Tag Archives: green

CHESTER: Guilt Trip

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The day after our zombie friend has  inadvertently wiped out an entire town by the hungry virtue of vice.

“I’m looking for information.” Chester settled onto a barstool. The pub was empty but for a priest slumped at the bar and its bartender who stubbed out his cigarette and took to polishing a glass.

“It’s about the Storied Woods, isn’t it? Just about the only reason folks stop by this godforsaken town.” He rubbed ferociously at the glass, peering closely. “It’s suicide, you know. Nobody ever comes out.”

“I’m aiming to go places no man has ever gone.” False braggadocio there, failing to camouflage the slight quaver of fear that caught in Chester’s throat, and the bartender knew it.

“It’s not that the place is lacking visitors. Just… nobody real comes out. That’s why we don’t mind the likes of you.” The man behind the bar shrugged. “There have been worse.” He put away the glass. “You seem to have a tale caught in your throat. I’m all ears and it’s a slow day.”

Dust settled. The priest woke up. Chester shook his head.

“There’s nobody around, and there ain’t much difference between a bartender and a priest.”

“O-okay. Father, I have sinned.”

“Wot’s that? Heh heh.” The padre nodded at the bartender. “A drink for my new friend, here.”

Chester protested vehemently, suggesting that it would be only a waste of money. The padre wouldn’t hear any of it. “As long as you’re paying,” Chester said, slamming back the shot of corn whiskey. It splashed on the floor, the padre who looked him up and down concluding, “Guess I shoulda listened. So, what’s your grief?”

So the zombie regaled the duo with his sad tale, culminating at the fateful meeting and concluding at the moment he stepped into the pub. The padre smiled a sad smile and said:

“Oncet I brought a boat load of drugs—the boring ones, mind you, antibiotics, aspirin, antibacterials, and all the like—to an impoverished people, they bellies all hanging out like they had gone and swallowed a watermelon whole, who wore pieces of green plastic (PCBs?) they found in the wastes through in their ears and noses and mouths and tongues and Lord knows what else, and I helped them.”

The padre settled his cheek against the smooth bar. Each burst of breath threw a fan of steam on the polished surface. He sat up, his fingers compulsively scrabbling for his brandy.

“I wanted to help them. The medicines I brought were corrupted. Poisoned. They died by the hundreds, painfully. An entire culture vanished before my eyes, and I was the one responsible.” The brandy tumbled golden in its glass until it disappeared into the padre’s mouth. He brought raw, blood etched eyes to bear onto Chester. “I lost my faith. In everything. The Lord, he had made me an angel of death. And why? To these people who most needed his help. I could not accept it.”

He gestured at the bottle. “I drowned myself in a sea of escape. I floundered in these dark and filthy”—nobody noticed the bartender nodding to himself. He knew too well, having had to replace his mop one time more than he preferred—“places until the Lord sent me a message loud and clear.”

The padre slapped the bar top with both hands. “It was you, Chester. You slaughtered an entire town by virtue of your raw hunger, unbridled with your selfish purpose. Me, I was trying to help, and help I did.”—bright beaded eyes raised towards the heavens—”I delivered them from their earthly prison, their pain and suffering, into the bosom of the Lord! I’m not a monster like you. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

“More brandy! It’s a time of celebration!” cried the padre. “So Chester, my green drippy friend, thank you! From now on, I drink for recreation only, not guilt!”

The bartender chuckled at that. “It’s business either way.”

The padre glared at him, as if saying see if ya get a tip, and took the proffered brandy. Chester was looking at the priest with horror. His guilt had doubled, trebled. What remained of his heart palpitated with regret.“Are you sure you’re a priest?”

“Who, me? No!” Guffaws. “T-that’s rich. You thought I was a p-priest?” Wiping laugh tears from the corners of his eyes, the man who looked like a priest told Chester an undependable tale of a whore with a heart of gold, a priest with a fish in his knickers, and himself, a man in the right place at the right time, who had the most to gain from it all. “Look!” he said, lifting a fish from his cassock. “Ain’t that a beaut?”

Shuddering, Chester left the pub and wandered until he fell into a farmer’s pen. Something pushed roughly at him amid curious snorts. After a while, he awoke engorged and covered in blood, sprawled smack dab in bull’s eye circle of stiff hogs with hollowed out brains.

He ran screaming into the morning as the cock crowed.

The Green Philosopher

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Olympos Mons split open like a god vagina and magma crept over its labial cleft. Martians ran in panic while the green philosopher perched on porous stone, pointing his finger skyward, swept by and said, “I told you so.”

The river of fire poured on, throwing up great slow heat shimmers and bursts of steam from extinguished bodies. The green philosopher on his stone watched the glass cities crumple with slow grace to rejoin the earth. His large purple eyes blinked slowly.

