Monday, May 30, 2011

Spider

Posted by A Great Liar

25 years, a life span most of the mygalomorph spiders are expected to share, years spent in captivity of the predatory inclinations inherent in my kindred; catching the unexpected prey with a silken smile, O the irony of that; I have never been fond of non-predatory feeding, if there is such a term.

With fangs that inject venom to a mere wanderer in my parlor, a Sicilian death kiss most of them find a little too sticky, though they never complain, was a necessary predicament of my livelihood; feeding my little young ones, like a good mother that I am; always making a point of eating the eyes off my prey, for my little ones did not deserve to see the glimpse of darkness in the dead eyes; the accusing look that dwells there forever.

Death was a necessity, I once thought, and was proven wrong in the course of my lifetime; the long tedious hours spent in the hollow shade of wait, watch and wait, soundless and like a shadow that casts no suspicion to the unsuspecting prey; it became a pleasure.

I have stared down many desperate faces, in fear and hopelessly deprived, throbbing and pulsating from the sigh of the silent specter before them, some begging for mercy, others dimly hoping for it, none ever appreciating death; the value they put on their lives ……

‘Is it a bad thing’, one of my young one once asked me, having watched me taking the life out of one of my victims, ‘to make a living of their lives’; ‘No’, I told him with a smile, ‘once they are caught in the silken fate, it is all right to feed off them’; a curious babbling fledgling he was, soon he will learn the underlying principles of death and dying.

Soon I will too learn the fears that enveloped my prey, now having grown in both wisdom and age; a little too much of both is a luxury none can ever afford; waiting … waiting for a silent silken kiss.

Thursday, May 26, 2011

God's Business

Posted by A Great Liar

Blood came spurring out of the wound as if finally relieved of its tensions, of all that tension of living in a state of war. The little green man fell haplessly on the ground; his blood curdled eyes staring at my lily white face - the last thing that lucky commie bastard would ever get to see in this world.

Down onto my haunches I searched the body and found nothing to my liking. Like most of his kind, he lived in the teepees and humped in the bushes - now just another slit-eyed creep with his throat gashed from my bayonet.

War is murder in wholesale, somebody once said, and I say the hell with him, because we are at war. It’s the natural order of things, and you never ever fuck with nature.

                                                ---------------------------

We move on, like a bunch of best trained sniffers a country at war could ever hope for, slashing and moving our way in, deep within the forest.

Look behind every jumble of bushes and you see a commie either breeding, or smokin' leaves, or doing both. Keep the trigger pressed for long and it doesn’t feel so cold any more. Doing God's good work on this earth makes you feel like one lucky bastard on this cursed land of tropical horrors, where sometimes the rain and mosquitoes seem more evil than the commies.

But we move on anyway, because that is the only way, because we ain't fighting this war to win; we keep on because the job needs to be finished off. We ain't no quitters, no siree, not we; it’s about finishing what you started and moving on to better things in life.

                                                ---------------------------

The cigar stays tucked in my mouth as I walk. ‘Watch out for the commie dirt’, someone shouted. It's the brains splattered on the ground, mixed with a lot of blood and stuff, mostly from the guts; the other green stuff that always shows up every time we fry a commie family of four or more with an M1 semi-automatic carbine.

That’s the one to look out for, its heathen blood and its fucking contagious once you catch it; because then you can’t get it off your skin. And aint that the proof, like someone said, proof that there aint no humans around in this island till we first landed.


Good Lord has shown us signs, the right ones, and only the weak and the faithless will ever turn away from it; and once they do, they are as good as the dead commies, 'coz we need to tell the world that it's God's business we are here to mind.

Sunday, May 1, 2011

Born Down In the Dead Man’s Town

Posted by A Great Liar

We are all born down to the dead man’s town. Where each of those good old skunks was once a man of worth, till he learned to have an opinion.

Where they all kiss, smile, and die henceforth, some by chance, other by providence.

Where the wise men have a crack at Divinity and the mere average souls strive for immortality within their shaded abodes. Some worship the Seen, some Unseen, and the rest who could do with neither, followed none but their own shadows.

Some had Gods sculptured in the shoddy back lane shops, others strove for them in the towering erected domes.

