Cruor Mare (short story, originally written and published in 2013)

 WARNING: This story contains setting-appropriate racial and ethnic slurs.

“I can paint ya a bettah one, sah.”

That was what Opa said upon seeing the still-wet shark faces plastered across most of the squadron’s P-40s. A new lieutenant transferred over from North Africa, said that he saw Kraut planes with shark faces and they looked appropriately menacing, like predators in the sky – so why not paint ours like that, too? This is the Pacific, after all; both us and the Japs know that we’ll likely end up as shark bait, in the end.

Turned down the new scheme, at first. Didn’t want it, looked silly, like something from a goddamn Terry and the Pirates strip. But seeing those Forties lined up in the tropical sun, teeth bared and eyes staring, started to have a change of heart. And now Opa, the squadron’s resident Polynesian pet and sometimes-painter, wants the job for himself. Why not – it’s just an oval with teeth in it and a pair of eyes. No way that anyone could possibly fuck it up, not even a guy wears a misshapen chunk of polished driftwood as a necklace. Knock yourself out, Opa, and don’t you splatter the windscreen, or that chunk of wood gets tossed into tomorrow night’s bonfire.

Saw the results the next morning. Opa had spent all night on it, on a goddamn shark face paint job that anyone else could have finished in two hours. And he still managed to fuck it up! That goofy grin had a primitive, almost childish quality to it, the teeth were ragged and uneven, and the eyes were crooked, like the shark was afflicted with a nasty case of walleye. There was none of the bold, cartoonish menace that the other planes had. And yet . . .

“Take care, sah. You see eyes? I mix black stone, little bits in; you see teeth, I mix white stone, little bits, old coral and such. You plane look like shark because shark demon like it, look like it. Shark demon fly with you now, you shoot many slanty-eyes, sah. But he want go home, one day; you take care.”

Didn’t know what the damn fool was talking about; but had to admit, the longer you looked at that plane, the less you wanted to. There was something alien about it, as though Opa had dipped his paintbrush right into the Pacific and swathed the plane with its unforgiving vastness and still, quiet lethality. It looked right back at you, not with the blank dead eyes that festooned the rest of the squadron, but with real obsidian malevolence – the void noticing you and taking your measure, just in case it decided to swallow you later. It was unpleasant. Decided to fly with it anyway.

 

Took off for combat air patrol the next morning. Didn’t expect anything; at least four days out of five, never saw any Japs anywhere. Just as well; everyone knew a Forty was no match for a Zero in a dogfight, unless the Jap was a rookie and the Yank was shit-hot. Felt a familiar hollow feeling in the chest, seeing the sun glinting off of metal wings over the sea, and knowing that they weren’t ours. They saw us, and went for us, like barracuda after big, fat tuna.

The Japs expertly broke formation and selected different targets. Took evasive action, focused on living long enough to get away. No such luck. One came right over, sprayed bullets across the left wing, spun on a dime, ended up behind. Christ, he’s fast – and the Forty flies like it’s tied to a string – this time, it’s over . . .

Stick seemed to move itself. Blood drained away as the Forty shot up like a rocket – Jap couldn’t follow, he’s in front now – Forty rolls onto its back, the stick slams forward, nose dives and blood returns. The Forty’s faster than a Zero in a dive. Jap’s under iron sights, now. The guns roar for a brief moment, and the shark’s first victim spins into the sea. It barrel rolls of its own accord to commemorate the occasion. The other Zeros break off and retreat.

Back at the field, everyone’s agog. “Where the hell did you learn to fly like that,” they want to know. “Didn’t think a Forty could climb like that without the wings peeling off,” they muse. Don’t have any answers; stick moved by itself. Plane seemed to have a mind of its own. Still not complaining when they paint a little rising sun flag under the cockpit. Noticed Opa watching from under the palms with a little grin on his face. Must think his lousy paint job had something to do with it.

No more Japs seen that day, or the next – then another tangle in the afternoon, and two more fall prey to the shark. Suddenly tied with the Major as top killer in the squadron. He seems pleased to finally have a little competition. “I was starting to think that none of you sons of bitches could actually fly,” he says, “Except the ones who can shoot. And the ones who can fly, can’t shoot! About time someone’s learned both.” Wonder if he longs to see them fly apart as the bullets hammer into them. Can’t muster up the courage to ask.

Japs are making a big push, now. Carriers and cruisers move east, taking new islands, staging aggressive patrols far beyond them – if there’s still a front line, it’s wrapping around us now, and starting to strangle. Tangle with Jap patrols almost every day, in numbers you wouldn’t believe, like we’ve stoned the world’s biggest hornet nest and they’re aching to sting anything that moves. Other guys fall; lose a third of the squadron in a little over a week. But the shark keeps scoring; there’s blood in the water now, and it will not be sated.

Don’t even have to pay attention to anything except at takeoff and landing. The Forty had never been a bad plane. A few bad points; a little sluggish, too stubborn to climb to altitude or pull out of a dive – but no longer. Now it’s gleaming, hard-edged perfection. The shark flies as though it’s hell-bent to claw everything but itself from the sky, and neither the law of gravity nor the fundamentals of aeronautics are going to stop it. Mechanics double the ammo load, but the extra weight makes no difference. The shark knows where to find its prey, knows how to conceal itself above or below, how to maneuver into position, and exactly – exactly – where and when to strike. Poor Japs rarely ever see what blasts them out of the sky. Occasional Jap ace manages to dodge the first strike and gives the shark a good fight. They wheel and flash in the blue, their contrails swirling and intertwining like lovestruck cobras looking for the tenderest place to bite. But in the end, only the shark is ever left, serene and invincible in the deep blue overhanging the deeper blue.

It’s beyond impressive. It’s beyond uncanny. It’s destiny with guns and horsepower. On the ground, there is only awe. Both for the increasingly dull-eyed and disinterested pilot, and the shark-faced Forty, its coral teeth now blackened by countless puffs of gunsmoke, its fuselage now adorned with row upon row of little sun flags in commemorative triumph. There’s constant talk of medals, promotions, studying the shark’s tactics and teaching them to every son of a bitch in a flight jacket – but what is that to a predator? All that is wanted, or needed, is the killing field and the kill. God bless the Pacific, it grants us both.

The whole island buzzes with rumors and stories about the shark. Some said there was a good-luck charm involved – a golden ring, a vintage whiskey bottle, a whore’s stocking. Some said the pilot flew drunk, or manic with dexedrine, and couldn’t even get off the ground if sober. A few pilots even believed that it was because Opa, and no one else, had painted that bloody plane. They begged him to do the same for theirs, offered to pay double or triple, slipped him all the alcohol they had hoarded – but he always begged off. “No sah, I can’t conjah but one shark at a time. And dis here shark’s gettin’ too bloody for his own good – mebbe havin’ to pull his teeth out, yeh?” he would say.

Laughed that off, and forgot about it. Japs were still pushing hard; had to fly four, five, six patrols a day. Everyone exhausted, unshaven, underfed, surviving on coffee, cigarettes, and the desperate comfort of routine. Dreams are filled with slashing teeth and wrenching jaws, and always the scent of blood, that stink of rust and decay. And Zeros still fell to the shark every time it took to the blue, like coconuts from a well-shaken tree. After one hard fight, saw Jap pilot eject, his white chute billowing above him. He landed in the water. The shark spun, dove, and put a few dozen rounds into him. Spreading pool of red surrounds him as he hangs limp, his limbs fading into the blue; his chute falls over him like a shroud, its edges slowly turning pink. The rest of the flight is aghast. Major is furious when he hears. “Not supposed to do that,” he says. “It’s a war crime.” War crime? Odd choice of words. Others say, “No problem, Japs do the same thing to us.” No repercussions; everyone knows the squadron needs the shark, badly. Reverse may not be true, not anymore.

Then, one gray morning, saw Opa standing at the shark’s red nose, holding a bucket in one hand and some tool in the other. No one but the two best wrench monkeys on the island are allowed to touch the shark now, and Opa ain’t one of them. Walked up to him, red mist over eyes, asked what he thought he was doing.

“Taking deh shark back, sah,” he said, clutching a rusty paint scraper. A couple of its teeth were already gone, revealing bare, battle-worn metal.

Why.

“Deh shark has done its job, sah. It needs to swim free, now.”

You can’t.

“Deh shark, he’s had his way with you, sah. Looky your eyes – dull and dark, the midnight sea undah no moon. You become blood-thirsty, sah – no good for no man. You let shark go, he let you go too.

I won’t let go.

“Deh shark must go, sah,” Opa said, with absolute finality. And he turned away, dipped his scraper in the bucket, and resumed scraping.

I won’t let you.

Body moved on its own. Smashed him to the ground, kicked the scraper out of his hand, leaned over him with teeth bared, saliva dripping. His throat looked inviting –

Felt a sharp pain from behind, then blackness. Nothingness.

 

Woke up in a cell, light streaming through barred window. “You lost control,” Major said, “Damn near killed him. Had to clock you with a wrench. Look, we’re all under pressure; everyone’s tired, everyone’s pissed. No need to kill each other over it. Stay on the ground a few days, have a few drinks, watch the sun rise and fall over the palm trees. Take it easy, for Christ’s sake.”

Did he finish?

“Finish? Finish what?”

The shark – the paint.

“He’s in no condition to finish anything. Jesus, no one’s touched your goddamn plane – see for yourself when you get out tomorrow.”

The shark still waits, complacently grinning.

