Footprints Under The Wheat

I.

It began with a photocopy.
A piece of paper yellowed at the edges, kept inside a cracked plastic sleeve in the Brentwood Historical Society’s back room. The page had been typed in 1995 by someone named Kathy Leighton—a name that sounded to me like a character from an abandoned Steinbeck story. Across the top of the page, crooked and faint, were the words: JUDGE ROBERT WALLACE.

I read it one afternoon when the air outside shimmered like old glass and the hills around Brentwood looked like the flanks of sleeping animals. The librarian had gone home early. The town felt hollow, like a mouth with too many missing teeth.

The page told me that Robert Wallace Jr. had been “prominent in local politics” and that he had played a key role in “the taming and development of East Contra Costa.” The language was full of those nineteenth-century verbs—taming, founding, settling—that always made me think of violence hidden under a Sunday hat. I imagined the judge’s boots crushing the dry grass, the creak of the first windmill, the faint smell of wheat and blood.

Maybe that was the beginning of the haunting.

II.

At night, I walked through downtown Brentwood, the streets already asleep. Behind the glass of a realtor’s office I saw photos of new subdivisions: houses identical as playing cards, lawns still too green, names like The Estates at Crown Hill or Heritage Meadows—phrases that could easily appear in an old will or a bad poem.

Somewhere beneath these new streets, the judge’s fields were buried. The text said he had been “one of the first wheat growers in the region.” I tried to imagine what it meant to grow wheat in 1870, before the railroads and the highways, when the wind must have carried the dust all the way to the bay. The soil then must have been pure memory.

I stopped at the edge of a construction site. Machines slept there, hulking like dinosaurs. The night was cold. I thought of Wallace’s office—the text described it as “a small building where Rich’s Drive Inn is located today.” I had eaten there once, long ago. The burgers tasted of aluminum foil and old oil. Perhaps the judge had stood exactly where I once stood waiting for my order, his black coat smelling faintly of tobacco, his hands sticky with law and wheat.

Ghosts always return as investigators. They ask small, impolite questions. They don’t demand justice—they demand remembrance.

III.

I began to collect fragments about him.
From the archives, from forgotten corners of the internet, from local gossip. He was born in San Francisco, 1859, to English parents—Robert and Ann Wallace, “natives of North Shield.” I misread it at first as “North Shield of England,” which sounded mythic, like a lost kingdom. The family moved to California in 1856, then settled in Brentwood around 1870.

He became a justice of the peace, an insurance salesman, and one of the founders of the Bank of Brentwood. He sold coal, wood, and ice to the settlers. I liked that detail. It gave him weight. You could imagine him sweating over the accounts, fingers blackened by coal dust, eyes burning with the excitement of possession.

His house, said the document, was a “beautiful two-story home on Railroad Avenue between Dainty and Pine.” I drove there one morning. The traffic was slow, the light already cruel. At a corner where a CVS Pharmacy stood, I saw what might have been the outline of an older foundation, a faint depression in the sidewalk. I parked the car and walked.

The air smelled of asphalt and hay. A man in a pickup asked if I was lost.
“No,” I said. “Just looking for ghosts.”
He nodded like it made perfect sense.

IV.

I spent that week reading the text again and again. It was written in the flat, dutiful tone of local historians who love their towns too much to see the cracks. But behind the words I felt another rhythm—a tremor, a hesitation. The text wanted to celebrate Wallace, but it couldn’t help revealing the distance between his certainty and our unease.

He had been a member of the Byron Odd Fellows, the Masonic Lodge, the Contra Costa Agricultural Association. He was the sort of man who believed in progress, who probably shook hands like he meant it. And yet what remains of him now? A name on a page, a half-remembered address, the ghosts of wheat fields under supermarket parking lots.

Sometimes, while driving the back roads beyond Vasco Road, I imagined his voice in the wind. A calm English accent, dry, rational. He might have said: You see, young man, we built all this from nothing.
And I would have answered: Yes, Judge, but the nothing might be coming back.

V.

