skonen_blades

The other day I saw a crow with bird poop on its wing.
A smear of white that I thought must be quite embarrassing.
The sleek, black shine of feathers painted with a milky splash.
A stinking signature becoming drying, chalky ash.
A fellow bird’s insulting effluent cloaca stain,
Waiting to be washed away the next time we have rain.
A Judas crow above it must have pooped and flown away
before I saw this bird crime on this sunny, fateful day.
It stopped and looked at me in what I swear was maybe shame.
I wondered if this young crow knew which crow bro was to blame.
I wondered if the pooping crow was capable of guilt
or if it didn’t care about the liquid that it spilt
or if either of them comprehended irony?
Bird poop on the shoulder of a crow? It’s lunacy!
“How does it feel?” I nearly yelled at this poor, sheepish crow.
“Who’s the statue now?” I almost said as it crouched still, and low.
The midnight-sable, iridescent blackness dripping white.
The whiteout on the bird with wings the inky shade of night.
A ying/yang remix, monochrome; a little pooped-on bird.
A metaphor at once profound while also quite absurd.





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Take the halo
And give it a half twist
Into a symbol for infinity
An 8
That can also be used
For handcuffs
And hang it up
Where you’ll never return

Take the feathers
From the wings
And use them to stuff pillows
For children’s fights
And deep fry what’s left

Take the robes
And cut them
Into flags of surrender
And let them wave goodbye
In every wind

Take the harp
And pawn it
Or melt it down
Or leave it lucky horseshoe empty
By using the strings
To cut cheese
Or hang pictures
It doesn’t matter

Go forward
With no light in the dark
Grounded
Naked
And silent



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You’d expect a physically challenged, mentally retarded child born with a life expectancy of six years to figure out a crude way of getting around. Some simple crutches, perhaps. Or maybe a box to drag oneself around in.

You wouldn’t expect that child to build robot legs that worked.

That’s how the aliens saw us. They looked on us in pity and in fascination.

They came to us from space without the benefit of ships or space suits. They floated down on rippling bio-solar panel wings of unfurling grace. They were humanoid but much taller, bilaterally symmetrical like us. They had four more senses than us and were able to breathe in fourteen different atmospheres. Those solar sail wings could extend for fifty meters when fully extended in space. They were so very thin.

They looked like us for a reason.

And we didn’t look like them because we were deformed.

In this universe, they explained, there was only one dominant form of life.

Humans.

Planet Earth was seeded with that form of life but somewhere the replication got too many errors in it. A few missing pieces in the helix or a few too many where it counted. Our growth was stunted and our full potential squandered.

According to these superior versions of humans that wafted down from space, normal human beings kept every trait in the DNA that they’d gotten along the way and were supposed to flower in a second puberty around sixty years of age.

That second puberty would have us grow much taller, become psychic, kick all of our evolutionary traits into full-blown activation, and give us the ability to fly into space like a dandelion seed pushed by a gust of wind. And those wings could tesseract space. Living wormhole organs. The distances between stars made it necessary for them to have lifespans measured in thousands of years.

We felt jealous and ripped off. But also proud. These beings had no need for technology. They’d never invented radio or television. That explained the silence of space. They’d never had to invent spacecraft. They’d never had rocket technology or microwaves or chemistry or vacuum tubes. They could construct stable wormholes but they didn’t understand the math behind it.

We were a marvel to them. A doomed, stunted, tragic, tear-jerker of a marvel.

But they couldn’t read our minds. We lacked the broadcast and receiving apparatus. They learned our language in hours and communicated with us using their rarely used mouths. It was a novelty for them.

It gave us the time to mount an attack. Great minds must have thought alike because in a surprisingly effective military movement, as accidentally co-ordinated as it was spontaneous, all the countries of earth killed these super-humans.

The ones that could flee, fled. Around two-thirds. The rest of them fluttered like moths in jars, trying to get out of our buildings as our bullets tore holes in their paper bodies.

The brutality shocked them. They felt the trapped ones die in their minds. We haven’t seen them since. It’s likely that they have marked our planet as a no-go area.

Suits us fine.

However, we’ve been busy researching those bodies. Every country on Earth is in a race to see who can get the first patents. The first stable wormholes, the first space-faring wingsuits, the first immortality drugs, the first psychic warriors, the first amphibious soldiers, etc, etc.

And when the time comes, we’ll spread out amongst the stars ahead of schedule because of them. We’ll see who’s superior then.




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An unfortunate collection of thoughts had a car crash in my head yesterday.

