Apocalypso

“a curse is a curious thing.”

//apotheosis//

Once upon a lightless morning, an anubis rolls from slumber in a forest far from the land it calls home. Almost a thousand years of dreaming have allowed once fresh battle wounds to heal into scars. The beast stretches its muscles and pricks up his daggered ears. At full height the age-old predator would loom between three and four meters tall. Before sensing the present danger, a farmer’s scythe severs the god’s head from its ziggy. All this happened; all the names have been changed.

//sunset//

An invitation slides below the door, folded in a thick envelope & sealed in black wax, tells everybody to make disguises and nicknames. Shadow would have had something inspiring to say to get things rolling. We don’t tell Storm where we’re going. We don’t tell Storm anything at all. If it had been her who discovered the invitation, she would have had it burned. Storm has been saving bullets in a brown paper bag ever since Shadow ran away to fight desperados and clincher scum for the yankees. Gator twists Akashi’s ear until he agrees to steal his sister’s ammo and they meet up with the rest of us behind a recently exorcised manor. We leave before dawn, before the streetlights dim. Gator tells loud stories of the Kuro hoping to piss it off enough to put his new sword to use. Meanwhile, I quietly pray to the moon goddess, hoping to ward it away.

In Aluna, there is a magician. Sphinx thinks we ought to prepare for a route along the coast, cutting through the port town in order to go see him. Gator says it’ll be a waste of time, thinks we ought to trek through the high country to visit the psychics. We trade our most prized possessions in a stall full of fleas at the black market and somehow manage to scrape together just enough currency to purchase a pistol in the slums from a witch with no lips or tongue. Now, says Sphinx, we have to &&&travel to the sea, to make sure the weapon isn’t possessed. Gator picks through Akashi’s stash, gloomily pulling all the nine millimeter rounds he can find in the pile. He carefully slides the lugers into the magazine.

Akashi is fixing to catch the land orc. As the gulf is setting, we climb onto a yellow cargo box, and peel open the heavy metal rib cage, clamoring aboard. We turn away from the sea, into foggy forests, heading north. For dinner we gorge ourselves on cream guavas and warm cola. The log is painted white. The log is painted as a distraction and I tuck the revolver out of sight. The invitation tells us to bring a weapon, most of the hermanos won’t survive the night, and second place gets 20k, first place gets to keep it.

A rotting red barn has been covered almost entirely over in handprints. Everyone hands their invitations to a sentry yielding a massive jackal skull, jet black, as a helmet. Inside, weapons from all ages line the walls and spores grow through the mushy floor. A disc jockey with melted angel wings scratches vinyl but the music is far too loud to be emanating from that ancient gramophone. The lights turn off. A fight breaks out. How pretty the log must have looked. Someone turns the fan on. When the hermanos get hit the angel drags them outside with a fresh curse to remember the night. To remember the night they live. The angel calls to the hound. She calls Akashi, Ash, which means friend. Gator gets hit.

The shack is on fire. Akashi sleeps among ashes & dreams of the past, the day he witnessed his first apocalypse, the day he became an orphan. Crime is running rampant through the village, unfortunate.

✖️

An assault of decapitated heads will welcome our return home. The smell of oil hangs in the humid air mingling with the putrid stench of burnt flesh. We venture through a flaming forest of melted skin. The apothecaries have declared all the sick in this district to be rounded up and killed. Those bodies have been burned by the pyre. Some did not go without a fight. Their heads have been jabbed into the gravel on jagged stakes of wood and set aflame, a warning of what happened here. There are few survivors. They tell us the world ended. There are tales of a doomsday party. They will call it the apocalypso… Everyone is gone when Storm rouses you up from a haunted slumber. She tells you to grab your boots and your blanket.

//midnight//

the house is always dark.it’s a small house with a bed and a bookshelf.the walls are cold when the lights are down.sometimes the house shakes.there’s a little black book under the bed.it begins, a curse is a curious thing.