Everyone looks at you differently after you’ve acted a certain way. Mixture of respect, fear, unease . . . is that envy? “You can do what we can’t, or won’t, and you have, God damn you.” But a smug envy; “We’re civilized, you’re a barbarian. We can shed blood like no men since Cain and still go back, play with our kids, love our wives, grow old enough to forget that cruelty and avarice make the world go round. We’re still people; you’re just a predator.”

Maybe they’re right.

Out of the brig the next day. Still supposed to be grounded; no matter. The blue beckons, outward and upward – or is it downward? Catch a glance of Opa, cowering away under the palms. That’s right; run. Hide. You’ll do yourself no good. The shark has tasted blood. It’ll never stop.

Kick the chocks away. Climb into the cockpit. One mechanic jumps up on the ladder, says “It’s not allowed” in a jittery little voice. Pathetic. One punch sends him to the ground with a broken nose. A few drops of blood spatter the windscreen. Plenty more to come.

Start the engine. Hear that welcome roar, that unhinged, full-throated wail of a just-awakened beast longing to flex its wings and sink its teeth.

See figures running towards the shark. A few carry guns, for all the good they’ll do. Fools – should be running away. Throttle forward – get the shark moving. Give the pedals a light kick to level the guns – and pull the trigger. Hard. Again, and again, and again. Bullets buzzsaw through metal, palms, flesh. Kick the rudder and the shark pivots beautifully, just enough to line up its nose with its former comrades. No longer worthy to share its domain. They go up in flame, smoke, and shrapnel. Puddles of blood spread on the tarmac, slowly seeping towards the shore. Like to see it drip into the white foam lapping hungrily against the sand – but the sky awaits.

The shark rockets above it all, driven by unseen forces beyond a mere three blades, twelve cylinders, or thousand horses. The cries of millions echo past in the warm, moist air, seeking absolution. Everyone wants to kill, even if they’ll never admit it to anyone, not even themselves. Everyone wants their pint of blood, their pound of flesh. Today, they’ll have it.

In the blink of a lidless eye, the Japs are there in numbers. The shark is but one – but look, the Zeros now bear their own toothy grins. No need to feel alone – it’s an uproarious tournament of equals, predator upon predator, all equally lethal, all able to dispatch and be dispatched with identical alacrity. Sky and sea merge into a limitless blue void.

The sharks wheel and loop and roll, fins glinting under the unrelenting sun. Bullets fly, parts fly – sometimes metal, sometimes flesh and bone – blood flies. Teeth gnash and tails flash. It’s a full-blown frenzy, and it is glorious.

But it cannot last. Soon, the last of the sharks hangs alone in the blue, wings creaking, breath sputtering, vision dimming. Red, red everywhere; what a brilliant contrast against the blue. Never noticed it before. And then the shark dives.

Time to go home, it says, back to the deep, the tranquil peace of the still waters. It sounds inviting.

I can already feel my body bursting.

 

Back on shore, one hand pressed against the bullet wound in his thigh, Opa looked to the sky, at the impossibly tangled spiderweb of white contrails, already scattered by the wind. He had seen a great many dogfights in his time, and that was incomparably the greatest. No one else would ever know that it had happened. He saw the last plane fall, spinning like a rifle bullet, somewhere beyond the horizon. He frowned.

“Dat’s deh shark demon, sah,” he said, to the corpses scattered over the runway. “He give much, but he take all – in deh end, he take you, too.”

He pulled the wooden amulet from his neck and tossed it into the water. Then he waded in after it. The blood had already reached the water, and there were fins circling.

This story is published with a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Tipuluka (short story, originally written and published in 2014)

 

The sun’s hot rays beat down with an almost physical force. Sweat poured down Samka’s face as he encircled another huge water jar with his arms and heaved it against his chest. His arms and thighs burned as he carried it from the storage hut across the parched and cracked ground, and over to the well. His steps were unsteady, his grip unsure, but he dared not drop it. That much lost water would guarantee death for an entire family.

His mouth agape, the dry air rasping in his throat, Samka only just managed to lift the jar to the lip of the well. He tipped it upwards, and the welcome dribble of water joining water filled the air. It might be the last time any of them ever heard it.

Still breathing heavily, he turned to Bael, the eldest of the shamen, and sighed. “That’s the last of it. We have no reserves left.”

“Unless someone is hiding a few jars, beneath their floor or hollowed into their walls,” Bael smirked. “Who among us would do such a thing?” Addressing the onlookers, he asked in a loud voice, “Who knows someone who is hiding their own personal water, while the rest of us wither?”

The old man had always been suspicious of everyone and everything, but now, with the drought upon them, suspicion had edged into paranoia. He constantly suspected anyone and everyone of acting upon some secret and nefarious plan behind his back, and did his utmost to convince the other shamen to share his suspicions. It did no one any good.

“There is no private water, Bael,” said Yol, emerging from the storage hut. “We have checked every house, every granary, every hunter’s roost. There is none, save what sits in this well.”

Samka nodded to his friend. “We have been patient. We have waited for the gods to favor us, for the skies to open and for the land to become green again. The gods have abandoned this place. The animals are gone. It is time we—”

“We will NOT leave!” Bael screeched, leveling one weathered finger at Samka’s face. “This is our home! The gods are testing us, as they have many times before. We must show them our resolve; we must believe, and beseech, and hope!” Murmurs of agreement rose from the crowd. For all of Bael’s distrust of others that in turn inspired distrust of him, few could resist his powers of persuasion when his passion rose.

Yol rolled his eyes at the shaman’s outburst, but said nothing. Samka looked at the villagers, their eyes rapt upon the empty sky, their lips moving soundlessly as they prayed. There would be no convincing anyone, not today. “We will discuss this again later,” he said to Bael. The old man dismissed him with a wave of his hand, and went on to chant the opening verses of a ritual rain song.

Samka felt like punching him, but instead motioned Yol to accompany him as he walked away. The once-fertile dirt crumbled into dust beneath their feet.

“I can’t tell if that old man is crazy or a mere fool,” Yol remarked.

“Perhaps neither,” replied Samka. “He knows his power, his magic, is tied to this place. Were we to leave he would become just another stubborn old man – if he survived the journey.”

“So he would have all of us die like fish stranded on a beach to satisfy his vanity?!” Yol snarled. He kicked a pebble into the riverbed, now long dry and strewn with bones.

“You expect anything less of a shaman?” Samka asked with irony. They shared a bitter laugh, then stopped to stare at the birdman paintings covering the rocky face of Tipuluka. At the foot of the vast cliff, women wept, wailed, and beseeched, crying, “Why have you abandoned us, birdmen? Why have you not brought the rainclouds back to this land?” In the rising heat, the dark paintings looked even more sinister than usual, as the red-orange rock shimmered and danced beneath them. As mesmerizing as the sight was, Samka and Yol both looked away from the paintings quickly, for they knew that gazing too long at the birdmen could easily drive a man mad.

“Even if we can’t save the village, we can at least save our...” Yol’s voice trailed away as he saw Samka grimace in pain at his words. “Oh. I’m sorry, Samka.”

Samka shook his head. “No one can save them now, Yol,” he said, sadly. “I’ll speak to the shamen again tonight. You should start preparing what you can, and encourage all who will listen to do the same; gods or no gods, we must leave this cursed place, and soon.”

“And if the shamen say no?”

“We don’t need their permission.”

 

“Why do you disturb us now, Samka of Llag?” thundered Bael. “Can you not see we are in the middle of the raincalling?”

“I see it,” Samka said, “But we must talk, now.” He squinted through the cloud of pungent smoke filling the hut, and wondered where the shamen had found so much yagrati plant to burn. That plant needed much water to grow, and he hadn’t seen one growing anywhere for at least three moons. It was no great loss; except to the shamen, who always claimed that the smoke of the plant cleared one’s mind and opened the path to the gods. Samka just found it nauseating.

The elder shaman sighed, stood from the altar, and shuffled over to Samka. His eyes were bloodshot, his voice high and dry. “If you still wish to wish to convince me to move the village, Samka—”

“I do,” Samka cut him off, “Because there is no other choice. Can you not see? Cannot all of you see?” he shouted, addressing the other shamen kneeled around the altar. Deep in trance, they paid him no mind. “The rains are gone,” he continued. “The rivers and lakes are dry. We cannot even lick the dew of dawn from unfurled leaves, because there is none. The gods are dead, absent, or have simply forgotten this land. There is nothing to do but leave.”

Samka expected the old man to chastise him for these words, but instead Bael merely studied him with squinted eyes through the smoke. “You are certain there is no other choice,” he said quietly.

“I am.”

“And what if all of us perish on the journey?”

“It would be no worse than perishing here.”

Bael turned away for a moment, his brow furrowed with thought. Samka felt the first flickers of hope that the old man might finally understand the situation. But then he turned to Samka and asked, “And what of the birdmen?”

“The BIRDMEN?!” Samka exploded. His voice rose as his hopes vanished. “The birdmen? Our people shrivel in an endless desert, and you ask of those accursed pictures?”

“You know what they are, and what they signify,” Bael said, with a slight smirk on his face.

“I know what they are supposed to be, and what some madmen say about them! By the flames of the sun, Bael I thought none of the shamen held any faith in the birdmen anymore – nor should they! What good do they ever do, those black and dead pictures?”

“Perhaps none,” Bael said quietly. “But the birdmen themselves – well, they may be able to save us. A last resort, when all else had failed, and it seems the very ground we walk upon wishes to swallow us up.”

