skonen_blades

Sixteen points off of westward for an undergraduate is the same as a hedgehog wanting to upscale his wardrobe. A flamingo can’t be held responsible for bad hands at poker. If you judge a peacock by its ability to explain particle fusion, you will disappoint the road map and learn to speak in crutches. Every soldier dreams of nutcrackers.

Far away and hoped for are not the same fish buckets. Chest plates are only as good as the trucks they’re driving. A soft steamer is worth six reverse cowgirls. The scorpion’s claw can’t handle a pen. Your name in lights is the left corner of your enemy in gravy. No skirts are allowed on topless airplanes.

If your robe is black and long then you may be mistaken for a priest wagon. Winter tires are only affordable if you have the parakeet stomach to swing them. You might not enjoy the ride but a rescue mission can understand the ugliest reasons. Gravity, history, and ignominy. They’ll read the papers and write the history for you.

The shallow end has the best oysters. Every beach is the prow of a ship. Without violins, we have no reason for war. Your spokes help you roll but they are easily broken. You are a cross between a glove and a cardboard box. Keys are needed for explosions. I have pencil shavings that understand heads peeking around corners better than your average dog show.

If you want recipes, seduce a shoe store. Your shopping list can be as long as you want. Just don’t airplane it into a blue sky you can’t come back from. The bedsprings of your lips leave me wanting to test the tensile strength of honesty. You bend me like sound waves through a speaker. I’m a frat party balancing on a stool in a closet and you’re the avalanche pinned behind the starting gun. If this is a staring contest, I’m all out of eyes.




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He cracked as he moved, sounding like a fireplace. Popping softly, brittle matches stuffed into every joint. Each step brought him closer to me. I was handcuffed to the radiator. I didn’t know where I was or how such a frail old man had the strength to capture me like this. The room was old and looked abandoned. Piles of newspapers gathered in the corners, rustling with mice. One of my eyes was swollen shut and the other one was blurry. I looked up at the old man as he came closer. He held a tray of tea which he placed just out of my reach and sat down with painful, slow effort.

“Hello Jeremy” he sighed. “Do I look familiar?”

I’d been testing the strength of the handcuffs. Either my enhanced strength wasn’t working or the radiator’s mooring was reinforced. I looked at him with my good eye and snarled, trying to give him the sense of a dangerous animal.

He laughed. “Oh, very good, Jeremy. Very good.”

I was worried that he kept calling me Jeremy. That wasn’t my name. Mentally I reached for my name and found nothing.

A shot of panic rustled through me when I realized that most of my memory was a void.

“Yes, yes, by now you’re realizing that you’re not altogether altogether, are you? You’re here but you’re not really here, eh?” He laughed softly. “Yes, well, that sort of combat will do it to you. Tea?”

I lashed out with my foot at the old man’s tea set but came up short. Something gave way in my shoulder and I shrieked with pain like an animal. I immediately felt embarrassed at crying out.

“Jeremy, Jeremy, listen. Look. You almost spilled the tea there. It’s going to take weeks for your memory to come back. All you need to know right now is that I’m your friend. We’ve trained you and sent you out into combat and now you’re back. No one will find you here.”

I glared at him. I was more scared than before but I found the sound of his voice comforting. My instincts were all I had right now. I didn’t trust him but I did think that he was an ally. I’d never been in a situation like this before.

He stood to leave with the sound of toothpicks being broken, muffled popcorn, and twisting celery.

“I was like you, Jeremy. And you’ll get through this.” He nudged the tea closer. “You better drink this before it gets cold.”

He walked towards the door. Just before he left, he turned back to me.

“We won, you know. We won because of you. No one’ll ever know but I wanted to tell you that.”

He shuffled off down the hall until I couldn’t see him anymore.

I stared at the tea, debating whether to drink any.




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Every veteran, to me, is a mad hatter.

I see their crazy eyes and their attempts at tea parties in a civilization they broke themselves protecting but no longer understand. Their humour can be brutal and it does not make sense to me. They’ve been driven insane by the weight of nightmares. They don’t get better.

