Tag: Death

Poetry-Thing Thursday: Embodiment

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

If only we’d known,
what freedom would bring,
we might have stopped it,
before we’d sing,
of such beauties and reverie.
that have been nothing but lies,
brave and free? Unlikely.

Here, it is all for the highest bidder,
if in politics or power.
Everything else,
the lowest.
Anyone that disagrees,
called heretics, traitors.
For money’s the master,
in this brave new world.
While Orwell’s spinning corpse,
nears perpetual-motion disaster.

Society may have order,
but it is flawed at its core.
Temporary-cure for permanent chaos,
when knowledge is a bore.
A few years from now,
centuries, millenia,
people will watch the collapse
all asking, “how?”

The truth is,
it’s our fault.
Here and now.
We are as children,
no adult around.
We whimper,
whine, stray,
claiming we can hold things dear,
our hands to our ears.

What bullshit.
We are the embodiment,
of our own worst fears.

Short Story: At Peace on the Water

~ S.M. Nolan ~ 3 Comments

John McDonnell was a fisherman. He rode the seas by day, slept atop them by night, trawled them the times between. John was mostly a one man show; did it all himself despite the workload required of a commercial fisherman of his station. But such was the way of the industry that a man did what he ought to earn his daily bread. For John, like most good, hearty Americans, that daily bread cost him hours ‘n hours of blood and sweat that dribbled periodically down his catfish-smooth back.

While trawling for whatever his nets could haul in, Martha was at home. Two boys and the life of an overworked school teacher meant, like John, she was under-appreciated, under-valued, and stuck in an industry as collapsed as his. Ever the homemaker and loving mother though, despite the collagen beaten thighs aching from hours on her feet. Each night she’d tuck the boys in, recalling stories John had told her. Stories she felt it her duty to impart to them. Told her, that was, on the rare nights he managed to make it home for supper instead of trying to procure it.

John had wanted to be a fisherman all of his life. He’d sit in school, drawing finely detailed sketches of the various species prowling the coasts and waterways of his childhood. He’d fill whole pages with specs of various rigs for boats and special fish. It was a pass-time. An obsession in the truest American tradition. All of those times he should’ve been focused on maths and sciences so he could “grow up and getta’ good job,” he was planning and learning his trade. When first he started to ply it, the middle finger he gave to dejectors gave him a hard-on. Martha would’ve enjoyed that thoroughly.

The first boat was an old one. Barely large enough to piss off. He spent more money repairing it from summer gigs than he’d ever earn with it. Between that and the oft-bags of ‘shrooms and grass aboard it, he was at peace with a lack of profit.

Cue Martha with comely good looks and dimpled cheeks. The bottles of Ole English Rye, John had taken to drinking. One hot night, and nine months later, there wasn’t much more he could do but provide for the twin boys that popped out.

That wasn’t to say John didn’t love his family. On the contrary, he was a family man through-and-through. Just like Pop’d been. And Grandad before him. Difference was, they’d made their livings as leather merchants or carpenters, back when those things were still valued. In that way, John had followed in their footsteps, found the thing he knew and was good at, and refused to do it for free– or anything else for that matter. That work was for land-lubbers though. The types that could sleep without scents of fish on ice or the sea-salt spray.

John just wasn’t quite the way about things most fellows were. He needed the water. Be it Pacific, Atlantic, or any rivers or streams between the two. He rode them all like a true man of his craft. It was all business until the lunch-time beer, then nothing more ’til the day’s the work was done. And when forced to sleep, the photo of Martha and the boys at his bedside got the nightly, longing look. Then the one of Martha naked got the nightly, stroking grunt. The light went out on his bed with a broad beamin’ on his grizzled face.

It was a bad May that John finally met his match. The season was just starting again. He’d only been out a week. The weather’d been fierce, but nothing the forty-footer couldn’t handle with John at the helm. Per usual for spring and summer, he’d hired on a few, part-time hands to help rake in the expected rush. The result was a near twenty-four hour done in twelve-hour two-man shifts. Only a pair of hands were there to tend the wheel or empty the nets at any given time.

