Tuesday, September 17, 2013

Here be Dragons

Posted by A Great Liar

After the sun goes down and the surrounding forest becomes quite dark, you begin to hear noises of almost innocent birds or mammals. They may sound strange to you, but the cynic within would holler and pretend they are nothing. The left hemisphere of your brain, the curious Sméagol within, seeks solace in common sense. As you prepare to sleep and lay your head down, you hear a spine-chilling wail almost like a coyote.

With his one good eye deeply shut, the old man could see them, and deep in his sleep, he hears the whispers of the specter in the remote wanderings, closing in with its weight, with the bones of the universe breaking, giving in beneath its feet, and the silence holding the woods deep in its snare. The imprints left on the patch of barren gray, sulfuric and they glowed against the dark.

You don’t come out into the Pine Barrens for a nice camping trip.

He spent most mornings hiding from the sun, while the heaven beyond the stone-age roof of his abode is stirred by the endless flights of nameless birds above. His starved fingers groping, fumbling into his cowboy leather saddlebag, gaping holes and all, taking out the yellowed bunch of parchments he had long discovered from his deceased grandfather's basement, locked and forgotten in their revered family vault. The parchments looked old, older than the world as the man had always known it to be.

3 comments:

Thursday, January 10, 2013

A World in Black and White

Posted by A Great Liar

[The following is an excerpt from a currently undergoing novel, 'Requiem for a Vertical Man']

One quick glance at Raspil and you would suspect that he was a rat who has learned to evolve with the passage of time and exposure to human bondage. Learned to speak rather than squeal and to walk on two, a lone survivor distinguished from the rest of his clan beneath the swells and filth of the life underground; a labyrinth of dark sewers populated by the blind seers that feed upon the human waste, and look upon them as would an ill-treated disciple upon the Godhead responsible for their little misfortunes.

He entered the East End of the city, after one long hour of walking, an abstract figure with his head down, with usual brisk strides. Just one of his daily night walks.

Raspil has always felt more at home in the suburbs of the low, with the weakly lit street lights, and poorly maintained houses with broken porch stairs and the fuzzy window panes with secret messages scratched all over its glass. The old bricks that have witnessed millennia of living their lives, never to stir a limb, or utter a whimper of complain, for the years of inhuman conditions it has endured, forever plunged into the sinful cycle; the livelihood of the East End inhabitants.

The usual expressions stayed frozen for ages on the heavy laden doorways, made of thick wood from which arose a dull odor of ennui and old age, and men who appeared out of them every morning, leaving behind a stupor to join the squalor that they have grown to love and hate in their own peculiar ways; the way of an East Ender.

Silly rabbits seeking heaven in the most unlikeliest of the rabbit holes, behind dark lanes of the slums and dwellings, at the Hogan’s Alley, with years grown immune to the stench and foul odor of the little dens carefully tucked in between the residences of poverty, where strangers made merry on most nights during the week. And come every weekend, it was a mass requiem of the sinners and the unfaithful, men with prospects of syphilis, and the painted fairies of the dark who much appreciated their penchant for doom and feasted on it.

14 comments: