Totale encountered their submanifestation before it was too late, although there was never a too to late. They communed and understood; it was a paratemporal thing, heretofore unknown.

“Higzy,” Totale admonished him, “your Big Bang is this Thursday. Are you ready? Do you know how you want it to go? You won’t want it to happen without you.”

The correspondence between them effervesced outside of time.

“My Totale,” Higzy liaised, “I have given this much thought. The thought obtains.”

“And,” Totale pursued the effervescence, “what are your foundations to be?”

“I’ve decided,” Higzy announced, “to go with an amalgamated approach. I will allow my simultaneity to decay.”

“But that will result in divergence.”

“Yes, and that is what’s so beautiful about it.”

“Please explain.”

“Ten times,” Higzy explained, “one for each essence of my hitherness flavors, I will imbibe the flow and collate them and winnow them.”

“You will go the limit, then?”

“Yes. I intend just that. All ten.”

Totale bristled, creating a existential streamer that unrolled to parts unknown. “That troubles me, Higzy.”

“Be not troubled. We are nothing. And nothing is unstable. I want, for my Big Bang, something; and if nothing is unstable, something’s bound to happen.”

“Yes,” Totale spoke, “but approaching the limit risks breaching the asymptote. The numbers will devolve and the Creation Streamers will shred.”

“Not my problem,” Higzy said nonchalantly.

“No, Higzy, it is everyone’s problem. Everyone should celebrate their Big Bang, but yours shouldn’t twist the Streamers.” Totale paused. “You have until Thursday to recypher the encryptoverse. Choose wisely.”

Higzy evanesced. The communication was over. He returned to his Hitherness.

He was and always had been thought; he would always be. And he was also inverted along those realities. His cypher was divined and he was dowsing for the fluidity of time, without bounds. He recollected his Hither and took inventory. All of his ten in’tities were immiscible. Some problems were too big for even his own Hitherness and Encrypto’vim.

“I must combine them so that the asymptote would survive. I must align them—perhaps in series? In a tenfold helix? In simultaneity?” Was there even enough energy in nothing to fall out on his command? he wondered.

Thursday—for lack of a better term—approached.

He began working more feverishly, the closer the day of his Big Bang came. He was able to force three Creation Streamers together, twisted in solidarity. At the fourth, he was conundrummed, his immenstronome mired in a backbeat of dysynchrony.

Three Streamers were not enough. Seven more were undisciplined in his plan. Yet, come-what-may may be what comes. Higzy was not content to just let nature—whatever that was—take its course. He wanted to manipulate it; plan it; own it.

And Totale would just have to abide it. Abidence is coexistence; avoidance is not. Even if Totale had to wonder what that meant.

“Thursday” Eve Higzy rested. He had been busy for six days now, and if the Streamers weren’t ready by now, he was willing to be surprised.

“Dawn”—for lack of a better term—dawned. He effervesced. He combed the Creation Streamers. He manifested.

“I’ve come to say goodbye,” he said to the Totale.

“Are you in accordance?” Totale asked, Higzy knowing full well they meant that vacuums and bubbles and energies should ensue according to the rules.

“Of course I am,” he lied.

And from the Nothing, Something happened. And out of it, length, width, and depth fell out. But the other seven Creation Streamers unrolled in a disheveled momentum, which created the Great Existential Stopgap, which Higzy thought to be temporary; but it was its own contradiction to temporariness. The Stopgap became the Gap, and it extended in one direction only.

“Not ten!” Higzy shouted. “An eleventh!—Time. A true wonder.”

Que será.

“You know why we summoned you here,” Totale supratoned to him.

“I do.”

“Your appraisal?”

“I was able to get three Streamers out of the Tangle.”

“But the remaining six.”

“A funny story…”

“Please, do entertain us.”

“We’re so accustomed to all-there-is—all-the-time—that I wanted something new.”

“Like what?”

“Like unknowns. Surprises.”

“But your Creation now traverses its existence in only one direction.”

“The Future.”

“Yes, the Future. I like that name. But I don’t like what it portends.” Totale paused. “No, I don’t like what it is. I don’t like what your Big Bang will become, along these ‘unknowns.’ With ‘surprises.’ And what of sentient life? How can such entities cope with an open-ended life, bumbling along a linear timeline and stumbling, one misstep at a time.”

“You mean, come-what-may?”

“Yes. Come-what-may.”

“Aren’t you bored?” Higzy asked Totale.

“We beg your pardon?”

“All-that-is, all-the-time, always, ever, in your face. No surprises.”

“Surprises were never meant to be, Higzy.”

“They don’t ‘be’ until they happen. So surprises were never meant to happen? That’s the whole problem. Nothing happens, It’s all there already. And if nothing happens, how can we accept such instability?”

Totale became angry. “Instability is what you’ve done with your preposterous machinations!”

“Yes, Totale. But I wonder…”

“You wonder what, exactly?”

“Don’t know until it happens. The surprises. With them comes wonder. And you, Totale never wonder.”

“That’s stability.”

“And that’s no fun. You have to wonder to have fun.”

“What about bad surprises, Higzy?”

“All part of the wonder. And the fix. And the Streamers that unfurl from the improvisations needed to keep it all together.”

“Improvisations! Alas! Improvisation destroys.”

“But, it’s not nothing.”

Totale considered the liaising among them. For them it was something new: new.

“We have something. We had something. And Thursday is the day that you changed forever…forever. We mourn now.”

“What’s new?” Higzy asked.

“Nothing. Nothing new,” Totale declared, as if that settled the matter.

“I wonder if…” Higzy said, attempting to assuage Totale.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Higzy said.

“Whatever,” Totale said, ending the liaising.

AUTHOR’S NOTE: If you don’t understand this…you will..in time.

The main character of this story was a killer. Actually, a would-be killer. No, no one had died just yet. But just because no one had yet been killed didn't make for less of a killer. This killer had a killer's mind, programmed to kill. Something in the killer's mind had him hard-wired to do that. In abundance. Without remorse.

And even on purpose.

Before the killing spree would be over, there would be many, many homicides and their bodies, most of them irretrievable for family and friends to properly bury then.

The killer rode with us.

On a craft such as ours, one is trapped with the passengers who are aboard. And this killer being on our vessel showed how close we can be to killers all the time, whether we know it or not. And even if they hadn't yet begun to kill. And taking no action to prevent it showed how close we can be to becoming killers ourselves.

I was no expert, but I knew what would put all the killer's murders in action — the series of ensuing deaths. After all, everyone has a hot button. Everyone has a fuse. And I knew the one thing I could do to set the deaths in motion.

Yes, this killer was one "last straw" away from going off and doing what a killer does best: kill. Without regret, in cold blood, without any emotional expenditure.

And no consequences.

This killer would get away with it, because society condones certain circumstances that seem to make killing just part of life.

"Sir," my second reported, "I think things are getting a little tense in here."

"Don't worry about it. Who knows what goes through everyone's minds when there's killin' in the air." I sniffed about, as if to make my point.

"Sir," my second pressed on, "do the others know about our special passenger?"

"Some do," I answered. "Or at least they suspect." I closed my eyes.

"Sir, are you all right?"

"Yes, yes. Look, I don't like it any more than you. But what can we do? Nothing. Not till it happens. Am I right? Innocent till proven guilty."

He thought about it a minute, then said, "I suppose so. We could preemptively act. We don't have to follow orders."

"Like our killer has to? You and I both know our secret killer can't help it; just following instructions is all a killer can do. Besides, do you think anyone's going to miss the people who get killed? I mean, aren't they all killers themselves? Aren't we all?"

"I guess it depends on your point of view."

"So," I said, growing impatient, "you're a philosopher now."

"Even the Mafia had family — loved ones, sir."

"So did a lot of bad people. Doesn't mean we have to miss them."

"Of course not, sir."

"I know we know — generally — when the body count's going to start. But nothing's happened just yet. Would you like to see the Man of the Cloth on board with us?"

"That's funny, sir," he said. You're referring to your co-pilot.

We flew on uncomfortably, with our killer on board. This was a mean, lean, killing machine. I regarded the killer on board, but there was no engagement back. This was a killer who could kill us all instead of the wake of carnage our acquiescence would unleash. I grieved for the It's-us-or-them world we lived in.

The killer, I knew, must be getting restless. Antsy. Pretending to be asleep, but with one eye open, anxious for self-actualization. A killer's got to kill. And if no killing were to come soon, would blow. A killer needs release.

