s just my imagination.” Hermes lowered his arm and with his Caduceus pointed right at Bard; stone lips moved, unable to expel air or sound, to silently form words Bard could not hear.

“You’re not real. This isn’t real.” Bard walked backwards, nearly falling on his back. “Leave me alone!”

Another rumble, as the skies ran crisscross with lightning, and from the fountain rose all its water as a waterspout, circling higher and higher until it reached the very heavens, then added to the rain which hit with the might of fists. Bard tried to shield himself with his jacket but the wind stole what little protection he had until the winds nearly swept him away.

For a moment, Bard was a black-winged bird midflight.

Around him the clouds and rain billowed like a cloak, and above him was the great black shape of a hammer. From the massive open mouth blew a gale, and throwing Bard backways, flailing to the ground, it seemed the storm-head announced to the world the coming of the old gods.

But rather than a name, came the scream of a horse. A whining and neighing that drove 

Bard to run for his life, as the skies exploded with lightning and the buildings shook with the strength of the thunder. Projected upon and ahead of Bard was a misshapen shadow, far-reaching, with the hammering of an anvil the size of the world came sparks the size of harpoons, raining on the world of men.

Each scorching blast seemed to draw nearer, despite the next bolt always being a near miss. One piercing bolt of light hit close enough to scorch Bard’s hair, sparks flying in every direction as Bard turned a corner, nearly sliding to the ground, his shoulder thumping against the glass display of a shoe store.

Large as a titan, fully formed, came horrid Donar, a younger man astride his father’s horse, naked, slowly turning the corner with hammer in hand. His eyes and mouth expelled black clouds emitting thunder, and repeatedly he hit the ground and surrounding buildings with his hammer. More lightning came as he rode on a black cloud-horse with too many legs. On his shoulders hung a storm mantle weaved of the sky-symbols that morphed from one shape to another, crafted by the hand of Wotan and unreadable in the eyes of mortals, casting the enchantments with which Donar chased Bard.

Frigid winds blew, slowing Bard down. Nearly blind, he peeked between shadows and lights, and saw long lost forests. Bard was, for a moment, trapped between present and past. One moment he ran down alleyways, the next he was dodging massive trees, running away from Roman soldiers.

Bard would have gladly crossed to those other woods and dealt with a human menace rather than the godly one, if he had the chance, but the mirages were gone the moment he reached them, leaving behind only the frigid cold. Bard continued being pelted by rain and hail, freezing him to his bones as he reached the foothold of some edifice, too darkened by the storm for him to see clearly. Bard fell, managing to sit with his back to the gates of the building, staring into the eye of the god thing who gazed down at him as if he was both cathedral and lighthouse.

“Leave me alone! Leave me alone!” Bard screamed, driven mad with fright. “I don’t know you; I have nothing!” Donar raised his hammer to the skies, while the horse lunged forward towards Bard, who screamed and pushed himself against the gates.

He tried to escape in blind panic, wishing with his whole body he could squeeze through the metal bars of the gate that were digging into his back, until the gate swung inward, giving in to his weight. Bard fell past the threshold and into the building; without looking back, he turned and raced inside, past the double doors.

He was crouching with his hands on his knees once he made it to some sort of reception area. Warm artificially conditioned air, and artificial light that hurt his eyes, welcomed him from the chaos outside as the doors closed behind him. One last bolt cracked like a whip, shattering stone and filling the air with static. This lashing out and the roar of the cacophony were muffled by the thick walls.

“Hi,” greeted a jovial voice, blind or pretending to be blind to Bard’s distress. “Welcome to the War Museum. Would you like an audio guide?”

Drenched, swallowing dry, Bard stared the young woman in the eyes. He had been tempted to say something quite rude but held back his piece, stunned by her resemblance to his sister. The receptionist was much younger, but the resemblance to that memory Bard still held was baffling.

“No.” He swallowed again, regaining his breath, forcing the parts of his brain that helped him act and sound normal even when stressed out of his mind. “To be honest I hadn’t even noticed where I was going. The storm got so awful I just wanted out of it.”

