Arc 2: Locust and the Pomegranate
*
The Parson’s Tale
*
Fragment: 0x20b.0
Frame: ‘Earth 0x20B’
Date: 1/7/2021
Location: CARCERAL FACILITY OUTSIDE PITTSBURGH.
SUB-FRAGMENT: WRITTEN EXCERPTS FROM A(523)
Extract-Excerpt Source: United States Library of Congress, Truth and Reconciliation Commission
LOC CALL NUMBER: KFD 523 .A6 20B 2027
*
The woman, REDACTED, sits in a prison cell. For clarity’s sake we’ll call her A(523) or the Parson and her home ‘Earth 523.’ She was a Universalist Unitarian minister in a universe, a timeline, a pomegranate seed, where the “You-Yous” were a pretty laid-back big deal. Now, she lives in a jail cell in a theocracy. Her church isn’t a thing anymore. There’s one church, and it’s wrapped in the flag.
She is a prisoner of conscience sitting in a windowless cell. Steel door with an oversized mail slot for the gross food. Bed bolted to the floor, moldy-foam soiled mattress with a scratch-blanket too small crumpled on it. Toilet, no-seat. Rust-water sink.
What did she do? She lives in a ‘fresh’, as in recently established, theocracy. For brevity’s sake, let’s say she’s left handed (she is).
For sanity’s sake, she calls herself an anchoress. Holy lady; swamp witch. Her big nose is bruised and crooked, but it’s healing. She whistle’s when she breathes. Finally learned a new instrument. Wonders never cease. A(523) sings to pass time she can only really mark in terms of meals through the slot. Sometimes she writes. One of the guards outside passed pen and paper, the very large one. He’s not kind. Less cruel. She likes Carol King, her mom’s music, his mom’s music.
For the sake of filling silence, or to accompany the white noise of the prison’s HVAC system, she sang that song. First night, day, whatever. The song had been stuck in her head all week. It was first thing she could think to sing to calm herself, forgot everything but the chorus. He felt the Earth move under his feet, and eventually she got the precious pen and the backs of receipts from his wallet. Received paper towels from the locker room where he changes into his jackboots, napkins from the cafeteria she’s never seen.
In the cell, she sits with her back to the metal door cross legged on the bed. The Parson sets a paper scrap stretched over the bedrail, her ‘desk’, she writes. Pen held southpaw, careful not to pierce the paper, her normal-scrawl small to save space, she writes. A(523), the minister, secrets her scrolls in a hole in the wall beneath the sink. There’s a leak, but a hole in the cinderblock is desert-dry.
To keep herself sane, and perhaps proof she’s losing it in isolation, she’s started re-writing the Bible from memory, from the beginning:
*
Since some are so worked up and foaming over such a small thing, let us speak creation.
This is Genesis by the way.
If creation was copulative both (or more) parties are resting after the act.
If creation was feminine and involved birth (since ye seem fixated) post partum recovery is necessary.
If creation was male masculine masturbatory/onanistic, god would certainly be sleepy in the afterglow.
Verily, warily, wearily I say unto thee that’s when we are: the perpetual 7th day and the aching absence of waiting for a sign.
*
Fragment: 0x1861
Date: EOT (End of Time)
Location: NULL
Subject(s): A(84);A(79)^
CFC Breach? CONFIRMED. PROBABILITY: INEVITABLE.
Curve-Status? DEGRADED/DEGRADING. CFC MEMBRAINE: PERMEABLE, BREACHED
*
Down a long drive in a dead wood on the scorched plain at the End of Time, there is a small chapel. A(84) and Flannel Man, the HVAC man walk down the drive. The ash falls here, does not collect near the chapel. The door is open, a figure backlit.
“Be not afraid.” She is risen. Big nose, my nose, 84’s nose and hers. Alive and singularly her. Joint on her lip. Shit eating grin. Coffee, holy pajamas, slippers, rich fabric bathrobe. Only has two arms, but A(79) is wearing Nic’s uniform. A(79) the witch woman, the third weird sister, is entirely alive.
There is a crumpled field blanket draped over A(84’s) aching arms, the body he carried forever and a day and a day gone. “It’s you.”