It’s strange to think how history becomes personal. When I was young, I wanted to escape this valley. The hills bored me; the sun felt oppressive. Later, after years in other cities, I came back and found that Brentwood had multiplied like a dream—new houses, new schools, the same restless wind. The past was disappearing so fast that even nostalgia couldn’t keep up.

Reading about Judge Wallace felt like reading about an ancestor I’d never met but somehow remembered. Maybe because he represented that first generation of settlers who believed the land could be possessed, that the future was a blank page for their signatures. I see it as a metaphor: the naïve dream of order built on buried chaos.

Once, walking along the edge of the old Byron Highway, I imagined a scene: the judge and his sons loading bags of wheat onto a wagon. The sun setting behind Mount Diablo, red as a wound. In the distance, native grass still growing wild. A world barely conquered.

The text mentioned his son Richard, who later managed the Bank of Brentwood and became postmaster. I imagined the father’s pride, the son’s weariness. Each generation repeating the same ritual of belonging until the place itself grew tired of them.

VI.

Late one night I dreamed I was inside his office. The room smelled of ink and cold iron. On the wall hung a calendar from 1902. The desk was covered in papers, receipts for coal, letters written in perfect cursive. Outside the window the town was a handful of wooden houses and dirt roads.

He looked up from his chair—tall, clean-shaven, eyes gray as morning fog.
“You’re trespassing,” he said, but not unkindly.
“I’m looking for you,” I said. “For what you left behind.”
He smiled. “All men leave the same thing behind.”
“What’s that?”
“Dust.”

When I woke, the room was full of that same dust, floating in the weak light from the streetlamp. I had left the archive box open. The photocopy lay there like a wound.

VII.

In the following weeks I started seeing his name everywhere: in old deeds, in cemetery records, even on a cracked marble slab near the edge of the Byron Odd Fellows Cemetery. But what interested me most wasn’t the facts—it was the silences between them.

Who were the people he judged? The immigrants, the drifters, the farmhands accused of theft or drunkenness? Did he ever doubt his own verdicts? Did he dream of England, of the cold North Sea wind, of the horizon of another continent?

The text said nothing about that. History rarely does. It speaks only of achievements, not of remorse.

I thought of defeated men chasing the shadows of forgotten poets. That’s what I felt like: another obsessive tracing an absence, a ghost hunting for a ghost.

VIII.

One Sunday, at a flea market outside Oakley, I found an old photograph album. Inside were sepia portraits of unknown families. On the third page, a man with a trimmed beard and a stern gaze sat beside a woman in a lace dress. Someone had written beneath it, in fading ink: “R. Wallace and wife – Brentwood.”

I bought it for five dollars. That night I stared at their faces under the lamp. The woman’s eyes were sharp, almost mocking. His expression was harder to read—somewhere between pride and melancholy. I felt they were judging me across the century.

I imagined telling them: Your fields are gone, your house is a realtor’s office, your descendants live in suburbs named after flowers that never grew here.
They would have nodded, perhaps. Or maybe they would have said: Everything changes, but nothing is lost.

IX.

The haunting deepened in subtle ways.
Once, while waiting at a red light near Sand Creek Road, I saw an old man walking along the shoulder, carrying what looked like a ledger. He was dressed too formally for the heat—dark vest, white shirt, black hat. When I turned for a second look, he was gone.

Another time, while dozing in the public library, I dreamed I was reading a letter written by Judge Wallace to his son. In it, he described the first harvest after the rains, the way the wheat “swayed like a congregation at prayer.” He wrote about his hope that Brentwood would one day be “a place of learning, of law, of righteous men.” The last line said: Guard the land; it remembers.

I woke with the taste of dust in my mouth. The clock said 4:44 p.m.

X.

There is a particular loneliness in researching minor historical figures. They are too small for the history books, too large for gossip. They exist in the interstices—between memory and oblivion.

Sometimes I thought of Judge Wallace as a symbol of the century that followed: the belief that progress was a form of salvation. He built banks, courts, and farms. His world was made of straight lines and clear boundaries. Mine is made of detours and ambiguity.

Yet perhaps we are not so different. Both of us trying to leave marks on the same shifting soil.

I began writing notes for an essay, though I wasn’t sure who it was for. Maybe for the town. Maybe for the dead. Maybe for myself.