The lava was sluggish, almost stagnant. On his stone the green philosopher, antennae drooped with thought, chinned his hand. He saw the burning now and the wasteland his land would become. He looked at the pale sky and said, “So this is the price of being right.”

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…contrived visions…

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she peers through the stalks and brushes the cornsilk from her cerulean gaze with golden hands…small green boys caper in the tall rushes under a bloated red sun…a lagoon boiling with silver ripples as dark things twist in its depths…line of labor in the desert, plucking burning bushes to be thrown in long yellow bins…a trail of bubbles etching a line of blue breath as the fish god passes through its medium…orange men with long slender wings gambol above a watery marble, trailing their fingers through the russet clouds…black basalt is the relief which outlines these small, fur white people ascending the mountain…girl children with sad eyes huddle under weak shelters as it rains green frogs and blue snakes…a field ruined by grasshoppers and the wheat’s ward hangs from a tree in hopeless abandon…its corrugated steel rusted, its timbers rotted, its plaster and paint peeling, its streets and windows cracked, its buildings and stores crumbled, its soul decaying like the corpse on the road into the city…a hum of computer in an empty room that smells of morning coffee…roaches desperately race across linoleum, a black flag at their rear…shoes, countless matches and mismatches, fill the warehouse with a musky smell…candles gutter as the black nights blows through the red drapes…women weave baskets from the slender hairs of yellow-eyed cattails that root and lap at pond’s edge…songs that echo through its drafty streets, and a long dead philosopher asks if a tree can be heard when it falls with nobody around to hear…blue and orange turtles leashed to a sapling with bright yellow string trundle in a circle as the laughter of children echo over the hill…neon squirrels flicker through the park at night…old men sit on knurled steps to reminisce about the green days of youth and sip tea in a cloud of smoke…tin cans and aluminium kitchenware on small paraffin stoves splash ethereal blue on the walls of the cardboard shanty…the circle of stars, through the quickening ever-rushing fall of night and swell of day, wobble as the years pass…lazy dust in the lethargic bedroom…thin and bent, his spectacles reflecting monitorlight, he taps slowly at the keyboard

The Prodigal Son

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The wayfarer stood at the crossroads, holding a small leather satchel with gloved hands. He wore a long coat, with an upturned collar. His eyes, green like beetle sap, watched the crooked streetsign rattle in the wind, its mischief also fondly fondling his rich brown mantle of hair. His breath steamed from aristocratic nostrils that sniffed as a line of dust slowly grew from the west.

It screeched to a halt in a paroxysm of steam and dust. He could barely see the figure who crawled out of the contraption. It was only a boy! He affected scratched aviator goggles that he pulled from his eyes, snapping it onto a thick mop of dirty brown hair. His eyes, like blueberries in a barrel of water under a clear summer sky. Boy blue eyes. A wide grin redeemed the grimy face and a hand gloved with thick old leather reached towards the wayfarer. “Joannes. How do you like this thing?” The wayfarer took the hand gingerly and nodded. “Ashford. Ashford Blaxhill. W-what is it? I was expecting a carriage.”

The boy whooped and slapped the metal beast. “It’s a Steamhorse Deluxe! It’s a carriage… horseless! Car, for short. A beaut. It’ll take us where you’re going right fast.”

Ashford nodded again, nervously. He made to step into the carriage and lost his balance. With a cry, “Careful, hot!” the boy steadied him.

Ashford began to regret his excursion, but it was necessary. The boy did something with the carriage, uh, car, and it bucked into violent life, eliciting an involuntary cry from the wayfarer. Steam broiled the low, thin glass pane that faced them and the boy sniggered. “I heard that.” Ashford gripped the satchel until his knuckles became white. The boy laughed again, his goggles frosted. They were off, the car once more tossing up dust, headed for the road.

It flapped in the wide open spaces above the rolling hills and blue winding streams that made up the sun-spattered countryside of checkered orchard greens and golden wheat, above stone bridges and old, cracked roads. It was the very last of its kind, its species’ only survivor of Nature’s compassionate cruelty, and it ranged the land for a suitable nesting place for its precious hoard, tumescently tucked under the whir of its iridescent wings. Multi-faceted eyes gleamed, telescoped and its antennas susurrated a hum of approval; its slow drone upped the ante and it fell towards a copse of gymnosperms voraciously choked by twisting vines dotted with yellow topped blue blooms.

“WAHOOOO!” The boy bounced in his seat with childish enthusiasm. Ashford was beginning to smile. Once on the road, the going was much smoother, and admittedly, this new-fangled thing was surely faster than a horse drawn carriage. Something pulped against the windshield and he squeaked with fright.