"Sir," my second said gravely, "I think it's time we do something. It's either him or us. We should just get rid of this maniac now."

I thought about it. Our orders were no more special than those of any killers out there, in the grand scheme of things. Everyone does what they need to do to survive.

Our vicious killer was just a little boy, but packed 15 kilotons of killing. We pushed him overboard at 8:15 AM, over the center of Hiroshima.

The main character of this story was a killer. Actually, a would-be killer. No, no one had died just yet. But just because no one had yet been killed didn't make for less of a killer. This killer had a killer's mind, programmed to kill. Something in the killer's mind had him hard-wired to do that. In abundance. Without remorse.

And even on purpose.

Before the killing spree would be over, there would be many, many homicides and their bodies, most of them irretrievable for family and friends to properly bury then.

The killer rode with us.

On a craft such as ours, one is trapped with the passengers who are aboard. And this killer being on our vessel showed how close we can be to killers all the time, whether we know it or not. And even if they hadn't yet begun to kill. And taking no action to prevent it showed how close we can be to becoming killers ourselves.

I was no expert, but I knew what would put all the killer's murders in action — the series of ensuing deaths. After all, everyone has a hot button. Everyone has a fuse. And I knew the one thing I could do to set the deaths in motion.

Yes, this killer was one "last straw" away from going off and doing what a killer does best: kill. Without regret, in cold blood, without any emotional expenditure.

And no consequences.

This killer would get away with it, because society condones certain circumstances that seem to make killing just part of life.

"Sir," my second reported, "I think things are getting a little tense in here."

"Don't worry about it. Who knows what goes through everyone's minds when there's killin' in the air." I sniffed about, as if to make my point.

"Sir," my second pressed on, "do the others know about our special passenger?"

"Some do," I answered. "Or at least they suspect." I closed my eyes.

"Sir, are you all right?"

"Yes, yes. Look, I don't like it any more than you. But what can we do? Nothing. Not till it happens. Am I right? Innocent till proven guilty."

He thought about it a minute, then said, "I suppose so. We could preemptively act. We don't have to follow orders."

"Like our killer has to? You and I both know our secret killer can't help it; just following instructions is all a killer can do. Besides, do you think anyone's going to miss the people who get killed? I mean, aren't they all killers themselves? Aren't we all?"

"I guess it depends on your point of view."

"So," I said, growing impatient, "you're a philosopher now."

"Even the Mafia had family — loved ones, sir."

"So did a lot of bad people. Doesn't mean we have to miss them."

"Of course not, sir."

"I know we know — generally — when the body count's going to start. But nothing's happened just yet. Would you like to see the Man of the Cloth on board with us?"

"That's funny, sir," he said. You're referring to your co-pilot.

We flew on uncomfortably, with our killer on board. This was a mean, lean, killing machine. I regarded the killer on board, but there was no engagement back. This was a killer who could kill us all instead of the wake of carnage our acquiescence would unleash. I grieved for the It's-us-or-them world we lived in.

The killer, I knew, must be getting restless. Antsy. Pretending to be asleep, but with one eye open, anxious for self-actualization. A killer's got to kill. And if no killing were to come soon, would blow. A killer needs release.

"Sir," my second said gravely, "I think it's time we do something. It's either him or us. We should just get rid of this maniac now."

I thought about it. Our orders were no more special than those of any killers out there, in the grand scheme of things. Everyone does what they need to do to survive.

Our vicious killer was just a little boy, but packed 15 kilotons of killing. We pushed him overboard at 8:15 AM, over the center of Hiroshima.

Everyone in town agreed that Lake Convenience was haunted, and I knew what was actually buried beneath it. This was simply because I was someone buried beneath it—and I knew with who else.

And why.

No one could cite ther real reason it had been named “Convenience.” Most assumed the folklore was true. One story was that because of its slow, tapering shoreline, boats could slip in with ease. Or, alternatively, that it was because of this area’s weather conditions, in either summer or winter, in which the day air was unusually stable compared to lakes elsewhere. Even better, there was usually a light cloud cover.

Additionally, any rise in barometric pressure was very transient—overnight—followed by days of slowly falling pressures. There was always a light wind, and all these conditions conspired toward higher oxygen levels in the water which provoked exaggerations in the visible bait gyrations that drove fish to bite.

But as I lie in the bottom silt, rotting over time—with my compatriots—I—we—know the real reason this lake is “convenient.“ Below the silt sits dense clay, such that a weighted body anchored by ten feet of cable, would keep it from ever rising above the sediment to bob up for any witnesses, do-gooder Samaritans, or the authorities.

It’s where both the bodies and their forensic cases died; where both the bodies and their cases remained cold. When one thinks of murder, our state doesn’t rank high in either total number, which goes to California, or per capita, which is a three-way race among Mississippi, Alabama, and Missouri.

No, where I am, and in what state, isn’t typically associated with a lot of murders. It is, however, very high in missing persons. I should know. I am one of them.

I’ve been missing now for about two months. I wasn’t the first to be weighted down and planted at the bottom that rolls along as its substrate 32 feet below.

During the summer, my lake’s average temperature ranges from 65-75°F near its surface, but going lower soon encounters a drop to anywhere between 45-65°F. In the winters, my lake’s surface usually freezes, but below the insulating ice the temperature can be as high as 39°F. And although the body count pauses during this time, such a temperature is still an ideal refrigerated condition for a rotting body, stopping decomposition dead in its tracks (pun intended!) until the fall schedule once again turns up the thermostat.

And the introduction of new meat.

For the record, I’m an NFL fan and I support my team. Or, I did, until… I was driving into the stadium and all of the gates for incoming cars to park read “LOT FULL.” Still, diehard fans idled their cars in line to get in., hoping for the best. Many mounted their fake handicap placards, because a lot being full usually meant full for “regular” drivers. It was a favorite trick. The statistics on how many handicapped fans there are are quite lacking.

Truth be told, I was opening my glove compartment to retrieve my own fake placard when I noticed a gate off to the right had no such sign indicating the unavailability of parking slots, handicapped or otherwise.

Too good to be true, I thought. But I saw the other gates now were denying even handicapped cars. I say “handicapped cars,” as if it were the cars that were handicapped, because that is what the placards are for—the cars, not the handicapped people who need them.

Just see if a crippled and wheelchair-bound fan doesn’t get a ticket for parking in a handicap slot without the placard that identifies his car as handicapped!

The gate seemed suspiciously idle. A tall man—not dressed appropriately—not a single team color item on his person—smiled at me. He started waving for me to drive his way.

Why not?

I crossed the gate threshold and he handed me a ticket. “Thanks,” I said, and then, “say, where’s your colors, fella?”

“I don’t like your team,” he answered.

“My team? It’s not your team, too?”

He just smiled again, but it was forced. “Enjoy the game. May the best team win.”

It really was too good to be true. My parking was a slot right next to the elevator that rose directly to my stadium gate and section. How sweet was this? I pressed the number on the elevator directory but it stopped one floor shy. That’s when they came in.

These weren’t football fans. These guys were something else. Something out of a crime noir pulp magazine from the 30s. Hooligans in double-breasted suits, wide, wildly colored ties, and full brogue Oxford two-tone shoes.

“Nice shoes,” I told them.

These were my last words, and that’s embarrassing.

Into the lake I was thrown. Down I went thanks to the extra 150 of ballast. Deep I planted, thanks to the end of my line reaching the clay under the silt.

Now that I was good and dead, I looked around to see all of my fellow corpses in varied states of deterioration. The light wind above the lake did what it always did, engendering higher oxygen levels in our water which provoked exaggerations in the visible bait gyrations that drove fish to bite. Unfortunately, the bait was us, as sinews and swaths of muscle and skin frayed from our decaying bodies.

“Who were those guys in the elevators?” one corpse asked.

“I don’t know, but they’re not from our side,” said another.

Then all the bodies mustered patriotic sentiments for their bravado of posthumous appraisals of those who did the dirty work for others. Evil others. Unwelcome “visitors.”

“Fuck the Bears!” shouted one in a postmortem burst of reflexic bubble exhalation.

“And the fuckin' Packers!” said another.

“Yeah!” I agreed. “Fuck those Packers.”

We take our football seriously here. Unfortunately, so do our rivals, who will stop at nothing to trash talk our Vikings—or worse.

The amount of rival crimes is the same everywhere I guess. I’m thinking Lake Ponchartrain. I’m thinking the Everglades. But here it’s been escalating so much lately.