If the world goes to hell around them, they will not change their behavior. It will be like the chaos in the real world will finally be mirroring the chaos they keep inside. They over-react. They protect with extreme prejudice. They cry when they see something beautiful because they have the worst experiences possible to use for comparison.

Standing right beside me, they live in an entirely different world.

They have been warped and dented by the forces of the battlefield. Sculpted by the tools of war. They know how transient the good times are and how valuable friends are. They have insulated themselves to the possibility that anyone close to them could explode into fragments at any moment even though the time for that insulation is long past.

They drink. They sleep. Or they never sleep. Or prefer stronger methods that drinking. Or they find God.

Our society says ‘you can’t just go around killing people’ while a voice deep inside of us, a worrying voice, a dark voice from way before law says ‘sure you can’. The veterans among us speak that language fluently and hear it even when they don’t want to. They hear the drums of war even during peace time.

They are maniacal and chuckle at jokes that only they can hear, that we wouldn’t want to. However, it's not them that are out of place. It is me. If I was on the field of battle with them, their behavior would make much more sense to me while I would merely scream and cry. I’d put my fellow soldiers in danger. I’d fail and then I’d die. Or if I didn’t, I’d become a veteran.

Every veteran, to me, is a mad hatter.



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I had a notion of war orphans being owned by the state and experimented on to become super heroes but that maybe a few of them became WAY more powerful than the scientists had predicted. So now they're in dark prisons with crazy security FAR under the Earth waiting to escape. But it occured to me as a poem. See what you think.

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Mom played the harp, Dad played the gun.
He was a soldier, I was their son.
Mom left for Heaven. Dad left for hell.
He fought in the war, and he fought well.

Now I’m an orphan, one amongst few
Kept from the world, stuck here with you
The orphans of war, kept by the state
Kept from the papers, behind a gate.

They work on us here. They give us names.
My name is Cobalt. Your name is Flames.
We, too, are soldiers, I read your mind
I’m in the next room, hoping to find

A way out of here. A door. A hole.
A crack they forgot. I am a mole.
You burn the planet. I’ll kill the brain.
Together we’ll be. We’ll rule the rain.

Monarchs of new Earth. One king and queen.
Eaters of planets. Reigning obscene.
For now, though we wait. Here in the dark.
I am the petrol. You are the spark.



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Mordeck and Cheddar Plain were field-stripping their weapons on top of Concourse B. The hit was still two hours away. No one came by here. They talked and smoked openly. Eyes in the sky were a thing of the past.

They perched there, monkeys on an I-beam, ten stories up from the concrete graveyard.

The leaning broken teeth of the buildings around the two of them creaked in the wind. The rubbish of destroyed skyscrapers snuggled up to the corners of architecture too stupid to fall down. Cities like zombies. They didn’t know they were dead. Sunlight picked out the holes of shattered windows like hundreds of surprised but empty eye sockets. They leaned against each other like headless drunks.

The shattered glass was in the process of becoming sand. The concrete was becoming dust. The gyprock was becoming mud from the rain. The paper from office after office had taken flight That Day and settled whimsically around the town. Most of it was used for nests. Every intersection was a wind-shaped bowl extending down from building’s eroding corners. Dunes formed in places. It didn’t take a predicator to see that the city was being scoured from the Earth and it was being done quicker than one would expect.

Soon, within centuries, the red bones of rusted rebar would be all that was left poking up occasionally like treasure through the sand.

The buildings were crying dust and the wind sounded like their keening. No wonder the postborns saw the cities as haunted.

Preday survivors like Cheddar Plain and Mordeck knew better. They could go into the cities with no fear. Their mythologies were buffered by childhood memories.

The priests came into view, dressed in red cloaks. They were carrying the incense of their profession. Scavengers and Repopulists. Enemies of the pair squatting up in the shadows.

Mordeck and Cheddar Plain still had working implants from before when they were soldiers. Batteries were easy to find. Mordeck switched on his eye. Cheddar Plain carefully studded his firing arm to ‘on’. A supersonic flashbulb whine of readiness cycled up, muffled by the towel he’d wrapped around it.

