The Crucifixion of the Outcast

by William Butler Yeats

A man, with thin brown hair and a pale face, half ran, half walked, along the road that wound from the south to the town of Sligo. Many called him Cumhal, the son of Cormac, and many called him the Swift, Wild Horse; and he was a gleeman, and he wore a short parti-coloured doublet, and had pointed shoes, and a bulging wallet. Also he was of the blood of the Ernaans, and his birth-place was the Field of Gold; but his eating and sleeping places where the four provinces of Eri, and his abiding place was not upon the ridge of the earth. His eyes strayed from the Abbey tower of the White Friars and the town battlements to a row of crosses which stood out against the sky upon a hill a little to the eastward of the town, and he clenched his fist, and shook it at the crosses. He knew they were not empty, for the birds were fluttering about them; and he thought how, as like as not, just such another vagabond as himself was hanged on one of them; and he muttered: ‘If it were hanging or bowstringing, or stoning or beheading, it would be bad enough. But to have the birds pecking your eyes and the wolves eating your feet! I would that the red wind of the Druids had withered in his cradle the soldier of Dathi, who brought the tree of death out of barbarous lands, or that the lightning, when it smote Dathi at the foot of the mountain, had smitten him also, or that his grave had been dug by the green-haired and green-toothed merrows deep at the roots of the deep sea.’ (Continue Reading…)

The Dark And What It Said

by Rick Kennett

The light touched on a bulky, indefinite shape, hard by a tree, obscured by a low branch across the top of it.

‘What’s that?’ whispered Andrew.

‘That old car body I told you about,’ Rudy whispered back. He moved the light along, then swept it all around to catch whatever might be creeping up from behind. Nothing was creeping up from behind.

‘Maybe it was a night bird like you said before,’ said Andrew, not at all sounding like he believed it. ‘I’ve sometimes heard a bird call that sounds like ‘Whatcha reading.’ Maybe there’s something out here that hoots ‘Hey you there’ at night.’

A Revelation of Cormorants

by Mark Valentine

Cormorant, from the Latin for “sea-raven”. The Tudors saw the bird as a symbol for gluttony: Shakespeare refers to hungry Time as a cormorant. It may have gained this reputation because of its proficiency at catching fish. Milton, however, invested the bird with a dark glamour: he likened Lucifer sitting in the Tree of Life to a cormorant, no doubt because of the bird’s habit of standing with its black wings spread out to dry. The satanic image stuck. The occultist and poet Ludovic Horne wrote of his “Cormorant days/dark and sleek”. The atheist essayist Llewellyn Powys refers to the birds as “satanic saints” in Parian niches on the chalk cliffs of Dorset, but he celebrated them too as manifesting the ecstasy of the moment, as they plunge into the sea after the silver-scaled fish of their dreams. Conan Doyle alludes to an untold Sherlock Holmes case of “The Lighthouse Keeper and the Trained Cormorant”. Isherwood cites them in a nonsense poem. Folklore about them is much barer than the literary record.

The Burning Servant

by Steven Saus

‘Mrs. Freeman,’ Dr. Montegro said, ‘I believe there was a tale in the offering. While your observations of old age are … fascinating… they are not the coin of the realm. So to speak.’ The doctor looked down through his glasses at her. ‘We trade stories here, madam, and your grandson was going to tell one.’

The smile creased her face even further. ‘Why, yes, yes, he was.’ Jonathan tried to guide his grandmother to an armchair, but she waved him off, settling onto a barstool. ‘You fine educated men know of General Sherman, don’t you? The Union commander who burned his way from Atlanta to Savannah?’ Several men nodded; a few, who had betrayed Southern accents earlier in the evening, frowned. Montegro’s hand touched the silver chestpiece of his stethoscope.

Sarah looked up at the paneled ceiling for a moment, then back at the listening men. ‘What you don’t know is that Sherman didn’t do it all himself.’

Let There Be Darkness

by Mike Allen

A day will come when the sun’s pale yellow stare starts to fill with the taint of blood.

Among the confused and tremulous hordes of mankind, amidst the endless processions of grand towers forged from metal stolen from the moon, I will walk. One knowing face, one unique being traversing the rivers of humanity that flood this world.

Mentor

by Sean Eads

I recovered myself with difficulty. I was in my mentor’s house. I stood here uninvited but nevertheless I stood here. Understanding the opportunity, my attention burst outward in glances both rapid and greedy. I took in everything, finding the details of corners, seeking every scrap of intimate but banal information about the man. People might think this insane—I had after all worked closely with my mentor for a decade and a half, giving him my poems for his unsparing critiques, listening and agreeing to his thoughts on literature, attending his seminars and readings, making his friends my friends. I still was not good enough. I had never published anything but I kept at it. I was poor and I wrote about poverty. “You are poor,” my mentor would say, “but you have not suffered.” I was lonely and I wrote about loneliness. “Yes, you are lonely,” my mentor confirmed, “but loneliness is not suffering.” Gradually this became the sum of his critique. At the bottom of each returned poem he scribbled: “You still have not suffered.” I felt I would never understand. I looked about this room now as if it would tell me how to feel the anguish that clearly my mentor felt, the despair that made him so superior a poet. How could his kitchen tell me more about him than his verse, which was so confessional, so full of agony and torment, like a man imprisoned in his own flesh? What was knowledge of his plates and silverware in comparison? What could his dirty dishes tell me about his soul?

This Is Now

by Michael Marshall Smith

If you were seeing the fence for the first time, you’d likely wonder at the straightness of it, the way in which the concrete posts had been planted at ten yard intervals deep into the rock. You might ask yourself if national forests normally went to these lengths, and you’d soon remember they didn’t, that for the most part a cheerful little wooden sign by the side of the road was all that was judged to be required. If you kept on walking deeper, intrigued, sooner or later you’d see a notice attached to one of the posts. The notices are small, designed to convey authority rather than draw attention.

NO TRESPASSING, they say. MILITARY LAND.

That could strike you as a little strange, perhaps, because you might have believed that most of the marked-off areas were down over in the moonscapes of Nevada, rather than up here at the quiet Northeast corner of Washington State. But who knows what the military’s up to, right? Apart from protecting us from foreign aggressors, of course, and The Terrorist Threat, and if that means they need a few acres to themselves then that’s actually kind of comforting. The army moves in mysterious ways, our freedoms to defend. Good for them, you’d think, and you’d likely turn and head back for town, having had enough of tramping through snow for the day. In the evening you’d come into Ruby’s and eat hearty, some of my wings or a burger or the brisket – which, though I say so myself, isn’t half bad. Next morning you’d drive back South.

I remember when the fences went up. Thirty years ago. 1985. Our parents knew what they were for. Hell, we were only eight and we knew.