And I Lie a Lot

When I was a kid mom said not to tell stories.  If I told stories God would know it and I'd go to Hell.  Hell was hot and smelly.  Angels never went to Hell; they always told the truth and wore clean panties every day.  I wear clean panties, but Mom never called me an Angel. 

I'll post short stories here, some poems, some chapters from novels.  Let me know if you like them, okay?
Here's one.  It's dark, it short, it's been published and I got paid for it.  The title is, "It Was the Child."

It Was the Child

The war had ended, but the people were not half finished with death.  They hid in the wet oak woods of autumn.  They ate little.  Hunger would force a return to their larders, and they would find the painful end which war had merely threatened.

I approached a former town.  Already a woman crept into the wind which rimmed the forest with ice.  A young girl followed.  Perhaps the child would be the first; she had no robe against the cold and strained town-ward against the grip of the woman's hand.  I had little time to prepare.

The sole remnant of the town was the gate; of that, only its coffered arch and the pillaged armory atop it remained.  The mounted stag rearing above them both had been struck through one eye with an arrow and was nearly toppled.  It veered slightly with the dark wind as if it were searching; perhaps for the townspeople, perhaps for a savior.  It was nonetheless blind to my approach, as are the living.  As I dismounted I again noted the woman and girl struggling beyond the corpse-littered field.

Perhaps it would be the mother.  She no doubt starved herself from over-sharing with her child. 

"It is often the case," I mused.  I spoke to my lieutenant, for I am a solitary and at times forget that speech wants a human ear.  He continued a little way, then pivoted and returned to my feet with upraised head.  His nose and whiskers twitched; his bare tail furrowed the mud.  "Nothing," I said in dismissal.  He returned to his errand.

The town was leveled and ash-strewn; were it not for the remains of its sooty walls, one might assume it to be volcanic spew.  Yet it offered beauty; daub when burn flakes, bursts and falls; the straw within it leaves black hatch-marks on a golden matrix.  The charred wattles that remain sketch a counterpoint across the yellowed fields.  Thus the former town.

I hobbled my steed and paced the maze of ruined homes.  Strange that people cling to so small a space of earth; one crosses it in so few strides.  Yet ask a huntsman or a warrior, inured howsoever he may be to sleeping without shelter; ask him, I say, to forego his narrow home; he will deny you.  People are varied, and with little more foresight than, say, my rodent aide.

I am fond of rodents and make them my study.  I have watched for contented hours as a beaver dammed a stream, or a packrat built his domed nest beside a tree.  Rodents will not return to their shelter if it is visited by man.  The reverse, however, is not true.

Across the field the child broke free of her mother and stumbled toward the town.  The mother gave a thready cry; her outstretched arms yearned but, weak, she sank among a scatter of slaughtered forms.  A shadow within the woods emerged, became a cloaked priest, and followed.  The mother remained.

"Perhaps the priest will recall the child," I said.  My aide ignored my voice; he entered a gap between stones.
The child reached the town, hesitated a last time at the priest's shout, then advanced.  The dark of her hair increased her pallor.  She was thin.

"Help me, sir," she called.

I was surprised.  "You see me?"  My deep voice may have made sher shy; she looked down and spoke more softly as she fumbled with one of her plaits.  However, she drew near.

"I am cold."

"And I am cruel."

"The cold brings more lasting pain that does your cruelty, sir."

"That is a thing you cannot know."

"I feel the cold, sir.  It gnaws my bones and stays even beyond the return of sunlight."

The priest hesitated, clutched the cross upon his chest, then thrust his hands into the sleeves of his robe.  I doubt he heard her words, but her bowed head and chastened gesture made it obvious she spoke to someone.

"Answer me, child," I pursued, "Do you see me?"

"Sir, I see your shape."

"You cannot see my face."

"I see your glowing eyes."

Thus already she was half mine; only the priest and Hope, his whore, could prolong the cold in this child's bones.  He came fast among the blackened homes.  The girl glanced toward him and hastened to make her point.  "And sir, I see your horse."

"What color is my horse, then?"

"It is not white, sir, but it is as pale perhaps as your brother's."

The priest struck his knee against a ruined wall, exclaimed, and fumbled at his belt.  He called a name which I did not understand; probably hers.  He called the name again.  Something flashed from his hand.

The child's weak sigh collapsed her body by a third its size even as it sharpened her presence to me a hundred-fold.  She looked directly toward the hollow of my gaze and stilled.  She fell.  I saw the reason for her sigh; the hurled, the merciful, blade had sunk deep into her neck.  Nonetheless she was no victim; she died the first by right of choice.

The priest, the assassin, approached.  He spread his cloak across the corpse and raised a warning hand toward the fields.  He spoke to the chilled air, aiming his words as had the child.

"I greet you from War, sir.  He left only the women and children.  I shall not spare you the young."
I understood.  "You did not survive; how is it you can yet kill?"

He shrugged.  "My burden is love."

He half-stumbled, displacing a stone.  Behind it was a broken chest, a woolen robe, burst jars of mildewed corn--all my mission required.  I whistled to my flea-bearing lieutenant.  He came.