skonen_blades

Hey bookshelf! How’s the bullet wound in your green shirt doing? Is the red ink flowing? Are you in debt? Do you fear the reaper? Does your wooden exoskeleton feel exposed to traitor arrows? Do bullets made from the same stuff at printing presses scare you? You are a hardcopy going softcover. Your spine is thinning. Heavy books covering heavy subjects are becoming fewer and fewer. You might even say that it’s become the twilight of an age when books about vampires are no longer sun-damaged and have lost their teeth to love.

As your subjects become lighter, you need less support. Oak bookshelves give way to plywood. Huge bookshelves are replaced by smaller ones. Periodicals disappear into phone lines and magazines grow in number to satisfy the shortened appetite-span of the average reader. We used to be locusts. Now we are full. Libraries are turning into uninhabited airships, becoming all homeless Bruce Wayne secret identity that no one even cares to know anymore. Cruise ships up to their necks in cat pictures.

They’ll join the billboard atlases and vintage spacesuits in the attention span vortex of the internet. They’d be better off becoming a vagina with a Mohawk. Crater photography and florist x-rays have no place in a society that no longer cares how things work. Even mechanics now dream of playing mechanics in movies. Famous is as famous does has become the reality television motto of every living soul not struggling for water in the third world.

If this is the year of the dragon, then maybe fire will descend from the clouds. Perhaps electricity will stop swallowing all the words and give us back some candlelight. Closets full of worlds will bloom again, cats will dream of whales, and black-eyed barbershop quartets will appear in park gazebos. Panda bears will roam condominium halls and ideas, precious ideas, will swarm like hornets dripping lust from the fertile minds of our young men and women. Each tickled fish will gives an artist year of pleasure.

Rubbing two ideas together can create a storm. Let the light bulb of your ideas give you enough illumination to write when it’s darkest. Because the sun is going down.



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The port was crowded with the usual stinking mélange of homeless adults, orphaned children, prostitutes, dockworkers and sailors.

It reeked of seaweed and pungent flesh.

Every once in a while, a man with a clean suit and walking stick of one sort or another would come down, holding a handkerchief to his nose, and check on his investments. These men braved the stench of everyday life before hurriedly concluding their business and leaving. They never returned, trusting these duties to their manservants after that first visit.

“Got to have a hand in.” they probably thought as their carriage made their way to the docks.

Some captain-of-industry’s son, no doubt, thinking that money or not, he still had a connection with the people. It was highly amusing to us. We would see these men coming a mile away and take bets on how long they would last and whether or not they would notice, before they left the dock, that they had been pickpocketed.

All manner of shipping containers came through this dock, some with no identifying markers. The dock was as lively by day as it was by night. A lot of greasy money changed hands on the floor in the darkness. Cops were paid, politicians were paid, guards were paid, captains were paid, and collectors and/or traffickers of valuable merchandise that wanted no questions asked were satisfied.

It wasn’t unusual to have greedy third parties end up in the drink, their bodies crushed silently between the giant ships, gurgling as the dank salt water rushed in through their slit throats and the gulls screeched hungry cries in circles above them.

Murders aplenty, secrets abounding, and a complete lack of morals. Anything could happen here. There was no law. It was the asshole of the city. There was a loose code of honour between the guild generals but for the most part, the weak died down here and the powers that ran the rest of the city turned a blind eye.

I supposed it was this kind of diseased social system that let Them invade. At first, we thought maybe it was an outbreak of leprosy. A few new people dressed with rags over their face and stinking more than usual.

Then a few more.

After a week, we noticed that half of the seagulls were gone and there were no rats.

Then a few more.

It took a week before we were sure of it and by then it was too late. It hadn’t happened during out lifetimes but there were writings and myths and bedtime stories passed down. Emergency manuals of sorts of what to do in case they rose again.

I remember grabbing one of the people dressed in rags. I tore off her head covering and the eyes of an octopus glared back at me. Air ventricles quivered above a human mouth. The stench was half human and half marine animal. The human mouth tried to speak to me but nothing came out except for bubbling salt water.

I felt the tentacles wrap around my arm. I jerked back and started hacking.

I’d recognized the lips. It was little Sarah Mulligan from Northdock. The fish-change was upon us.

Within a day, all of those that had been affected were dead and thrown into the ocean. The infection never reached the city, thank the gods, but our population had been cut in half.



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