The ocean swelled. The sky gave a thunderous roar. Squalls blew past island coasts far to the west and south. The season was geared to start with a bang. In the middle of it, John and his hands were slogging through knee-buckling waves while the forty-footer rode ‘em like a rag doll. By the end of their second full-day, they were all exhausted, their haul only half as intended.

Were he not chasing something in particular, maybe John wouldn’t’ve kept himself out so long. Maybe he’d’ve been satisfied with the first days’ bounty. Then again, maybe if he’d been that kind of man, he’d’ve never spent all those hours drawing fish or making charts. Never stepped on a boat. Never even dreamed of being John McDonnell, fisherman at sea.

But life’s funny that way, for both the fish and its most patient predator. It’s not quite a matter of maybes. Rather, it’s a matter of the soul. A sort’a passion that can only be appeased and rocked to sleep by the caress of water against the hull.

John and his hands were in a squall to beat the band. They all sensed it. When it finally happened, they almost welcomed it. Like John had said, though more sarcastically than not, he was doomed to end his life at sea. It made sure he was no liar.

The waves pitched and rolled him back. The trawler heaved and hoed. John sensed more than anything that the sea was fierce. Almost seemed as if he’d done something to anger her. Maybe it was his own foolishness. Maybe greed. Maybe poor, dumb luck. Whatever it was, there was no escape.

A final, forceful heave. The sea crashed from two directions. The keel groaned and flexed. Then, a loud crrrack. Fiberglass snapped. The hull tore open. The forty-footer began taking on water. It was over in moments. The trawler headed for the ocean floor, John with it. The last thing he saw before the air left his lungs and the life left his eyes, was the limp curl of a dead fish. It floated up past him in the aerated water, no doubt released from the trawler’s own depths.

As a fisherman’s wife Martha knew the fear and sorrow of missing husbands or partners. Even at the best of times, they lived a life of perpetual torment, terror. Ever on the precipice of tragedy and sorrow. None of them knew if or when their mates might make it home. Usually, they missed their scheduled returns by days anyhow.

Martha and the boys didn’t worry ’til then. It wasn’t long after that they knew she’d joined the ranks of widows whose only solace was that no man could be so cruel as to stay at sea so long.

John was one of those men. Lost to the sea. Lost to history. Nothing was left to find of him or the others. He’d spent his whole life wanting to be a fisherman, living as one, then dying as one. Even in his final moments when he felt the forty-footer shudder and begin to sink, he was at peace knowing that. After all, the water was his home, always had been. Now, it would be forever.

Short Story: Sprawl-Blue

~ S.M. Nolan ~ Leave a comment

The sky was that special kind of blended deep-blue only found against the foreground of metro sprawls. The kind of blue where countless neon lights mix it with old-time incandescents, radiating their offspring for miles. While their multitudes fuck to make the paint, they bounce and rebound off the gloss-coats of high-end, self-driving cars.

And at a distance, it all forms that thing loosely termed “Humanity.” Progress. Civilization.

Most call it “sprawl-blue.” Not just ‘cause that’s what it is, but ‘cause it perfectly encapsulates life in a sprawl. It rolls off the tongue easier than sweat along a belly-dancer’s undulating navel. It even gives a bit of the taste of it. Copper, like blood. Hints of irreverent neons. No-one knowing could deny sprawl-blue’s as much a way of life as Junk or The Net.

Personally, Carly didn’t care for either of the last two. She was just a girl trying to make her way without being fucked for her money. In a sprawl, if you didn’t do it for yourself, you sure were getting fucked. Carly didn’t like getting fucked. She liked fucking. She liked to get her hands dirty. Slake her blood-thirst. Seel the adrenaline rush of gun and fist-fights. Most of all, she loved control. Being in control was better than cumming on X.

It started young: a taste of power from being the smartest street-rat in the pack. All the others looked up to her. Boys. Girls. It didn’t matter. Carly was Alpha-bitch. Queen. Empress and Matriarch. Everyone followed her. Those that didn’t, got far outta’ the way– or, on the wrong end of her pack.