Their job was to kill folks trying to come back and live in the city. The two of them patrolled the city. They were snipers that had to work as a pair. Most of the Polis Fors had implants that enabled them to work alone and they liked it that way. It was a grim business suited for sociopaths, nomads, and loners. Mordeck and Cheddar Plain were something of an oddity in that regard.

The Christ-Chins down there in red had dreams of a new future. They wanted to go back, not forward.

Vets like Cheddar Plain and Mordeck understood. Postborns were outnumbering the Preday survivors every day, though, and it was possibly a losing battle.

With a shrug, Mordeck hooked his visual cortex up to Cheddar Plain’s arm and looked down at the priests in red shuffling their way through the debris. The priests lit up in heat-vision, dark-vision, and sonics. The reds became greens, the grey dust became blue, and through the directionals, Mordeck could hear them as if he was walking with them.

Vitals were targeted.

Cheddar Plain drew in breath and bit his lip in anticipation. Mordeck nodded once, quickly. That was the trigger.

Cheddar Plain’s arm-tip flowered open. Six hunterstrikes winked forward in a puff of smoke and a slight recoil.

The priests exploded in an orange ball of plasmic flame seventeen blocks away. Today’s quota had been reached.

Cheddar Plain and Mordeck smiled in the shadows and waited for news of another gridpoint sighting.




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Trapped under a rock. That’s what it comes down to.

It’s a slightly higher-gravity planet. The sky is bright green and the ground around me is white gravel. I feel like all of those musicians from back in the nineteen-sixties would really enjoy it here with these strange colours.

I don’t think that they’d be too crazy about the war, though. The creatures that live here have said that their planet is not for sale. Not a great move on their part. Earth is hungry, as we’re taught in school, Earth needs food.

So I’m a soldier in an exoskeleton and there is a giant rock on my legs. The gravity here is a little higher than Earth Normal but it’s not that big of a deal. The rock on my legs is massive. It has to weigh the same amount as a galactic thruster. Tons of compressed sedimentary patience stares back at me when I look down at where my legs disappear below the knee.

The battle had caused a small avalanche. I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. My fellow warriors who weren’t dead had retreated. My beacon and radio were damaged. They were probably still getting life signs back at the base but this battle had been lost. I was still in a hot zone.

I stare up a the emerald sky and it occurs to me that this kind of situation has been faced by many creatures over the billions of millennia. Trapped under a rock. From tiny spiders to buffalo, cavemen to dolphins, it’s happened at some point to every living thing.

They’ve breathed their last, hopefully half-amused at their predicament. I wonder if they thought the same thing.

I can see that my oxygen meter has six hours of air left. I haven’t seen any of the aliens poking around for survivors. Looks like I have some free time on my hands.

I’ll get to see the suns go down. Night time here is beautiful.




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With lost marbles over mixed drinks, I stare at the face reflected in the oak bar beside my highball. It looks more real to me, somehow, than I feel.

Everyone on either side of me is sitting at the finish line, racing to the bottom of a glass and tying for last place. Our bellies press up against the metal bar. We’ll never be done or have enough.

The bartender comes over to me. I can see him reflected beside my face. His huge moustache is waxed to slippery perfection. He looks down at me with crossed arms and a scowl. I know what that means. Time to pay up and leave.

I look up at him. I smile to let him know that I’m alright but unfortunately, the mirror behind the bar is a lot clearer than the reflection from the bar counter and I can see that I’m a clown with wide rubbery lips smiling an idiot’s smile. The five-o’clock shadow on my face has turned into a two-in-the-morning carpet.

I’m having trouble balancing on the wide stool that I’m on. He doesn’t even need to say it. The bartender’s right. I’m done for the night.

I reach back to get my wallet. It takes five tries. He’s patient.

I pull out my credit card and lay it on the bar. The bartender picks it up and carries it over the credit card machine. I’m left alone with the last half inch of my martini trying to keep the bottom of the olive damp.