The young receptionist seemed genuinely worried. “I hadn’t realized it got that bad; helps explain why things are slower than usual around here.” She stood behind a counter and pulled something for him. “Here, it’s not much but you can take this towel.” She winked. “No need to pay. No one’s been buying the things. Not sure why they thought people would buy these from the souvenir shop. No one’s picking the umbrellas either.”

Bard accepted the towel and thanked her. It was the second time in a short period he had received the kindness of strangers, and as counter to his nature it was to accept kindness from others, it would have done him no good to refuse.

“Since you’re here, spend some time looking around. You’ll dry up faster and be a little less bored while you wait for the storm to pass.” Bard was about to mention he had no money on him, when the receptionist anticipated the argument. “You don’t have to pay to enter. We’ll happily sell you stuff or accept a donation to help run the place. Just come back some other day to make up for today, if you feel like it.” She smiled. “We joke about it, given the museum’s theme. ‘War is for everyone’, we say.”

Bard laughed awkwardly at the joke, thanked the young woman again for her kindness, and headed further in while drying himself up.

Chapter Three

Sleep was blessed with the absence of thought and memory, thus free of pain. There was not even the sensation of falling through the air or breaking the water’s surface, nor the sinking into the dark lake.

Bard’s eyes opened only when he had hit the bottom, and he trudged through the muddy flats, lifting dust and untangling himself from the algae, stumbling more than swimming at random. Death had been short-lived. Bard’s lungs did not burn despite the seeming lack of air, yet he was compelled to escape the darkness.

Rather than finding his way to the surface, the upper world had come to meet him. He was met by the friendly woods and the shores of the lake he had been taken to with his sister in long gone summer days. There was no sound and he was met by his parents in their summer clothes—from the lake’s shore came running two young girls.

In the soundless mirage they splashed joyfully, cool spray rising to the darkened pits Bard had fallen to. Water within water, a memory within a lake, shown through a dream. Father mouthed something Bard could not hear but could guess; he crossed his arms and touched his own chest to feel the scars, two perfect half-moons.

He turned his back on the memory and walked on, dazed and more alone than before. Bard wasn’t lost for long—a storm came which stirred the waters and pelted him with rain and hail until he woke up.

“Genda?”

The figure looked more like death than it did the mysterious person from the bar, at least to a shaken, drowsy and beaten-up Bard. It was as if this figure was wrapped in a dark shroud, their pale face peeking from underneath the veil of shadow like a pale mask. A hairless face, which as Bard’s eyes adjusted, did resemble Genda’s.

“I’m Erinn. My sibling left you in my care.”

“Where?”

Erinn gestured to their surroundings. “Our perch. Genda couldn’t stay so I watched over you. It’s been a day since you were brought in.”

Bard fought back the nausea at the realization a whole day had been lost after he had been assaulted. Still wondering how close to death he had come he, felt his face and arms, his ribs, but despite feeling sore all over, he found no bruises, nor broken bones. He tried to sit and seemed unable to; Erinn reached out and helped him to sit, then to get out of the sofa.

This had been covered with sheets and pillows, making for an improvised nest. “Let’s get you to the backyard. Sunlight and fresh air will do you good.”

Bard at first felt blinded by the sun. As his eyes adjusted and he sat down again, he noticed they were surrounded by apartment buildings. It seemed Genda and Erinn must share a ground floor, or basement, open to the outside. Their backyard was shielded by the towering buildings, walled off by a waist-high concrete wall, and the stone-paved ground had a single tree standing at its center. Bard couldn’t tell what kind it was, only that it reached high into the sky with its many branches.

The yard was filled with bird song. Genda returned with a bowl of gruel that smelled of honey and nuts. “Here. It’s good for you.” The bowl was made of wood, as was the spoon. Bard was filled with impossible memories of long-gone homes and families that had once populated the countryside, and ate with gusto. His strength was soon restored, though the memories did not fully leave him.

If anything, the longer he stayed by that tree the more nostalgic he felt. He tried to pluck at the memories that did belong to him but found them hard to grasp.

“I have a sister,” Bard announced to no one in particular. “I dreamt of us when we were young. I haven’t spoken to her in a while.”