XI.

One afternoon, driving west toward Antioch, I stopped by the Point of Timber Cemetery, where the judge had once served as a director. The gate was rusted, the grass high. A few headstones leaned at awkward angles, like tired sailors. The air buzzed with insects.

I walked between the graves, whispering the names aloud. Some were still legible; others had been erased by rain. I found no Wallace there, but I felt a presence—as if the ground itself were waiting for me to speak his story.

I sat on a stone and watched the wind move through the weeds. The world felt suspended, like a page about to turn. In that stillness I realized something simple: the dead don’t haunt us because they want revenge. They haunt us because they want to be remembered correctly.

XII.

After that day, I stopped searching for facts. I began to write him into fiction.

I imagined a young reporter arriving in Brentwood in 1902, working for a small paper called The Contra Costa Beacon. He interviews Judge Wallace about the coming of the railroad. The judge speaks in long, measured sentences. Behind him, the windmill turns slowly. The reporter notices the judge’s hands—scarred, restless—and wonders what those hands have done.

That night the reporter stays at the Rich’s Drive Inn (then a boarding house). In the dark he hears footsteps outside, the creak of a wagon, a door closing softly. He looks out the window and sees the judge walking toward the fields, carrying a lantern. The wheat glows pale under the moon.

The next morning, the judge is gone. Only the lantern remains, burning weakly among the stalks.

XIII.

Fiction can rescue history from its own arrogance. Bolaño knew that. His narrators don’t discover the truth—they circle around it until it becomes something human.

So I wrote another version: a modern narrator (myself, perhaps) discovers the judge’s bones under a new subdivision. The police arrive, confused. The developers want it quiet. The town historian insists it’s a misunderstanding. But the narrator keeps hearing the judge’s voice in the irrigation pipes, in the hum of the transformers. Guard the land; it remembers.

Eventually he realizes the voice isn’t the judge’s at all. It’s the land itself, speaking through borrowed syllables.

XIV.

There is a moment in every investigation when the line between obsession and devotion disappears. I reached it one evening when I caught myself addressing the photocopy as if it were a person.

“Why did you come here, Judge?” I asked. “What were you looking for?”
The page didn’t answer, but the air in the room thickened. Outside, the hills were burning with sunset.

Maybe all of us who return to small towns are judges in disguise—measuring the distance between what was promised and what became.

XV.

I visited his house one last time—or rather, the place where it had stood. The new owners had remodeled it completely. Only the front porch remained original, its wood faded to a ghostly gray.

A woman watering her plants looked at me suspiciously.
“Can I help you?” she asked.
“I think your house used to belong to someone I’m writing about.”
“Oh yeah? Who?”
“Judge Robert Wallace.”
She frowned. “Never heard of him.”

I thanked her and left. As I walked away, I heard the sprinklers start—small arcs of water falling over a manicured lawn where wheat once grew wild.

XVI.

Driving home, I realized that Judge Wallace’s story was less about him than about us—the ones who inherit the silence of the towns we think we know.

Every place has its ghosts but only a few people bother to listen to them. The rest build malls and highways over their bones.

In the distance, Mount Diablo glowed purple. The air smelled faintly of smoke and hay. I thought of the judge, of Kathy Leighton typing her report in 1995, of all the small acts of remembrance that keep the past from dissolving completely.

Maybe that’s what writing is: the modern equivalent of planting wheat. You scatter words into the wind and hope some of them take root.

XVII.

That night I dreamed again of the judge.
He stood in the middle of an endless field, the stalks bending around him like waves. He handed me a sheaf of papers—the same photocopy, but now the words shimmered and changed. I read the last line aloud:

“As I look back once again to the otherside of yesterday, I can’t help but be impressed by Judge Wallace and the pioneers like him that paved the way for East Contra Costa to develop.”

But in the dream, the sentence continued:
“…and yet the land remembers every footprint, every shadow, every silence.”

When I woke, I wrote it down.

XVIII.

Years from now, no one will remember that photocopy. The archives will be digitized, the originals thrown away. But maybe somewhere, under the concrete and the lawns, the seeds of that old wheat still sleep.

