No Gravestone For the Forgotten

Marcus looked down at his stomach and made his peace with death. It was funny — he decided — that despite the dark red of his uniform, he could tell exactly which parts were blood. It had been a bayonet. Perhaps a knife. Some hazy part of his mind — the part that had stood on a stool at his mother's side and watched her perform surgeries with deft hands — told him to collect bandages, bathe the wound and stitch it up. The rational part told him to sit exactly where he was and let himself die on the battlefield.

"Here," there was a hand waving in his face. It held a flask; brown leather and metal stitched tightly together. "You want a drink?"

The figure attached to the flask was dressed in black. It slumped down next to him, long legs folding onto the grey stone.

"Please," Marcus' lips were dryer than they were a minute ago. He grabbed the proffered flask and unscrewed it, greedily swallowing. It burned the back of his throat and for a moment his eyes watered and he choked. The coughing made the pain in his side worse; twisting like a corkscrew.

"You're alright lad. Come now. Have another sip," the words came from the mysterious man in black. Marcus looked at him, trying to focus. He was older — grey haired and lined face, blue eyes staring out amongst crows feet. He smiled with one side of his mouth. "Looks like you're hurt. Want me to have a look at it?"

"Are you a surgeon?" Marcus tipped more of the whiskey down his throat. There, perhaps the pain was a little number now.

"No, not in the slightest. But I could help."

"You can't," Marcus shook his head. "My mother was a surgeon. If she could see me now she'd already be burning candles in my memory. You can't fix me."

"If that's what you want. Mind if I have a drink?"

Marcus returned the flask.

The older man lifted his hand away from his right side as he reached for it. That too, was blood red. He grimaced as he took a gulp from the flask and refastened it, clamping his hand back to his side again.

"They say abdomen wounds are the most painful to die from," Marcus said lazily. Really, when you thought about it, the stone was quite comfortable.

"Thank you for your reassuring words," his companion chuckled dryly. "I take the red means you're with the Columbines?"

"Yes," Marcus waved his hand in the hazy air in front of him. The flask was placed into it. "Columbines. What about you?"

"No, I'm with General Krynesberg."

"Ah,"

"Ah indeed. Pass the flask, lad."

It swapped hands again. The brown leather was stained with blood now; almost black in color.

"What are you out here for? You're old for a soldier." Marcus asked

"Funny ideas get into your head when you're old. You like things the way they are."

"The Columbines wanted to change things..."

There had been rallies. At first they'd been angry students standing on a quad hundreds of years old and shouting at stone buildings facing them down. Then there had been occupations, sit-ins — protests. It had become violent and students had started creating Molotov cocktails with rum and ripped up clothes. That was when the General had retaliated.

"Some say too much." The older man leant his head back against the rocks behind them.

"Maybe," Marcus hummed. "Do you think this means we get to go home?"

The older man glanced down at him and then at the desiccated battlefield. Hundreds of red bodies, still holding scraps of homemade weapons, lay scattered amongst the smoking rubble and twisted metal of a carrion-city. It could have been a clean come morning. The General liked order, after all.

"What's home for you, lad?" He said softly.

"It's just my mother. She's called Lena and she's lovely."

The old man stiffened as Marcus' breaths began to judder as he breathed in and out. His hand slipped away from his side and the older man pressed the flask into it, helping Marcus get it to his mouth and take another sip. The boy's eyes had gone hazy — a film of tears over them.

"Tell me about your mother. Is she well?" He asked.

"She's doing great. She's been lonely, with me away. But it'll be alright, because I'll be back soon. I'll get a job this time, so she doesn't have to work any more." Marcus heaved another breath and closed his eyes, tears beginning to slip out from under his eyelids.

"Hush, you'll be fine." The older man pushed Marcus' hair back from his face, feeling his own wound protest at the movement. His side was wet.

"I'll go home, you know," Marcus offered, eyes still closed.

"I know, I know." But the boy had gone still and the old man could feel his fingertips go cold. He took one last sip from the flask and refastened it, empty. "I know, lad..."