“Even if a word of that were true,” Samka seethed, “What would we do? How would we even speak to them? Birdmen are not gods – they hear no prayers, answer no calls. They wander as they please above the clouds, and pay no heed to the troubles of the earth. We could no more speak to them than a worm could speak to a rainbow serpent.”

Bael waved a cloud of smoke from his face and smiled. “You misunderstand, Samka. I do not ask anyone to speak to them. I only ask one man to join them.”

Samka turned pale, and coughed. “You cannot mean this.”

“I do.”

“For what purpose?! Even if you believe that old wives’ tale, what good would it do us to send one more man to live above the clouds, to ignore us at his leisure?”

“If we sent one now,” Bael said, smiling with a superior air, “He would know of our plight. He would know how to help this land, and he would bear rainclouds on wings that stretched from horizon to horizon. It would take only one man.”

“One life, you mean,” Samka corrected him angrily. “One fool, willing to take the plunge...”

“Why do you assume the birdmen are dead, Samka?” Bael waved his thin arms in exasperation. “The dead leave behind their earthly flesh – even a hunter caught in a grassfire leaves charred bones and ash! Have you ever heard of a birdman leaving anything but a shadow on a cliffside?”

“The last birdman was sent in the time of my great-great-grandfather,” Samka said, folding his arms. “No one living knows what they leave, or what even happens to them after they are sent.”

“I do, Samka,” Bael purred, his voice suddenly soothing. “We do. The shamen know, as they always have and ever will. Trust in us, even if you trust nothing else.”

Samka said nothing for a few moments as he stared into Bael’s eyes. They shone brightly even through the smoke. Did he honestly believe this was going to work, or was he simply stalling for time – or for some hidden plan? In the many years Samka had known him, Bael had never revealed the whole truth about anything unless he saw some advantage in doing so.

And yet – the old man’s eyes betrayed no duplicity, no malice. He truly believed that they could send a birdman, and that this simple act would save them all. And it was but one life, of which they had already lost so many, against the survival of their entire village.

“I will bargain with you, elder shaman Bael,” Samka said, extending his hand. “I will agree to send a birdman – on the condition that, if rain does not follow in three days’ time, the village will leave immediately.”

Bael blinked with momentary surprise, then smiled. “I accept your bargain, Samka of Llag.” He grasped Samka’s hand with a strength belying his many years. “We will begin preparations to send a birdman, and you may tell your friend Yol to continue his preparations to move the village.”

For all that he lived his life in smoke and myth, the old man never missed a thing that happened in his village. “Very well. And who will be the birdman?” asked Samka.

“You are headman, are you not? It is your responsibility to choose.”

“The headman is supposed to have a family,” Samka said, his voice ringing hollow in his ears. “I have no family now.”

“Nonsense. You are still headman, and you will choose who is to be sent,” Bael said, placing his hand against Samka’s back and pushing him to the door. “Be quick – we must begin the ritual at sunset tomorrow. And choose well!” he added, as he shoved Samka out of the smoky hut into the blissfully clean air.

 

Twilight was falling, and the blank sky faded to violet as the sun sank beneath the cliffs to the west. Samka took no notice, as he pondered whether he had just made a grave mistake. Regardless of what Bael said, he believed that the birdmen died when they were sent. And it was such a terrible way to go; leaving behind no body to mourn over, just a faded picture of a misshapen shadow on a rock wall. Whoever was chosen must be strong and brave enough to climb to the rim of Tipuluka, the highest of cliffs, at night, with no one but themselves and their personal demons for company. There were few men left in the village up to the task – perhaps none.

Samka gazed up at the cliffs as he walked. In the gathering darkness, they were forbidding and menacing, looking as though they intended to cast their pointed spires and giant rocks down onto the puny beings below. As far as Samka knew, no one had climbed to the top of Tipuluka for at least four generations. His great-great-grandfather had been involved with the sending of the last birdman. Perhaps he had even been the birdman; the identity of the man who was sent depended upon who told the tale. What would he do in my place, Samka wondered. Would he send a birdman, or would he walk a different path? There was no point in asking; his grave, if he had ever had one, was long lost and forgotten.

A welcoming yellow light poured from the windows of Yol’s hut as Samka approached. The sight, the smell of cooked food and burning oil, and the soft murmurs of a family at rest washed over his mind, conjuring up memories; once cherished, now acutely painful. He cast them aside as he strode to the door and knocked once.

Yol’s beautiful wife Celelé answered the door. “Samka!” she beamed, smiling broadly. “Come in, come in!” She took Samka’s hand and led him in. The hut, once ornately furnished, now looked bare; Yol had wasted no time packing things away in preparation. The couple’s two small daughters sat in a corner, playing with dried wood and chunks of charcoal. Their faces were thin and sallow, but at least they still had the energy to play; the same could not be said for most of the village’s surviving children. Yol himself dropped the strip of dry meat he was eating onto the table as he stood. “Samka, my friend! How did it go? Has that old shaman finally turned his eyes away from myths and spirits and seen reality? We are to leave, aren’t we?”

Samka wearily sat at the table and beckoned Yol and Celelé to do the same. He explained what had transpired at the meeting, and how he must now chose a man to be sent.

Celelé turned pale and raised her hand to her mouth. “This is madness,” she whispered. “To place our faith in this . . . this sorcery, and to banish one of our men to such a horrible fate – what did that old schemer threaten to do, Samka? He must have said he would call down the ynreach to incinerate us all, for you to agree to this.”

“No, Celelé,” Samka said, tracing his fingers over the grains in the table’s wood. “Bael asked for one last chance to save our village where it stands, before we uproot from our ancestral lands and undertake a long, dangerous, possibly fruitless journey. And I agreed, because there is little to lose; even if the sending fails, or if the birdman will not help us, we will only lose one man.”

“Will you say that to this ‘one man’s’ family?!” Celelé stood from the table, her cheeks flushed with fury. “Life has been so hard for so long, and now you would ask us—”

“I’ll go!” Yol interjected.

Celelé and Samka stared at him in mute shock.

“I volunteer,” Yol repeated, setting down an empty cup. The sweet scent of oleta wine caressed Samka’s nose, and he realized that Yol had been drinking it for some time; he must have been saving water for his daughters. “I can be the birdman – I can climb Tipuluka, and I know as well as anyone what we need. When I’m the birdman,” he announced, staggering to his feet and spreading his arms wide, “I will bring you such a deluge—”

Celelé slapped him across the face, hard. Her daughters froze and stared at their parents in abrupt silence. Without a word, Celelé sat, placed her face in her hands, and softly wept. Yol stared at the floor, for once at a loss for anything to say.

“No, Yol,” Samka said slowly. “Your family needs you. The village needs you. I suspect it will need you much, much more in the coming days.”

Yol looked at him curiously. So did Celelé, her eyes red with tears. “Samka…” she began.

“I will go,” Samka said in a calm voice. “I will be sent to the sky, to bring the clouds and end our suffering. I will be the birdman.” He stood, expecting his hands to shake as they pressed against the table. They did not.

“Samka . . . my gods!” cried Yol, suddenly sober. “No!”

Celelé’s tears burst forth again. “Please,” she moaned, “There must be another way...” Their daughters rushed forward and grabbed Samka’s legs, their small, sallow faces twisted with uncomprehending anguish as they looked up at him.

“Someone must go,” Samka said, striving to keep his voice steady. He reached down and gently pried the girls from his legs. “I can make the climb, and I have no family to look after. I am the only choice.”

“You are our leader!” Yol shouted, lurching forward and almost collapsing across the table. “My friend, you cannot leave us like this—”

“I am no leader,” Samka said bitterly. “Look what has happened while I ‘led’; the rains fled, the land cracked and burned, too many died, hearts grew heavy with despair. I will be a better birdman than headman.”

Now Yol’s eyes too were wet with tears. “Samka...” he began, but there was nothing else to say.

“I am sorry, Yol. I am sorry, Celelé; I did not wish to ruin your dinner. Please excuse me; I have preparations to make.” Samka turned and walked out into the darkness, closing the door behind him.

 

Knowing Yol and Celelé, the entire village would be in an uproar by mid-morning. Samka left his hut at dawn, taking only a little food, a small bottle of water, and the necklace hanging from his door. He didn’t look back as he left; there was nothing to see there anymore.

For some time, he wandered aimlessly, across yellow-brown fields, over once-green hills, down gullies that had once roared with torrents of water. There was little life to see now; just buzzing flies, an occasional snake or lizard, and the great schar birds, cruising tirelessly in the sky in their endless search for the dead and the dying. “I will join you soon, my brothers,” Samka called to them as they circled overhead. “But not just yet.”

As the day’s shadows shortened, his mind still refused to choose a destination; but his heart, and his feet, knew where they wanted to go. Samka felt a lump in his throat and a pain in his chest as he crested a familiar hill and looked down at the dark, peaceful alcoves cut into an enormous, freestanding white rock. His knees wobbled, then gave way; and he crawled down the hill like a baby, to look up at the coffins holding his wife and son.

Intricately carved and decorated, suspended above head height by thick ropes, they swung gently in the breeze. Bracing himself against the rock, Samka reached out and brushed his fingertips against the smaller of the two. He remembered small hands, clutching his; always insistent, always in motion, ever ready to grab and poke and explore and create. Until the day when he lifted them from the ground, cradled them in his own, and folded them across a thin, emaciated little chest, never to rise again.