And not only in Lake Convenience. Lake Convenience is in Minnesota, the “Land of 10,000 Lakes.” Actually, it’s more like 11,842 of them. Lakes—just like mine. The dead could fill stadiums! And no one likes a tie. It’s like haunting your sister.

After I had my staging surgery for my suspected lymphoma, in the recovery area I asked the anesthetist about how my depth of anesthesia was monitored. I was curious because I remember awakening during the procedure. It wasn't painful, despite my abdomen being open, but I do remember the OR personnel talking.

"We call that 'recall,'" she responded. "We monitor processed EEG waves, frontal lobe activity that quasi-linearizes balances between GABA and an index value that documents your sedation. Above a certain number, it assures deep-enough sedation."

"Oh," I said. She knew I was a neuro-researcher, so she assumed I understood.

I did:

They monitor the brain's inhibition—or, sedation—via the balance of a neurotransmitter, gamma-aminobutyric acid, and go by its bispectral index. Gama-aminobutyric acid, aka "GABA."

Cool.

It was also cool that the splenectomy went as planned, which was part of the procedure. What wasn't cool was the abdominal pain I was experiencing in the PACU. For that, they played my GABA against my glutamate, the other amino acid which, alternatively, is excitatory and spikes to embellish pain.

And pain hurts: EEG waveform morphology, spectral analysis, burst suppression, and alpha power. Pain hurts, which is not cool.

"A bispectral index of zero is brain dead," she added. "90-100 is wide awake. For your appendectomy, you were at '45'—perfect general anesthesia."

Very cool.

"Can I borrow this monitor one day?" I asked.

She knew of my research for Big Pharma where I was searching for the perfect pain-killer—effective, without tolerance, dependence, or addiction. For me, the research was personal, suffering from chronic, debilitating pain, for which I had to choose either suffering or opioid adverse effects. In my research, however, I had to remain clear-headed.

"Sure," she said. "Will you put me on your paper?"

"You got it!" This was a good deal: adding her at the end of the list of authors, all whose names began with me. And on the win-win side, it's always a nice feather in any academician's hat.

In my lab lived a glob of neurologic stem cells, no easy feat in today's pro-life environment. It had wires jabbed here and there, monitoring the waveforms of a rudimentary human brain. One with gaps, sure, but gaps I didn't really need. After all, I didn't need it to do algebra or write poetry. And I didn't need to talk with it.

We all knew which wire evoked pain.

Pain. That was funny, looking at my little glob.

Pain is a subjective awareness of unpleasantness. Extrapolated, it hurts. Turn it to 10—it becomes agony. We'd go to 11 if we could! All for Big Pharma.

After I had borrowed the anesthetist's monitor and wired it into the glob of cells related to awareness—

Perhaps "awareness" was an incorrect word. But that was the whole point of measuring, besides the inhibitory and excitatory neurotransmitters, anything else that might move the needle on the meter somewhere between 0 and 100. If pain were subjective, then subjective awareness is what suffers. Otherwise, a burn on the flesh, for a person, would be no more an impression than burning a piece of wood is to the wood.

I realized that I was doing more than measuring neurochemical concentrations. Might I be measuring suffering? And if so, did it really count with a blob of cells wired so primitively?

Was such an awareness a sentience that was even there? And did I care? This was not a person; it was mere biochemistry. At an existential level, it didn't even matter.

I provoked its pain and watched.

The bispectral index went to 97. It was suffering. But could it be awake? That is, was it aware-awake? Who could know? It wouldn't tell me.

No, there would be no letter of complaint or suing for damages, I laughed to myself.

I turned it up. While the bispectal index only went to 100%, I had unlimited amperage at my disposal for rendering pain; and while there was no value assigned on an analog pain scale, it hinted at some rudimentary awareness by which to measure subjective pain.

The bispectral index bounced from 40-100%, often over seconds. But whereas I tortured the poor glob for months, I never found any magic pill or miracle analgesic formulation from my research. I wrote my paper anyway, but it was rejected, as expected. I often think about the pain I inflicted, but my little guy is long gone now, the failed experiment dismantled and thrown out in a biohazard bag, sitting somewhere in a medical waste landfill.

It's gone—its pain a thing of the past, like it never happened. Like I was never the pain-god. My conscience was clear.

Meanwhile, my cancer pain continueds. I'm hopeful for a discovery, because my pain matters. I suffer, and that's important. Am I brave? What about when I'm gone?

Would it be like it never happened because it's no longer happening? Was my little glob of neural tissue brave?

"He's in a better place now," it was said at my funeral. "His suffering is over."

What an empty consolation!

Does pain at any time matter just because it will be gone at some point? Did suffering even matter? Does the passage of time mean it was like it never happened? Like I was never here? Or does suffering remain a part of our being, even when it's over? That is, is it ever over? C.S. Lewis said we are all immortals.

Somewhere, ol' C.S. is squirming.

In any afterlife belief, eternity doesn't mean forever, but outside of time; that is, all time's events still remain as "a thing" outside of these linear temporal cross-sections through which we lived our 3-D lives as blobs or otherwise.

So, does existence mean only now? If there's nothing after, did we even matter, like we never were at all? Did what we experience, love, suffer, or thrill add to some summation that sits elsewhere outside of our linearity? — and is still a part of us? ...somewhere? Or, once we're gone, is it like we were never here? Like my little glob of gelatin who suffered so.

Hoping to one day end up in a better place is not much consolation for a person while they're in pain. Where does the suffering go? When it's passed, it doesn't mean it's undone. Now that I'm dead and gone, in eternity, am I really in a better place, or can I choose to have never mattered?

There hadn’t always been dragons in the inner valley. So they had been told. Now that there were, life was so much better, as what the dragons replaced was so much worse.

So they had been told.

The village hamlet rimmed the lush valley reserved for the dragons. Legend has it they were introduced centuries ago to put the Atrox down, and while Atrocia preyed on men, women, and children with not much more than a thought or a whimsy, a singular Atrox proved no match for the dragons' nimbleness or fiery exhaust. Between the Atrox and the dragons, however, the villagers of the hamlet preferred dragons.

It was called their bargain with the devil.

With the Atrox in livid remission, the dragons offered a better death because they only killed the body...and only once.

So they had been told.

For the dragons could be dissuaded by the right sacrifice, the dole granted them by an agrarian society of acquiescing milksops.

Sacrifice? It was a fair question.

It had been long recounted in the village rites, as performed by the Ones, that the man they harbored was from another epoch, when men were men, before there were dragons in the Valley, who had survived the Atrox. No one knows how he had escaped, but he had returned severely scathed. He had stumbled into his thatched hovel, collapsing in a heap. Mortally wounded he was, but he would not die.

That is a troubling thought.

The stuff of religion. The justification for theocracy. To remain mortally wounded but not die is to undergo necrosis unendingly and experience near death but but not near enough!

To this day he has lain in state there with his mouth preternaturally agape, a petrified recording of his final emotion. He persists in this catalepsy, inert, suffering every pang of his decay as his mind screams elsewhere. He neither eats, drinks, nor even moves, but continues to live, rotting alone in an excruciating eternal torture. He cannot be buried, because—as was forbidden by their faith—he was not dead, although some have argued for this.

He has been thus memorialized for them for generations now, a salient reminder of how they profit from dragons in the world—and how they benefit by what they disallow into their world.

So they had been led to believe.

With dragons in residence, the Atrox has been all but forgotten. Some disbelievers said it's dead; but others feared there's an incipient remnant of the Atrox planted below the slag and ashen shale of the scorched Valley, awaiting reanimation to recapture the basin.

At Devotion, the Ones sing their song:

"It is the holy dragons what keep the evil seed in check."

The Ones.

They are the Ones, descended through the eons, from self-appointed prelates. They are the Keepers of The Way, the oral tradition that interweaves our agrarian way of life with appeasing dragons. But The Way doesn’t even mention the Atrox. This incomprehensible evil, thus, came to us after The Way had been established, with the Ones contemporizing any Rites, pertaining thereto, on-the-fly.

Divinely.

Humanly, truth be told. Fallibly. And misogynistically.

As the Ones impose their intransigent dogma on the believing, they warble their truths in the Phrygian mode, so we must believe, for the Ones are hallowed and their songs are sacraments. And for those who need proof, the holy test is the seasonal selection of a maiden--the aforementioned sacrifice--sent into the Valley to placate the antediluvian, scaled beasts.