“Why’s that?” Despite asking the question, Bard felt there was a knowing look in Erinn’s eyes.

“Angelo. He did this to me. Things were different back then … well, I …” Bard closed his eyes and breathed slowly, trying to regain his calm. “He’s no good, to me or anyone else. My sister warned me; she was there for me through thick and thin.” Bard felt the familiar twin scars. “I don’t know if she understood me, but she loved me. I think I can see it now. Clearly, for the first time; Angelo tore us apart so I would be alone.”

“The cost of wisdom.” Erinn nodded. “Pain and many mistakes. We learn, eventually, don’t we?”

Bard shrugged. “Maybe. I don’t know. I hate him and I don’t want to see him again. I want to talk to my sister, make amends.”

“You should do it then. Without hesitation, without compromise. Call her and she will come.”

“No.” Bard shook his head and regretted it, feeling dizzy again. “No. It’s not that easy. I don’t know if she’ll ever talk to me again.”

Erinn shook their head. “You never know when you’ll have the chance. I never forget a thing; some say I do nothing but dwell on the past. Someone must remember how things were, and I tell you why: to prevent others from repeating old mistakes.”

“You don’t understand. I appreciate the concern but you don’t know the full story.”

“You have told me enough. Mistakes were made but things have changed, or must change, or else end in tragedy. Don’t wait too long.” Erinn had brought tea which they both drank and felt soothed by. The bule was of cast black-iron, decorated with reliefs depicting birds in flight. “I must leave you now. You must make your own choices in order to move on, so remember my advice. You are not your past; your past is but the roots of the tree you are still growing, its branches reaching towards the heavens. Good luck.”

Bard was left alone then without further explanations or instructions, and unable to thank his host. He finished his tea and took the things to the kitchen sink. New clothes had been left for him, including a long coat which was most absolutely not his style. It could either be something fitting an old woman, or some cartoonish pimp, made of black fur, or perhaps feathers—Bard wasn’t sure which.

As garish as it looked, it was better than catching a cold. The weather had turned and he felt a chill sink into his bones that he desperately wanted to keep out. Wearing what he had been lent, or gifted, the keys to his own apartment and his wallet, much lighter now, left for him to pick up from a coffee table by the sofa, Bard found his way out of the apartment.

Chapter Two

The streets were blissfully empty. Bard’s peace was broken by a wheezing, loud as a whistle; with eyes wide in terror, he greeted a shape coalescing in the depths of the fog. The old man was coming for him, supporting himself on a walking stick, his breathing and clicking of his wood against the cobbled street growing closer. The noise grew louder, from a clicking to a deranged clopping—a horse with too many legs. There was something in that shape that reminded Bard of an open wound. A deadly slit cut across the canvas of reality.

He ran. The world turned gray tinted with hues of a dark-blue, the old man keeping pace with Bard’s running. “Leave me alone!” he screamed back at his pursuer but received no answer.

Bard’s hurried footsteps seemed muted by the density of the humid air as he raced past the rows of buildings, great fingers of stone and glass barring his escape, directing him down a pre-destined path. Possessed with irrational fear, Bard worried he would find his pursuer in front of him, somehow. Reality plummeted into a nightmare, Bard’s vision becoming blurred. Rain, mist, and the coming dark made the strange blue into a hue that colored the world.

Drenched in sweat, cold, Bard felt as if he was swimming in a soup bowl. He didn’t dare look as he felt the approaching form breathing down his neck, when he was blinded by the lights of an oncoming car.

It clipped him on the hip and sent him spinning to the sidewalk. Bard screamed, curling on the ground, dragging himself away from the road. He could feel his hip swelling and exhaled with relief when he realized that, despite the pain, nothing felt broken. The car that hit him simply drove off into the blue limbo, until it was nothing but a distant sound.

By the time Bard managed to drag himself back to his feet, holding to the side of one of the buildings he could barely see, slipping on the slick, rain-drenched ground, a neon light went on. It was glorious as the sun parted the rivers of night to announce a new dawn. Other lights turned on, and the noise of people filled the air. Bard limped towards that first light, and squinting, the neon sun spelled the words of salvation:

“Party Here.”