Samka’s vision blurred, and he stumbled across loose pebbles as he walked to the alcove holding the larger coffin. It seemed to sway towards him as he approached, as though drawn to his presence. “You always wanted one more embrace,” he whispered, as he placed his palm against the carefully carved wood. Yes, one more caress, one more kiss; she never wanted to say goodbye, not even for a single day. “I’ll return home before the sun falls,” he always told her. And he always did, and she was always there, longing for him. He could never imagine a day when she wouldn’t be there; and then, one day, she wasn’t. She had collapsed under the hot sun while trying to dig tubers from the dry ground. She died under the open sky, while he was far, far away, foolishly doing something he thought more important. And now this was as close as he could ever come.

The pain was unbearable. He felt as though the air was dying and turning to dust in his throat. He turned away from the coffins and retreated back to the hill overlooking the rock, and breathed a little more easily. “You’ll never see them again,” he said aloud. “They dwell now in Sileruia, the great sea beneath the earth. The birdmen dwell in the sky, and are forbidden to return to earth – much less burrow beneath it.” I know that, he told himself silently, but I will watch over them, from high above the clouds that I will bring.

The sky to the west was now tinged with red, and Samka silently followed the sun, back to the foot of Tipuluka.

 

As he approached, Samka saw a number of people already gathered below the cliff. Bael and his fellow shamen were busy lighting torches, burning yagrati plants, and chanting. The others from the village milled about hesitantly, as if unsure why they were there or what they should do. Most of the village’s healthy men had gathered, but only a few women; Celelé was not among them.

Spotting Samka, Yol rushed up to him with a feverish look on his face. “Samka,” he gasped, “This is our last chance to stop this madness. Let us have a gathering – we will call everyone together and talk, all night if need be, until we find some other way.”

Samka laid his hand on Yol’s shoulder and shook his head. “We have had gatherings, Yol. We have talked and talked under empty skies, and done nothing and gone nowhere. That was our mistake – my mistake. It is time someone took responsibility; time someone stopped begging the gods to do their job, and went up there to do their job for them.” He lowered his hand and smiled at Yol’s confused, ashen face. “There is no other way, my friend. You know this, as do I. Let us stop denying what we already know.”

Yol began to reply, but Samka silenced him with an upraised hand. He looked around at the others who had gathered. Men he had grown up with, and known all his life; friends, rivals, fellow workers, hunters, builders, sufferers. His men; but not anymore. It was time to leave them, yet he could think of little to say. “I expect all of you to aid Yol and Bael when I am gone,” he said, trying to instill his voice with more confidence than his spirit felt. “Do not make the same mistakes I did; don’t lose the future by clinging to the past. I will be watching you,” he added, stabbing one finger towards the darkening sky. “When the rains come again, I wish to see our village, our people, regain its former glory – and more. That is all I ask.”

He turned towards Bael, who had quietly approached behind him. The old shaman looked conflicted with sadness and the dire necessity of duty. “You speak well, Samka,” he said. “The sun has set, goodbyes have been said; are you ready to begin?”

Samka stared at the ground for a moment, and swallowed. “Yes.”

“Then we will begin,” Bael said, though his tone implied an end, not a beginning. He beckoned Samka to follow him to the long-disused trail up Tipuluka. “You must reach the top by dawn,” he said, motioning towards the black cliff face looming over them. “Take this flask; you will find no water along the trail. There is a round moon tonight; you have good light, and should not lose the trail. When the winds begin to howl without rest, you will know that you are coming close. When you reach the top, and look across the world, you will see us far below. When the rising sun breaks the horizon, you will know that it is time to be sent. With the names of the gods on your lips and the birdman in your heart, you must leap from Tipuluka, as high and far as you can.”

Samka swallowed again and willed his pounding heart to quiet. Bael took no notice. “You will fall for some time, while the spirit of the birdman searches for you. You must not fear, you must not despair. You must believe, or all of this will be for nothing,” he said, glaring hard at Samka.

Samka nodded, and Bael continued. “Sometime before you reach the ground, the sun will crest the horizon, and you will be blinded by a bright flash. That is the spirit of the birdman. It will cast your shadow upon Tipuluka, to join those who have preceded you,” he said, gesturing towards the dark pictures upon the cliffside, now almost invisible in the moonlight. “Your body will vanish; after the flash, we on the ground will see you no more, and only feel the wind of the birdman’s wings – your mighty wings –as you ascend to the heavens.” Bael stopped speaking, looking drained and weary. He turned to Samka. “Do you understand this?”

“Yes,” Samka said, gazing at the moon. It was exceptionally bright tonight.

“Even we shamen do not know all there is to know about the birdmen, and why they do what they do,” Bael admitted. “We only know that they can bring the clouds – and you must bring the clouds, Samka,” he said, solemnly extending his hand. “We wish you well . . . birdman.”

Samka took the extended hand, gripped it for a few moments, then released it. Bael walked back to the assembled crowd, now lit from above by the moon and from all sides by the fires and torches the shamen had lit. “The climb has begun!” he shouted. “All who are not shamen must leave now; this place must be purified and untrammeled for the birdman to take flight.”

Reluctantly, the people of the village turned away – all but one. “Samka!” Yol yelled. “After the rains have come, we will build a great fire, and send smoke to the heavens, so that you will know you have saved us! Look for it, Samka!” he cried, now openly weeping.

“I will look for it, Yol,” Samka said softly, as two of the shamen took Yol’s arms and dragged him away. Samka turned back to the moonlit trail, set his mind, and walked, one foot in front of the other. It would be a long climb.

 

The beginning of the climb was very hard; boulders and sharp rocks littered the old trail, bruising and cutting his arms and legs as he clambered over them. But after a time the trail left the cluttered rocks and turned onto a gentle, open slope, slowly twisting upwards towards the cliffs. Samka now had much time to think, and his mind wandered as he walked. The fear that he had felt at the foot of Tipuluka had been left behind; now his mind turned to curiosity. What would he see as he looked from the cliff, he wondered. Bael had said he would be able see the shamen below him – or their torches, at least – but how could the old man know that? Had he, or anyone, ever been so high above the ground before? And how would life in the sky feel, as the birdman? Surely the air would be very hot, so close to the sun – but would it cool at night? And if he flew among the stars at night, what would he see there – the gods? His ancestors? Perhaps even the great beasts and monsters they had always seen in the night sky – would he have to fight them, for the right to stay up there?

The shamen left so many questions unanswered, he mused. He may have failed as headman, but they had failed as guides. The thought was oddly cheering. But then, they didn’t know the answers; no one alive knew them. Perhaps his great-great-grandfather did, if he had really been the last birdman. Samka wondered what it would be like to meet him – would he even remember his life as a man on earth? Would Samka remember his? The possibility of losing it all chilled him to the bone. The pleasant days spent with his wife and son might seem but faded, half-remembered dreams in the eternal morning above the clouds. He would have to forcefully remind himself, over and over again, who he had been, where he had come from, and why he was there – even as a birdman. “I am Samka of Llag,” he said aloud to the silver-lighted sands and moon-dappled rocks. “I am Samka of Llag,” he said to whatever beings were watching him from the stars. “I am Samka of Llag,” he said to himself, “And I must not forget it.”

The trail grew steeper and harder, the rocks around it sharper and more menacing. His throat was dry, and he raised the flask Bael had given him to his mouth. It contained only a double mouthful of bitter-tasting water, with a tinge of some unknown herb, but even that was welcome. He tossed the empty flask aside, and the winds began to howl around him as he climbed. It was often said that the words of the dead floated on the wind; were his wife and son speaking to him now? As he listened, Samka heard two different tones on the wind: one shrill, excited, and expressive, the other quiet, heavy, and mournful. The dueling winds spoke to him— not in words, for there were no words, but in feelings, sensations, memories.

“Why do you speak to me now,” Samka whispered. “When I sought guidance down below, when it seemed all hope was gone and all I wanted was to dig myself into the earth and never see the sun again, why were you silent? Why wouldn’t you help me then?”

There was no answer, but Samka felt the winds push at his back, shoving him onward and upward. “I’m walking,” he growled, with humor in his voice. “You don’t have to push me along.”

The trail rolled to a stop below a huge, flat rock, more than three times Samka’s height. Beyond it, Samka knew, was the rim of the cliff – and beyond that, his destiny. This rock must be climbed. He walked along until he found cracks breaking its smooth face, just large enough to serve as handholds and footholds.

It was slow going, but he managed to climb until he hung just below the lip of the rock. As he reached for it, his left foot slipped, and his body slammed against the rock, knocking the breath out of his lungs. He gasped, holding on only with his fingertips – and then laughed uproariously. Was this anything to fear, next to what he had climbed up here to do? He found his footing again, and with a last effort, heaved himself up and onto the flat top of the rock.

He lay there, breathing heavily and staring into the sky. It seemed a shade lighter now – perhaps the sun was on its way to break up the circular dance of the stars. The moon hung low, its pale face still lighting his way. It was time to look out across the world.

Samka picked himself up and strode forward across the rock. The air, never heavy during the drought, now hung so lightly that a stiff breeze might blow it away. The wind no longer spoke to him; it merely howled endlessly like a man dying in agony. Carefully picking his way across the sand-carved stones and dried shrubs, Samka walked to the edge of the silvered cliff. He took a deep breath, and looked over the rim.

