Category: The Horse You Rode In On

This has seen several revisions, but this is the most recent.  Cheers.   I’m just a voice for now, and I try to be impartial, but this story gets me every time I tell it.  How many times? I don’t know. But it’s about love, I swear to God it is, the brutal iniquities of the world, and the thousand little doubts and demons crawling around inside everyone.  This is about what happened in the Strait those years ago, it being a shame so many people died. Let me tell you about Aloys and Sophie, poor Yair and Calloway, Leon…

Seven years ten months before The Strait of Taiwan Incident.   The last time Calloway saw Sophie was in the library at Edinburgh, just off George Square, those years before.  He rarely needed to go there; he wasn’t taking classes that would require referencing many books, nor was he teaching anything of the sort (or much at all, since his handlers had gotten him preferential treatment; he helped teach one class, twice a week).  He spent time in the library because he liked the firm, industrious quiet.  The place was a shrine to learned work, enlightenment, and the pursuit of…

Just a little date chemistry. Him a Scotch, her a white Russian, then they swapped for the second round, and they talked childhoods, music, and first kisses.  The alcohol and obvious thoughts that go along with such a topic left them both buzzing in a holistic, all-body sort of way, with warmed cheeks and glassy eyes, young and oblivious to surroundings, the air between them the only burden.  The bar was all well and good, smoke-free and half-full, the music not too loud.  It was the perfect setting for organic chemistry:  C19H28O2, C18H24O2, C9H13NO3, C2H6O, O2, CO2, etc., but that’s…

And you know, friend?  Coming from a not-so-impartial third party, she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, and ever would.  But don’t worry, he’ll see her much more before this all ends and we part ways.

For him, it was one of those days when you’re walking with a purpose, to actually get somewhere, and everyone just gets in your way.  It’s not that you’re even trying to swim upstream against the current, you’re trying to go with the flow and the flow is telling you to shove it up your ass.  It was one of those days that was “just one of those days.”  Aloys decided to buy an actual newspaper for the first time in years to sit and read outside, since it was a nice day, if windy.  He thought the physical act…

Aloys and Birna talked by the window, a flirtatious, smiley conversation filled with her hand frequently resting on his chest or hitting him playfully, and his occasionally resting on her waist.  He time and again peered out into Oslo from the seventh story vantage point.  The city was globs of light in the frigid darkness, and he thought about how cold it was out there, how the air must feel downright syrupy and fluid compared to the warm, dry glow inside.  He imagined that the air must be a slurry outdoors, a half frozen slush oozing through the streets and…

I think it might be time to tell you about Leon the shoemaker, and more of the world in which these fine folk breathed.  Leon lived in Lyon, France, and he was indeed a shoemaker.  Leon was the most revered and sought-after men’s shoemaker in the world, and he made men’s shoes exclusively.  Leather dress shoes, of course, he wasn’t stitching up boat shoes for the kids.  Leon worked on exactly one pair of shoes at a time and was the most masterful of master craftsmen.  He raised his prices only every couple of years to keep up with inflation…

The end of the universe isn’t pretty.  I’ve seen it.  It falls apart and slides into a gaping, chasmic cosmic pit that swallows up everything, and you can’t get away, because all the places you could run to are being gobbled up into the pit just the same as you, even as you jump from one piece of splintered existence to the next trying so desperately to find a safe haven.  You remember what peaceful existence feels like, but it’s gone.  In the end, you accept the hollow, because it means the turbulent, ugly, fucking torturous ride is over.  At…