Bard entered the bar without being able to tell what it was named. It didn’t matter in the end; it was open, warm, and Bard was quickly seated in a corner on a pillowed seat. The waiter didn’t look impressed by the miserably drenched and wounded customer.

“Just a beer please. Can I get some ice too? Had a nasty fall back there.”

The waiter gave Bard a weird look but nodded in agreement and moved on.

“Name’s Geda.” A different person returned with a plastic ice pack wrapped in a towel, and a large mug full of beer.

“Thanks.” Bard accepted the ice gratefully and didn’t comment on the fact he had expected a much smaller drink. “I’m Bard.”

“Hi, Bard. Big fall huh?” Geda sat next to Bard. They were androgynous, and pretty, with long black hair and black clothes that revealed a toned midriff. “Want to talk about it?”

“Oh.” The realization only then hit Bard that this person was not a waiter.  “I’m sorry. I just had a rough break up, I’m not really looking for … you know. Thank you for the ice though.”

Geda smiled. “I’ll be honest. I’m using you.” Bard remained silent, too stunned to react. “There’s this guy stalking me, and you seem pretty harmless. Just want to have a chat to get my mind off him and tire him out. Don’t look.” Genda held Bard’s hand as he had been about to turn and look. “Better to ignore him.”

“What does he look like?”

“Creepy. He smells like storms.” Bard wasn’t given time to think what that meant. “I have a sibling. We used to be inseparable, you know? We’re twins.”

“What happened?”

“There’s a guy, kind of our boss? It’s complicated but he is calling it quits, so we’re fighting about what to do with the business. Erinn doesn’t like taking risks, always holding on to the past. Can you guess what my position is?”

Bard laughed. “The opposite. My sister and I were like that once.”

Genda squeezed Bard’s hand; he was embarrassed to admit that between the human warmth, the cooling of the ice and the tang of the foamy beer, he was feeling relaxed. Enjoying himself always seemed to come with some guilt. “What happened? You guys don’t talk anymore?”

“No.” Bard could feel his face growing red, and gently pried his hand loose, using his bruise as an excuse, nursing it with ice in one hand, and his beer in the other. “We changed. Or at least that’s what she told me. Before I changed, before I felt I was finally becoming myself. We never really had an argument—one day we just stopped talking. Last thing she said to me was she couldn’t recognize me, almost.

“I wasn’t myself.”

“Erinn always says we are who we remember being; I disagree with that too. I know the past is important but I try to live in the now. Change is normal—I’m nothing like I used to be either.”

Bard held back from a bad habit he had developed, of instinctually touching his chest, feeling his scars. It brought a strange assurance to him, as if Bard needed the assurance that he was still himself. “I’m still me,” Bard said more to himself than to Genda.

“I’m sure you believe it. Time changes us; thoughts and memories are fluid. Between who we were when we started and where we are right now? Entire countries disappeared. People were left to wander in search of a home, an entire new identity for themselves.

“We remember a version of things, which keeps us sane and lets us go on believing we are who we always were; but in the course of our journey down the streams of time, walls have crumbled to dust and temples were raised to strange new gods. We’re birds in a storm, all we can do is ride the winds.”

“I have to refuse that. Feeling like we don’t have control of our lives. I didn’t choose to be me but I chose the direction I’ve traveled since then. That wasn’t destiny or faith—that was all me.

“I have changed but I’m still me.”

“And what are you?”

Bard held back his gut reaction—he nearly said “alone”. Instead he replied, “I’m a writer.”

Genda seemed interested. “What do you write?”

“Poems. Some short stories. It’s hard to tell them apart sometimes but I like to mix them up anyway.” Genda drew themselves closer to Bard who felt as if the storm had started to brew inside his skull as much as it did outside the bar, his thoughts racing.

“Got one for me?”

Bard wet his lips with two more swallows of beer, then mastered his courage and did his best not to trip on his tongue.

“Black wings,

Sore tidings.

Better the disquiet than this,

The storm brewing in my lungs.”

Genda cheered. “You just had that one ready to shoot?”

“I improvised it.”