The sight took his breath away. Even in the dim light, he could see just how dry and ravaged the land was. Once-lush forests were now skeletal, their bare branches unsoftened by leaves and entangled like so many thorn bushes. Fields where great herds had grazed not so long ago were now empty, choked expanses of dead grass and sand. The dry beds of streams and rivers crisscrossed the landscape, empty veins that carried no lifeblood for anyone. Samka saw no glint of water anywhere, in any direction – not even in the far west, where a legend told of a vast blue lake that never dried and succored all who found its shores. That legend had comforted many during the hard days of late. It would not comfort him, not anymore.

Overcome, he slumped to the ground and wept. Why did the gods torment them like this? They had always done their best to keep faith with what little they had. Even if the gods just want to watch us suffer, Samka mused, there must be other ways of doing that – anything but stealing the rains and leaving the earth to crumble into dust.

“You see why this is necessary,” a voice spoke behind him.

Startled, Samka leapt to his feet and whirled around. “Who’s there?! Bael?”

“I am no shaman,” the voice rumbled. It was deep, and cold. Samka could see only a shadow against the rocks – a huge shadow. It looked something like a man, but it wasn’t; the way it stood, and swayed in the wind, suggested a bird.

“Are you a birdman?” Samka called excitedly. And then the thought struck him— “Are you my great-great-grandfather?! I have climbed Tipuluka, just as you did – I will join you—”

“There are greater things in the world than men,” the voice cut him off. “The world was not created to shelter men and nurture their problems. The world will not end because men have grown weary of it. You journeyed to this place to become something more . . . than a man.”

“I journeyed here to help my people,” Samka said, angry at the tone of the shadow’s voice.

“Then why do you hesitate?” the voice asked. “Look – the torches are lit. The chant begins. The sun rises.”

Samka looked to the east, and saw that a sliver of fiery red had appeared above the horizon. He turned back to the shadow, but it now looked shrunken, as though about to collapse on itself.

“I did not come to fling you from Tipuluka, Samka of Llag,” it said, its voice barely audible over the wind. “You can become a birdman, or leave this place and return to your people, only of your own choice.” A sudden gust of wind drove a cloud of sand across the cliff, stinging Samka’s skin and veiling the shadow. “You can choose to believe . . . or not,” it whispered – and then it was gone.

Samka looked hard as the spot where the shadow had stood, but saw nothing more. He leaned over, peering down at the torches lit by the shamen far below, as dim to his eyes as the most distant stars. And he looked to the sky, where the fast-fading night was losing its battle with the merciless sun.

“Why not believe?” he asked, and he took a running leap.

 

Winds lashed his body from every direction, but Samka heard nothing. There was no more weight, no weary head to raise every morning, no tired arms and legs to force along to some indeterminate end. He felt a peace that had deserted him since his wife left his arms for the last time, even as the world spun incomprehensibly around him.

A sudden blast of wind stopped his spinning, and Samka found himself staring into the sun, hanging below the dark horizon. “Please, shine on me,” he said to it. “Make me a birdman, ye gods – flash this flailing body into a shadow, and grant me the wings to watch over this dying world.”

“I believe.”

“I will bring the rains.”

“I will look over it all, and smile.”

“I am Samka of Llag...”

The sun flashed. White, beautiful and soft and pure, filled his eyes, his mind, his heart. He felt his new wings, and laughed and wept.

“Thank you...”

 

Samka’s flailing body hit the earth with a dull thud. Just as expected.

Bael leapt towards it, giddy with relief, yet weary and afraid that all their work might yet be undone. “You are certain no one saw?” he demanded of his apprentice.

“No one,” the younger man affirmed, “Except us.” He looked uneasy. “But, master, when the sun flashed like that—”

“How many sunrises have you seen, child?” Bael scolded him. “I have seen many. The sun may flash as it pleases; we have a job to do. Quickly, now.”

Bael had seen many dead men in his long life, but even he was shocked by the grisly sight before him now. Samka had hit the ground headfirst; his skull was shattered, his brains scattered like pinkish-red mud across the desiccated rocks. His spine had twisted horribly, his ribs entangled with each other like maddened snakes, his dislocated legs were bent and jagged. Most of his innards had disintegrated into a thick, foul-smelling liquid that now quenched the thirsty ground. Oddly, his arms were still intact, as if he had held them away from his body as he fell.

Several of the other shamen were audibly sick when they saw what remained of Samka. There was no time for that. “Clean this up!” Bael hissed at them. “There must be nothing left of the body by morning.”

As they reluctantly moved to do his bidding, Bael and his apprentice walked away, to the cliff face where the birdmen were painted. Bael held out his hand; his apprentice handed him an age-weathered brush, its bristles wetted with a special mix of charcoal, ash, and a caustic liquid distilled from the yagrati plant. Though his fingers were stiff, Bael painted with a free and confident hand. There would be a new birdman silhouetted on Tipuluka by morning, as fresh and dark as if it had been burned into the rock by a flash of the rising sun.

Bael’s apprentice looked distinctly unhappy as he held the paint jar for his master, and not just because of the stench. “Is it so important,” he asked, “That they believe he became a birdman?”

Bael’s brush hovered above the rock as he turned to his apprentice with an amused expression on his face. “Are you sure enough to tell them that he didn’t?”

His apprentice made an unpleasant face, but remained silent. Bael smiled as he returned to his work. Far overhead, the earliest of the schar birds roused from their roosts, to soar on silent wings in a cloudless sky.

This story is published with a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

Click-Clack (short story, originally written and published in 2020)

 

Click-clack. Click-clack.

Mike never tired of that sound. The sweet auditory finesse of polyurethane wheels bumping over cracks in the sidewalk; it was a marrow-deep tattoo upon the stretched drumskin of his life.

His beat-up old skateboard pivoted under his feet as he leaned back and forth, carving along the pavement on his way to nowhere in particular. He went there almost every day; it was so much better than anywhere else.

As he rounded an abandoned liquor store, he saw the local crew standing in a semicircle, talking, gesticulating, and spitting as only teenage boys could. “Hey guys, what’s up?” Mike inquired as he skated up to them.

“Hey, greenie,” said Raj, normally the friendliest of them. Jorge, Jules, and Manny merely glanced in his direction for a moment and then turned their attention back to Frankie, who never ceased talking. At nineteen years of age, he was a little old to be hanging around with them, but no one ever told him as much. Partly because they looked up to him, partly because he was bigger; but mainly because he told great stories.

“And then,” Frankie went on, “I went out again to find a new spot. On Thursday after midnight, so there wouldn’t be no pigs around. And I saw this…THING there. All on fire, like the Ghost Rider, only a skater instead of a biker. A real old-school skater, with a wide-ass board. And he glowed - he was all like, bright green and shit. And he moved like he was, y’know, floating, like on a Back To The Future board or something, ‘cept I heard his wheels on the ground. And his fucking wheels were on fire, man.”

Frankie paused to allow a chorus of approving “cool’s” and “no shit’s” to wash over him. “And what did he do?” Manny, the youngest of the bunch, asked excitedly.

“He fucking SKATED, dude!” exclaimed Frankie, stomping on his board’s kicktail for emphasis. “He carved, he rode walls, he nollied and kickflipped and did these weird grabs that I don’t even fucking know what they were called. He was like all the best skaters from those old Powell vids. And I swear I felt the ground shake, like a goddamn garbage truck was going by or something. And there were always these green fires trailing after him – like something you’d see in chemistry class when some kid mixes the chemicals all wrong, y’know? It was fucking awesome.”

“Did you talk to him?! What did he say?” shrieked Manny, temporarily forgetting how to be cool.

“He didn’t say nothin’, man. After I watched him for, I don’t know, fifteen minutes or somethin’, I said, ‘Hey, dude!’ And he turned to look at me, and his face was…blank. It’s like, he had no face, ‘cept for eyes, and they were all burning and green. And when he looked at me, I was just fucking floored, y’know? Couldn’t say nothin’, couldn’t move. And I dunno how long it took, but then he just vanished. There was, like, this circle of green fire – y’know, it was kinda like that fucking fire tornado vid I showed you guys last week? – and then, nothin’. I pulled out my phone for a pic, but there wasn’t nobody there anymore. It was incredible.”

If jaded old Frankie was impressed by something, the rest of them know they’d damn well better be, too. Mike tried to think of an intelligent question to ask; and almost had one when Jules cut in.

“Do you think if we head to that spot, WE can see him too?”

“Dunno,” Frankie shrugged. “Maybe. But if he’s, y’know, dead, maybe he only shows up at certain times or to certain people. I heard some ghosts do that.”

“I bet he’d show up to ME!” Manny declared, his tiny chest puffed out in pride.

Jorge and Jules chuckled at that. “Don’t make bets you can’t cover, Manny,” said Raj with a smile.

After a little more sniping, Frankie interjected, “Look, guys, I gotta jet soon. But let’s agree that if any of us hears anything or sees anything about that ghost, you gotta let everyone know, so we can get to the bottom of this shit.”

After a general consensus to that, they all dispersed and went their separate ways. Mike was just about to head off when he heard something stirring in the late-afternoon shadows against the wall behind him. A gaunt, unkempt figure raised itself off the ground and tottered forward, unsteadily.

Mike was momentarily afraid; but then he saw that it was only Drago, one of the homeless bums who hung around the neighborhood. Most of the adults hated him and told kids to stay away from him, but he seemed harmless enough to Mike. Besides, he was pretty entertaining.

