skonen_blades

The problem with suicide is that, to friends and family left behind, it feels like murder by community.
Like we all lent a helping hand to the death by not lending a helping hand at all.
Murderers by omission.
Culpable by our absence.
We killed through inaction.
And we go on not knowing if it’s true.
I heard that there was a struggle with mental illness that had been ongoing for a long time. I remember having a long conversation the last time we talked but that was a few months ago. Nothing seemed amiss but he was his usual awkward self. I wonder if there was something I could have done or could have said that might have altered his trajectory.
I know that there isn’t.
I know that if I could go back in time, I’d stop him from doing what he did. Or at least try.
But his demons were huge and I didn’t even know they existed.
So I know that what happened isn’t my fault.
But in my soul, I shoulder part of the burden. Guilt lurks in the folds of my heart and mind. Even though I know it’s misplaced, I imagine that it lingers like a halo over all who knew him.




tags

It’s the glowing catfish moustache that gives the only light down here, the fish’s lower lip tracing powdered silt on the ocean floor.

The dead eyes of dead faces stare eternally, skull-holes hollowed out by crab-things long ago. Each dog tag wrapped around bird skull furred with mold. Fistfuls of lariats and identification cards stick up out of the ground like exposed wiring and Barbie-doll gravestones. Magnetic strips discolor with algae. Barnacles clog the gun barrels. Long strands of seaweed reach up through ribcages with too many ribs.

Fore-armed is forsworn, said the recruitment packages. Join Earth’s Army to Help Bring Civilization to the Stars. First pick of the spoils. Beings signed up. Jelimorphs, hellicorns, annamen, retreads, and silicates. Even now and then an esper became corporeal, risking truedeath to join the fight and get a slice.

And now, down here under intense pressure in the blackness of an ammonia sea miles deep, bottom feeders nudge their bones. The soldiers are strewn across hectares of dull, smooth reef down here amongst the glowing fish that target carrion. Soldiers with many limbs and some with only a few. Soldiers with hard bones and soldiers with exoskeletons. Soldiers with tentacles and soldiers with articulated mandibles. Poverty-stricken, uneducated, and greedy. Their death is not a tragedy.

An entire shipload arced into orbit here with an exterial winch brushing too close to a moon that wasn’t on the charts. The explosion was instant and inside the shields. The ship opened wide and spilled nearly a million sleeping soldiers through the soupy atmosphere into the cold ammonia sea.

They never woke up.

Here they lie while battles rage and lovers love light years away on other planets. The ebb and flow of conflict and union continues to play its song across the stars.

While these dead soldiers are watched by a glowing constellation of fish.




tag

I have a stable of angels out back, behind the mausoleum. Their eyes are gouged out so they don’t go anywhere and they’re chained next to the bodies of the faithful. It’s like tying a dead chicken around a dog’s neck for a few days to teach him that killing chickens is bad. I’m teaching these angels that handing out hope and miracles like candy is a stupid thing to do. Over the next few days, I’ll fuck them until their wings darken and let them loose as my pets.

I tend the graveyard.

The headstones all lean slightly towards my stone house like it’s the opposite of an epicenter. They’re sniffing the gravity of darkness.

Post-angels come close and perch on these rocks stuck in the ground. The Turned. They’re no smarter than crows these days. They cock their eyeless heads and pull their black wings back from their cold, pale, human bodies. They perch and look at me with smiles that belong on different faces.

I’ve slept with all of them. The dark raping ink of my sperm is what has ruptured them inside and blackened their wings. They’re greasy to the touch. Their always-bleeding windows-to-the-soul sockets are red with the vision of the combat to come. They hemorrhage with a lust for battle and a single-minded all-consuming hatred of The Host.

There are thousands of them. I think they’re all here. This is a first. Tonight might be the night.

I love this. I live for this. I start undoing my belt and making my way towards the stable.

She arrives. She is merely in front of me as if she has always been there. She smiles with sticky, red teeth and raises an eyebrow.

Every now and then the Remnant awakens. A dark shard of what hatred used to mean back in the beginning. The eyes of the black-winged harpy flicker open with true intelligence and glare with fury as she makes plans for an attack run on Heaven. She’ll attempt to bring down the Big House.

When I say I tend the graveyard, I mean that anyone good that gets buried here goes nowhere near Heaven. I collect the glowing flowers of good, decent people with my scythe and bring them back to my place. I have thousands of jars of souls in the basement that I’ve tortured into screaming grenades of pain. They amplify the angel-catcher on the roof and will be used by her flying shadetroops as ordnance in the war to come.

The last attack on Heaven failed. This woman in front of me was knocked back to earth in pain and fire with a smile on her flayed skull. She landed in a swamp in what would become Baton Rouge, Lousisiana.

She finished healing ten minutes ago. She’s been healing in the swamp since she was thrown there in 1360.

I’ve been making troops for her for sixty years like my father and grandfather before that. I bear the tattoos of my allegiance to her. There are thirteen of us scattered around the country preparing for her return by doing exactly what I’m doing.

I can hear the damaged angels in the stable screaming like babies and pulling at their chains.

She looks gracefully towards the windows of the basement and I nod. She looks around at the vast number of black-winged obedient deathbringers around that my family has collected for her over the generations with something like pride. They adjust their weight on their perches, sensing their purpose reaching fruition.

I am no longer needed. She'll take the weaponry and the darkwings back to roost in a growing poisoned stormcloud before gathering the rest from the other twelve spiritmancer rapesmiths arranged around the focusing dish in the center of the States.

I can smell the darchangels around me smile wider.

"Welcome back Lilith" I say with a wink.

"Good job, Jake" she says back and I go deaf.

I kneel before her and it’s an honour when she kills me.



tags