I fish the olive out of the glass but there’s a bit of a miscalculation to that motion and the glass skips away and falls over, spilling the last little bit of gin onto the bar. The glass doesn’t break.

“Oh Jesus, Danny!” I hear from the end of the bar. I recognize the voice. I look up from licking the gin off of the bar to see what the problem is.

It’s the bartender again. He’s looking straight at me. I wonder why he’s doing that until I remember than my name is Danny and he’s probably found a problem with my credit card.

He comes back and puts the card down with the receipt. It’s gone through just fine. Of course it had. This is the magic card given to me by the government after the war. It never ran out. I was determined to drink the treasury dry.

I bring my other arm, the heavy one, up with a clank onto the bar. Its jagged shapes are cornered with rubber to prevent it from scratching furniture or people. Its barrel has been filled and plugged, never to fire again.

It’s too wired into my head to be removed, they said, and this credit card is their apology.

At first I bought a huge house but it was too many rooms and no friends. I threw the keys to some homeless people with a map. When they all left, I sat down where they’d been begging. That was six weeks ago.

“You can’t lick the bar, Danny. You know that.” The bartender says and shakes his head.

”But….I shpilled.” I explain, amazed at the thickness and unpredictable willfulness of my own tongue.

“Come on, Danny. You can’t stay here. Go on. Get out. See you tomorrow morning.” Said Danny, not unkindly.

He took my money. It was a business, after all. He poured me drinks. That was the service this place offered. His hands were tired. He was killing me just as if he was stabbing me with a knife but he was doing it really slowly. I was no different from a half doze other slobs that came here.

I stand up, aim for the door and walk outside. It takes five tries. He’s patient.

I fall over into the garbage in the alley behind the bar.

Home Sweet Home. I’m enjoying the freedom I fought to preserve.

I’ve drunk enough that the faces of the screaming children in a country far away from this one won’t wake me up. That’s the theory, anyway.

I close my eyes.





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This shift in the way things were named by the management was what really pissed Frank off.

Frank’s full name was Franchild Shinemount Iffens. He was a decorated field general. He’d earned his medals and his scars on the battlefields of Jerrytown, Hansfield, MoorShire and Cockswain’s Jut years ago before Victory Day had been declared.

Not like the virtual medals being handed out in today’s unified world. Now, the strictly hypothetical battles were fought on computer and the winners were sent their medals in the mail with online ceremonies being held in situ-cam so that no one need leave their houses.

Oh, we the conquerors. It made Frank sick. To the victor went the spoils. That was true. The subjugated foes were dead or slaves. Those that wanted to join were accepted after a drawn-out acceptance process.

The world was united. The hunger for battle that still existed was fed only by the computer sims.

Peace reigned and it made Frank want to puke.

He was down in a mech-making facility overseeing the refit process. The huge bipedal machines were being retooled now for construction instead of war. The missle-bays and armament housings were unbolted and stacked in corners. They were stripped of their military green or beige and repainted a bright yellow with black stripes.

Frank’s huge moustache twitched.

The thing that bothered him the most was the renaming.

Right now, he was looking at a Pomma Politica ‘Fisherman’ Class Whorebringer being bleached and setup for repaint. She had giant, round shoulder casings and a flared waist-chassis for a wider turning radius. Must have been forty years old if she was a day. The marks of the last firefight she was in were still evident. She stood there, naked without her offensive weaponry and defensive shielding.

She was ready.

He felt like he was watching a friend die.

The yellow paint sprayers started up with a hiss and twenty minutes later, the glorious war machine was standing, looking bright and new with her identity erased. Soon, she’d be outfitted with grapples, welders, up-to-date construction programming and safety harnesses.

The identification tags came down and with a burst of black molecular bonding paint through the stencils, the Pamma Politica ‘Fisherman’ Class Whorebringer became a brand new DB-765.

DB-765.

Frank’s eyes glittered. He’d been overseeing this for months. Once or twice, he’d even recognized machines that he’d used or fought against. Gorgeous graffiti, paintings, sunsets, winking women, kill notches, all of them stripped, bleached and repainted.