“Oh, man look at the mess that one made!” The glass was a meaty smear, and a piece like a rainbow shard tinkled against the beating air resistance. Joannes stood, bracing his knees against the dashboard and reached over the windshield, wiping at the mess. He still handled the steering wheel and the car almost plunged off road, into dark forest. Joannes gave Ashford the little piece of rainbow. It was soft, like flimsy velvet, but it did not snap in his hands. He put it in a pocket.

They puttered past cornfields, stone cottages crumbling to ruin, rusted industrial complexes surrendering to choked foliage, invading morning glories, past chicory and datura and belladona that overtook the gravel bordering the ferrocrete, threatening to strangle the road. Foliage whipped their cheeks and they had to huddle to the center. Nothing grew on the ‘crete road.

It became prematurely dark. Clouds boiled a purple black cauldron in the sky and teemed with dancing lightning. Joannes had brought out a pair of Naptha lamps. It was an unnerving experience, as the boy had a way of doing things with seeming disregard for the road. Somewhere between the torchlight and fading visibility superstition had crept into Ashford’s mind. He heard cackles between the crackle of tire and road, saw foliage rustling with sudden motion. Witches weaving through the corn, and long skeletal hands plucking at the plants of secret magic, dark green fire of straddled broomsticks jetting through the stalks. Purple eyes that gleamed amid unholy incantations through mouthfuls of rat blood. Bat streaked air. Ashford clutched at his hair. The sun buried itself in the far clear horizon, the light disintegrating with a green flash.

The rain started coming down in stinging sheets. The boy shivered in his seat, and Ashford felt depressed. The lamps still swung and rattled on their hooks, flickering in their glass globes. Firelight in the distance. Joannes howled joyously, and seemed to get a bit more speed out of the monstrous contraption. They sluiced off the road, snapping a sapling, and rutted in the mud before finally surging forward. The car shut off, but they seemed to slide sidelong for many long moments before finally coming to a halt.

The house lay before them, its many windows aglow with welcome light and warmth. The screen door clanged open and a plump, matronly form in baby blue apron stepped onto the porch. Joannes was already making his way towards the hearth glow, but Ashford just stood in the rain. A gray hair in bun, crow’s feet on a map of wrinkles, spatula in hand. A smell of cookies smiled down at them. Relief flooded Ashford and choked his voice. It was not too late. “Father…”

The Blank Slate

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Darkness, the blank slate. Pop pop pop: White-boned skulls flash, of cattle, fish, frog, dog, human, a multitude of calcified blooms on the slowly greening tree that is greeting the light. A neon skeleton of ash flashes solid and boils with leaves and keys that keen in a high wind. Picture this. The disembodied skulls swing in the teasing wind, as if hung from rope… and they are.

Golden hemp, noosed at the necks of rotting corpse bodies slowly fading solid like a photographer’s darkroom trick. Bull’s head above a half fleshed ribcage, cobra vertebrae hissing raspily against paperdust snakeskin, a weasel writhes a facsimile of life under its dead-eyed glare, shark teeth grin at the irony of deathdealer dealt its own card, a man without a face but for a skull wears his skin like a loose robe. The skulls gain a light of their own, red and green and blue and purple and yellow and orange, in soft, blinking auras.

Ornamental tree. Raiments of diffuse death hung on the worldtree, coat rack of the dead gods; the gods have dusted, turned into the very earth the ash roots in, and the goddesses have splashed, a monsoon from which its root suckle greedily.

The Cat Lady

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Under the heavy curtain of the sky, two girls joyfully bound unto the empty park. The bright green of chlorophyll dominates the scene, and is draped by gray veils of rain. As they play wetly amid bright plastic and iron rails, we remain dry under a shelter’s roof and watch the lightning play over their heads.

A Cadillac pulls into the parking lot and waits for several long moments. The door opens and an umbrella appears, escorting a woman of advanced years towards us until she is also safely dry under the shelter. She carries a heavy plastic bag. She murmurs to us. My hand points to my ear and I shake my head: the universal gesture for deafness. Ahh, she nods. She understands. This town is accommodating.

She sets to work efficiently. First, a tin of water at the head of the shelter, just out of the rain. Six paper plates heaped high with dry cat food are distributed equidistantly around the shelter’s perimeter. Lumps of canned cat food are then deposited onto these piles. She coos, beckons.

From the rain-jeweled jade of summer foliage emerge, with wary tread, her wards. Parchment yellow eyes in midnight black. A calico dream. The overly cautious cream puff with a pinched face. They emerge from beneath dripping leaves to wait in the rain, the heavy droplets effortlessly leaping off their coats. Finally they dare, and come out of the rain. They feast with darting glances and nervous twitches.

I smile at them, then at her as she, umbrella abob, leaves the way she came.