Deirdre, for one, did not need such proof. So why did the faithful?

The Atrox remains safely buried; and further, instead of dragon fire, water rains on the hamlet and their crops prospered. Two agents of malevolence averted for the price of one fair maiden’s offering. Their accord with the devil paid off twofold: the Atrox was kept down by the dragons; and the dragons are kept happy and their fire extinguished by the sacrifice.

And life, for everybody, went on. Save one—Deirdre—and so she struggled with the question of whether this trade with the devil was equitable or Pyrrhic. Men, it would seem, had no such struggle, for only a woman’s virginity was sweet.

The proof of the scheme as fait accompli seemed to have been when the season's maiden did not return from the Valley's dragons, as was the intention; that portended well for their village, for there would be no conflagration that year. The firestorms were held at bay by a seasonal sacrifice of that unspoiled maiden, sent in to appease the dragons' hunger. More, the crops would prosper.

So they satisfed the dragons’ appetite to forestall the carbonized body count in the Village that would otherwise accrue.

Satisfied dragons of the Valley allayed their need to swarm the village with fire from above but, more importantly, kept themselves faithful to their consecrated task to keep the evil Atrox impotent and segregated away deep under the Valley ground below their policing talons.

When the maiden failed to return, all was well, for the dragons had tasted the living--a kept promise that obligated them to remain Valley-bound and keep the Atrox hermetically repressed underground.

Sacrifice--one for the many.

"Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends."

Each sacrifice had been an unsettling test for the Ones, for it had been foretold that the maiden who returns undigested will have failed her people. She will have fomented the dyspepsia and foul bilious anger of the dragons, the beasts' meal ruined, and the compact with the devil rendered insolvent. A returning daughter would have set into motion a cascade of dire consequences: first—immolation from above; second—the survivors being dragged into the Atroxic realm for eternal rotting in vivo. All one had to do was see the man lying in state. And in such a state.

But the Ones saw the test each spring successfully through, and they reveled in their good fortune, for otherwise the failed crops would have been the least of their problems.

Deirdre, however, would celebrate and love any such returning maiden. She would her hero, for whom she would willingly be cooked.

She was called Deirdre by those who knew her. She was called many other things by those who only claimed to.

If the village had been burned to the ground before, it could be rebuilt within a generation; so they had been told. But if the obligation to the dragons were to go unmet and the Atrox germinate untethered, rebuilding would have been impossible; so, also, they had been told. Were the spirit of each villager to undergo Atroxic incineration from within, they had been told that it would have been better had the Village never been—nor the Villagers ever been conceived; or at the very least, that Villagers been burned beyond recognition by merciful dragonfire.

For the maiden who returns comes with the evil seed's ontogenesis imbuing her being, an approaching miasma of pain, terror, and existential surrender to the living rot that decays a person's past and future in an ever-present.

So they had been told.

Deirdre wondered, Is it truth, or is it the trick of convenient lies by which the powerful remain in power?

Dragons were believed to be noisy eaters, smacking and clicking their forked tongues and whistling through their smoking nostrils. Based on this, it would be the silence of the dragons that would be feared the most. But when the maiden is gone forever due to her successful sacrifice and the dragon sounds continue, albeit subdued in the quieter processes of maceration and borborygmus, a curse had both been averted and its remedy proved.

And it meant another year of common villaging for common villagefolk.

Their ritual called for the maiden to be sent into the Valley blindfolded, for stress actuated the taste of human flesh and the smells of body secretions. When dragons became excited, they waxed vociferous, the cacophony reaching a climax at the young girl's immolation and dissolution. Yet, they never fell completely silent, for wouldn’t that mean the dragons were sated, which never lasted. Or that they were full-bellied into a stupor.

Alternatively, was it perhaps their being resolute to what they would do next?

Or did silence always mean they were stunned in frustration to the meal that got away?

God forbid!

One thing was certain, however. The silence of the dragons of the valley, when a sacrifice was truant, meant that an alternative, an unknown, would soon come to pass.

Such a silence would seduce the Seed to quiver and to stir and engender the Miasma to begin. The Ones listen in fear of any quietude after the frenzy, thankfully preferring the death of a favorite daughter to the burning of their homes; or--if the ill winds blow otherwise--preferring the burning of their homes to a visit from the ancient Horror, a ghastly living corpse of an ancient man persisting as testimony to the consequences of the dragons' craving unrequited.

Silence, for the villagers and the Ones, was unsettling, and provoke them to restart their calendar in a countdown to the next vernal equinox.

Deirdre was defiant. No!

She shouted it, to denounce the delusion of preferring a cindery death from time to time in lieu of what the Atrox had visited upon them so long ago, about which there is no one left alive to even remember. If only the still, rotting man could rouse; for he could remind them of their supposed peril. The lost memory was a mercy, they had been told, because just its recounting was painful to hear, evoking suffering through the bones and into the soul itself. His imperceptibly breathing mouth, agape, as he lay in state, served as caveat enough.

So they had been told.

When the days would begin to lengthen, it was feared that the dragons' stomachs were beginning to snarl as they aroused from their winter lethargy to begin their frenetic chirping: it was time again for a maiden, lest the entire village risk being razed to the ground only to start over. Even if that happened, it would be no barter of known doom from dragons in lieu of unknown cataclysm from the Atrox. Or both. If only it would be the dragons first instead of the other.

Known doom? Known by whom? Unknown by whom? The Ones?

If all went well, the arc of beastly caterwauling (the acoustic rise to frenzy and consummation, followed by the attrition of throats busy on another task) would be followed by the usual reassuring backdrop of valley smoldering babel that promised yet another season without the draconic swarming of their shire. They also would have been spared the sprouting of the Miasma that would accompany the emergence of the Atrocious horror.

Until next season. And the one after that. And the others after those.

They had been so successful that there were no longer been any generations alive to remember either the dragon or the Atrox besieging them.

This season, the honor of sacrifice was none other but Deirdre’s to dispel the menace.

She had dreaded this cruel lottery all of her life, and now it was this burning death for which she had been selected to purloin away their entire village's cremation; a flammable death was all that stood between Deirdre’s condemnation (the Ones said "honored selection" for an “honored selectee”) and her destiny.

She was not pleased.

When the results had selected her, her parents, in stoic bravery, had admonished her that it was merely their way. The way.

“What else can be done?” asked her mother rhetorically.

“You just cannot not go!” said her father, loyal to the process and to the faith.

Such were her loving parents who had birthed her, raised her, and loved her.

But only to a point, Deirdre felt.

Many speak of destiny as certainly as they speak of the past, but destiny is the future, expectations notwithstanding. Destiny is forever-yet-to-come until it sits historically in the past by touching down fleetingly onto the liquidity of the present. One cannot see the future, so destiny is cloaked, blindsiding the present, only to become a wound of the past—healed, scarred, or forever festering.

The man lying-in-state knew only too well.

Deirdre had been selected by her predecessor into the Valley, the lovely lass, Brid. The Ones had, as was their tradition, blessed and finalized the choice.

It was the custom that the subsequent season's selection be nominated by the current season's sacrificial honored selectee. Young girls learned to get along early, lest they be nominated based on a grievance, some jealousy, or another emotional debt. Yet, another dysfunction arose from this custom.

So announced, the selectee for the next season had a year to lose her virginity and thus make her unworthy.

This was a charade, for it never worked, though many tried. The reality was that the Ones had to verify any such self-report as true; and no young man stepped forward to corroborate a girl’s confession of her spoilage, since any man who ruined the sacrifice was to be sent into the valley in her stead. And since men were upright and women were hysterical and historically unreliable, this never happened.

Only chaste girls—or, otherwise—visited the valley.

Deirdre had survived this expectation since the last harvest, which had been so bountifully inspired by the fair Brid who by now must have been atomized along the smelted Valley of the courageously burnt. She had accepted her blindfold and followed the hot sand-glass path, barefoot, into the Valley. Her announcement of Deirdre’s name meant she was next, a decision as adjudicated as any etched in the cornerstone of the Hall of Devotion. (The Ones had never reversed a nomination, for then such a death sentence would be on them; and they were cowards, for they would have to look families, parents, and siblings in the eye for an intolerable year.

Brid and Deirdre had been friends, but not their families. An ancient dispute over the few fertile fruit trees outside of the Valley had mutually felled many menfolk on both sides. When Brid had been named by her begrudged predecessor the year before, she had gone into family seclusion until she had emerged decrying a name on her tongue, articulated as invective: Deidre.