ONE

Woman says “Put your whole hand in there, sailor.”
Man does as he’s told.
Woman says “Put your OTHER hand in there as well.”
Man does as he’d told, both inside of the woman as if to make a prayer.
Woman says “Now clap.”
Man struggles, fails, and says “I can’t!”
Woman says “Tight, eh?”

TWO

Tinkerbell’s near death experience in Peter Pan. She urges the witness to bring her back to life by believing in fairies. She wants the witness to demonstrate this belief by clapping. “Clap if you believe in faires! Clap if you believe in fairies!” she says, fading from this reality.

THREE

A person cannot go back and kill their own grandfather because if they did, they would make themselves not exist which would bring their grandfather back to life and then the grandson as well and then the grandson would go back in time to kill the grandfather again and, well, it would make a causality loop that would, quite possibly, short circuit the universe.

UNFORTUNATE CAR CRASH OF THOUGHTS

I’m picturing both of my hands wrist-deep in Tinkerbell’s tiny hoo-ha and she’s telling me to clap if I believe in fairies. When I can’t, she dies and disappears. However, that frees up my hands to clap and so she reappears, enveloping my hands again, restricting my clapping, and causing herself to disappear again, etc, etc. until she is a flickering, quantum hand-trap on the end of my arms.

So I’m caught in some sort of bizarre fairy-fisting causality death loop.

This moment brought to you by too much sushi during lunch and a rather unfortunate habit of trying to make sense of things and usually coming up with some far left of the sum of its parts.



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Angels and demons are nothing but carrion birds.

They fight over our loose souls like seagulls and crows fighting over sandy French fries on the beach.

They do not ferry us from here to one place or another. Our souls are merely food for them and they are hungry.

The only difference between them is the colour of their wings. The angels are white-winged and strong, a little bit bigger that the demons. The demons have black wings that glint red highlights in the sun. They are slightly smaller than the angels but they’re quicker and there a few more of them.

They circle above us, unseen, waiting, diving at every death in a flocked race with a gluttonous finish line. Disasters with high body counts thicken the air with their screeching cries and flapping wings.

We are a school of fish. They circle, gliding in lazy circles above the shifting, scalloped-glass meniscus of the ocean’s surface. They drift in an energy-conserving spiral, heads twitching for signs of death, flecks of struggling fins breaking the surface. Then they dive.

The sun glinting on the waves, shimmering down into the depths, is the light we see near the end.

There is no afterlife. Nothing is wasted, not even the soul. It is a closed system.




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Angels don’t go anywhere when they die. They’re created in heaven, serve in heaven, and are entirely composed of heaven.

They’re given regular infusions of love and happiness by their friends and the boss. Their days are litanies of smiles as they reward the human dead that file through the gates.

They hand out halos and harps the same way that ushers hand out programs at a symphony hall. The grin widely at each other with love-filled eyes. They move slowly. Occasionally, one or two will leap off of a cloud and soar around for no other reason that to experience the sheer thrill of it.

They relax in their off-time and play their harps, joining in with the cosmic music that always plays. They experience bliss at the oneness of the universe.

When an angel dies and is brought back to life, he or she breaks. They’re the stewards of the Earth but the price for having Heaven as a home address is that they don’t get an after life. Being brought back is almost a curse at that point.

Knowing this abstractly poses them no problems.

When it actually happens, however, a downward spiral develops.

A listlessness develops in their actions. Their smiles falter. The eyes have an edge to them. The serene expression becomes a mask for deeper, unresolved questions.

It’s the jealousy that seeps in then. These humans, they get to come to Heaven. The angels, God’s creations, highest pinnacles of creation, they don’t get anything when they die. Their life is their reward. Oblivion greets them after death. They already live on the highest rung of the celestial ladder. They can go no further.

After that, flying seems a little less thrilling. The music they create doesn’t seem to mean much.

They become addicts unable to satisfy their craving.

One time, a bunch of them got together and lobbied to change that. They were expelled. They started up their own show.

You know how that turned out.

Soon after being brought back, an angel will start to play his or her harp too loud. It is the music of the individual, not the chorus. It is petulant and angry. It shouts. It ignites discordant emotions of anger and fear.

The halo slips.

The skin changes, the wings become ragged. They snarl. Their anger consumes them and they start to demand that they be treated fairly.

That’s when the clouds beneath them can no longer support their weight. They slip through and fall.

Lucifer catches them with open arms and soothes them, congratulating them on waking up. He croons to them, allaying their fears and wiping away their tears.

They’re too heavy to fly back. They have to stay. Lucifer welcomes them into the family.