“I like it. Feels like something out of time.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, no one really says ‘tiding’s anymore, or brews storms. Feels like an 18th century sailor just tried to hit on me.” Genda laughed as Bard’s face grew red; a laugh without malice. “I liked it. It stands out more.”

“Thank you… I meant what I said before, by the way. I’m really not looking to hook up just now.”

“That’s fine.” Genda played with Bard’s hair, which he had cut shorter in recent days.  “Let me hear another.

“I don’t know if I can do another,” Bard lied. “Is he still here?”

“He’s outside. I saw his reflection in the bar mirror.” Bard peeked from where he was seated but couldn’t spot anyone who stood out from the growing crowd, nor did he see the old man. Outside the storm was all he could see.

He felt split between the comfort of a warm body and the toll that would result from enabling a stranger to take such liberties. Genda could have lied about their stalker, weaving the fiction in order to lower Bard’s guard; there was a flash of panic as he wondered if his beer had been spiked. It had tasted normal and half the contents of the mug were gone by then. Still he withheld from drinking the rest.

Realizing he had been quiet for an awkwardly long time, Bard coughed and excused himself. Rushing to the bathroom in his awkward escape, bumping against strangers, he made it to the toilet stall. A horrible dizziness and lightheadedness invaded him but a familiar sort; he breathed more easily realizing with liberating irony that he had not been drugged and was simply experiencing another panic attack.

Locked inside a stall, leaning against the wall, hands on the toilet tank’s top—Bard put his forehead to the tiled wall to feel the coolness spread through what felt like his inflamed brain. The panic was a tide and he let the tide carry him; he imagined a river cutting through a densely populated woodland. Branches at both sides decorated a starry night sky as he carried on down the river.

Bard was shaken out of it by someone hammering at the stall’s door. “Fuck! Hold on a second.”

He flushed, then opened the door. Angelo stood drenched, a nightmare out of the rain, and he hit Bard with the back of his hand. “Leaving my things out in the street, you cunt!?” Bard raised his arms to shield his face. Angelo punched and kicked down at Bard, who retreated further into himself and curled into a fetal position, feebly attempting to push back or kick out but with no luck. Angelo stopped when he was too breathless to continue, leaning against the stall, red and numb from the effort. He spat on Bard, some of the drool running down his chin.

“I put up with your shit and this is what I get? I’m the only one who’s ever given two shits about you.”

Angelo reached out and Bard cringed; but this time Angelo settled for finding Bard’s wallet and taking all the cash. “When I get back home you better open the fucking door.” As Angelo counted the bills, he turned to Bard once more, before taking his leave:

“If I see you talking to that freak again, I’ll kill you.”

 Bard wept and nursed his wounds once alone in the bathroom. It was a painful crawl to the sink, to then grab on to the edge of it and stand up and assess the damage. Bard’s reflection in the mirror showed a young man sore and swelling but alive. There was a new scar that was unlikely to disappear any time soon; it was a small but very visible and painful cut on his upper lip. Bard splashed cold water on his face, and did his best to stanch the bleeding.

“I had it worse. I had way worse,” Bard said to his reflection. “He can’t get in the house. He can’t get me.” Bard was shaking at this, his body denying the sentiment. “He can’t. It’s going to be different this time.”

All fell to black as Bard felt himself carried away in the fluttering of black wings.

Chapter One

“Their chief is Crom. He dwells on a great mountain. What use to call on him? Little he cares if men live or die. Better to be silent than to call his attention to you; he will send you dooms, not fortune! He is grim and loveless, but at birth he breathes power to strive and slay into a man’s soul. What else shall men ask of the gods?”

― From Robert E. Howard’s Conan of Cimmeria.

*

He prayed for it to stop, wishing to be unseen: to be forgotten. Even should all of humanity forget him, he would accept it—Bard just couldn’t take it anymore.

“No matter where I go or what I do, he’s there, staring at me.” Bard didn’t care if the psychologist, Joanita DeMillo, believed him or not; he needed to talk and she was paid to listen. “It started on the night I broke up with Angelo. It was an ugly scene, decades in the making.”

“I’m sorry to hear it,” she tried, meekly; the feeling was genuine, but the relationship had been bound to crash and burn. It had been obvious to her, and certainly to him.