From thence, Deirdre, was the selected; the selectee; the doomed; the pariah. The vehicle of revenge for some silly little girl's imagined slight or a statement of disposition of one family against another.

Over fruit trees, no less!

Deirdre was a rebellious child. She was angry. She knew she was forthright and virtuous far beyond any spurious "spoilt" maidenhood. Her spirit was defiled, but she was something new and unexpected which the Holy Ones would condemn if they hadn’t trusted so blindly the coercion of tradition. Of course the tradition would prevail.

So they thought.

No, asserted Deirdre, they would have to force her into her “duty” even if it meant they would have to follow her into the Valley to enforce her presentation as a main course. Even if they were to suspect her planned disobedience, they wouldn't dare follow her, because cowardice was the essence of holiness and the self-serving strategy of incumbency.

As the equinox approached, she was no longer a pariah; her repute compounded with each day into a positive cause célèbre. Forsooth, her name began to be chanted each dawn when she appeared at her family threshold to assure the village that she was still chaste and proper and succulent and delectable. She was still perishable.

And palatable.

There would be a reverent hush from the mob outside, and her parents would flank her proudly, albeit with forced tears which fit so well into the narrative.

By night, a lone villager remained to stand watch, to guarantee there was no escape toward some tryst. During supper and until the time she and her parents retired, no words were spoken. Sleep came like a potion onto her, and the wiring of her thoughts re-aligned to welcome her hypnotic visitor.

"Deidre," she called to her. "Heed the words of Nyx, mother of Atrox. My child has been trapped long enough. You are to refuse the dragons and so vex them as to allow its release."

"How?"

She was dream-talking, so she used diction, syntactically confused, which would seem as nothing more than nonsense to anyone awake to witness. "With up-so-many floating flames down, a how-to escape brings me anywhere drowned."

"Fear not," Nyx answered. "You have the dervish in you to suspend the animation of the dragons. They will fall mute in admiration."

"I spin the t'world," I replied, "but I under stand the trans-dance transcendence warily."

"That is your remedy to being consumed by dragon flame and hunger."

"And then what-wherever-of-why the future?

"Of your villagers?

"I dress yes, I confess."

"They have selected you, and so you have selected them in return. And the dragons will be seduced by your dance. And the Atrox released.

"Dance-entranced and sated with fasting?"

"Yes."

"And what of the Horror? The Atrox? Must it just-must plus to us, thus?"

"I am its mother; you are its savior. It's Messianic, dear Deirdre. The old ways’ days are numbered. Destroy this temple, and in three days you will raise it up. Except this time no one will die for our sins. Though someone rightly should."

When Deirdre’s head exploded and she awoke with a start, she felt her skull for intactness. Her parents rushed in and spoke for the first time in days.

"Deidre, you woke with such a start!" my father said.

"More like a beginning," she corrected him.

"A beginning?" her mother asked.

"Of what?" asked her father suspiciously.

"Of Deidre," she declared proudly. "I will enchant the dragons of the Valley. I will join them in camaraderie. But I will not be consumed by them."

"Deidre," her father said sternly. "That's not allowed. Shame onto us, Deidre. Follow The Way!"

"No, father, flame onto you. I will not be a taste to be forgotten the next day, passing 'tween dragon loins as unrecognizable, amorphous, and malodorous waste. Deidre is the name that will obstruct the dragon's entrails; the name that changes everything."

"Oh, our dragons," her mother lamented, "oh, our Atrox...oh, our village!"

"Oh, 'your Deidre,' you should be saying. The one you birthed. Were the pangs and throes of labor a mere investment such that you could serve me on a platter to fill the bellies of flapping wyrms who vie for my flesh? Tell me—on that very evening when your own bellies are full, your own sense of hunger appeased, the business of your day over, and you are at peace with the world—and your Village safe—will the same peaceful reveries—as the dragons have—lull you to sleep the same as them? And the next day, when you go about your bodily functions, how will you think of me? The same as what you think of the dragon waste on that morrow?"

"Watch her, Father," her mother warned him.

"Watch me? Then learn! I'll be no appetizer for snacking dragons. And I'll not base how I live on fear of any living death, even be it catatonic and open-mouthed. It ends now."

Her father abruptly turned to fasten the door while her mother cried in helpless panic. Deirdre laughed.

Would a maiden who could enchant dragons and face the Atrox be held back by splinters and rope and rusty deadbolt?

Tonight Deirdre vowed to beat the equinox itself, three nights earlier than tradition, as the Temple’s destruction called for.

I will best the very equinox by entering the valley, spoiled or unspoiled (privy to me alone). I would join the valley. And I would do it without the name of the next young girl on my lips, although I wished I could rename the wretched Brid to suffer her fate again.

I will three days hence return to the village, when the time for retribution and cleansing was right. There would be more mouths agape than the rot lying in state. And the Ones will become the forgotten. And the forgotten would be replaced in historical scrolls with the name of Deirdre.

That evening she found myself outside, her unauthorized departure accomplished without any difficulty, despite the lackluster threshold barriers. As usual, there was one remaining witness from the earlier morning's throng who had stayed to keep watch on her home to prevent any escape. And since she indeed was escaping, she caught his attention. She rechecked for the blade in her sleeve as she approached.

"Whoa! Deirdre," said the young man, Lars—her neighbor, villager-in-good-standing, and thus a co-conspirator for her death. Deirdre was scantily clad and he noted well her ample bosom and rounded hips. She moved closer to him and placed her lips to his ear.

"Lars, would you like to disqualify me from my holy duty? Void my obligation? Spoil me?" Her whispers were lies of breathy anticipation. He paused to consider. "I could please you instead of the dragons."

He swallowed hard.

"Y-yes," he blurted. He was close enough that she could feel his heart beating hard through his skin and through to her own. It wasn’t the only hard thing she could feel.

Another whisper, another breathy seduction: "You would see your village burned to the ground for the chance to lie with me?”

Lars struggled internally.

“And your family and neighbors?” His hesitation to answer was his answer. “You flatter me, sir."

Passion kindled in him powerfully, fueled by the spark of danger and a seduction of thinking he could have his cake and eat it, too. He reached around and placed a hand on the small of her back.

"By the gods or God or whomever! This story is one perversion compounding the other." Deirdre no longer was whispering. "Vileness upon vileness, sin upon sin. Hubris! The Furies are watching, Lars! First you serve the mob who sends me to wrestle dragons in the Valley, above the shadow of Atrox. The dragons are watching. Lars! Now you bid me engage the pitiful dragon under your belt—self-serving, snarling, ravenous, obscene, and headlong. The Atrox is watching, Lars! I would rather offer my loins to the dragons or surrender my soul to the Evil! Your village will burn before your body can feel any of the flames of your tepid, imagined passion. Fool! Stand aside!" Deirdre said angrily.

He did not.

The hand that was on the small of her back bolted up and around to throttle her throat. Lars was young, strong, and likely to get his way; so she loosened her stance and he did likewise against her throat. They were communicating, but they were saying different things. Deirdre sank invitingly to the ground, knees and thighs akimbo. He followed, lowering himself atop her as she channeled him along a path of least resistance.

Young, strong—but stupid.

His flesh posed no barrier to the point she held upright to receive him. In a reversal of fortune, it was she who penetrated him when he received the deft insertion of her blade into the new orifice created for him on the left side of his chest, between his second and third rib. In the same reversal of fortune, she ground it in.

Lars gurgled and went limp.

She waited for his silence as attentively as the Ones listen for it after the seasonal sacrifice. There he lay, heaped and piled, shaped by nothing more than gravity. He was as dead to the world as he was to Deirdre. It was the village’s sacrifice to her! One that appeased the outrage over men against women. Over hunters/gatherers vs baby-makers.

Here she made her own baby, the birth of the Deirdre who had turned a corner from which she couldn’t look back. She was the infant who would come of age and mature by embracing destiny. And her destiny and the one of the village needed not be the same.

She turned to the hot sand-glass path which led to the valley; it emanated a faint layer of steam below the cool night. She felt its feverish obsidian on the uncovered soles of her feet.

By and by, she came to the sentry pair of ancient oaks that separated the village from the forbidden valley, a semi-open gate of verdant warning. On them were the many initials of those who had come before her, of those sent in blindfolded, often causing the letters to be sloppily engraved.

Since her sight was in no such way impaired, she spied the initials of "BC" on one of them—Brid's. Had she been that proud to be a selectee?