A(79) standing in the doorway stunned when A(84) rushes up and vice grip hugs her with arms invigorated by the sight of her. Coffee sloshing, “watch the beverage, Broomstick.” The mug hits the ground when Flannel Man, face wearing surprise for the first time in a span a mortal can’t fathom, hugs the two–lifts them off the ground.
The three compose themselves, she gathers the mug. The boys ask A(79) in unison: “How?”
I told you. I’m a luminous being. The mug is instantly full again. The short-lived joy of reunion.
Headlights, cop-lights. Red and blue, red and blue, repeat. Blacked out SUV’s times 3. Two familiar sedans.
*
Fragment: 0x20b.2
2/28/2021
Frame: Earth 523
Primary Source: United States Library of Congress, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Record (2027)
LOC CALL NUMBER: KFD 523 .A6 20B 2027; LOC CALL NUMBER (PRIMARY): KFD 523 .0x7EB 2035
STUDENT# 801-701 CLICK HERE AT ANY TIME FOR INTERACTIVE CITATION ASSISTANCE FROM OWL
ONLINE WRITING LAB: WHERE RESEARCH AND WRITING ARE A “HOOT”
*
The book of Job (2nd Draft):
Job died, being old and full of days.
God and the devil made the bet, played it out: plague and pestilence to test his faith.
Took his family.
Job buried his dead. He took his assigned replacement wife.
But Job wouldn’t eat; Job couldn’t eat.
“May my lips be ever fresh with praise” Job prayed. He dreamed of ashes, endless ashes.
Job sang a sorrow song forever. No joyful noise.
Song so beautiful god came back to record the tune.
The devil thought it beautiful too, said they should play it twice.
Rewind: Job died, being old and full of days, having known only peace.
*
The Parson, A(523), sits writing carefully on the edge of a bed frame in a windowless prison cell. She is singing softly: “but anyone who knows what love is would understand.”
Quiet lightning. Pop. Aphasia. The Parson vomits prison food on the cold concrete floor. Slowly learns to focus on the familiar face, nose-first then the sad eyes. A(79): “Face to face with yourself is a lot.”
Yeah. I’d been contemplating something similar: we, myself, and I. The Metatron is a bit better looking than I’d imagined, gesturing to the copy of herself.
“You’re sense of humor is intact. You’re taking this well.”
Is it? Am I? Dry laugh. Where’s my wife?
I don’t know.
The Parson asks, with urgency: “If it’s not too much to ask the divine, can you find her?”
I’m here for you, just you, to take you away from this.
Hard pass.
“But I’m the Metatron. Be not afraid?” The Parson: I am afraid every second of every day. Anyway, I’m done with the angel theory. I saw the holster strap under your jacket. You reek of weed and cigarettes. There’s ash in your hair. I’m guessing Lady Philosophy at best.
“The jokes.” Defense mechanism, infuriated my wife as well. “If I get your wife out too?”
I’ll go wherever you lead, acid flashback. Leave the aviators though. Proof this happened when the walls start closing in.
A(79) gives her the sunglasses. “I’ll be back.”
“Love that movie.” Quiet lightning. Pop. The Parson alone in her cell.
*
Fragment: 0x1861
Date: EOT (End of Time)
Location: NULL
Subject(s): MANIFOLD
CFC Breach? CONFIRMED. PROBABILITY: INEVITABLE.
Curve-Status? DEGRADED/DEGRADING. CFC MEMBRAINE: PERMEABLE, BREACHED
*
B: “He’s Gildenstern.” G: “And I’m. He’s Bartleby.” Two too-tall, gaunt, whip skinny men. G-men.
Red and blue. Red and blue. Cop lights leaking into the chapel through the open door. The two talls and four more cops-in-suits: feds. Across, in front of the altar: Nic’s twin aspects, each crossing two arms. Flannel man glaring at the feds, A(79) and A(84) curious behind the altar.
The mortals in almost-unison: “Where’s Rosencrantz?”
Bartleby restrains G from stepping forward: “Funny you mention my missing partner, mortals.” The last word, mortal, said like a slur.
‘B’ and ‘G’ trade lines, barely talking over each other: Rosencrantz was on the trail of a couple of mortals. Couple of big-beaked ‘never dies’ running amok. Three to be precise. One down. Two to be precise. Not surprised to find these two. Here.