She’d started with drugs. At eleven. Stumbled onto a deal gone bad and found a few kilos of grass, X, and Junk. Got her start with it. Made bank. At fourteen she was running guns like a bike-messenger to parcels. Literally. She and her people were decked out in street-rat clothes, looking as pathetic as possible. Were it not for Carly’s cunning, they’d have been that way. She earned herself street-cred, and eventually, control of territory.

It came with blood. Serious cost. Her first turf war left her limping every time it rained. It drew suspicion anytime she was around the “real-world” straights. That term alone always made her laugh enough to forget the limp. The real world was no different from the so-called “shadow world.” Both survived, and thrived, on power, control.

But both worlds had started to take their toll. On Carly. On people in general. Now, at twenty-two, Carly’d seen more than most people three times her age. Double that for straights. She still limped when it rained, was blind in one eye, and had the accompanying slash-scars across her face. Random hunks of meat were missing from her body. Others were fused shut, grotesquely mottled from burns, bullet-wounds, stabbings. Each was a prize of the Sprawl-blue coloring the background of every memory of every night of her life.

She stood center-stage in the middle of a storage warehouse. She was leaned forward, hands on a pallet of bags of cement. Various construction materials and pallets were laid out in seemingly random points about the floors. Elsewhere, were giant rolls of goods. Filled shelves. Everything there waiting to be shipped.

Carly’s people were formed around her, armed to the teeth. They awaited her order to throw themselves into the fray, if or when it came. They’d jump in front of bullets for her. It wasn’t for lack of survival instinct. Carly just had a way about her. A certain charisma. As a child, sheer arrogant confidence had backed it up. Since then, its spine had been reformed by bloodshed, survival. She was the only reason any of her people were alive today.

But Carly knew she wouldn’t live forever. Nor would her people. Or their ways. That’s what tonight was about; survival. Carrying on after the loss, insurance and assurance, that the world could survive no matter what happened to the “shadow people.”

The sprawl had been divided too long. The various gangs at war too long. They’d fought for territory for generations. The battles always ended with less people. Less land. More damage. Carly was no different. The only thing separating her from her enemies were the imaginary lines they’d collectively drawn– for survival’s sake.

Carly knew that. Her people knew that. Most of all, their enemies knew that.

She’d called a meeting, a summit of sorts; all of her gang, all of the other gangs. The collective armies of over a dozen warlords, mafioso, and G’s were en-route to sit down in their massiveness. Carly had managed it with exorbitant gifts. Neutral messengers. Peaceful letters. It was time for a sit down– a parley. Pow-wow. They needed co-existence, she said. If not for themselves, then for all the lost.

It had taken time, and doing, but eventually Carly’d convinced the gang-leaders to meet. It was time to end the wars, to unify the people against their true threats. The elites. Aristocrats. Politicians. Police. In effect, the so-called “Real-world establishment.”

“It is time,” she’d said. “To emerge from the shadows and retake the day.”

The first to reach the meetings were the Asian gangs– Yakuza, Triads, the like. Punctuality was their way. And scoping out the competition, laying in wait in the event of ambush, was the other gangs’ way. With the obvious recognition that no slaughter was about to take place, the Mexican gangs came next. They had to be macho, show they weren’t afraid. Then, the black-only gangs. The white-only gangs. The Italians. The Irish. So many that the warehouse was packed. Standing room only.

Carly’s heart swelled with tension and pride. So many opposing colors together. Even as the last gang-leaders led their people in, she couldn’t believe what she’d achieved. She smiled, lifted her arms wide in a V, and projected her voice.

“Thank you all for coming. You know why we’re here. To ensure the safety of our city. Our people. Our families. There’s only one way to ensure that happens. That is why I’ve brought us all here today.” She lowered her arms as something slid subtly from her sleeve and into her hand. Nobody noticed. Even her own people were oblivious.“We’ve all become a blight,” she said to suddenly confused looks. “We’re a plague. A cancer on this city. I aim to cut that cancer out!”

The obvious trap’s recognition appeared instantaneously across hundreds of faces. A single heart-beat separated it from the explosion. In a blink, the warehouse was in flames. Bits and bodies were thrown about. Blood and chunks strewn everywhere. Carly was blown clear through a metal wall. Her torso was lacerated, organs and bones pulverized by the explosives disguised as cement bags.