And some dreamed of heaven above, while most strove to erect One of their own devices, heavens bricked with concrete and blood of their fellow beings.

But each man is born to burn in this funny little town, is what none of us realize, not in the nick of time anyway.  

An Unkind Birth (An Excerpt)

Posted by A Great Liar

(The following is an excerpt from the currently undergoing novel, The Liar's Lobe)

(Narrative by Martha – Danny’s Mother)

Danny was disposed off the Heaven as if treated as a mistake.

It was as if the child would break into pieces any moment. He wasn’t too well done as a creation. Came off a month early, my Danny did.  
 

But Danny did make it home. After months of labor, which Good Lord has devised in His plans for women to bear, he made it soundly. Unlike many newborns I have seen, Danny didn’t seem to have enough tears to shed. It’s as if providence do away with him in some urgency, disgusted or repelled by what it has got at its disposal.

The little child Danny was hardly complete when he was first unhooked of the meaty strings. Hardly breathin’. Looking starved, and not much stirring, puffing noiseless in the well lit room surrounded by faces indecisive of whether to rejoice or be alarmed.


I am just a mother. Now bearing a child that I could never save, knew the moment I lay eyes on him. He demanded too much work than a woman of mortal capacity could muster. Faith’s a thing plenty, but it ain’t enough to save everybody.


My suspicions were confirmed when, days later, baby Danny first opened his eyes, his dark black eyes just like his father’s and the busy brows. Those were beautiful eyes and what lurked beneath the early years of innocence was sea of lies waiting for the right moment to gush out. 


Much as I loved him back then, and did for the rest of my life, for I never stopped loving him, even when the moments when I looked at him with nothing but spite and wish nothing more than to ram the dagger down his baby chest and let him take it down to his young grave, I never stopped loving him.


But the dagger moments were too many and the love at times was forgotten in the moments of intense hatred and enmity in the air, though it continued to exist.  


But there were no surprise, because even as a young baby, my Danny had a look of a liar in his eyes. If eyes are windows to the souls as some wise mouth cracks it out to be, than my baby had a soul prone to deceit, fallen already at the time of its awakening, fallen to the touch of the devil.


I had no chance. What happened probably wasn’t fair, but who am I to complain. All I can say is that Good Lord in the sky has created angels, demons, and men, and everything in between that walks upon two or four legs in this world.


And then He goes on to do the inexplicable; He creates Danny, my boy. 

Saturday, April 30, 2011

The Liar's Lobe (An excerpt)