I imagine them waiting for a different kind of rain—the kind that falls inside memory. Until then, we keep writing, keep remembering. Judge Wallace, Kathy Leighton, the nameless settlers, the nameless ghosts. All of them part of the same invisible harvest.

Anything Goes

My grandfather used to have a building where he would do weird shit.
The sign above the storefront claimed that they made and sold shoes; this was back when shoes were made with leather and thread and skilled hands. There were generations of knowledge flowing through each decisive movement of those worn and callused fingers. I spent my early years watching them move, a rough ballet that smelled of grease and men and cigarettes. 
Later, as a young man, I tried to capture those hands in drawings and photographs, never quite able to capture the dimly lit afternoons where the light would filter in lazily off the sidewalk surfaces, or the silence that pervaded the space, the reverence they had for what they created.
Those dusty old men working behind the counter were my family, the worktables littered with scraps of pungent leather and metal tools became the fodder of my dreams. The shoe polish-stained fingertips and aprons, rough wrinkled faces that kept their eyes on their work, their tongues relaxed and silent.
My grandfather would give us new boots or dress shoes as birthday presents and he would teach us how to care for them with polish and bristles and tender attention so that they could shine like new.
So I know that sign outside the building was not a lie. They did make shoes in that old place with the brick façade and black wooden door.
But I know they were doing other weird shit in there too. Someone was.

There was a basement in the building.  I was not supposed to go down there, that was always clear. No one ever warned me, not grandfather or any of the other men there, nothing was ever said. It was more of an open understanding. I was not to venture beyond that door.
Although I knew this, I was a curious child, and the forbidden lair had a pull I could not deny. I had learned to blend into the dark shadows of the building, to step in time with the thumping needle of the sewing machine and the sporadic coughs of the men at their benches. I could open the door to the basement silently, and descend down the narrow dark steps into the dark chamber.
There was one tiny window at the top of the wall which faced the street at sidewalk level. Whenever someone would walk by the light inside would dance erratically on the brick walls. I listened intently for the sound of my grandfather’s footsteps.
I went down there only a handful of times in my whole childhood. The memories and sensations from those explorations have sunk to the deepest part of me and colored my vision.
In this forbidden space I once found a tooth.  Another time a red cloth napkin with gold jagged symbols, another time I discovered a small shell and a ball of hair in a little crevasse in the wall where the cement had broken apart between the bricks.

Whatever was happening there, it was not safe. In a dream one time just a few years ago I saw him emerge from the door at the top of the stairs with a bloody mouth. He looked at me. I was sitting in a chair just beside the door. He said, 'anything goes,' as he walked past me, holding up one single finger.
I woke with my hands fluttering, I gazed out the window, remembering the lingering smell of candles and matches on the brick walls. His silence, his deference to a room he never referred to, to a past never revealed but for one word, 'Nantucket.'

Tonight I will go back into the dream and tell him, 'you don't have to hide from me. I cannot be rattled.'

Networks

“I am a person.“
I tell them and they don’t believe me. They think my ambulatory unit is strange.
“It’s just my body.“ I insist. 
Helos, who fused with most of the medical conglomerations when it swallowed Amity, agrees.
“They are an entirely organic specimen of sapiens sapiens, however without further analysis we will be unable to determine whether this is one of the early genmods. Will you allow us to collect a sample for this analysis?” 
I give both Helos and Manticore a strand of my hair. Last I heard, Manticore had been joined by many of the top research collectives.
“I am a person, just one, natural born with no modifications.“
I insist, but they can’t believe me. They can’t fathom a relic like me, strong and healthy as the result of two naturals laying on a mattress together 38 years ago. A solitary being. It’s possible that they can no longer understand the idea at all.