Her last breath made her arm go limp. The charred detonator rolled from a hand. Her eyes fixed up on the sky, that never-ending, ubiquitous, sprawl-blue.

Short-Story: Staccato

~ S.M. Nolan ~ 3 Comments

Ryan McCafee hadn’t spoken to his father in over twenty years. He’d seen him. He’d even exchanged words with him. He hadn’t spoken to him. They’d interacted millions of times, even come close, but to “no cigar.” It wasn’t for lack of wanting. It just never happened. If they’d been insightful, or traffic control tower workers, their perpetual status would be “failure to commit.”

Ryan knew his father’s health was failing him. He remembered the first phone call. Mom had called. He’d spoken to her. They’d spoken often, in fact. Usually, she was speaking. Ryan wasn’t immune though, his mother was simply a gusher. The type to call eight or nine times for trivial things. Then, on the ninth or tenth, she’d suddenly burst with joy, sorrow, anger– whatever she’d been bottling. Ryan always listened, waiting patiently. This was, after all, the person that had taught him to walk, tie his shoes, dance with girls– the sort of thing every good mother does.

For a while, Ryan thought that the source of it: maybe their inability to say anything meaningful was from lack of some paternal role. But, no. The more Ryan thought, the more he’d recalled his father teaching him to swim, to ride a bicycle, to get dates and tie a tie for them. He did everything in his factual, punctual way, but he did them. His instructions were short. His tone staccato notes. Others might have thought him cold. Ryan knew it was just his way. He’d watched Dad explain things to Mom, or anyone else for that matter, the same way.

If he thought hard enough, Ryan could almost see where the shift began. When the proverbial chasm opened. It was around his seventeenth birthday. He’d been caught drinking and getting high. Nothing unusual for the time nor place. His hometown was what some might’ve called “one-horse.” Most just called it boring, Ryan included.At that age, his friends agreed. A few got daring, and grew grass or smuggled it in from other towns. Everyone got a piece, and ended up lying around giggling and fat from junk-food.

They’d been doing just that in a friend’s basement when the party was raided by the friend’s parents. They took Ryan and the others out, lined ‘em up by the phone, and made them each call their parents. Most importantly, they were made to say why. The first kid that didn’t had the phone torn away and the situation explained. The phone returned to his ear and his face went white. The kid whose parents had done it didn’t even need to punish him further. The death-marches of his friends to the phones and their parents’ cars was more than enough.

Ryan’s parents weren’t particularly disposed to discipline, but even he’d feared the eventual return home. Rather than treat him like a wild-west outlaw, they sat him down to “discuss things.” It was like the sex-talk, but longer, and somehow ended with him feeling more ashamed. His parents had been disappointed, but that was it.

Still, if Ryan thought hard enough, the “silence” had begun there. Not totally. There was no hard-edge. No “boundary.” These lines were the real kind. Not the imagined ones on maps. The truth was, it started there, but the separation was a process. It left Ryan feeling as if he couldn’t honestly say he’d miss his Father once he was gone. He knew he would, but admitting it didn’t feel honest. There simply wasn’t anything more between the two than if they’d been strangers at a party.

Now, at thirty-eight, he lie in bed staring at the ceiling. He’d gotten another call: Dad was going. They weren’t sure how long exactly, but it wasn’t long. He was still active, still moving, but that was the “silent killer’s” MO– your death certificate was signed before you knew it was on the table. Then, a few days, weeks, or months later, tired from the fight, you were gone.

Ryan left the one-horse town over a decade before the call for the city. There was a liveliness to city-life he liked, no matter how exhausting it got. Mostly, the world was there. The jobs were there. Mom and Dad weren’t, but that was it. He’d gotten Mom’s ninth call around midnight: she was sorry to wake him, but on-cue, gushed. Ryan said he didn’t mind, wasn’t sleeping, and listened to the sopping utterances.