Over the Hills and Far Away, Teletubbies Come to Slay

"The baby in the sun commands us my brothers and sister, we ride forth across the green plains of eternity to sweep down upon the mortals below!" Tinky Winky shouted from his purple steed. The horse dug its hooves into the vibrant green grass and reared its head.

A red rift ripped open in front of the four and they spurred their mounts forward, and with them they brought chaos. Dipsy swept his scythe back and forth cleaving fleeing mortals in half. Blood rained down from the scythe's blade as he rode through the streets.

Laa-Laa brought forth her plagues, disease erupted from her mouth in a black cloud of flies. They swarmed over the cities, their bites left boils and blackened flesh.

Po destroyed the crops of mankind. Fires swept across the fields incinerating anything that could have been edible. Cows, pigs, sheep, goat, anything and everything humanity could have dined on was swept away in the burning curtain.

Tinky Winky, War. The fallen humans filled the horrid ranks of his immortal army which he led against the bastions of mankind. The humans were more resourceful than Tinky Winky had imagined but in the end they were weak, pathetic soft creatures that were consumed by his voracious horde.

Tinky Winky, Dipsy, Laa-Laa, and Po stared out across the desiccated landscape that was once the kingdom of mankind. They threw back their heads in laughter as the baby in the sun looked on with glee.

Humanity Dies

Humanity dies.

Always it is dying. The humans need to eat to survive. They need the right mix of oxygen and nitrogen and a handful of other gasses to keep from suffocating. They need a full atmosphere of pressure just to keep their bodies from hemorrhaging apart. Microorganisms invade their bodies and kill them. Sometimes their cells even attack themselves and the body dies.

But even without all these, if a perfect human lives in atmosphere with all the food and gases it needs, shelter, safe from micro and macro-organisms alike, even then, after a long enough time it just dies. All the processes that keep it alive just stop, for no good reason.

Hardly an intelligent design.

Somewhere on a space vessel, a tiny rock punctures the hull, and humanity dies. Not enough shielding from the radiation of space, and humanity dies. Somewhere, humanity fights itself, and it dies by its own hands. A group of cells begin replicating too quickly, and humanity dies. Sometime a filter fails, the balance of gasses shifts, and humanity dies.

Humanity is always dying, any time, place, or way you care to interact with it. So many design flaws compounding, so many bad physiological choices, so many psychological errors. To humanity this is normal.

Humanity considers itself created to die. Doesn’t consider that there is any other way. When it met us, humanity thought we were the strange ones. Then it died.

Here is a human expression: the short end of the stick. It means to be unfortunate. To not have as many good things as other parties. Humanity got the short end of the stick.

Every time you talk with humanity, it is a manic preoccupation that runs under the words. Humanity always talks about what it is going to do before it dies. It is unsettling. Humanity doesn’t even seem to want life. Humanity calls it “immortality.” Mortality means death. Our life, humanity calls “not-death,” and that’s probably the most telling thing about humankind there is.

But for all its flaws and stupid design errors, humanity is successful. I asked a human why, once, and it told me after some thought: “Gotta make your mark before you kick off, right?”

“Making your mark” means creating something that will be remembered. “Kicking off” is another one of a thousand words humanity has for death. I thought at the time that those were both of them such novel ideas. But to humanity, they are normal.

Humanity is absolutely obsessed with making its mark. Then after it has done so, it dies. No time to enjoy its labors, no periods of rest; humanity works and works and struggles without stopping, and then it dies. Such a bizarre species. Many of us think humanity is kind of pointless. And yet...

Where we colonize a dozen worlds, humanity conquers hundreds. And then it dies. Where we know how to split atoms, humanity has figured out how to put them back together any way it wants. Then it dies. We occasionally build art and monuments, but humanity puts them on every world it can live on, and even those it can’t. Afterwards, it dies. We draw life from the stars, but humanity has learned to make them dance to its will. And then it is dead.

Anything our philosophers grapple with, humanity already has an answer. Anything we build or create or alter, humanity has already done so. Our theories are examined by humanity and either proven right or discarded as wrong. Humanity already knows the answers. We struggle to learn even the basics of human communication, but humanity picks up our language and cultural lexicons almost as an afterthought. And at the end of all this, it still dies.

Humanity dies and dies and dies and we, in our ‘non-death’—we can’t get out of its shadow. Humanity does great things and dies, but more humanity is always there, and it is always better. A manic obsession with constant improvement. Of working until it dies. Of making its mark.

Humanity has no time to enjoy its accomplishments. It never sits back and looks at all it has done because it is always busy doing more before it dies. It creates wonders and forgets that they’re wonders because the new humanity that comes has always had them; those wonders become normal. This concern over death drives it in a constant struggle—here is another human phrase: rat race—and informs everything humanity does. It can never escape death, even though it runs from it. Then the new humanity starts where the old left off and runs further before it too dies. Ironically, this is what humanity calls ‘the cycle of life.’

We do not have to worry about such things. We will not die. We will never end. We may spend as long as we want enjoying our lives and the things we create. None of the frantic obsession that plagues humanity. This is very fortunate for us.

So why do I feel that it is we who got the short end of the stick?

Of Men and Universe

Some millions of years ago in the depths of space a large chunk of rock smashed into another large chunk of rock. The resulting collision sent an almost innumerable amount of shrapnel in every direction. In order of magnitude, the rock that ended up going through Don Johnson’s skull was the 8,435,345th largest. It had no hopes or aspirations, no utility whatsoever. Merely the resultant effect of an event set forth by the creation of the universe.

And they say determinism is all hogwash!

As a dying dinosaur looked to the ashen sky, a great crater smoldering across the world, the rock slowly span in and out of view. Uncaring of that great meteor which had just struck the world. Thousands of times its size, formed for some other great purpose. Ending its million year journey in the Yucatán. Or what would eventually be called so.

As Martin Luther looked to the sky after nailing a piece of paper to the church door, the rock tumbled unaware of its great purpose. Of its divinely inspired mission. More pure than Manifest Destiny. Just entering the confines of our solar system, peering at Pluto. The planet, or planetoid. The distinction of no apparent value. All its brethren living out the rest of eternity floating aimlessly in the void, the rock felt the full force of gravity for the first time in eons.

Don Johnson looked at the starless sky from the brightly lit stage, crowds of cheering and histrionic supporters at his feet. Supporters maybe, but definitely fans. A small boulder slowing burning up in the atmosphere.

"This is our night! It’s time to take back this great country once and for all. The polls close in just a few minutes, but I’m pretty much ready to call this one for us!"

The crowd went wild. The rock, now the size of a thimble, charred by its harsh entry slowed to the speed of a bullet, for the first time in millions of years felt ready for something different.

"Our mission is inspired by God. And if he hath any qualms with my presidency, may he strike me down this very moment!"

The rock in all its ethereal glory flew straight through Don Johnson’s brain stem. Killing him immediately. The crowd chuckled at this welcomed sight of slapstick he’d been so well known for. And as the laughter died down he never got up.

The rock was dislodged from his corpse and tossed aside. Don Johnson’s body buried the next few days and began to slowly decompose. Eventually, every single member of the audience died too. The rock nestled into the ground ready for the long haul. The only remaining memory of a moment long lost to history.

The Earth eventually was hit by an even larger rock that killed the rest of the humans. And from the ashes new forms evolved. And those too were eventually destroyed. At the hand of God, or nature. It doesn't really matter. Determined ambivalence.

And as pressure built and continents drifted the small stone was ground up and fully assimilated into the world. Claiming just as much ownership of it as anyone else.

A Nest of Frost and Steel

Listen, how the wind howls! How it plucks at my numb flesh with swarming ghost pincers. There is no escape in this white plain. The cold seeps into my flesh, ounce by ounce, choking the veins, drowning the muscles in ice and bitter frost.

I will die here, upon these ice flats, my corpse preserved in whatever final repose my broken body may deign to assume. It will not be a gallant one, however. My sword and shield are far behind me. I held them long past their purpose. Not for fear of enemies. No, for fear of something far greater.

For fear of remembering.