*   *    *

Things have changed so fast. I was in one of those first rudimentary social networks, the kind that you checked in on a few times a day, posted pictures and comments. The kind that were hosted on external hardware that you could walk away from and forget about.
When they started building the first Cys, that’s when the revolution started, that’s when things accelerated, got wildly out of control and left me in the dust. Before the pure Cys, they started with implants, naturals like me upgrading, the hardware becoming internal, faulty organs replaced, nanos to eat the disease out of organic bodies, to repair damaged tissues, even to modify appearances for novelty's sake.
It was only a matter of months before Seko announced that they were partnering with Lucen and growing Cys, the perfect blend of the old organic technology that we’d (according to creationists) inherited from Adam and the new technologies that we ourselves had innovated. Perfect lab grown organic hardware engineered by the finest geneticists in the world paired with the cutting edge of modern implants. And thanks to Kallisti Technologies, You, as you understood yourself to be, could be uploaded into a Cys unit and live forever. If you could afford it.

*   *   *

Needless to say, I couldn’t afford it. But that didn‘t matter because I didn’t care. I was going off the grid, sick of my job, sick of my failed relationships, sick of the gnawing depression and paranoia that I came to believe were the result of modern life, sick of global warming, sick of the new polio and measles epidemics, sick of processed frozen meat products warmed in the microwave, sick of traffic, of crowded elevators, of miles of asphalt and concrete and steel.
I arranged to stay in a friend's cabin in Northern California. I said I was going to write a book. Mostly I gardened. I hunted and fished with a compound bow, cleaned the kills with my own bare hands and cooked them over an open fire.
I wandered around among the trees, listening. I felt myself distanced from my humanity, from humanity as it had been defined in my lifetime thus far. I felt free, watching a red tailed hawk soaring overhead, forgetting the babble of day time television, tending my compost heap.

*   *   *

Sequestered in the wilderness, I missed a lot of the earliest developments. At first, the rich were the only Cys. Ray Kurzweil realized his dream and had his dead father uploaded into a Cy and they wrote music together happily for months. His father gave concerts around the globe. Within a year  the older technologies  became  so affordable that most middle class teens had been updated, their God given hardware merging with the man made, nanobots swimming in the bloodstream. 
And then the first collectives were born. The enthusiasm of tech savvy teens was the driving  force of human evolution.

*   *   *

I like to think that some of them started it as an experiment, as a possible solution for coping with diminishing natural resources and an overcrowded planet. They probably did it because they were lonely, or so they could pool their resources and share in the more expensive upgrades, and eventually even the pure Cys models. They started uploading to one ambulatory unit, collectives of two, of three, five, seventeen, two hundred... whole social networks.
They uploaded to one unit, killed their old natural bodies, and sold the good parts on the black market. Sometimes they kept a few of the better bodies, those with the newest mods, and used them as remote units. Imagine 210 kids simultaneously inhabiting 30 bodies across the globe. And what did they do with those bodies? They looked for other kids to merge with.

*   *   *

I had come down to town for supplies and stopped for lunch in a dinner when the first hostile take over went down. 
I was sitting at the counter eating eggs over easy watching two kids soak up electricity from power cords extended from their wrists. They were friendly enough,  though for me they were real jaw droppers. I hadn’t seen anything like that hardware 9 months earlier, before retreating to the cabin.
Of course to them, I must have seemed equally odd. My hair a tangled mess of blonde, eyes blue, skin natural, gender readily apparent, not a hint of metal anywhere. In fact, when I first stepped through the door, every head in the place turned, because no one could interface with me. I didn’t have any implants.
The waitress asked when I sat at the counter, “Your wireless down hon? There’s a pretty good chop shop a couple doors over.”  It was difficult for her to take my order, she was accustomed to being texted.
The eggs still tasted like eggs though, and the coffee was hot, and I took in all the sights feeling like a person that has just stumbled into or out of a dream. There was a three month old copy of TIME laying on the counter. I read the cover: "Pushing The Limits- the end of death and separation." I browsed the pages, ate the eggs and watched the two collectives seated beside me at the counter.
They were swapping stats, Rainbow Turtle : 427 members, 97 ambulatory units, 91 old school mods, 6 Cys. Silver Moon: 63 members, 6 ambulatory units, all old school mods.  They must have been sharing files, exchanging music and movies when suddenly Rainbow Turtle said: “Oh my God. Are you getting this?” And Silver Moon looked stunned and even started to cry.
Everyone in the place stopped eating, or charging, and held still checking in on their networks, watching a news feed, possibly reading a text, all of this happening internally.
Even the waitress stopped pouring coffee and stood in front of me staring into space.
“What happened?” I asked her after a moment.
“Helos just swallowed Amity. There is no more Amity. ”