“He’s not a ghooosst,” Drago rasped. “‘Ghost’ would mean he’s dead, that’d mean he was alive, once – and he WASN’T!”

“Were you listening to that whole conversation?” He was so stealthy that Mike hadn’t even noticed that he was there. Maybe it was a learned skill that homeless people had.

Drago raised one bony hand over his head, as if to blot out the sun, and then swung it down with a flourish. “The Green Roller was NEVER alive! He’s BEYOND life and death, good and evil, heaven and hell and the DMV!”

Mike didn’t quite see the point Drago was trying to make. Assuming there was one. “So what was he then?”

“A SPIRIT!”

“That’s the same thing-”

“NO! A spirit of a PLACE, not a PERSON! The Green Roller is the SPIRIT of THIS CITY!”

Huh, Mike thought. “Huh,” he said aloud. “Well, thanks for the info, Drago, but I gotta go home now. Bye!” He dropped his board to the ground and pushed off.

“I ain’t FINISHED, boy!” Drago yelled after him, waving his thin arms in the air. “A SPIRIT sprinting of the CITY, citified! It becomes an OBSESSION, folk thinking there’s SOMETHING THERE! But there ISN’T! I once knew…”

He was still ranting as Mike rolled out of earshot.

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That night, Mike retired to his room after a relatively subdued dinner with his mother and father. He didn’t mention anything to them about what Frankie or Drago had said; he knew that they’d only order him to stop hanging around those bums, or losers, or whatever choice denigration they reserved for people unlike them. He was struggling through yet another homework math problem when he heard raised voices from his parents. As usual. It seemed to him that they spent more time screaming at each other than on…well, anything.

He tried to zone them out.

It didn’t work. They only got louder. Meanwhile the numbers in front of him stared at him, tauntingly. Ten digits in infinite combinations, with infinite wrong answers and only one, mysterious, right one. For each one of an infinite number of problems.

Parents… Why couldn’t they just shut up if all they were going to do was yell? A riddle for the ages…just like his damned homework.

After a few moments of indecision, he dropped his pencil, put on his skate shoes, grabbed his board, and was out the door.

The embracing air of a warm summer evening caressed his face and tousled his air as he weaved along, the wood of his deck creaking under him and lulling him into a sort of trance. It was about the best feeling he could get, just skating around like that. Some days, it was the ONLY good feeling he could get.

Perhaps unconsciously, he directed himself away from the housing tract where his parents lived, towards an industrial area that was always deserted at night. Well, almost always – sometimes college kids had underground, illegal rave parties there, or so he’d heard. He had always wanted to see one.

As streetlamps and lighted windows faded behind him, Mike found himself in an expanding sea of dark gray and black. The moon was three-quarters full, but it was still pretty dark out; and he knew from experience that it was a bad idea to skate when you couldn’t even see the cracks in the pavement. He was about to turn around and head back towards civilization when, to his left, he saw a strange greenish light. It definitely wasn’t moonlight, and it didn’t look like any streetlight or car headlight he’d ever seen before. It appeared to be emanating from an empty lot amidst a cluster of abandoned warehouses. Maybe it was the college kids? He turned the nose of his board towards it and pushed, hoping he might at least be able to score some ecstasy or something there with the twenty-four dollars in his pocket.

As he approached, Mike noticed that the light didn’t shine steadily; it was pulsing in and out, almost as though it was keeping a beat. But he didn’t hear a note of music. Finally, he turned a corner and got a good view of the lot, only to see – an empty lot. The greenish light still seemed to be emanating from there, but it was everywhere and nowhere at once, like being inside of a hologram.

Mike heard a few stray wrappers blowing along the pavement, and turned to see them spinning in a circle. Dust in a devil. The glow seemed very slightly stronger there, and he cautiously rolled over to get a closer look. He stepped off of his board, bent over–

And was promptly knocked to the ground by a blast, of air and light and sound all at once. An emerald bomb going off in his face. Even with his eyes closed, all he could see was the most neon green imaginable; a green that made a well-watered July lawn look like pale ochre dust. After a few moments, it dimmed some, and he cautiously opened his eyes halfway.

There, standing before him, was a green apparition. Vaguely human in shape, but with odd angles, strange proportions, and flames licking up, down, and all over it. It was standing on a skateboard which looked almost normal in comparison to its rider, but it, too, was covered in bright green flames. Mike could smell the stench of burning asphalt where its wheels touched the ground.

The apparition turned to look at him. Its eyes, too, were green; but a green so bright that it was almost yellow. Mike’s jaw hung open, his throat too dry to speak. He managed to emit a gasp – and then the apparition pushed off. Just one push, and it roared through the empty lot as a meteorite burns through atmosphere. Mike saw the apparition lift off of the ground, as if it had ollied; and then it vanished, with another green flash.

He sat on the pavement, staring dumbly, for quite some time. Boy, would he have a story to tell tomorrow.

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 “Get real, Mike,” Jules sneered.

Mike folded his arms against his chest and scowled. As well as he could, anyway. He hadn’t had that much practice.

“You’re just saying you saw it because you heard Frankie say he saw it!” Jorge piped in.

“Then why’d you believe Frankie when he said he saw what he said…” Manny trailed off, uncertain of his grammar.

“Frankie’s seen it all; he’s got no reason to lie about stuff like that!” Raj declared.

“I got no reason to lie about it either,” Mike mumbled. He wished he hadn’t bothered telling them.

“Yo, guys!” Frankie yelled, from across the street. He rolled across to them, dodging a couple of cars on the way. “I scored some weed from these college guys, and…” He trailed off, apparently noticing a preoccupation. “What’s up?”

“Mike says he saw the Green Skater,” Jules said, with an exaggerated eye-roll.

“He did?!” Frankie looked at Mike with renewed curiosity, and Mike felt his heart race a little.

“Well he SAYS he did,” Jorge pointed out. “Mike says a lot of things.”

“Well, I believe him,” Frankie stated categorically.

“Me too!” Manny said, tugging on Mike’s sleeve. “I ALWAYS did!”

Seeing a new consensus, Jules stayed silent for a moment, perhaps trying to think of a new plan of attack. “OK, so maybe Mike saw the Green Skater, after Frankie did,” he said in a dubious tone. “Then why’s this fucking ghost keep showing up to us – is he trying to haunt us or something?”

“Some ghosts hang around places they died, or where they hung around a long time when they were alive,” Mike said uncertainly. “I think.”

“Like Lincoln’s ghost at the White House,” Raj murmured.

Everyone was silent for a few moments, pondering the imponderables of death, ghosts, and why ghosts hang around after death.

“Hey,” Manny said, “Maybe he WANTS something from us!”

Everyone looked at him incredulously.

“Us?”

“Something?”

“Like what?!”

“Well…,” Manny hesitated, the question apparently having not crossed his mind. “He’s the ghost of an old-school skater, right? What did old-school skaters like?”

They all mulled that question over.

“Gatorade!” Jorge piped up.

“Punk mixtapes,” Jules added.

“Porn of girls with feathered hair!” Raj declared.

“Alright, alright, chill, yo,” Frankie said, waving his hands in a vaguely authoritative manner. “Here’s what we gotta do. Everyone search your basements, attics, storage sheds, whatever. See what’cha can find, and if ya find anything – y’know, LIKELY – grab it and bring it here, tomorrow night, ‘bout 11:30. We’ll start a fire or something and try to summon him at midnight.”

“But isn’t that kinda…Satanic?” Jules asked. His parents were very strictly against anything remotely devilish. Yet they let him skate.

“Yeah! So what?!” Frankie said. Jules abruptly clammed up. “Any other problems?”

“I’m not supposed to leave the house after nine,” Manny said, timidly.

“For fuck’s sake, Manny, SNEAK OUT! Your parents don’t nail your window closed, do they?”

“Well…not anymore!” Manny responded, apparently happy about that development.

After a little more back and forth, everyone went their separate ways, vowing to make the fabled Green Skater their servant tomorrow night. Mike thought it a superb plan, and was thrilled – this was easily the most exciting thing he’d been involved in all year.

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The next night, a little after eleven, Mike grabbed his board and headed out. He was so giddy with anticipation he nearly forgot to bring the yellowed old Def Leppard poster he found among his parents’ abandoned boxes of junk in the attic. Were old-school skaters into that kind of thing? Guess they’d find out.

When he arrived at the lot, Jules, Raj, and Jorge were already there. They had set up a camping lantern for light, and were fiddling with the biggest boombox Mike had ever seen. “Where the hell did you guys get that thing?” he asked.

“Pawn shop,” Jules responded, without looking up.

“Only cost fifteen bucks!” Raj said, triumphantly.

Frankie appeared, with Manny trying to keep up behind. “Alright, guys, let’s get this goin’!” he yelled enthusiastically. “I found an NES game and an old Playboy!”

“And my cousin who visited my house last month likes old music and he gave me THIS!” Manny declared, producing a cassette tape which bore a piece of masking tape scrawled with faded letters reading, “PUNK HC 84-89.”

Frankie held the mixtape up, almost reverently, then slipped it into the cassette tray, closed it, and pressed play. The boombox’s long-dormant speakers roared to life with tinny drums, sloppily played guitars, and a vocalist who screeched like a raccoon in heat. To Mike’s ears, it sounded like any other 80s punk rock: Bad. Did people really listen to that stuff because they wanted to, or just because it was cool? No matter.