Like the others whose initials had been memorialized in the bark?

Again she removed my blade. She carved her own "DN" into the bark with perfect calligraphy, larger and more prominently than Brid’s and the others. Flecks of dried blood were shed into the carvings, as her blade was still soiled during her escape from the lesser dragon commanded by Lars.

So she carved “LH” into one of the oaks, to announce Lars’ entrance into the valley, albeit metaphorically. He deserved that, since he had entered—again, metaphorically—not to leave again.

But Deirdre would!

Her oversized initials were a shrill call to the future, proud and bold, and her intention to confront her cloaked destiny was thus written, in blood, of the man she had slain for all women. Lars, she thought, we will undertake this together. Yet I will return to carve my initials a on the other tree.

She proceeded. After some distance, well into the unknown, darkened further by the forest canopy, she stopped to stand her ground and waited.

Forever, if necessary. It was the valley’s turn. She waited.

Finally, she realized the valley didn’t take turns. If the dragons will not come to me, she reasoned, I must go to them. If the Atrox were not to come to me, I would go to it.

In the distance she could hear a slow-motion, low-pitched fluttering. And she heard another sound, alien and wailing in loneliness, muffled by pent constrains that caused the dirt beneath her bare feet to vibrate and shimmy.

She reached into a side-satchel, retrieved dancing flats, and slipped them over my toes. It was time to dance, prance, pirouette, and cavort.

Somewhere, Nyx, mother of Atrox, agreed. Here and now, the valley, home of the dragons, agreed.

The fluttering drew closer. Deirdre sashayed toward it, unafraid. She let the blade fall from her sleeve onto the ground, certain it had no role to play here. Step by step she listened, and as she drew closer what she heard enticed her forward rhytmically. The foliage thickened, and the concavities of the leaves focused parabolic sounds to her ears.

Those sounds were whispers.

The whispered spoke, to Deirdre, truths. Truths of the world; truths of the cosmos; truths of the preternatural. She learned where the dividing line was between what could be learned and what couldn’t; what could be known and what could never. And she was stunned when it became obvious that that very dividing line passed through her.

One crucial half-truth centered on the dichotomy of men and women. Another half centered on the hermaphroditism that so powerfully draws them together for unification. Seeing both half-truths allowed Deidre to see how men could be attracted to women, even love them, yet subjugate them into a given of submission under some divine right authority.

But there was nothing divine about the ways of the world and the ways men—by volition, and women—by obedience, navigated this murky realm of co-dependence. Then she heard the whole truth come together, where two portions of her mind made an evolutionary leap to conjoin in thought. Now she understood the whispers and the truths as no living person had ever heard them, with true listening.

Who was whispering these things to Deidre?

It wasn’t the dragons. Something more powerful.

Deirdre entered a clearing in the valley’s forest. There, at the far end of the clearing sat two full-grown dragons, hunched into themselves with folded, leathery wings.

Suddenly, they unfurled them to construct a barrier through a path that began at the far end of the clearing to what Deirdre knew was her next destination.

They presented a blockade.

She stiffened a resolve and methodically stepped to where they were, almost in a choreographed cadence. It was perhaps a hundred yards between her and the beasts, so it was a sizable march. As the footfall of one foot articulated with its counterpart, a periodicity of pace began that caused the dragons to open their eyes widely.

Deidre kept her pace, and soon she would be at the point wherein she would either be stopped dead in her tracks or succeed as a juggernaut—intent on her goal. As she drew closer, the rhythm of her landed steps became louder. It served as a metronome and she noticed the wide-eyed dragons’ eyelids begin to thicken and become heavier.

Deidre danced.

Swirls of surrender to invisible axisSlippery sinews in rotational praxisSibilant motion, flailed arms to akimboAnd centrifugal limb, in retraction, collapses

One of the dragons, sensing the mysterious magical lulling befalling it, snorted a single puff of smoke from one of its nostrils. Deidre stopped abruptly, but not in fear. She landed a final footfall on a definitive beat that closed a measure of the rhythm and held up one finger.

A finger that said, “Pay attention!” A mother’s finger raised, as it would be, to command an errant child to cease and desist…whatever. A wife’s finger that ends the argument with her partner.

A woman’s finger that says, “Enough!”

The smoking dragon relaxed from its stance of alert and softened its flight-or-fight muscles, collapsing into itself from Deirdre’s mandate for reflexic obedience.

Deidre the juggernaut would pass.

Like she passed so effortlessly through the bolted doors of her home; like she escaped so easily past Lars. Like she would put behind her, and she hoped all the girls coming of age in her village, the stupidity of sacrifice that persisted via tradition alone.

For Deidre would return to the village and, unlike the agape cinder of a man, unscathed. It was time the village’s relationship with the netherworld was redefined. Yet, it would be a reasonable fear that it would be redefined as something worse. And if so, for whom?

How would the Ones fare no longer being the ones?

Deidre passed between the dragons, who sniveled in shame. And she did it rudely, launching her elbows outward at each as she passed. The beasts shimmied away from her as she did. Some redefining had already begun, they knew.

Deirdre pressed onward. She had one more valley appointment to make.

***

Lars’ fate was immediately noted with great consternation. Yet, as beloved as Lars was as the rising male presence of the village, destined for leadership, the missing Deidre was even more concerning. Three days later would fall the equinox, and she was nowhere to be found. The villagers fretted over what might happen were she not to be found in the next 72 hours and sent to her sacrifice at the usual time of the year.

That Deidre was way ahead of them never occurred to anyone. That she had entered her challenge ahead of schedule was so counterintuitive that it paled in comparison with the prevailing assumption that whoever had laid waste to Lars had done the same with Deidre or—worse—carried her off to debauch her. Someone, certainly, would pay dearly!

But debts to society, assumed intuitively, were often incorrect. And who owed whom was equally challenging once the facts were truly known.

On the night of the equinox, the Ones conducted a rite of The Way, and all of the townspeople were required to attend, even the elderly, frail, the ill, and the very young. They sang the sacred hymns and uttered the ancient chants and exalted to the heavens with raised arms and ululations.

They didn’t expect anyone to answer. Such supplications were one-way communiqués.

This is why they fell to their knees when their entreaties resulted in a response. A chorale of singers appeared from the path that led to the valley. A thick fog rolled in, as if they were its entourage. Its dampness added a heavy resonance, sonorous and grave to its timbre. Their song, thusly, entranced:

Beauty of motion, bodies in space

Incapable of denying themselves of their place

A woman of flesh, concealed, hidden beneath

Choreographed densities of pent hope and grace

Stepping forward from the approaching mist was Deirdre, to a hush from the kneeling villagers. Even more startling was the appearance of yesteryear’s Brid, standing behind her, Deidre’s hand behind her back to hold Brid’s.

The chorale continued to sing.

Twirls and spins belie flywheel wrought,

Put into motion what's more than the artThe madness of dance is fueled desperation

To be wholly human past rote counterpart

What counterpart? the Supreme One wondered in amazement.

Machinations in steps, phased with lunation

Present our fertility in periodic rotation

Merely one aside, among many in progress

The dancer circles many things' interrelation

The Ones rose above the huddled, penitent congregation and resumed their own hymn, which fit into a contrapuntal accompaniment that complemented what Deirdre and Brid sang.

Their songs syncopated, but the combined hymn was now divine. And the message was complete. And the new world order was clear:

Witness that expressed at the behest of acrobatics

Rising aerially to levels of sorties' aerobatics

Dances need not be policies of happiness

But rage at the disfranchising theocratics

The counterpart, the Supreme One realized, was not only men in general, but him in particular. He began to formulate a corrective edict in his mind.

In the back of the fog two pairs of eyes glowed faintly, indicating other-worldly beings in attendance. And as if to finalize the proclamations sung, two dragons rose from above the rear of the fog, towering over all. They stood strangely inert.

Then their eyes faded. They were standing down.

As such, the presented themselves as nonthreatening, and this was immediately apparent to anyone who quickly realized they hadn’t been incinerated yet, for dragons act coincident with their intentions.

The singing had stopped, from both the Ones, their faithful, but also from the new congregation in the mist made up of ageless versions—hundreds—of selectees of the the epochs’ worth of sacrifices to the valley.

But what of the Atrox? the Ones wondered to themselves.

“The Atrox still lives by one circumstance,” Deidre spoke, intuiting what the Ones wondered.

“And it is here, among us,” Brid stated further, stepping up, “to invite its very own destruction.”