They’re only too happy to punish the humans after that. It feels natural.




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I guess the wings should have given it away but I was pretty high at the time. Accepting the occasional hallucination had become a way of life.

I was hungry, I was poor, and I had just killed a woman in the process of stealing her purse. Turns out she had no credit cards and sixteen dollars in cash. I vomited into the purse when I saw how much she had died for. I looked up at her body. Plain face, wide open eyes, and blood washing off of the plastic of her bright raincoat in the rain.

I was filled with revulsion at myself, my actions over the last six years, my upbringing, and my self.

It was an epiphany. I’d heard alcoholics refer to it as The Moment of Clarity. I could see my entire life spooling back down a stairwell, all the way back to the foster homes that had whipped and raped me into the person I was. I was a frankenstein’s monster made from molestations and beatings. I had no concept of love except as a tool for bartering. I had no concept of remorse except for when I was in danger of getting caught. I had no concept of loyalty unless there was a reward. I had no concept of empathy except as leverage. This was not the first person I had killed.

My last piece of humanity died that night. It came out of me and sloshed into the dead woman’s purse.

I used the sixteen dollars to get high. I climbed up to the top of a water tower. I looked down. With a sigh and a smile, I jumped off, racing the raindrops to the gutters. I didn’t flail or scream.

Before I hit the ground, I was caught. Strong arms circled me and slowed my fall. I heard the flapping of great wings. I didn’t struggle. I was slowly lowered to the ground in a comforting embrace. I lay back on the wet cobblestones and gazed up into eyes that understood me.

From that day forward, I no longer felt bad about myself.

I understood then that I had been chosen and that I was a soldier in a powerful army and that I could do no wrong in my commander’s eyes.

In fact, I felt like I had been given a purpose.

The understanding eyes I had gazed into were glowing and red. The wings that had slowed my fall were leathery.

I’ve killed more people in the last week that I have in the last year.





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Messengers come and messengers go, it’s the message that stays constant.

It’s a rough job being a courier. ‘Time is of the essence’ is written on the ceiling above my bed so that as soon as my eyes are open, I know I’m already late. I put on the wings of my profession and pad down the hall to the coffee machine.

It’ll be hot enough today for me to do my job naked except for the shoes. I’m looking forward to that.

It’s the charm in the wings that has the power. They can be sewn onto any old pair of shoes or hat to do the job. Whatever the wings are attached to absorb the charm so they don’t burn off on re-entry or fly off in the turbulence.

I remember a Canadian back in the day who wore red socks and a red toque with the Canadian flag in the middle. He was a young kid, a snowboarder or something before he got the job. He loved it. His uniform was frowned on as a little too casual but his high performance feedback let him get away with a minimum of uniform-related reprimands.

With a smirk I remembered Jack Steel, the football player. Probably the biggest messenger ever chosen. He was a huge football player who had the wings glamoured onto the side of his Amercian football helmet and his cleats. He looked a little silly wearing the toga but nothing matched his power when he was running through the skies. That helmet had no peripheral vision, though. Rest in piece, Jack. Watch out for jets.

Cradling the nearly-finished cup of coffee in my hands, I thought back to the narcissistic tennis player we had in the early eighties. Pierre Willingdon. The wings were attached to his pristine white sweatband. He wore tight white tennis shorts and bright white tennis shoes. I remember his huge reflective pilot’s sunglasses. I think he slept wearing those glasses. With his long curly black hair and that white scarf, he cut quite a figure.

None of us could stand him at the time but now, looking back, I missed his eccentricity and sense of play.

We’re chosen for our drive and not our physical ability. We’ve had heavy messengers and slight ones. Hell, Old Shen was practically obese. Boy, he could laugh.

I read about Ophelia the Kid and Old Woman Jacobs.

'Bones' Johnson was skeletal. I remember him with that cigar always screwed into the corner of his mouth and his fedora pulled down over his eyes.

Being a woman, I’m in the minority here but I’m doing my best. I was a punk-rock calendar model back when I was chosen after my accident. I’m not a modest woman and getting a job where I get to criss-cross the known planets wearing completely nothing at all except for footwear is a dream come true. I want to do my best.

It’s a gutsy maneuver but I’ve attached the wings to very strong ear cuffs on either side of my long, green mohawk. I’ve dyed my pubic hair to match. I’m wearing calf-high leather books with metal caps on the heels so that I make sparks when I land. I’ve got some pretty extreme make-up on to make me look like an intimidating warrior.

When I look in the mirror, I like to think that I look like a regal valkyrie of some sort. An avenging angel of information.