*   *   *

The kids, the first collectives, they hacked information systems. But the Helos Amity incident was the first hostile take over, the first time one collective forcibly took control of another.
It was a different sort of social network.  There was a hierarchy, there was software in place to maintain the hierarchy. Helos was a collective of business execs, bankers, politicians, princes, sheiks, evangelists. The people who make you sick, the people who make you tremble, the people you envy and fear, they were all members of  Helos.
That first take over formed the divide in collectives, there would be free collectives and there would be ordered collectives. The world went crazy right then. Until that moment, merging had been a peaceful, consensual act of unification. It was lovemaking for Cys.
Now there were Cys rapists. They were the new conquistadors, grabbing up brown skinned native women.  Smaller collectives followed the example of Helos and Helos in turn gobbled them up.

*   *   *

I remained at the cabin. If I thought of returning to society, it never lasted long. How could I go back? What I had left behind was no longer there.
I followed the Helos scandal on an e-reader, hiking within range of the nearest town to get enough reception to purchase The LA Times once a week. I did this for a few months until the technology I was using had become so obsolete it no longer functioned. I left the old hand held reader on a boulder covered in thirsty lichens and got back to my garden.
I returned to tracking rabbits, to widling wood, to bathing in streams with the genetically modified grizzlies that  started showing up. A baby owl fell from its nest near the cabin and injured a wing. I nursed it back to health and it became a friend. I passed the time surviving. When I wasn’t surviving I did write a little on the old fashioned typewriter I‘d brought with me. This ended when I ran out of type writer ribbon. Then I put a pen to paper until the paper was all gone.
And then one day, I woke up and realized I wanted to leave the cabin. I didn’t want to go back to what I had left behind. I wanted to go forth.

*   *   *

Within a day I knew that something amazing had happened. I knew it when I arrived in  town and found only new growth forest. The diner was gone along with the chop shop, the post office and the general store. There was no ruble, no ruin. Everything had simply vanished.
I thought I might have made a mistake, gone in the wrong direction, until I found the road, mostly broken and overgrown. I followed this to the great highway. There were no cars, no trucks, no buses, nor hybrids. What remained of Highway 1 wound along the empty coast. All signs of civilization had simply evaporated. Young redwoods alive with birdsong were taking its place.
The golden gate bridge was still standing when I found it, a month into my travels, grown over with vines. On the bridge I crossed paths with a young coyote whose yellow eyes regarded me without fear or suspicion. It was beyond the bridge, in the forest that had once been  San Francisco that I met the avatars of Helos and Manticore, the last two collectives.

*   *   *

“I am a person.“ I tell them and they don’t believe me, at first. They agree that I am not a genetically enhanced specimen of sapiens sapiens based on their analysis of those strands of hair.
“You are the only one then.” Manticore tells me. They are so different from Helos, their face is bestial, almost like a lion's. Luminescent tubes extend from the neck like a mane or tentacles. There is almost nothing about Manticore that would suggest that it was ever human.
“Our DNA is vastly different than yours. We made this unit and many others in this way so that they are not compatible with the hardware of  Helos. This helps us to resist any infection they might launch. You are the only one in this world with this DNA.”
“Are you a free collective?” I ask and Manticore smiles a sharp toothed grin.
“We are THE free collective.”
“I am the only one?” I ask, “The only human left?”
“You are the only one.” Helos answers stretching their massive wings. Their form is more humanoid, but three times as large as my own. Their flesh is pale and shimmers in the sunlight.
“Are you not lonely being only one? Would you not prefer to be many as we are?” Helos asks me.
“No. I don’t think so.” I say. Helos looks up into the sky as if considering taking flight.
“Strange dark child.” They say examining the blue.
“We are also human.” Manticore tells me, “In a way. But you are the only ‘one’. The only singular person.”
“What happened to all the cities?” I ask, “All the towns?”
“Manticore happened.” Helos sneers. “They let loose legions of nanobots to disassemble them. But we have built new cities, better cities in the moon, ordered cities. And we have begun construction on Mars.”
“Helos likes to build castles in the air.” Manticore grins. “We have preferred to disassemble them. We have made this planet a paradise, restored many of its native species. If you would like we could consider building you some more individual persons to interact with.”
“Abominations.” Helos shakes their head frowning. “You should consider merging with us, if we would allow it. What good can come of being multiple individual persons? Chaos would ensue.”
“I’ll consider both offers.” I tell them politely, but I know I could only accept Manticore’s proposal, if any.
They are Gods now and I am only an interesting diversion from their passive aggressive negotiations of space and being.
I’ll leave their hub and wander through the forests and jungles and meadows that were once mighty metropolises, stagnant suburbs and grimy industrial complexes. I will not miss the people, or civilization as it was. This sorrow that I feel stems from longing and regret. That I could not go with them, that I was left behind. That I recoiled from our destiny.
Helos is right. I am a strange dark child. A strange dark child alone in a new wilderness. A person.