As the music blared, Mike unrolled his Def Leppard poster and deposited it next to a few bottles of oddly-hued Gatorade, a 720⁰ NES cartridge, a pair of ugly Hawaiian shorts, and the August 1979 issue of Playboy. They all stared silently at the odd collection of items they’d brought, uncertain of what to do next.

“Sooo…what should we do now?” Raj asked.

“Don’t people stand in a circle at a séance?” Manny queried.

“If we’re summoning a skater ghost, we have to stand ON OUR BOARDS!” Jules declared, rolling his eyes at the obviousness of it all.

“Maybe we should stand on the kicktails, like we’re about to drop in to a halfpipe?” Mike offered.

“No, wait – I’ve got a better idea,” Frankie declared. “Let’s skate in a circle, around the boombox and all that other shit. Try not to bump into each other or fall or nothin’.”

No one disagreed. In short order, all six of them were turning counterclockwise circles around the blaring boombox and the old-school trinkets in near-perfect synchronization.

Mike noticed the different pushing styles of each of them – Frankie, assured; Raj, steady; Jorge, impatient; Jules, angry; and Manny, unsure – then shook his head and turned his attention back to the circle. He thought he saw a few green sparks, crackling as they danced along the pavement. Then a few more.

Then far too many for comfort, searing the air and slicing through the darkness.

There was a swirl of emerald flame, spinning as if circling an infernal drain. Flames coalesced into a figure that appeared vaguely human, but off. Just enough to be unsettling. Its movements were smoothed, flowing, as if it had no joints to worry about. As they rolled, its head turned with them - a full 360 degrees. All the while, its green flames flowed over and around it like angry bees disturbed from their hive.

The six skaters jerkily stopped turning their circle. Jorge bumped into Raj; neither seemed to notice. All stood stock-still. After a moment of stunned silence, everyone started blabbering at once.

“Holy shit!” said Jules.

“Dios mio!” said Jorge.

“Dude!” said Raj.

“Fuck yeah!” said Frankie.

“HA!” said Mike.

Everyone except Manny. He stood overawed, staring at the apparition with shining eyes, as though determined to drink in as much of it as possible.

The green figure continued turning its head – or what looked like its head – around, as if assessing the situation. Then it stopped, standing unmoving, save for the flames licking over its body.

Everyone was silent again for a few moments. Then – “Now what?” said Manny.

It occurred to Mike that they hadn’t really thought that far ahead. “We should talk to…it…,” he said, uncertainly.

“Frankie, you saw it first! Say something!” Jules prodded.

Frankie wasn’t about to back down from that challenge. He squared his shoulders, and inquired, “So…you’re a ghost, right?”

The Green Skater didn’t respond. Or even display any indication that it had heard him.

“Are you dead?” Frankie asked. “Were you, like, one of us, once?”

Again, no response. Just the subdued roar of flame-on-flame.

“FUCK!” Frankie exclaimed in exasperation. “You guys try something!”

Raj knelt, carefully, towards the pavement, and picked up a bottle of purple Gatorade. He regarded it uncertainly, then tossed it towards the Green Skater.

“Raj, no!” Jules yelled. “He could kill us -”

The Green Skater reached out with its flaming fingers, and caught the Gatorade deftly. They all smelled burning plastic as the figure looked down at the bottle, unscrewed the cap, and poured it into its…mouth? There was a loud hiss of steam as the liquid disappeared into the flames. The Skater then casually tossed the bottle onto the ground. It rolled towards Mike, blackened and half-melted.

“That taste good?” Raj enquired.

“Why are you HERE?” Mike interjected. The others looked at him disapprovingly, but the Skater seemed to notice. It looked in Mike’s direction, raised its arm – and pointed. At an empty lot across the street. There was a swirl of flames, and it was gone.

For a couple of minutes, everyone just stood and stared silently at the spot where it had stood. Their trinkets were blackened and burned. Mike’s contribution – the Def Leppard poster - was now singed so badly it simply read “D pard.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t have asked it anything?” offered Manny.

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They attempted another séance a few days later; then another, the week after that. Both were anticlimactic, with the Green Skater making no appearance. Jules and Raj didn’t even show up for the second one. Frankie said that they might as well stop after that; the Green Skater was obviously going to show only on its own schedule.

So, for Mike, it was back to the usual routines of school, barely tolerating his parents, and skating. Only the last brought him any joy. He imagined it was the same for the other guys, too. He didn’t see much of them, outside of skating; Manny was still in junior high, Jules, Raj, and Jorge were in different classes at school (and Mike suspected that Jules didn’t really like him, anyway), and Frankie… Well, he didn’t really know much about Frankie. Everyone just kinda assumed that he’d keep showing up to skate and shoot the shit, even though he was out of school and probably ought to be working a dead-end job somewhere. Come to think of it, Mike didn’t even know where he lived.

He found out one night near the end of August, when the unrelenting heat finally eased up a little and skating in an open lot no longer felt like rolling wheels of melting cheese across a broiling skillet. After a couple hours of wandering, Mike found himself near where the Green Skater had revealed itself to them. And there, sitting listlessly on the curb with his board under his feet and knuckles on the ground, was Frankie.

Frankie’s left eye was badly blackened, and a cut along his cheekbone slowly seeped blood. He looked at Mike dully as the latter skated up, unsure of what to say or do. There was always the old standby: “Hey Frankie, what’s up, dude?”

“Yo,” Frankie said, staring fixedly at the blackness beyond the perimeter of the streetlights.

Mike tentatively sat down next to him, opened his mouth, closed it, opened it again, and managed to get a single syllable out. “Y-”

“My fucking stepdad – I mean, step-prick – hit me in the face because he thought I raided his porn stash.

“And my mom took his side, just like that old bitch always does. And he had his ring on when he did it – you see this?” he asked, pointing to the cut on his cheek. Mike nodded. “I don’t mind a black eye, but I can’t stand no one cuttin’ me. I oughta creep in their bedroom while they’re asleep and give ‘em both a razorblade nose job.”

Mike was stunned. Frankie still lived with his mother? He’d imagined him living in a ninth-floor apartment with a revolving cast of hot college girls. Or something.

“Fucking adults,” Frankie said, spitting to accentuate. “They always act like they know what they’re doing, but they’re so full of shit, man.”

Mike said nothing. He agreed, of course, but the weight of being a powerless nonentity in a world built by idiots at the request of maniacs bore heavily on him. Also, he was unaccountably tired.

Frankie glanced at his younger confidant, then sighed his world-weary teenage sigh and stood. “Well, hey, Mike, thanks for comin’ out and sittin’ with me. You didn’t really help or anything, but it’s nice to have someone listen to you without dropping bullshit advice or lecturing you on what a fuck-up you are.”

After a cursory fist-bump, Frankie rolled his board on the pavement and skated away, quickly fading in the darkness. Mike stared after him, wondering what it was like to be mighty and brought low. He had never known; he was born low, and would remain so as far as he could tell.

Unprompted, a strange voice in his head hissed, “Pain is worse for the strong.”

…The hell?

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The next day after school, Mike heard an unusually high concentration of sirens out to the east. Had someone shot up a convenience store again? He resolved to find out later; it at least would be more interesting than English homework.

That night over dinner, his parents screamed at each other yet again. Apparently his mother had mistakenly bought a bottle of pinot grigio instead of pinot noir.

“How in the HELL could you mix those up?” his father yelled, his forehead throbbing with over-clogged veins. “Pinot noir is RED! This…is…WHITE!” he declared, holding up a glass he had already half-emptied despite its unacceptable whiteness.

“I couldn’t tell what color it was through the damn BOTTLE!” his mother fired back, hoisting the dark green bottle as proof positive. “Anyway, it’s wine, isn’t it?! Are you telling me you’re some kind of goddamned CONNOISEUR now!?!”

After a few minutes, Mike dropped his fork and left the table. His parents paid him no mind, their argument now having turned to who was to blame for the late cable bill. After burying a fist in the cheap plaster wall around his closet, he grabbed his board and stormed out the door, dropping wheels onto concrete as though he could seek salvation in their revolutions.

He headed east, towards where he had heard the cacophony of sirens earlier. The early evening air flowed around him his as he pushed, the pavement feeling particularly smooth. Soon enough, he spotted a cluster of police cruisers, a couple of fire trucks, and an ambulance – but not at a convenience store. In the middle of a parking lot. Right where the Green Skater had pointed.

Aside from the cops, firemen, and paramedics, a small crowd of locals had gathered. Manny, Raj, Jorge, and Jules were all there, too, standing huddled next to the bright yellow “CAUTION” tape. Mike felt a pit in his stomach. He picked up his board and walked over to them, seeing the obvious distress on their faces. “Uh…guys…” he began, and stopped.

Manny looked in his direction, his big brown eyes reddened. “Oh, Mike…” he trailed off and started sobbing.

“Frankie’s dead.” Jorge said in a toneless voice. “He was out skating, and some asshole rednecks in a brown pickup truck ran him over.”

Mike looked at them for a moment, then at the shapeless black-bagged lump the paramedics were loading onto a gurney. He couldn’t quite fathom any of it. “Did they get caught?” he asked, in a surprisingly conversational tone.

“Not yet,” Raj said, staring down at the pavement.

“Probably get off anyway,” Jules muttered, glaring at the police cruisers parked nearby. “No one cares if some punk skater gets killed.”

Mike didn’t want to hear the truth in that, but he did. He noticed something else on the pavement: Frankie’s weathered, stickered-up board, laying upside down and broken in half. At that sight, something broke in him.