And given a number.

There were collectors of these things. Collectors that were rich beyond the grasp of a field general like Frank. Frank wished, sometimes, that he could buy one or two and have them set up in his back yard like those collectors did.

Pipe dream. Never happen.

Instead Frank idly wondered. He daydreamed of being called into a room after his job here was done. He dreamed of being stripped, painted and tattooed.

He dreamed of his passport and ID tags being changed from Franchild Shinemount Iffens to DB765.




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I can’t believe that it used to take years and years of real-time school to become a doctor. I slip the spike with the red cross on the dust-cover into the jack at the base of my skull. Just like that, I’m a surgeon, which is good news for my friend currently trying to breathe around the hot shrapnel sticking through his lung.

We’re beneath the firing level in a crater in a no-person’s-land between the forces. I find it ironic that huddling there in the mud with bone-shattering explosions happening around us, I could probably speak to a soldier from World War I and we’d know exactly what each other went through.

Maybe I’ll get my chance sooner than I think.

My friend’s wild eyes are looking at with a silent scream as I get to work.

Every soldier on the force has seven spikes. Medic, Sniper, Engineer, Strategy Officer, Languages, Scout, and Beserker. We keep them in an arm band. They’re used when they’re called for.

This way each man can play whatever role necessary in the changing tides of infantry ground battle. It hasn’t alleviated the chaos.

The people up top keep trying to take the disorder out of war and failing.

I remember that somewhere up the line two days ago, a battalion of troops all jammed their Berserker chips in at the same time to try to freak out the enemy with a suicide run at their guns in the hopes that a few of them would get through. They didn’t even make it out of the trench. They tore each other apart.

I’m still working around the cooling metal sticking through my friend’s chest when I realize that he doesn’t need my help anymore. I stop working. I sit back. I slip the Medic wafer out of my head and put it back in my arm band. Dirt and body parts fly through the air above me amidst the deafening explosions.

I wish they had a spike that erased memories.




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He never got along with adults after the war. Only the children. I remember him needing to angle himself just a little bit to fit his wide shoulders through our front door. He was all grunts and one-word answers.

Married once but after the war, she eventually left him. She said that the humming his augmented body made at night made her feel like she was sleeping next to a refrigerator. Then she’d pause, glance at him and add, “In more ways that one.”

He was my older brother and he’d show up here every Sunday for dinner like clockwork. No pun intended.

Both his eyes were perfect circles, white plastic insets that could see in the dark and look through walls. They looked like child-safety outlet covers jammed into his eye sockets. Light blue tracery that glowed faintly in the dark zigged and zagged back to his grey-haired temples and down each side of his neck.

We always gave him the cheap glasses and cutlery because of the lack of delicate motor control in his massive skin-sheathed hand-machines. When he walked, one foot clanked.

We’d serve him a turkey dinner or roast beef which he ate obligingly to fuel the biological components of himself but it was always disconcerting to see him finish his meal with a big glass of oil.

After dinner, he’d mess up my child’s hair and do magic tricks. The decommissioned weaponry that the government took back left large hollow compartments in his back and one quarter of his chest. With clumsy sleight-of-hand, he could make objects ‘appear’ out of those compartments that he’d hidden before arriving.

He could make miniature lightning bolts between his fingertips that would dim the lights and make his own hair stand on end like Einstein.

I’d always think of how many of the enemy must have died screaming and blackened under those sparking mitts after giving up their country’s secrets.

I thought that the indirect and subtle world of adults was confusing to the cyborg soldier mind of my brother. His eyes were good lie detectors and often enough he’d see adult’s vital signs be totally at odds with what they were saying.

Children were pure, straightforward and had no idea that he was frightening.

We probably would have tried to find a polite way of stopping him from coming over if these nights weren’t the highlight of our son’s week. I can picture the two of them now, laughing on the living room carpet while one of my brother’s hands runs around by itself. My boy’s laugh sounds like a normal child’s laughter.

My brother’s laugh sounds like crushed tin cans being rubbed together at the bottom of a well.


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