Posted by A Great Liar


The first time Danny went to the liar’s lobe was when he was five. That’s when he had his first real visit to that place, standing at the edge of the pond with the cool heavenly breeze against his cheek. Peering down against the surface of the pond, both amazed and a bit scared, because he has never seen anything like that before ever in his life.
But above all, he was relieved to be here. He had started to feel strangled, the despair rising inside of him, while watching his parents have another fight on the dinner table, all that yelling and shouting. With mother cursing Dad, calling him names, especially the ones that always started with God, God this or God that. Though young as he was, Danny was already getting to grasp the scope to which this God thing could be used by adults in their daily life. He could understand that God was a major part of an adult’s vocabulary in their everyday life, and Danny was sure that it wasn’t a mere coincidence that it would always come out especially when people were angry or sad or in some kind of trouble.
Was it because everybody who ever went there was in some kind of a trouble. Danny wondered. In Danny’s brief experience of this world, most people were always in some kind of trouble or another. At least Father Callahan always maintained that they were. He always reminded him of his mother whenever Danny saw him talking in the church. Shouting, cursing in sheer excitement, speaking of things, bad things that are coming your way.
But of course, Father Callahan never offered the solution to the dark future awaiting mankind, and that was just as well. Because it’s been more than a year since Danny first heard him speak, and nothing even remotely that bad had fallen to either his parents or to anyone else in the town.
One year is a helluva time, Danny was old enough to understand.
But apparently mother didn’t understand. She sat in one of the long line of benches, nodding her head vigorously while the tall dark figure of Father Callahan spoke of great mysteries about to be unraveled. Her constant agreement to the ramblings of that crazy old man had what irked Danny the most. Wasting her life in a self conceived entrapment, a web of fear around her woven on grounds that were most absurd if you come to think of it real hard.
And Danny was worried.
One night, on a dinner table, he couldn’t resist and eventually had to bring it to her.
Danny asked her if she knew that how Father Callahan was crazy. The question, coming out of her only son who has not even reached ten yet, startled her.
From across the table, she gave Danny a curious look and asked. “Now why would you say something like that, Danny”.
Danny could sense her eyes piercing into him; they were full of surprise and something else. Something that Danny at first took as curiosity, but figured that it was something different, something a lot livelier, and almost malign.
It was alarm. That’s what remained veiled beyond her deep gray eyes, a sense of alarm that had suddenly become alive by the most unexpected question brought to her disposal by her son. To Danny, it didn’t look pleasant.
And Danny knew that mother will not believe him, having just experienced that magical moment of understanding, instantaneous and so clear, crystal clear. Just as that he knew everything there was to come. Darkness. All that darkness inside of mother now waiting to come out, now that it has found its prey, lurking in wait for an unbeliever to pounce at, to show him the way of the God.
The way of Father Callahan.
Now was that where the darkness was coming from, all that darkness that Father Callahan spoke of. It was from the inside of his mother. No wonder she believed him as well as she did.
He spoke. “It’s just those things he speaks, the kind of stuff he talks about”.
Mother persisted, as Danny had anticipated. “What do you mean by stuff, son. Father Callahan speaks the word of our Good Lord and the Bible. It’s called preachin’, not speaking, boy”.
“It’s all so disturbing, don’t you think. The kind of stuff he sa… preaches that is”.
Mother replied, her voice already growing sterner. “But that stuff, that stuff is from the Bible, Danny. What is it about it that you find so disturbing”?
Danny said. “It’s the things that he speaks of, things about death and destruction. The kind of things that are going to happen in the future, mom. He keeps saying them and they keep not happenin’.”
“But they will happen, son.” Mother replied. “One day, these things will happen, as Good Lord has promised us. Father Callahan only speaks of our Lord’s promise to us. It’s necessary that we shall be prepared.”
Danny asked. “How do you prepare against the mighty angels blowing the whole planet to hell, with massive earth quakes, storms and famines.”
Mother said. “By believing in them, son. And in Jesus our savior. It’s called having faith. You shall have faith, son, and you shall be saved.”
The idea of being saved by something as paltry as faith seemed a tricky proposition to Danny, it all seemed a little too easy, easy to believe that believing alone will save you. Something was missing, though he didn’t say so. Mother, like God, had limits, and he dare not test her tolerance.
Instead, he said something a lot worse. “But why would Good Lord promise us death and destruction if He is as good as you believe Him to be.”
Mother exclaimed. “Shut your dirty little mouth, Danny. Don’t speak of these things in that manner if you don’t understand what’s going on. You don’t understand nothin’. It’s the Devil whispering all that filth inside of you, and that’s what’s comin’ out of your little pie hole now, nothing but Devil’s filth.”
And that was the end of that, and later that night, father visited him in his room and told him that he was too young to understand. He must not mind too much what mother had said, because she was a fine woman, if only a little too much in love with our Good Lord.
“She loves the word of God more than anyone I have ever seen, that woman”. His father exclaimed. “And what she does is in the best interest of us all, which also includes you. Because she loves you, loves us, and would go to any length to save us, son. You ought to respect her and bear no ill will towards her, because she only means well. And because you are too young to know what’s going on, son.” 
Danny simply nodded his head and said nothing to his father. Though deep inside, he knew what was exactly going on. His parents perpetually afraid of the great darkness about to come, driving them on the edge of madness that was both quiet and destructive, eating them from the inside. Holding onto thin air for crutches that wouldn’t save them, because there was nothing left to save. How do you save someone who is as willfully mad as his parents, especially his mother.
That night he didn’t go to sleep, he stayed up late and believed, till he entered the place he cherished for many years to come, deep within the liar’s lobe.