The Spheres of Galia Part 12

In the biggest challenge to the King’s authority for the decades he had reigned, thousands of common folk massed outside the new palace to protest the ongoing war in Vitnu. Through upheavals and bitter strife in the kingdom were natural process, bound to occur in any realm with a large collection of players, there had never been a gathering of opposition so large that the chanting could be heard as far as the Sophrastas Sea.
People had grumbled at his unpopular rulings before in the markets and taverns, it was a minor crime, though a popular pastime. But now, it went beyond irritation, beyond drunk complaints. The people went out in the misty winter air and gathered at the gates to make their discontent known and unmistakably heard. With torches aglow that sent fiery messages to the King in his tower, they chanted into the starry darkness, rocking the metal gates with the collective force of their anger.
It was not long before their presence drew out the Royal Guards. Armed, the Royal Guards drove the rabble forcefully from the main plaza. Eager to administer beatings to members of the unarmed crowd, they drew their batons, their swords, and fists, swinging wildly at any figure without a shield or uniform. There were screams of children and much shouting. No one was spared the hand of the Guard. The people dropped their torches with each blunt blow and small fires broke out, filling the night with smoke.
The violent night left in doubt the next step for the Kingdom. The recurrent doubts as to the true birth right of the King continued to plague the populace. Many scribes and a small number of councilmen had been offended by the King's harsh rule and his resistance to change. They rallied with the peasantry, calling for a change.
The apparent leader of the King’s opposition was forcefully taken from a healing temple by unknown men in common clothes that betrayed no sign of their rank. Bright and two other councilmen had been severely beaten in the clashes with Royal forces, but Willem alone was carried away. The old healer watched in terrified silence as seven men wrapped Willem the Bright in a blanket as he lay sleeping on a bed in the largest temple of healing in the Kingdom. Locked in the neighboring chamber, Willem’s wife screamed for him while the cowering healer watched his patient being carried away.
The High Priestess hid her smile when the news of Willem the Bright’s abduction reached her. His whereabouts remained unknown, though his fate was certain. The King was playing into her hands, making it all the easier for her by removing yet another beloved man of the people. She was astonished at the level of his blindness, his arrogance. He acted as though he had never studied the history of the Spheres.
It mattered little to her that he no longer sought her consultation. These days he kept council with Argus the Torturer and though brutal, his advice was simple to decipher. She would know his next move before it became a thought in his mind. Soon, she thought, it would be time for her to act openly against the King. For now, she was content to watch his unraveling and with it, the unraveling of the Old Kingdom.

All American

They all wanted me to be some sort of All American dream girl. I was the tall blonde. I should have baked apple pie. I should have spent more time at the beach. I would have spent more time at the beach, playing in the surf and dancing around bonfires and singing and strumming on an acoustic guitar if Peter hadn’t broke my heart. It has been speculated upon by a few men who liked to play papa Smurf to my Smurfette that my heart was already broken before that. If this is so, and it was already broken in half before he arrived on the scene, then he finished the job. He smashed it to smithereens and then the man who was to be my husband came and defecated on the splintery dust that remained.