“Something’s gotta be done,” he whispered, in a voice not quite his.

The others stared at him. The expression on his young face could freeze hot blood. “Mike, are you -” Jorge began.

He dropped his board to the concrete, and, with a single push, left it all behind him.

“Mike!” Manny yelled after him. “MIKE!”

But he was gone.

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The next day, Mike left his parents’ house before breakfast and skipped school. All day long, he skated all over town, picking up fast food and drinks with what little money he had. Long after dark, he just kept pushing. Where was he going? Did it matter? He felt an irresistible impulse to keep moving, no matter what; he couldn’t let inertia drag him down. Couldn’t be a shapeless black-bagged lump.

Sometime around midnight, he found himself back at the lot. The lot where the Green Skater had appeared at their séance, right across from where Frankie died. There was nothing left of either of them; they even took Frankie’s broken board. As evidence for a conviction that would never happen, probably.

As Mike stared into the darkness, a not-unfamiliar chemical scent reached his nostrils. He glanced over his left shoulder; a few discarded papers and plastic bags were dancing in the air around a diffuse green glow.

He knew what was coming, this time. Sparks flew, there was a flash and a roar – and there stood the Green Skater again. But this time Mike stood his ground.

“What are YOU doing back here?” he said, angrily. The yellowish pupilless eyes regarded him without answer.

“Everything’s gone wrong since you first showed up to…,” Mike trailed off, staring at the pavement. Why was it so hard to say his dead friend’s name? “I wish you’d just left us alone and go haunted someone who deserves it.”

He glanced up, to see the apparition still staring at him. It seemed to cock its head, ever so slightly.

Mike had had enough. “Well?!” he yelled, his voice echoing off of graffitied walls and through empty streets. “If you have something to tell me, then TELL ME!”

The Green Skater opened its mouth, with scorching flames where its lips ought to be. Mike thought he heard a single syllable in a strange, ancient, alien voice…

And, just then, a car sped up the street, into the lot, and right over the Green Skater. Emerald fire was doused, flattened, and scattered into an expanding cloud of greenish smoke. It parted before Mike, revealing a late-model Corvette inhabited by four specimens of prime, well-tanned Eurotrash.

“Hey, bro!” one of them shouted, “Where is nearest mall?”

Mike stood speechless, his jaw flapping in the wind, what was left of his worldview suddenly upended and tossed unceremoniously into the gutter.

The Europeans scoffed at his silence. “Yeah, well fuck you, little Yankee man,” the driver announced. The Vette sped off, leaving naught behind but a whiff of sulfur and – the board?

There it was, lying in the road, upside down but apparently none the worse for wear. Its luminescent wheels turned slowly, writhing as if they longed to be back on the pavement.

Mike approached the tempting apparition slowly, unsteadily. The board sat inert, flames still oozing and cascading along its surface, the pavement crackling under its ethereal load. Mike crept closer. He thought he heard something unearthly, but he couldn’t tell if it was a distant echo or a voice in his head.

“Someone…” he thought it said, then trailed off. It came back stronger.

“Someone must ride.”

Mike felt as if his body was no longer his. He half-marched, half-stumbled forward, until he was so close to the green board that he could feel the heat radiating off of it. The hairs on his legs shriveled and curled back from the flames. He kicked the board back onto its wheels, sending a shower of sparks cascading across the lot.

Mike placed one foot on the board, and his perception exploded in a flash. He saw all; past, present, and future. He knew all; the eternal mysteries of life and death were solved in a moment of disdainful insight. No more wrong answers.

More importantly, he knew what was to be done – and that he was the one to do it.

He placed his other foot on the board, and straightened up. The flames took him, as he took them. Mike was no more; only the Green Skater remained.

He would take the city from those who trashed it, disdained it, feared it; and return it to those who rode it, used it, reveled in it.

But, first things first.

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Laurice sat at her kitchen table eating lukewarm beans and rice. The news of her delinquent, good-for-nothing son’s death yesterday hadn’t greatly disturbed her. She had been about to kick the little bastard out, anyway. What kind of nineteen-year-old still lived with his mother, without school, or a job, or anything? And he had upset Jonathan so badly that he had refused to even touch her that night! Now Jonathan was watching porn in the den, and there she was, alone, sulking over food. Pity them both.

She heard an anguished scream from the den. Maybe he was finally aroused!  She rose from the table and went to look, taking care to loosen her robe and reveal a little cleavage. “Tonight…,” she told herself.

She opened the door to the den, only to see a curious tableau: Blood and singe marks everywhere, a rapidly fading green light, and what was left of Jonathan, still smoking, curled up like a plucked and decapitated chicken on the floor.

After staring for a few moments, Laurice closed the door and returned to the kitchen. “He had it comin’,” she said, to no one in particular. She went back to her rice and beans, already musing about who her next beau would be. That new family next door had a pretty good-lookin’ daddy…

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The three good ol’ boys sat on the bench seat of Pierre’s brown pickup truck, drinking beer, munching on pork rinds, and discussing the week’s events.

“I still cain’t be-lieve you ran over that kid,” Steve said.

“And got away with it – that’s the best part!” Duke declared, burping for emphasis.

“He deserved it; he wouldn’t get da fuck outta mah way when I honked at him!” Pierre declared, with the serene immorality of the invincible. “Stupid skater-boarder. Ain’t no one was around to see our plate numbers anyway – why not knock one a them off, and do everyone a favor?” He laughed at this, and the others joined in. Though not without some hesitation at the “our.”

Their joint laughter was abruptly silenced by an audible *THUMP* from the bed of his truck. This lot was supposed to be deserted! “What the fuck – someone climbin’ in?!” Steve drawled, fumbling for the revolver in his patent-leather holster.

Pierre flung open the door and grabbed a double-barreled shotgun from the gun rack behind the truck’s seat. “If they touched mah truck,” he began – and stopped as he saw that someone was indeed touching the truck. Someone very green, and very much in flames. Someone who flung what looked like a burning skateboard at his legs, which were instantly burned to the bone.

As he fell, his finger inadvertently jammed against the trigger of his shotgun, splattering Duke’s brains all over the cab with both barrels. Steve, having finally found his revolver, raised it towards the specter. It raised its infernal hand in response. In a nanosecond, tendrils of green fire lashed out of its fingers and towards the weapon, snaking their way past the metal to find the powder within. All six bullets exploded at once, destroying the gun and most of Steve’s lower arm.

As the two crippled men wailed, and their dead friend congealed on the glass and leather, the Green Skater turned, and retreated across the lot. Pierre, dimly aware of this through his agonized haze, felt a sudden tinge of hope for another day.

Though only momentarily. With a stomp that left a crater in the concrete, the Green Skater launched toward them, the nose of its broad board blasting through the air like a blunt-tipped rocket. The Skater slammed down on the board’s kicktail, rising higher, higher; a verdant comet seemingly bidding a last farewell to Earth.

Pierre and Steve watched transfixed, their pain momentarily forgotten in the beauty of it all.

Then the Skater fell. Onto Pierre’s truck. Ethereal justice and gasoline and unspent ammunition and low-grade liquor all conflagrated together, in a bright green fireball.

A few minutes later, all that was left of Pierre’s prized pickup - a rusted chrome bumper, now singed jet-black - clattered to the ground. But no one was there to hear it.

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Manny yelped as he was thrown to the ground.

The overweight, mustached security guard looked smugly down at him, assured of his authoritative power. “You think you can ignore all the ‘NO SKATEBOARDING’ signs around MY mall, you little shit?! HUH?!?” He tossed the brat’s skateboard onto the ground beside him.

Though badly shaken, Manny was still defiant. “This mall is practically deserted!” he retorted – and quite rightly, as it was scheduled to be torn down in a few months. “I can’t hurt anyone by skating here!”

The guard’s nostrils flared with rage. Did this kid dare just insult his mall? “Oh, but you can get hurt here, punk,” he said, pulling out his extensible baton and fondling it suggestively. “And you will.”

As he was weighing whether to break an arm or leg first, he saw something approaching out of the corner of his eye. He whirled, baton at the ready - only to see one of those dirty, unwashed bums who hung around the place despite his persistent daily efforts to chase them off. “What do YOU want?!” he sneered.

“The children know,” Drago said, still approaching, his eyes cast to the sky. “They KNOW what comes next, and after, and BEFORE! And it’s time for YOU to learn!” He glared at the guard, who took an involuntary step backward at the insanity in this walking cadaver’s eyes.

But he couldn’t let this loser bum intimidate him. “Alright, you want some, asshole?!” he shouted. “I’ll mace you down before I fuck you up!” He reached for his can of pepper spray –

And suddenly felt an explosive pain through the fat on his left shoulder. He froze, turned slightly…and saw one green finger, wreathed in flames, poked into his flesh. It rose, then fell again. Tap, tap, tap. Burn, pain, wince. He stood frozen, unable to speak, to think, to move.

Unnoticed by security, Drago extended a hand to the fallen Manny. “Come on, boy,” he said in a paternal manner. “This ain’t no place for us mortals no more.” He pulled Manny up, Manny picked up his board, and they walked off together. Behind them, they heard a roar of flames and an agonized scream, abruptly cut short. The night was silent again, save for distant traffic and chirping cicadas.

Manny glanced back at the dissipating cloud of green, but Drago gently turned him back to the path before them. No matter. He knew what he saw; Mike had been right all along! Just wait ‘til he told his baby sister about this!

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This story is published with a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.