__________________

Inside the liar’s lobe, it was a middle of the night, and the crimson moon shone in all its glory, its orange flare setting all things aglow in Danny’s surrounding, keeping the darkness of the night at bay.
It was a powerful vision, and Danny was awestruck by it. Looking back, he could see the town he had left behind, quietly settling down as night grew deeper, with people slowing disappearing off the street, off to their homes looking for seclusion from the harrows of the night. The darkness made them uncomfortable, brought out unnamable array of emotions the simple folks of Derry could only secretly acknowledge, but failed to face up to, or talk about openly. They merely went on to do what every normal man does when faced up with something he did not understand, or see, is to scurry into their hide outs, looking for light and for familiar faces of their wives and children. A simple remedy that has always worked for centuries after centuries. Helping their minds to wander, to forget whatever that lay in the dark for them, the things that came down onto the very streets the people inhabited, intruding and intervening in their comfort zones with their harsh ghostly presence.
Danny could see it all as a blur, as if through a thick glassy wall, with thin layer of water streaming down from the top. It looked magical though Danny was sure it wasn’t real. The barrier was merely his mind’s interpretation of whatever it was that separated the unseen dimensions in this world.
Danny has always believed in the worlds within worlds, just he believed in the Liar’s Lobe; the brain within a brain. And he has made a major leap, a significant slip into the other world that would change everything for him in the days to come.
But from the day he first entered the liar’s lobe, he felt right at home. Probably because he had always dreamed of places like that, places where darkness never made it home, not even as a mere rumor, where all was light, and even in midnight, there was nothing to be afraid of.
Danny saw the pool and the deep forest across it, he bent low to touch the grass, which seemed to grow curiously thin and long, and found they were soft to the touch, like velvet. It didn’t even look like the grass Danny had grown accustomed to, a sea of blazing blue narrow heads stirring in the pleasant wind, in unison almost.    
The grass looked blue, deep thick mesh of blue that shone beautiful against the orange flare of the moon reflecting off them. And the pool, the water, looked like a painted veil set horizontally across the barren patch, as the pond’s surface looked like a colorless crust of ice that was neither frozen nor melted, enamored with tiny dots that looked like tiny pebbles dancing on top of it. The pebbles looked white and remained floating above the surface, thousand tiny dabs shining like crystal dots.
Danny crouched down, onto his haunches, his knees feeling the cold touch of the grass against his skin, beneath the stripped pajamas he wore. He stared down at the pool’s surface and saw nothing but colorless sheen of the surface meeting his glare, blankly, and with one outstretched hand, he dipped his forefinger in the surface, feeling nervous but compelled, penetrating the magnificent surface of the carpeted visual and felt the thickness of the surface slowly enveloping his finger. He continued to bring his hand downward till the whole of his hand up to the wrist disappeared inside the pool and felt the strange sensation against his skin, almost ticklish. The water had a thick, jellylike feel about it, like a well garnered shake.
He fetched his hand back, and realized it wasn’t wet. Not a sprinkle of water like fluid on it.
It was as if the pool wasn’t even real.
But, Danny decided, real or not, it worked.
It worked against the stuff of mortals that Danny had enough of. The stuff of mother and her blind pursuits. What did she know? What did she care about but an angry old man clad in cassock squinting on the altar, with an eye sight that wasn’t improving with each day. Old as he was, Danny was sure that man couldn’t tell a boulder from a rock, let alone heaven and hell.
Yes, where was the sense in that. Danny wondered.

And where was Father in all that. He wondered. A hard working man who had sold his soul to the evil of manly labors, yet another anonymous soul cursed with an occupation of feeding his family, doing something that God alone was responsible for doing. If there was a grain of truth in the ramblings of his mother. Danny could recognize the streak of hypocrisy beneath the facade.  
For people like his father always ended up having the worst of everything, even in their own homes, where there is a corner in each house reserved for men like him, and it’s a lonely one. Danny called it the waiting place for working men, little factory men like his father, spent in solitude, surrounded by shadows they called family.  A waiting place till they are ready to be passed on.
Like most men of his kind who made a living working in factories, his father was too busy licking his own wounds. And as far as Danny could foresee, nothing would change that in the days to come. Mother was a succubus he had fallen in love with. And he would probably never stop holding on to her, not in this lifetime anyway. In a way, she was his Father Callahan, the one he could hold on to and believe.
Leaving Danny all alone in this fight.