A(84) interrupts: “Sanctuary.”
“B” and “G”: Who told you you could do that?
Flannel Man raises his phone to take a pic. “I gotta save the look on your face.” Snap.
A polished ruse pops into place, a plane, like a two-way mirror with a perfect illusion moving on it separating Nic and the feds at front of the chapel and Flannel Man and the two A’s at the back.
*
Behind the illusion barrier, the back end is shimmering transparency, liquid light. Sound can be heard, as if at the bottom of a pool. Flannel man talks into the phone, his double, his illusion speaks: “Mortals can know things. They can be smart.” The feds buy the ruse.
A(79) leans into the phone “And I’m not sure I’m mortal at this point.” Flannel Man, phone-covered, mouths *What the fuck? Shh!* Nic holds one-of-many-hands behind her back through the barrier, gestures: fingers wiggling like running legs.
Front of the Chapel, the Feds gasp in horror sequentially, like they’re waiting turns. Bartleby: “A mortal ascends. It all” G: “becomes” B:”clear” G: “We’re taking the mud-people into custody.”
*
Back: Flannel pulls chalk from his boot. Sketches the outline of a door, mouths *Boogie.* The mortals lean, the door gives way. Out the back and around to the red and blue, red and blue. A(79) has her hand on the door of an SUV. Whisper-shouts: “What the fuck are you doing?” The boys are waving urgently, already half in the ride: a 2000-something Ford sedan, about to be stolen from the G-men.
*
In the chapel: Nic laughs. Nic laughs way too long. Holding up a finger at the feds that try to interrupt her fit.
Bartleby: Ok, we get it. Gildenstern: theatrical disrespect noted. We’re taking the “muddies” into custody. Sanctuary doesn’t…
“Sanctuary has little to do with this. This is my chapel. Those are my friends, and I don’t like you.” Nic’s aspects fuse into one woman. Casual and calm: if you want them, steps between the illusions of the two A’s and Flannel man, “Come and take them.” She waits, an ancient-beyond-ancient being in a bath robe sipping coffee with the most polite violence held in her eyes. “Or we can use our words.”
*
Fragment: 0x20b.5
3/2/2021
Frame: Earth 523
Primary Source: United States Library of Congress, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Record (2027)
LOC CALL NUMBER: KFD 523 .A6 20B 2027; LOC CALL NUMBER (PRIMARY): KFD 523 .0x7EB 2035
LOOKS LIKE YOU’RE ASSAYING TO WRITE AN ESSAY? NEED A THESAURUS?
OWL: RESEARCH AND WRITING ARE A HOOT
*
The Gospel of “Jesus, Chris” (Abridged)
Joseph Christ had a brother named Chris who had a wife
who died in childbirth.
ding-dong-ditch. Baby in a basket. Brother abandoned the baby on his door step
“Jesus, Chris…”
Mary resented the situation. Was kind to the kid.
She saw it: He was shifty.
Wouldn’t look her, or anyone, in the eye.
Weird tic habits and that need for routine.
That “lack of tact” that got him slapped as a kid and hurt as a man. .
*
The Parson sits cross-legged on the bed. Smearing a thumb in endless circles over one lens of the sunglasses concealed under the corner of the blanket. It’s difficult to mark time with nothing to mark time. The Parson imagines herself patiently, deliberately digging through the concrete wall with her bare hands. She is three feet deep in this imagining.
The flash flicker on the walls. Quiet lightning. Mirror image women sitting cross legged on the bed. “She is here. She is safe.” The Parson hugs her ‘alternate’, reflex joy. Hope. All the good stuff. A(79) doesn’t know how to react.
The Parson holds up her one-lensed sunglasses. “Nerves. Trade you for a cigarette” Are you ready to leave?
The preacher: “Still a pass on that.” See, you took a while, which suggests this place is big and not dedicated to little old me. “After you get my wife and whoever else out of here, I’ll go.” The Parson raises a hand: let’s save you some breath. I’m not leaving the zoo unless the other animals go out to by two.
“It’s an ark.” Don’t deflect.
A(79) serious: “You need to come with me if you want to live.”