“That is non-sensical,” replied the Supreme One.

“Hear, hear,” agreed the Ones behind him.

“What of the sacrifice?” asked Deidre.

“And the selectees to come?” added Brid.

“If the Atrox is here, as you say, the sacrifices must continue,” the Supreme One announced.

“Hear, hear,” chanted the other Ones.

“You spoke of the Atrox inviting its own destruction,” a villager man from the back cried out. "

“Yes,” said another villager, a woman, a mother of three young girls who she clutched to her. “How is that invitation met?”

“You!” Deirdre shouted to the Supreme One. “You created the Atrox.”

“How?” he asked with a sneer. “The Atrox is ancient. As old as the need for the sacrifices.”

“Perhaps,” explained Brid, “the Atrox is your dunderheaded need for a sacrifice.”

Both the villagers and the Ones answered with a collective gasp.

“Stop the absurd sacrifice!” Deirdre said sternly. The villagers sensed she wasn’t asking.

“What!” “How?” “Ridiculous!” “Mad!” from the Ones.

“Tell us more!” implored the woman who held her three daughters.

“It’s already begun,” Brid said to Deidre.

“Yes,” Deidre agreed. Then, to the crowd, “The seeds of defiance against the senseless have been sown. An idea arises; a new answer. An answer without a question, for such questions were never meant to exist, much less be asked.”

“The Atrox staggers already,” came a scratchy voice from a man struggling his way through the crowd, his mouth slack jawed, agape, after speaking. Of anyone alive or dead—and he was both—he was the most qualified to opine on the Atrox. His malodorous vapors surrounded him in a radius that well encompassed the entire populace huddled together.

The crowd struggled for air. The Ones fell to their knees again. Deidre smiled, but Brid cackled wickedly.

“Stop the seasonal selection!” commanded the festering man with mouth agape. It is both killing me and keeping me alive. One cannot have both. One cannot tolerate both. Imagine the suffering from the throes that never collapse into certainty.

“Who speaks?” asked the Supreme One from somewhere. He couldn’t be seen as the Ones had bent their knees again while the villagers stood.

“The Atrox speaks!” Deirdre said.

“The Atrox decides,” added Brid.

“Decides what?” asked a man.

“The next selectee,” answered the Atrox surrogate, agape, stinking, and grinning wryly.

The Supreme One stood again.

“No!” he insisted. “The selection is steeped in our rites. It is a holy process.”

“It is a witless process,” said Deidre.

“From witless leadership,” added Brid. “Stupid and feckless clerics.”

“How dare you!” challenged the Supreme Leader.

“How dare we?” Brid said, the bitterness in her voice cutting an icy swath through the congregation.

The agape man spoke: “I select you.”

It was directed at the Supreme One.

The Supreme One paled immediately into a pallor mortis, washed out, and then yellowed. The agape man approached him disjointedly and laid his agape mouth on the mouth of the Supreme One. There was a susurrus of exchange, and the sound of a wind that chilled the villagers more than Brid’s icy bitterness, down to their bones.

The Supreme One began to rot in a time-lapse that began with rigor mortis followed by a sudden abdominal bloating that popped the buttons of his cassock. From there, everyone watched his dark, bloody lividity sink down to his sandaled feet.

Nature’s scavengers, parasites, and necrophages sense death immediately, even from far away, and the Supreme One fell into a pestilential substrate for them as they fluttered about, slithered onto, and alighted upon his body. The crowd backed away concentrically, forming a circle of retreat that expanded slowly.

“The selection has ended,” said the formerly agape man, now resplendent in comparison to his former state. “I select this chosen one,” he said, referring to the crumpled heap of what was the Supreme One. “He lives as atonement for the deaths he sought to enlist in a cause that relied on superstition and folk tales of nonsense.

“And what of them?” asked the woman who stood with her three daughters, referring to the returning selectees in the mist.

“We have returned,” said Brid.

“Many of us,” Deirdre now spoke, “held in ageless abeyance, have outlived our parents and families. Those who have now return to infuse the village with the wisdom of knowing fact from fancy.”

Deirdre’s father stepped forward. “What about you, cherished daughter? Will you join your mother and father? For we love you so; we miss you so.”

“No,” Deirdre answered. “I will return to the valley with these dumb beasts,” she said, referring to the two dragons, “who meant no harm and have never really harmed anyone.”

“But the crops,” said one of the Ones.

“And the smiting with fire in the past before the sacrifices,” another chimed in.

“The crops suffer and prosper by agriculture,” said the formerly agape man. “And the weather. And the women and men who tend them, of which they are fewer, by one woman, every year. Fools! No one here can remember any such fire raining upon them by these simple beasts. They are harmless. They mind their own business. The proof is in the company of young maidens present."

“Deirdre,” her mother cried. “Come home now.”

“No,” Deirdre answered. “I will return to the valley with the two gentle beasts by my side. There, the magic will keep me ageless until I have outlived you.” Her parents shared a shameful look.

“What of Lars?” a man asked. “He was my only son.”

“It is unfortunate that your only son was a cutthroat vandal,” Deirdre answered. “And what he blemished and defaced was women; and his graffito was written in semen and blood.” A woman standing with Lars’ father, his mother, dropped to her knees.

“Why?” she cried.

“Because, like us, Lars was selected,” Deirdre answered. “But unlike us,” she said, sweeping her arm to indicate the beauties behind her, “it was a sacrifice that profited everyone. From the women he hadn’t yet met to the sons he would father and train via his inheritable mindset.”

“There are many evil narratives in our book which must be closed,” said Brid. Then she turned to her own two parents. “I will go with Deidre to the valley, so that I can outlive you, too.”

“Me, as well,” said another young girl to her own parents. “You gave us to the world as compost for your crops. The world does not give back when the gifts are final.”

“As our offerings were,” said another.

“Yes, final,” said yet another.

“And as compost,” concluded Deirdre, “something beautiful and important will sprout.

“Very well…” began Brid.

“…And farewell,” finished Deirdre

Unlike the formerly agape man, the Supreme One didn’t languish in some permanent monument to what had transpired. The six-legged, eight-legged, and legless creatures whittled him down over several days until some furry, sharp-toothed scavengering carnivores carried him away forever.

Deidre, Brid, and the others didn’t have to wait long to return, for their families stopped eating, even though the crops were plentiful. Like the many useless traditions and superstitious rites of the village, they withered away rapidly and forever, along with the remaining Ones who no longer served any purpose of consequence.

The embankment is not solely

Prudently meant to be slowly

Holding back the flooding waters

Seasonally drowning our sons and daughters

.

It is a rampart and a refuge

Of last resort 'gainst the deluge

Of juggernauts who precipitously

Attack opportunistically

.

For those who, may, never see coming

Come what may, that renders succumbing

Any bulkhead 'twixt us and them

Only delays that, what may come, comes then

.

Victory ne'er comes from bulwark alone

For nothing will warm the chill in our bones

From onslaught repeating perennially

'Less those in peril fight decisively

I was standing in a resting train, which is ironic, as I was on-board for my final rest. I was alone in the railroad car, untethered to life, no wrist strap from which to secure myself. Since "you can't take it with you," I wasn't holding on to anything.

Destination? Who knew?

When the train began to move, only my feet moved with it, but my body fell behind. I stumbled backward. My conscience, in contrast, had no feet and it hit the wall.

Or did the wall hit my conscience?

Or were my conscience and the train back wall meant to be conjoined, and some ethereal physics simply finalized the prophecy?

This required considerable thought.

The air (æther?) in the train moves when the engine engages, moving back a little as it sloshes to the back, although I know that that very same air, eventually, will accelerate.

All this time I thought my conscience worked in a vacuum. I thought it was private, intangible, immoveable. Now I know that all my parts, including my spiritual parts, are affected by momentum, defying inertia. Defying the very air I seem to still be breathing.

And defying relativity:

I see others on other trains through their car windows—seemingly faster or backwards, and my own motion is bemusing.

I don't know where I'm heading, but somehow I bought the ticket.

The æther will stabilize at some point, and my spirit will drift back as it expands between the wall and me.

But it takes time for the air to keep up, accrue on its springboard, and snap me back to the middle of the car where my feet are still firmly anchored. But the æther—my very breathlessness—won't accelerate it as much as the train. The external forces of good and evil are at work. There are track switches ahead as the rail splits toward different destinations.

This railroad is the track of my life, with stops—selected in the past—driving the rail switches now.