Bard shook his head. “He was cheating on me and didn’t have the balls to break up. I’m not sure he ever even liked me. I had money from some royalties and that’s all he really cared for. Residuals and bragging rights, having me as his trophy boy—the artist.

“I hate him.” Even as he said the words, Bard knew he only half meant them. He hated himself more than he could hate Angelo, who had always presented himself as he was: a tremendous piece of shit.

“He was somewhat aggressive, wasn’t he?” DeMillo asked politely. Angelo had a history of beating Bard, shouting and manipulating him.

“I’m the only one who cares about you. They’re not your friends. Why did you let him talk like that to you? Why are you such a coward?

“Why are you so useless?”

Angelo was a hedonist, seeking his own pleasure and stopping at nothing to obtain it. Bard had thought to see a core of decency in his boyfriend, something approaching kindness. At last the scales had fallen from his eyes. Not only to have found Angelo with his cock in another man’s mouth, but the state of that man. Bruised, anemic, and needle marks like a deadly constellation against the ashy skin.

A mummified teenager. His eyes were haunting and beyond suffering, dead and numb. Bard recognized himself in those eyes and felt his throat burning with acid. Angelo reacted as he had expected.

“What? Can’t I have a fucking moment for myself? Go home and try not to piss the bed this time.”

Bard forced himself back to the present, half-awake in the shadows in the confines of the little doctor’s office. A potted plant stood in a corner looking dejected, a sun-bleached calendar marking the year of 1981 hung from the wall, and every wall was covered by green patterned wallpaper.

The doctor waited patiently for Bard to continue, letting him form the words, but all he could see were the patterns, how they seemed to move. Bard mouthed syllables which he could not voice or even comprehend himself, reading a language so ancient it was alien to him.

Still the writing on the wall, or walls, didn’t need to be read in order to be known for what it was: a warning. He would fall to either madness or death and nothing would stop it. From the parade of runes, a face peered with a single baleful eye.

“I was outside. The night air cooled down the fire in my head and I started to shake. I was so angry, so lost. I think that maybe I deserved it. That I was weak, so he cheated on me. That weak people don’t deserve love, or respect. He never loved me…”

“Everyone deserves love,” DeMillo tried, her concern genuine. Despite having heard such things uttered a thousand times before, she hadn’t been numbed to them.

“No. Some people weren’t made for it. Maybe weakness has nothing to do with it and was just what I felt at the time, but I know it is not for everyone.”

“Do you mean Angelo or yourself?”

“I don’t know,” Bard admitted, hiding his face to shield himself from the glare of the one-eyed man. “I saw him then, that night, out in the street. He was staring at me from across the road, his face hard to see. I thought it was a homeless man at first.

“His hair and beard were so long and dirty, matted with shit. Half his face was covered with hair, and he was staring at me with this horrible yellow eye. He was all hunched, covered by some kind of quilt.”

“Did he say anything?”

“He … he made a sound.” Like the wind, like a trumpet announcing judgment day, a fog horn from the end of time cutting through the mist of ages. “He pulled back his hair,” and the stranger peeled back also the lids over both his eyes, “his left eye was missing,” a cavernous hole, a black chasm on a purple pit, his right eye yellowed and reddened, amber colored.

“You said you thought he was a homeless man. He wasn’t?”

Bard felt if left to his nervous ticks he might chew the inside of his cheek until he bled. He pried the answers from himself with tremendous effort. “It wasn’t a man at all.”

Outside Doctor DeMillo’s office the wind whistled like an oncoming train. She looked through the half shielded window panes to witness the sudden swaying of trees in the warmly lit afternoon. “What do you mean, Bard?”

“It was God.” Bard was again standing in the night, street lights dimming as the single-syllable lament grew deeper and louder. Winds grew violent, dust and filth were swept and some of that grime latched to Bard’s skin and clothes. He flinched and shouted in more surprise than pain; some of the dust had gotten into his eye. “I closed my eyes for a moment, and when I looked back, he was gone.”

DeMillo wrote something in her notebook and refrained to comment. Bard could practically see the word “delusional” materialize over her head, her silence accusing him of tipping over the edge. DeMillo would likely be sending Bard to speak with a psychiatrist, to have him followed by someone who could medicate him. “What happened next?”