It’s just “come with me if you want to live.” Just a classic flick. No. Not leaving. I want to live. Not in a prison, I promise you. But I can’t leave anyone else in this. I also can’t walk through walls or whatever that is. Waves her hands, gesturing at the ‘woo-woo’. The Parson takes A(79)’s hand in hers, clutching it, sincere: “Thank you, truly.” I didn’t say I would. “But I’m going to hold your hand and maintain uncomfortably strong eye contact until you do say that you will do this for me: Save the other prisoners here.”
A(79) falls out of the quiet lightning on the scorched plain at the End of Time, looks at the Parson’s cigarette butt in her palm.
*
Fragment: 0x20b.7
3/5/2021
Frame: Earth 523
Primary Source: United States Library of Congress, Truth and Reconciliation Commission Record (2027)
LOC CALL NUMBER: KFD 523 .A6 20B 2027;
*
Song of Songs
Your love is sweeter than wine
is the only line I remember,
but the book is dirty as fug
in a ‘history gets clinical’ way .
you are sweeter than wine
“you make me foolish”
written 37 times to save time,
something about ointments
(the kind I will apply to your
aching and swollen whatevers)
when we’re old, when we’re older
still. When all we are is the sum total of
wasted days not wasted.
*
In the long silence in the cell between visits from other-her, the Parson digs a hole in the brittle-old-foam mattress with her bare hands, then another, then another. In the forever between whatever-popping out of the wall, she sits with her back to the the bricks. Casual, normal-looking if a guard peeks, hands hiding between wall and mattress. The Parson digs her scrolls out of the wall quickly, crams and crumples them in the caves she dug in the mattress, the place that guarantees they’ll be found.
Building-shaking boom out in the broad corridor. Alarms. Shouts. Commotion in motion. Flicker fluorescent, flash. Quiet lightning. A(79) steps downstairs: out-of-wall to bed to floor. An alarm bell drones, shouts outside. “We gotta go, now.”
“Yeah, I don’t have to do anything. And that doesn’t sound like our agreement. It sounds like people about to be hurt.”
“Planning isn’t our strong suit, but the boys have it under control. Everyone is safe, will be, but we need to, uh, “boogie””
What does that even? These “boys” do not inspire confidence. And now for your third miracle: I’ll leave here when you save everyone outside the prison, super hero. You know what’s happening here, why we got snatched in the first place. You have to know. A(79) grabs the Parson by the arm, her arm, she pulls away. “You’re a shitty lady philosophy.”
And martyrdom is a stupid fucking concept, real bad look on us. How do you help anyone stuck in this cell?
It would’ve been a long silence. Knock, hard knock, third knock pops the rusted lock. The metal cell door breaks open and free of hinges. Freeze frame the cluster-fuck: Flannel Man, the man, surprised and bloody faced. The brick pile guard with the flat nose battering rams him through the steel door. A(84) clings to the mountain-guard’s back trying to choke him out, trying desperately.
*
EARLIER
*
Flannel Man prepares the blunt “pass it clockwise.” Loads the small pipe: “counter-clockwise.” The holy hotbox. Weed cloud in freshly stolen 2000 something Ford sedan on the scorched plain at the End of Time. A(79) shotgun, back in her aviators and action clothes. A(84) backseat worrying out the window at the ash dunes that shouldn’t be collecting out on the scorched plain at the End of Time.
Flannel Man, voice holding-smoke-choke: Let’s plan the caper properly this time.
A(84) wants to know the ‘why’ and ‘how’?
“There’s a minister.” She needs us, and I need her. She knows we’re coming.
Back-seat, mind blown, A(84): Wait, is that’s Nic-god ‘woo-woo’? You’re other split-fission you? You can be places? Same time places?
Flannel man, “She was busy while we were walking.” Adjusts the rear-view mirror. “Look at him. We got him high enough to plan properly. Where are we going? And are there goons to whip lightning at?” Being immortal is awesome. The luminous beings high five across front seat. Beep beep from Flannel man’s phone, drags it from deep in a pocket. “Uh oh.”
Pride before the fall, figura-literal-tively speaking. Metallic voice, cold clip trumpet from the phone: “HVAC license, revoked.”
