skonen_blades

And it’s the teeth that fold back into a karate punch of hot asses in black jeans making their way to war. Falling stars in silk dresses and broken fingers wear khaki post-apocalyptic riding pants to finish lines made of unforgiving fire.

Each satellite that cracks the earth open thinks it’s a dancer improvising a future like an oracle predicting circuitboard murder diagrams through the clenched chest of the world. Waking child eyes inside the navigation computer pull arrows back and let them go while glowing tattoos on Asian ghosts stare down from long-dead airplane crashes.

The zombies and the greek gods are taking it all back. They come up from under the snow and dive in front of subway trains only to get their blood on the cameras. This is Tron in a cornfield playing demolition abortion math near red-haired spring break chainsaw children, one sword swing away from knowing if fairies bruise.

Unseen dream hands and white-eyed possessed girls stand under skies with too many moons, too many suns. Huge creatures from massive, fragile buildings unravel helixes of DNA in an effort to understand armies and the concept of victory. Flaming chunks of rock pirate their way through a cloned army of Dark Knight Jokers wielding JK-47s. It’s all about the martial arts and force of will. Just ask Neo.

Cities bend, curling up and dying like robot stunt doubles punching comic futures through flimsy walls and candy glass. Little-kid dimension beasts snarl and leap when cornered but after that they’re gymnasts sliding under birdcages, making bullets bend trajectories past assassins dressed like medusa-prostitute-guitar-god forest witches.

The big finale drips off of the brim of a Kruger hat as the hot women drive shotgun heels and katanas through drooling Nazi faces. Splashing water up onto the computers, making lust and moisture and synchronized dancing destroy clocks, bunkers, and then it’s all x-ray broken bones and gyrating hips in red leather.

Your robot double can’t break out of the train. Your body will not be saved from the aliens. But your 18th century self will be just fine. Rely on that.




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The beginning of fall gave us reasons to do what we did. A darkening of our souls. A return to shorter days. More night. We all had our birthdays in October.

Halloween is celebrated much more in North American that in Europe. There’s a day of the dead in South America but it’s not the same thing. Halloween was the only true holiday left in America that hadn’t been ravaged by the rampant consumerism that plagued the rest of the society. Easter had been turned to chocolate. Christmas had been turned to greed. Halloween had candy and you could buy costumes if you wanted to but the spirit of it, the center of it, that never changed. It had no connection to Christ, for one thing.

Imagine something for me, if you will. Imagine you were seriously deformed. Imagine your presence in the daylight in a downtown restaurant would cause silence at best and panic at the worst. Imagine you were offered a chance to walk around unencumbered by screams and stares.

For one night.

This is what we offered them.

They called us Talk Show at school. Our names were Sally, Jessie, and Raphael. We always hung out together because we were the only people in our small town who liked the Smiths, who even knew who the Bronski Beat were, and didn’t wear black just for funerals. Sweaters in the summer kind of people. Not big fans of the sun. The regular beatings and teasing forged the bonds between us into iron.

Sally was the scarecrow. Jessie was the fat one. Raphael was gay. In a town of 8000 people, this meant that when we were kids, God said “You’re it” and tagged us. We had no hope of help unless someone transferred in that was the same as us. At least they’d be ‘new’ and the heat would be off of us for a while. No one ever did, though. This town was the kind of place you moved away from.

It wasn’t too hard to dig up the books.

Or the names of weaker demons with a vanity that we could manipulate.

One night on earth. The one night where a demon could be mistaken for a human. Where a demon could be mistaken for one of God’s favourites. This is what we offered them. We practiced the incantations and the protective spells. We sewed the symbols of armour into our clothes. We wore the amulets that we made according to the instructions.

We called up a demon for each of us.

They never touched us.


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