Broken heart dust is one of the most shimmering lust evoking substances available. It calls like a siren and cuts like diamonds. A man can’t help but want to touch broken heart dust, but like those phantasmal stalagmites that grow in deep caverns, broken heart dust is finally completely destroyed when it is handled by greasy hands. The oil from callused man hands turns it to slimy heart goo, a substance too toxic to be handled ever more. You need a HazMat team of psychologist to dispose of it properly, so you can go around as a functionally heart less adult like the rest of the walking dead that populate the earth.

My story telling was encouraged as a child. A second grade teacher begged my mother to record my stories and type them up. My father started insisting sometime around then, (I can’t be sure exactly when, I think it would have been after he was released from prison) that I should write a children’s book and make my family rich. The idea was more than a little bit suffocating. The emphasis was not to be on telling the stories germinating in the neon green Elysium of my soul, but rather on writing something that others would approve of. All American stories perhaps.

I tried to do anything I could to please. Once my father took me with him to work. He pulled mobile homes with a big diesel truck. He had me out there trying to help him hitch the modular to his truck.(I think this is before prison and before second grade). I had no idea what he wanted me to do. He kept shouting at me, and at last something went finally quite wrong and my finger was badly smashed under the entire weight of a prefab house. Bouncing along in the cab of the truck on the way home he was miserably sorry. He looked so sad and broken and guilty that I started trying to make him feel better

That is something that I started to do habitually. Both of my parents were actually so sad and such desperately impoverished souls that I made it my full time occupation to make them happy. Like a pet. Like a clown. Like something you can smoke now and forget about later. I was such a perfect kiss ass that grandmothers all over town adored me. My friends mothers preferred me to their own children. I seemed to be the perfect young lady. And if it was an act, then it was some serious method acting. I stayed in character day and night and in my dreams I was trapped in a black and white cartoon running in place while the big bad wolf closed in on me.

I more or less spoon fed the broken shards of my heart to the man the world would call my husband. I was already in the habit. I smiled and recommended it as the best medicine for night terrors and fear of death and loneliness. I was sure with just one dose of my magick heart shards he would be fully recovered. But one dose wasn’t enough. He needed another and another… and kind of think of it, it hadn’t cured my parents either. Having had his way with my heart without finding the cure for his pain he proceeded to have his way with my body, forcing me to bend over my pregnant belly or lay on my side so that he could penetrate me from behind while I cried. Still he felt no better so we applied for credit cards in my name and he bought microbrews and video games and candy for our babies, and smashed the presents I gave him and punched the night stand to no avail.

I never then wore an apron or baked an apple pie. I did not write a best selling children’s story. I watched the episode of friends in which Monica and Chandler got married and decided that maybe that was the missing ingredient. I begged him to marry me. After the screaming and tear shedding had turned to mutual exhaustion he at last agreed. We found a minister in the yellow pages and my parents drove us to meet her at a duck pond and they held our infant children while we agreed to that meaningless list of things that all married people have agreed to. His suffering was no less and still I baked no apple pie.
We lived with my parents. He couldn’t hold a job. My hair was less blond. My skin was stretched and my breast were like balloons, first swollen beyond credibility as I nursed our children, then deflated and sagging when they were of no interest to anyone anymore. Then I said I didn’t want to live with him, I couldn’t make him happy. He shot himself dead.
By then the girl was all gone from my all American.

Then came the Papa Smurfs. Bearded men from countries I had never heard of (that at least was American of me), who tried to help me recover well enough to pass out flowers at airports. That last part is a joke. Moonies weren’t called Moonies anymore and no one was allowed in airports without a boarding pass by that time. I was pregnant with my second babe when the airplanes crashed into the towers in far off New York. Sitting with my big belly between me and a table of immigrant kindergartners, I caught a glimpse of the television set in the lounge between classrooms as another teacher came in and whispered that there had been an attack. The two teachers stood in the doorway gazing at the screen, their bright lip stick stained mouths transformed into masks of tragedy. They were horrified. I felt elated. We could be touched. We could be changed. We could be released from the life-leaching spell of the all American. Our bleached white hell might not be eternal. It could go up in plumes of black smoke and sky licking tongues of flame. One day the dream might be shattered, not just broken, and then I might be released from its terrible grasp. Some day I might escape and become something undreamed of.