“Falling in 3.” Flannel Man snatches A(79)’s hand. Think about the place we’re going, think about it, “2” picture it, hard, harder “1” Broomstick, Buckle.
Air bags deploy. Lightning strikes the Ford sedan. It vanishes abruptly. Silence and slow-blowing ash dunes either side of the road.
*
LATER
*
Loud lightning. Pop. The sound of a Ford sedan emerging from ‘elsewhere’ in an instant, it’s ass half-stuck through the large gated door that’s the best entrance to this block of cells. The car, fine. Half a prison wall collapsed on its trunk.
A(79) vanished. A(84) dazed, cram-pinned in the floor of the back seat, struggling free. Flannel man wrestles the air bag aside. Hops out to celebrate his fresh mortality. Yells: “You, Big Boy. Come here.”
The very large prison guard who likes his mom’s music is a brick pile, flat nose, too many times broken. A professional wrestler in many iterations of himself.
Two regular sized guards with riot sticks get to Flannel Man first. Stagger step, dodge, goon whiffs with the stick. Punch one, catch the baton. Block the blow from the other. Bop him on the head with his friend’s club.
A(84) frees himself from the car, leaning on a broomstick like a crutch.
“Get the prisoners in this block.” Flannel man flows over and through eleven guards like wind and water. A few more trickle in a half-stuck side door. They join the 11 others, knocked out contorted or clutching limbs and whining.
Flannel man squares off with the guard who would be comedically large were it not for his soulless dead eyes. A single cockroach crosses the filthy prison floor between them. The two men charge.
*
The brick pile guard with the flat nose battering-rams Flannel Man through the steel door. A(84) clings to the mountain-guard’s back trying to choke him out, trying desperately.
The Big Man drops Flannel, staggers back and falls with force onto the hood of the car, slamming the schnoz clinging to his back. He wheels, fist raised over A(84)’s face. Clinches, rigid, tazed. Two darts wire- tied from his ass to the tazer in A(79)’s hand. She drops the tool, it keeps on shocking.
Guards peeking over the half-wall rubble. The sound of bricks clattering. Reinforcements trying to dig their way past the rubble and Ford sedan barricade. More goons kicking at the half-jammed side door.
The Parson sees her wife in the three dozen or so prisoners confusion-huddled by the Sedan. A(79) sits in the drivers seat. Start. Reverse. Rev. She stands stretching-distorting taffy and motion-blur-fissions into two people: one driving the car, the other standing beside it. The her at the wheel stomps the gas. A 2000 something Ford sedan snaps backward, vanishes, and a luminous portal, prism-leaking from the roof, stands where the wall and rubble used to be.
Time goes out of joint. The prison alarm, an old school-style bell: electric hammer beating metal many times per second. Now, it plans to ring, maybe, eventually.
Flannel man lights and passes joints through the crowd. Giving holy little loaves, no fishes. “It’s medicinal and necessary where we’re going.” No one passes on the opportunity.
The Parson, taking a long drag on a joint, looks to the slow-mo-tazer-twitching mountain of a guard: “I’m going to pray for you.”
The Parson, hand in hand with her wife, the prisoners of conscience in the wanna-be theocracy, all the animals walked through the portal, two by two. Amen.
*
In the small chapel on the scorched plain at the End of Time, Nowhere’s Endless Antechamber, Nic’s many arms sheath their flaming swords. The woman herself extinguishes, fissions into twins again. The women, equal and opposite in all things, the Weird Sisters, don the holy bathrobes. “I’m glad we could come to an agreement” to the relieved feds.
“B” and “G” at the head of the group: “Exile?”
Nic: We accept-in-exchange.
The women follow the feds out of the chapel. The lamps inside dim and die. Forever and a day’s disrepair and decay fall on the sacred building at once. Ashes to ashes.
*
END EXILE PT. 5
*
POST-SCRIPT:
**
Somewhere out on the scorched plain at the End of Time, there is the friction hiss of a great wave of animated-ash hunger lumbering. Further out, there is a great jet of illuminated chaos spewing upward from the scorched plain and zipper ripping in the most peculiar way: forward and backward at the same time–time that shouldn’t be in a place that is-and-isn’t. The ground rent, wrecked, was-ripped/will-be-ripped.