“I walked home.” Bard arrived at his apartment feeling miserable. Unable to tell fact from fiction, he locked his door and put on the latch; exhausted as he was, he dragged the heavy couch to block the door further. He would have done more to barricade himself but all he could manage was lay on the sofa and fall asleep. “I slept and there were no dreams I can remember. Next morning I put all of Angelo’s things outside the building. Haven’t seen him since, and the homeless just took off with his stuff. I’ve had the locks changed.”

“That will have consequences. I’m afraid for you, Bard.” He knew she would say it next, the thing she had said before and which haunted him since she first uttered the words so many sessions ago. “I see you very alone, Bard.”

“It’s fine to be alone.”

“By choice. Sometimes. We’re all different, but isolation comes at a risk. You need to be able to trust others, to reach out, and what I see is a ship drifting further away from the shore. Have you been talking to anyone? Family? Friends?”

“I’m fine Doc. I’m not a talker, not outside our sessions.”

“I think you would talk more if Angelo had been more receptive to listening. You closed yourself to the world, and you kept feeding a bad habit.” There was a sad shadow of a smile on her lips. “Since he’s gone, maybe it’s time you changed course.

“Is there anyone you could try and reach out to?”

“Yes,” Bard lied, “some friends.”

It would have been unprofessional of DeMillo to question the veracity of the statement; she pretended to take notes while figuring out how to broach the topic.

“I would like to give you a number for a shelter. You don’t have to call,” she cut off Bard before he could protest, “but I want you to consider it. If you need it. I know it can be very hard to ask for help but I want you to try; if the time comes and you feel you have no one else to turn to. There are things we don’t want to share with family or friends either but we have to share with someone, anyone.

“There are burdens too great for a person to carry alone.”

She reached out with the piece of paper and the scribbled number. From outside, the coming storm, the swaying of tree branches, the rustling of leaves and the apparent gathering of storm clouds combined to sound like a nautical scene.

Bard was drowning, and here was a fellow sailor attempting a tenuous rescue by reaching out with a boat paddle. Why was it so hard to accept it?

“Have you been through something like this?”

DeMillo did not budge. “Yes,” was all she said and Bard took the paper.

“Thank you,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault, Bard. Not my case, nor yours. It’s not on you.”

He could have cried then, but likely the appointment was already running overtime. “But before you leave … You said this strange man was God. What did you mean by it?”

“Honestly,” Bard replied after thinking about it, “I’m not sure. He made me think of God, I guess.”

The doctor scribbled her final notes for the section and released her patient to flee from her watchful eye. Bard greeted the outside gladly, filling his lungs with the smell of rain and wet grass. A light drizzle filled the air with mist-like textures, and the sky grew darker with clouds, a sudden twilight borne mid-afternoon. Bard had always loved the rain. Anxiety and a bad temper had always made it feel like he had a fire inside his skull that only such weather seemed to cool off. Bard imagined the smoke wafting from under his eyelids, the paper with the number for the shelter still in his hand.

He had stayed in a shelter, some two years before. He saw others he felt were doing worse than him, and felt guilty he had taken space that had to be denied to someone else. Reason told him he was being a fool; that he had to survive, had to stay alive somehow, had been as much a victim as the others. Suffering was not a competition.

He had seen a woman holding her boy. If she was like him, as she was like to be, he could not begin to imagine how much harder she had it. Trying to explain things that shouldn’t require explanation, that simply were, to a world that doubted everything that touched you, as if your existence was a contradiction and the very nature of the reality you inhabited couldn’t be trusted.

Bard would never forget that little boy and his toy hammer. The woman kissed her son atop his head, caressed his auburn hair. “We’ll be fine,” she whispered to him, “we’ll be fine.”

Bard let go of the paper, watched it float to the sodden sidewalk and dissolve away like sugar. The idea of the shelter sickened him; trapped in that warmth but unable to open up; seeing himself reflected in the eyes of others. He didn’t need the shelter, not this time, he argued within himself. He had changed the locks; everything would be fine.