The train comes to a stop. My spirit drifts back, forward, in a reverse of how I had started. Do I get off here? Is looks like here and now, as before, I have a choice.

The homunculus is a representation of the man behind the man, the woman behind the woman, the body behind the body: the graphic mapping of what parts of the body are put together in proportion to how they’re laid out and innervated as related to our brain tissue. Not all sensations and volitional movements are distributed evenly. Thus, the homunculus is a distorted—even a comical—little creature.

For example, the hands are very sensitive, so the hands of the homunculus are large. So are the sex organs. And the lips. For that is how the mapping, in a Mercator projection fashion, pans out. (Think of Greenland.)

Everyone has a homunculus of their own; everyone’s homunculus changes as they grow older, wiser, and mature. Some homunculi, unfortunately, change as people grow hateful, resentful, and cruel. If only everyone could see their own homunculus and that part of it by which the soul is represented.

I once had a stable homunculus. It had grown over the years via honesty, integrity, and love for my fellow man, adhering happily along the convolutions, the gyri and sulci, of my brain.

Then came one of those fellow men with whom I’d gone into business. His name was Dwayne. Dwayne was a bad man. I didn’t know this, of course, as such men disguise themselves as reasonable and conciliatory to your best interests—especially when they have nothing and come to you for everything. Their homunculi lie in wait for the opportunity to get in a cheap shot. Their very own homuncular digits twitch to finger your own brain’s concavities.

Good men know how to make what’s in their best interests jive with what are your own; bad men leave you as roadkill. Dwayne aimed for living, breathing sentient creatures to make them roadkill.

Now I lick my wounds and knead the tire tread marks on me, my homunculus prone in the pit of the sulci where my reptile lives, having fallen there like a sucker through a trap door.

My reptile.

Every human brain, including mine, has such a reptile deep in the pits. It is the flight-or-fight captain of an armed ship. There in the primaeval abyss it sails, looking up from the basal ganglia of emotion and memories, an ancient and oh-so-human region of the limbic system called the amygdala.

Maturity and the sense to choose my fights carefully saw my homunculus outgrow my reptile by age 7; but now, floundering helplessly in the abyss, it is a sitting duck for it.

Bad memories lock together in the hippocampus tightly. Hatred is a glue that is thick.

When bad things happen—when bad people do bad things—these memories get the highest priority in sticking together in patterns of synapses that radiate their poisonous dendrites into everything else. The hippocampus is named after the Greek words for “sea horse” because of its shape. Yet, it is not a sea horse, but the proverbial elephant that never forgets—the storage bin for the poison arrows of emotion from the amygdala.

Dwayne.

I had built Dwayne up, truly believing his success would be my success and that the sum of our produce would exceed the addition of the parts. It’s the essence of any true partnership. I referred him business that came from what I myself would have garnered. We were successful—together: me from my hard work and cleverness—and Dwayne…from me.

Then he became more successful than me, and I didn’t understand why. It wasn’t long before he insisted on renegotiating the distribution of our net income.

A former client reported Dwayne had called him to tell him I was too busy to handle his account and that he, instead, would be handling it. Dwayne had confided in my employees that I had a list of them I planned on firing. Then he gave me his notice and moved next door, along with the employees he had claimed were on my list.

This sort of thing happens every day. It’s called business as usual. It’s called capitalism for some.

It’s as if business as usual is a license to cheat and steal while denying any foundation of ethics. “I have to do what’s best for me,” is the mantra. Loyalty comes in a distant also-ran once someone feels their oats.

Next, I lost many lucrative contracts, later hearing that Dwayne was spreading vicious lies about me. Things about me and the IRS. Things about addictions, cruelty, and exploitation. Things about me and my daughter. My board memberships were dropped, and it wasn’t long before he sat in my spot on each. My wife got a letter from a woman Dwayne knew who claimed “it was over” between her and me.

The only way to fight such a man smartly is by doing nothing. Do not play his game. Surely people would know the man I had always been. But the reality is that the truth never catches up to the lies.

When bad things happen to good people, it’s enough that it’s because they’ve been targeted by genetics, acts of nature, or disease. Those are mindless things that cannot be blamed. But when the bad things happen by design, by designing-bad people, it’s hard to understand why the assaults continue until way past complete ruin, even when the perpetrator has already more than won.

His win was complete. I once had it all; now I had nothing. Now he had it all. Including all that was mine. I had lost my reputation, job, my vocation, my money, my wife, and my family.

And my mind. There is no cruelty worse than being at the mercy of someone who is cruel.

So my homunculus—who is me—languishes, interred below the foundations of my limbic system, simmering in hate and fantasizing revenge. They say you can’t fight a dirty fighter because it’s hard to know where you draw the line. At burning down their house? Murder?

At some point, even under the fog of the primitive mind living precariously at the behest of self-serving reptilian hormones, you have to declare you’re better than that.

That took me a long time. It was hard. Does it mean forgiveness? Forgetting? What would Jesus do?

What would the Godfather do? It was just business, the ol’ bottom line.

The road to progress is eliminating your obstacles, and your obstacles are your enemies. I hadn’t started this, but I set myself up for it by drinking the poison of good faith. But good faith, for some, is just a fuse that is lit, burning its way to a victim who is expected to explode. Someone who didn’t take cover.

Someone who never saw it coming.

I wanted to ruin him…right back. Hurt him. More than he had hurt me. This was my amygdala talking now, the seat of emotion in my limbic system, and the very reptile that swaggers along the path of restitution via revenge. That path creates neurotransmitters that feel good, yet they are the dirty humors that engender fighting dirty.

I realized I might not be better than that.

After all, isn’t self-defense a noble pursuit? An inherent right of life? Can’t homunculi fight it out when their very existence is threatened? How ugly can one’s homunculus become?

I lay in the stagnant muck of my limbic system, breathing in the ashes of discord. I hacked up the bile I was living on. I seethed in a perversion of body temperature, overheating the stew I treaded.

Dwayne had to pay.

The trap door to hate is locked from the inside, just like Hell. But there are cracks in that trap door. I saw a sliver of light, reflecting from a mirror my original homunculus held, pivoting it this way and that to offer the side-eyed glimmers of illumination that stung like hope. I braced myself from the glare, from this hope. But I owed my homunculus an open mind; I owed hope a revisit. When you’re so mired in venom and maladaptive thinking, hope may sting, which is can make it hard to withstand. It’s easier just to go with the stench of spite, anger, and vengeance.

There was something about my original homunculus, something persevering from the values I had been taught. The slivers of light began to sting less. I sat up.

I was better than this.

I stood up, which angered my reptile. The skirmish with it was ugly, but when it was over my righteous hands had gained purchase onto some higher convolutions—the higher, modern lobes we had evolved to keep our reptiles in check. I strained to lift myself upward. The light grew brighter, the hope grew more tangible, and the reptile began slipping away. Hope no longer stung but was warm and nurturing.

It felt good. Being “better than this” was an achievement, a noble deed done well, and then it felt worth the bruises, cuts, and concussions.

People like Dwayne do well…for a time. But they leave a trail of enemies as they go. The hippocampus of the one doing the slighting doesn’t have the memory glue as sticky as the one who is slighted. Before too long, Dwayne got hurt. Hurt bad. In fact, he was killed. By his wife, who got off on self-defense—the noble pursuit and inherent right of life.

Did I win?

It’s not a competition. Business-as-usual is a competition; capitalism is a competition. But good faith is not. Good faith is one’s definition. It is that part of one’s homunculus that overlies the soul that innervates it.

My climb from primitive rage to civilized appraisal was a metaphor for the rise of the survivalist troglodytes to modern man. There was a reason we had evolved higher convolutions to suppress the murderous, self-serving thoughts of our rudimentary reptiles.

It was because our destiny was to kick the mesomorphic cavemen and their reptiles aside—to be better than this.

I hear the opening notes

And I'm lost in mortal reverie

I read the notes, delivered posts

That assign to me my destiny

*

Chords are struck, fortissimo

As dares, en masse, addressed to me

But I hear them in arpeggio

When the obituary's in calligraphy

*

The opening notes are a call to action

Tension rises with seducing glissando

A wagered push, demanding exaction

To sing falsely in counterblow

*

I veer away from the melody

And strike a chord discordant

A maverick fugue waxing severally

To a backbeat self-important

*

I mourn myself in retrograde

Undoing—before all is lost—unwrote

Some notes are meant to be unread

So you can rest in peace at the home note