Good steel in your right hand is a kind of a madness. A useful madness, I suppose. The kind that conquers enemies. The kind that blots out the horror of tattered bodies and turns the scent of blood into an aphrodisiac. But it is madness, all the same. A madness few escape while still alive.

My father and brothers died mad. And proud. And, I suppose, alight with something like joy in their hearts. I saw their faces on the battlefield. Their eyes were already dim. Only the final wounds still bled; the rest had turned to dark red lines of ice. But their faces were open. Rapturous.

For some, I suppose, the madness can never be cast off – not even in death.

But they were born with steel in their teeth and fire in their bellies. I was not. I was never like them. Before my father forced the steel into my right hand, I was someone else…

A coward. That’s what Durun would call me. A fay, idle coward. More in love with songs and storytelling than the filthy work of living. And there was truth to that, I admit.

I am the last of Durun Forger’s seven children. Last and least, to hear my father tell it. My brothers were thick-necked and even thicker witted, but they held only physical pursuits in any regards, and in this they were superior to most. Reckless, wild, and uncommonly strong, my five brothers caught the eye of King Ulnar’s Man-at-Arms, who brought all five into service as civil warriors. They served the King directly as appointed peacekeepers with great distinction…until Gaya died.

Gaya was my sister. She was the youngest until I was born, and where I served as an unwanted spare from the moment I arrived, she was the apple of everyone’s eye. And rightfully so. She was a beauty beyond imagining, an outcome far greater than the sum of her ancestral parts. And where many saw beauty as a defining virtue unto itself, Gaya was above all kind and thoughtful. None spoke ill of her, for what complaint could there be?

Beauty, however, is a gem with sharp edges. While returning home from the Keystone Mill, Gaya met a stranger on the road. Here I admit my cowardice, because I have never sought to know the full extent of what happened to my beloved sister that day. It is enough to say she died.

I do not say with derision that my brothers were incapable of knowing sorrow. That is simply fact. My father and brothers all were possessed of an exceedingly narrow breadth of feeling. What they could feel, however, they felt with a dagger’s keenness. When they discovered Gaya’s body, they did not fall to sorrow. They fell to rage. Even here, lost in the ice, I still pray that the world may never know another rage so great.

In the end, the man was found and tortured and killed. But not before my brothers nearly brought our entire village to ruin in the pursuit. The King was understanding, but my brothers could not keep their royal appointments. They became millers and coopers and smiths, instead. They worked hard and even started their own families, but they were changed men. Something bitter and dark lived within them. A single man had so easily stripped them of their greatest treasures. What strength could defend against that?

But aye…what was that? That howl was not the wind. I do not know this land. I do not know what lives in this frozen abyss. I had assumed the cold would claim me, but perhaps not. Perhaps not.

The boots Freda made me are sturdy and as long as they hold, so shall I. That is the best I can do, I suppose. Forward, forward. Where the sun sets – that’s where I may rest. But no sooner. Freda made boots that would not fail me. I will not fail them in kind.

Freda…

As it was with all things, I took Gaya’s death much differently than my brothers. They could see only their own weakness and failure, while I…I mourned for what Gaya might have been. A maiden. A mother. A queen, perhaps. My sister had lived effortlessly. Not lazily, but at peace with herself and her choices. I admired that above all of her superlative qualities. She did what she felt she ought to do with no worries. No fears.

I sometimes imagine how that same openness may have doomed her that day she met a stranger walking on the road. But that is the cost of a life lived freely. It is, I believe, an acceptable cost to be as Gaya was – happy.

And so, to be as the sister I cherished, I pursued my happiness.

I began singing in the taverns in the evening. When I was a child, Durun and my brothers had often caught me singing in the forest as I collected wood for the fire. The toll was always the same – gales of laughter and a punch in the stomach.

“Women sing,” my father was fond of saying. “A man who uses his voice for singing isn’t worth listening to.”

I took his words to heart, but that could not stop the songs that lived – bubbling like a stew – in my chest from boiling over from time to time. And it always felt good, to sing. Singing loosed an indescribable warmth within me, one that flushed away the dull ache that lay like rusted mail across my arms and legs and chest.