He’d done his best to comfort her. He’d never been good at it. She wasn’t much in need of it anyhow. She’d always been the strongest of them– the warm, goose-down during the family’s sorrowful colds. Ryan did his best out of obligation, knowing it would never be enough. She was grateful anyway. They ended the call with the promise that Ryan would sleep then drive to One-Horse in the morning.

He hadn’t lied. He meant to sleep, but just sort of laid there. He must’ve fallen asleep at some point though as he found himself sitting in a strange, white room. It looked like an airport terminal, a train station, or a harbor, but didn’t at the same time. As if it were nowhere, everywhere, and those places and more all at once.

Ryan had just enough time to get his bearings in the uniform ubiquity before the odd shape of a person materialized beside him. It shimmered, fluttered into form. Even before it was whole, Ryan knew it was Dad. Once finally corporeal, Ryan gave his father a deranged look. He knew he was dreaming. Yet he was too conscious of it. It was like the room: the more he tried to convince himself of one thing, the more it felt like the other.

“Dad?”

“Hello, son.”

This can’t be real, Ryan thought.

“It is,” Dad said.

“Huh?”

“This,” he said with his factual way. His arms widened to encompass the place. “It’s real. As real as anything.”

Ryan craned his neck to eye every nook and cranny of the ethereal landscape. Dad’s tone put him at ease. Like everything else, this was his way of saying, “It is what it is. Whatever it is.”

“Okay,” Ryan replied aloud. “So, why’re we here?”

Dad eyed him, “I’m here to shuffle off. I ‘magine you’re here to see me off.”

The uncertainty gave Ryan pause. That pause lasted an eternity and a breath. However long it really was, he couldn’t say. All those emotions he thought they’d missed appeared full-force. Atop them were all the others he’d expected to have but hadn’t. He sucked in a pained breath that shattered the misty silence of that ethereal place.

Dad’s hand laid atop his shoulder. Suddenly, everything was muted. He found himself back where he’d been: Calm. Punctual. Like Dad. He exhaled a severely longer, deeper breath.

“One of us should speak.”

Ryan cleared his throat, “We haven’t spoken in twenty years, Dad.”

Dad nodded. “You’re right. But this’ll be our last chance. Might as well. Right?”

“Why was it that way?” Ryan asked for two reasons: One, it was a sensible reply. Two, if there was anything he felt could be worth speaking about, it was their lack of speaking.

Dad shook his head, “I taught you everything you needed to know, son. What I missed, your mother filled in. When I felt you were ready, I stepped back. Not because I didn’t love you, but because I did. I let you take command of your own life. I had confidence. I was ready to step in, if need be. But you’ve been immutable. When I thought you might falter, I waited. It took everything in me. But I waited. You stood tall. Every time.”

Ryan felt he knew the answer, but asked anyway, “Why? I spent years struggling. You couldn’t even say “congratulations” when I pulled through.”

For the first time in his life, Ryan’s father visibly winced. “It was a difficult decision. You might have resented me for it. We both know you don’t. If you did, I’d have been forced to step in. I knew, if you looked hard enough within you, you’d know I was proud. Now, you know I did it to help you be strong.”

Ryan felt like a broken record. “But why?”

Dad shook his head. He rose beside his son. Ryan found himself following suit. Suddenly the pair were walking along a long hallway. They stopped at a boarding hallway. Or atop the start of a train platform. Or the edge of a pier. Maybe it was all of them and more– or none, and less.

Dad hugged him, then stepped back. “A man’s life is his own. I love you, Ryan. I’d tell you to take care of your mother, but we know she won’t need it. She’s strong. You are too.”

With that, Dad began the walk to the end of the path ahead. As he’d materialized, so too did he flicker and flutter again to disintegrate.

A sudden growling from Ryan’s beside table tore him from the place. His phone was ringing again. He eyed the clock; he’d slept only a few hours. Darkness still pervaded outside. All the same, he knew. Even before he saw Mom’s photo. Or heard her sopping words. Or felt reality’s sting. He knew, but he was at peace. Dad was too.

Whether a dream or real, he understood. In the end, he decided, that was all that mattered. Like father, like son. Short. Staccato. Truth. Facts. Love.