Archive for November, 2009
Legend
Friday, November 20th, 2009
At the age of twelve I found a sword that spat lightning and hissed fire. Men came in its pursuit and it danced in my hand, carving them into the history books as my first kills.
It led me on. At thirteen my traveling companions taught me how to take the lightning and fire into myself and push them back out into the world. At fourteen I did battle with chitin-clad hordes, delivering my homeland from evil.
At sixteen my name was revered. By the time manhood was upon me, I had a temple of gold and a hundred concubines. The next year, I had an army, the next, an empire. I read ancient texts and learned to pull force from the ground beneath my feet. I reshaped the known world.
At twenty-five I had seen and done all things. I wandered to the edges of the maps and beyond, into shadows. I battled with a creature made fully of limbs–no head or heart, only hands and feet, elbows and knees–for five days, pulling the land around us to a shred, sitting in a bubble of my own puissance.
On the eve of my twenty-seventh birthday, while my people prayed for my return, I came across a woman in a tower, a great serpent coiled around its base. I swore to rescue her.
In bloody victory I learned my mistake, I learned of the bait and the trap. Weakened from the fight she bested me, easily. But when my strength returned I withered iron chains to weed grass and tore free.
She caught me once more. We battled once more. Years our battle raged. We tore down the world about us. We tore each other into new forms, each more ragged than the last. Down to nubs of flesh and bone, held together only by the power we had gathered to our breasts.
And then I lost.
I was undone. I was nothing more than a scared child gripping a sword as men advanced. And the sword did not dance, and I did not win.
As my adversary stood over me, she said, “Thank you” to me. She blessed me, put her hand on my bloodied cheek, to feel the heat leaving me. And for the first time in my short life, I finally understood power. Finally, I knew magic. And then it was gone.
Sandy
Thursday, November 19th, 2009
She was born not quite dead. The doctor at first said, “No head?”. Yet how to explain the thread of clumping sand that led from her spinal cord to more sand, two pounds of it expelled with the eponymous girl.
Given up in horror, Sandy landed in a foster home run by Betsy and Jim, who cared for the children just a bit more than they cared for the money that came with them. Mostly they wanted ones who would lie abed and cause no ruckus.
Sandy was not one of the quiet ones.
At a year, when most children would say their prayers and ABCs, Sandy was spattering her room with blasts of sand that scoured paint and varnish, bodies and faces. The moan of the sirocco presaged her darker moods. Of sunny days she had few.
Everything would taste of grit.
Jim and Betsy dumped Sandy on the street ten years later. She wandered from street to street, sleeping under bushes and avoiding contact.
Slowly the rest of her body turned to sand.
She learned to infest buildings. Any window or door left open, any crack in a wall was an entrance. She spread herself across buildings and blocks. She got into everything.
Sandy ruined it all.
Bits of her in gears, in food, in valves. Things broke down, people grew unhappy, as unhappy as she was. The first death was almost anticlimactic. A clogged fuel line, an auto that balked at the wrong moment, and just like that Sandy was a killer.
She liked it.
There was no stopping her after that first fatality. She made buildings and vehicles explode. She choked people, she tripped them, she blasted them with herself. Simplest of all, she blocked their bloodstreams. People had so many access points.
Sandy was the ultimate predator.
Almost.
Humans struck back. One by one, they captured her grains, weakening her. When they thought they had all of her, they stuck her into a blast furnace and fused her into a beautiful glass cube. It sits today on the desk of the president.
But they only thought they had caught all of her. She’s out there still, a particle here, a granule there. Some day you may feel a bit of her, a kiss almost of sand against your skin.