It’s time for me to finish my coffee and walk out the front door into the sky. My heels click out the seconds as I make my way to the launch mat. I squint my eyes a little before kneeling like a diver from a Nagel painting on the front steps of my house in the clouds.

It’s a jump into the stratosphere and my day is started. The messages pour into my head. With a snarl, I sprint on the air towards Pickup One.



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The rules were simple. No time manipulation, no transmutation, and no spell could be used twice.

Morden the Uneasy entered from the west quadrant of the arena on a massive floating bed attended by golem slaves made from flower petals. The metal caps on the stumps of her legs glimmered with diamonds in the sunlight.

I sat high up in the private viewing box with my client and tried to pay attention to the match. The arena floor was projected real-time on the table between my client and I in hard light. Whatever section of the fight I was paying attention to would come up picture-in-picture on a baseball card floating to the left of the action.

It was an expensive AV setup in the most expensive seat in the house. If this gross display of wealth was meant to impress me and keep me off-balance during the wage negotiations, it was working.

Khallista of the Red Flame entered from the east quadrant of the arena, wreathed in the red fire of her clan and already whimpering from the recent focal drugs that had turned her eyes completely black.

There were better skilled people on the craftlist above me that could have done the job that my client was asking me to do. I wasn’t cheap but this client could afford the best. I figured if he wanted a fall guy to use as bait for a trap, he would have sought out the cheapest loser he could find so I was curious why he picked me. Not the bottom and not the top and not a particularly fast riser.

I warily accepted his offer of more details over dinner at a Magic Pit Fight in the hopes of allaying my suspicion.

Rowst the Unbelieving staggered in from the ‘blue’ north quarter. He was blindfolded and dressed in nothing but a small toga, stained by the sores covering his body. A perfectly circular halo of small glowing fairies crowned his bald head.

My client sat across from me in the shadows. Whatever air of mystery he was trying to create for me was also working very well. I was very curious about his identity. Courtesy wouldn’t let me ask until he offered to talk to about it so I sat back in silence and continued to watch the players enter the arena.

Shorelocke the Dread Shadow entered from the south to complete the roster. He was cut from darkness. There was an absence of light around him. He was like a person-shaped hole cut in the fabric of reality. His glowing eyes stabbed out in twin beams of white, eager ferocity.

These fights were not to the death. They were for rights and rankings. This was a championship round, though, and sometimes accidents happened.

My client leaned forward into the light above the projection on the table. I looked up to meet his eyes and froze with the words I was planning to say dying in my throat.

A Fixer was staring back at me. I’d only heard legends. His pale face and dark eyes marked him out as a rare purebred human but that wasn’t the giveaway. He’d released the glamour for me to see in this moment so that I would be suitably awed.

He flickered with possibility.

He was staying close to the dimensions surrounding this one so his changes weren’t extreme. The different versions of himself were very similar to one in this quantum thread. His hair length varied a little from second to second. A scar would sometimes pop up on a cheek and then vanish. His eyes would go through a gradient of the colours he was born with as the moments went by. It made me slightly nauseous to look at, like I had motion sickness.

Very occasionally, a woman would flash through his features or he’d disappear for a millisecond as he passed through a universe where he’d died already.

He leaned back in the shadows.

I composed myself and asked him the question I’d been wanting to ask him since I’d been contacted.

“Why me?” I asked.

“Because”, The Fixer responded, “you are unique. You know what you’re talking to, yes? You realize what I mean?”

I nodded. As someone that could extend their sense of self across an almost infinite number of dimensions as easily as a bird could extend its wings, The Fixer had a very special definition of unique.

We all have a double in almost every other universe. However, if you picture all possible realities as a spectrum, the differences between our universe and the other possible universes get more and more pronounced the further away you get from your universe of origin.

There are universes where I have a different haircut and a different job. There are universes where I am married.

Go further and there are universes where I was hit by car when I was six, for example, or choked on a chicken bone when I was seven. There are universes where my parents never met and I never came to be.

What The Fixer meant by ‘unique’ was that he had spread his dimensional-self wings and hadn’t found me. What he meant was that there was only one of me. Here. Only in this space-time continuum and only on this Earth.

I reeled. This was the end of one life and the beginning of another.

“You realize how valuable that makes you to my kind, of course. I only offered you a job to get you here.” He said. Languidly, he motioned with his index finger and I heard the doors lock.

“You are going to be added to The Zoo.” He said.

On the table between us, the Magic Pit Fight began to the crowd’s deafening cheer.



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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.



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