I sang. And I was good. After a time they began to pay me. I added storytelling. I learned juggling and certain acrobatics. I began to travel. I thought my father would rage at this, but even I did not see how far I had fallen from his favor. To be out of his sight was the greatest gift I could give him.

I traveled and eventually I met Freda. She played the flute and the fiddle. Her father had been a cobbler and she had been his apprentice for a time, learning enough to make fine leather boots when her other sources of income failed her.

We fell in love. And it did feel like falling. It felt like tumbling together through the heavens with no end in sight. Everything in me came loose. We were weightless, laughing. Shameless fools in love.

Those years of singing and dancing in strange, colorful countries are memories without equal.

I cannot stand to think of them now.

War came. Ulnar called his men. And my father called me.

Why did I answer?

Aye aye aye. I answered because he called.

There! I see one now, following behind, slipping silently from bank to bank. It is white as the snow. A winter hunter. I curse myself for letting go of the sword, and then laugh. More madness. I dropped the sword because I hadn’t the strength to drag it behind me. Even a single swing is beyond me now. For the moment I live by the grace of my silent hunter’s caution.

I was never fit to hold the steel and yet I came when Durun called me. Freda cried and begged and still I went. Why? Why? Why?

Blood is treacherous. It breeds unrequited bonds.

Durun was my father. What other answer could I give him?

Ulnar’s Army was not just. Know that. No blood was ever spilled for so unworthy a cause. But I did not know that then. All I knew was that my King called and my father asked me to come and answer the call at his side; at my brothers’ sides.

Ulnar set us forth to conquer a northern shoreland – a simple tribe of heathens who ate human flesh and murdered fishermen who drifted too close to shore.

The tribe was there and they were simple. And we slaughtered them. That they killed our fishermen or ate human flesh…no evidence was ever found.

I am not a skilled swordsman, but you do not need to be a skilled swordsman to cut down women and children cowering in the dark. I did my share of the labor that night and by morning the tide came in red with the spoils of our efforts.

Did any on their side possess swords? Good steel? I do not recall.

The tribe, of course, was merely a prologue in Ulnar’s great plan. There were mines further inland. Deep shafts below the ice. Hordes of natural crystals and gems. A treasure fit for a king.

Did Ulnar think we could just take it? Did he know anything at all about the land beyond the shore? I do not know.

If he knew anything of the men we met below the mountains, he did not say. They came on in a sudden fury of spears and studded clubs. They were massive men, cloaked in a heavy, ragged furs. None of them spoke. None of them cried out. They swung their clubs and slashed out with their spears in silence.

The silence hid their numbers.

Durun was stabbed in the back. The black shaft that claimed his life went nearly all the way through my father’s chest. I decapitated the man who had held the spear. He had been distracted – trying to retrieve the spear.

I killed others. I was stabbed in the shoulder and stumbled away. Behind me Ulnar’s men died. Then Ulnar himself.

I kept walking.

At least three of their men survived, but none sought to follow me. They knew, as I did, that the cold would kill me. And if not the cold…

It does not conceal itself anymore. From time to time I turn to look at it – white, shaggy, long-limbed with a narrow muzzle. It is waiting for me to die – to lie down among the white and be still. I nearly laugh. What patience. Why do what nature will do for you?

Wolf. I knew the name would come to me. Wolf.

What songs did we sing, Freda? I don’t remember them. They were songs like the sun. They shined. We shined. And when we sang them that light went out and covered the world. Everyone felt that warmth.

It was our gift to share.

I should have stayed on the battlefield. I could have made myself a nest of frost and steel and laid down in it and closed my eyes…

Freda? Please sing for me. I want to hear your voice.

I try to sing, but my lips are numb and I cannot get my mouth to move the right way. Can I make the right sounds? Am I making any sounds?

The wind is no longer howling. I don’t hear anything at all. There is nothing to hear anyway. I am nearly to the horizon.

These are good, sturdy boots, Freda. They did not fail me. I did not fail them. But the sun is coming down and soon I must go to sleep.

Sing another song, Freda. I don’t know that I can hear you, but it is enough to know that you are singing.

Sing.

Sing.

Please, sing.