Chapter 1: A Hole Cut Out of the Universe
Let’s get this out of the way. The king is dead. She’s been dead for decades, her body sprawled out in jewels and finery atop a throne of white diamond. No one quite knows when she kicked it. The year 1989, ten years back? Somewhere thereabouts? Impossible to say.
So onto the good news. If the king is dead, Punk is alive. That’s right, baby! We’re bringing back Punk. Real Punk. Milan cocktails and colorful graffiti in the streets. Punk is so back!
There is only one tiny problem. Not even a problem, more like a slight hiccup. You see, there hasn’t been Punk–not real Punk with that delicious capital P–for over forty years of human existence. It’s been a dead vibe. Even the old school anarchists in their universities don’t know what a real Punk looks like. They only know it from the books, the last great Punks.
But Punk never died. It’s still here! They’re still here. In All Creation, on Arcadia the great ark. Home to millions of people. And as it turned out, one of those people was called Sadie Crane.
All to know about Sadie Crane lived in patches, sewn to the back of their denim jacket. They were a patchwork, Sadie Crane. Once and forever patchwork, said their world-weary guardian White Doe.
The Gods Are Dead, But I Am Alive said a round pink and black patch in the middle of their back. Surrounding the pink and black were more, containing such useful phrases as No Gods, No Masters and No Church, No Pastors and All Kings Six Feet Under. Quite a statement, that jacket! You couldn’t go wrong with good old-fashioned anti-royalist sentiment.
Thought: Going home is always the hardest part.
A long trail of bright stabbed it’s way through that familiar dark, cast from the enormous flat headlight perched between handlebars of a motorbike. On the right side were scrawled the words anarchy and finch, written just like that in grayish-white paint lettering. Over their ears was a set of headphones attached to a portable cassette player, through which sounds of the night could barely penetrate.
They were good. Real good even. Peachy.
Sadie Crane squinted their eyes out into the bright. It got foggy between towns, the sorta fog like cold fingers gathered in the cracks. It was a miracle they could see an inch front of their nose.
The road was bordered on all sides by thick trees, dirt to forest and back again. There were never highways, not the kind you’re thinking of. The highways that led between cities in Ru Divine or Eudora, the industrialized arks. Arcadia was all veins. Just veins of human civilization, trailing from one place to another.
Thought: Hair’s longer. Braids now, thick down your shoulders. Taken the dye out, so it’s dark again. In Arcadian tradition, braids symbolize new life trajectories. Starting again. Ain’t quite there.
They arrived in Alcoast and stopped off at a café-hostal called Long Way Home. The building was on the outer edge of town, situated close to a decent coffeehouse and the outside stands of a day market. The exterior of Long Way Home was halfway overgrown with vines and moss, cardiovascular up and down the marblework.
“Home sweet–cripes,” said Sadie Crane.
They did a quick visual scan of their home sweet cripes, standing on the wild dirt path. It was just like old times. Times that tasted like burnt rubber and sea salt tear streaks. They were here. The gods were dead, but they were still alive.
Thought: The maw of the past comes up to swallow the present. It could be yesterday. And you could be a poet.
Something about how history ran in loops, how the best day ever was only the best day until it came around again a hundred years off the first. By then you weren’t even alive anymore, you were a little bit of red paint on the side of a farmhouse. Sadie Crane’s guardian White Doe used to say that. White Doe was a poet and her eyes were the color of polished sandstone. Her sister, a willowy little thing by the name of Black Sparrow, tailored.
The first floor café of the café-hostal was open this time of night. The anarchist sat at the counter, they ordered a tomato sandwich and a cup of coffee.
A jackalope’s foot dangled from the light brown deerskin pack hung by single leather strap over their shoulder. Stuck on the back, there was a scrap of limp black paper with the Runic symbols for life and death in red ink.
In Arcadian tradition, amulets like that–black paper, red ink infused with animal blood–were hung from bedroom doorways or over sleeping mats. The Runic symbols–life and death–were meant contrast to each other. Together they represent the promise of change, but the singularity of cycles. Sadie Crane always thought that was contradictory and weird.
The person behind the counter shot them a look and didn’t say much, polishing the glass in hand with a once white cloth dirtied to brownish-butter.
Thought: Don’t like you. Has every reason not to like you.
The anarchist reached into their deerskin pack. Their family still had the farmhouse, untouched except for the occasional passer-through. It was off the road. Not that road, the one they’d been on. You’ll know it when you see it. You’ll-Know-It-Road. Off the main.
They’d been written at. It’d been an age, since anyone wrote at them. There was a farmhouse that needed cleaning out and there were no better hands for it than Sadie Crane’s, said the first letter. They received and forgot about it, as they took one last year of study and considered staying at Sparrow and Finch for the rest of their life. The students who remained often became professors.
The second was from Viola M’et-Sepirot-Keita. It was a loving piece of written, with flowers drawn all around their name and pencil renderings of moths in place of a signature. The contents–a desperate plea, a confused ramble, and an emotional appeal–called them back to this butt-dick nowhere town. This one did not get ignored, but spread on top of their bed and looked at for hours on hours on hours. This letter was received a month ago. It took Sadie Crane three days to return.
Thought: Every beauty in the universe comes back to her.
From over round spectacles, O’anna Eislane-Basalt did a hard study of Sadie Crane. The cloth worked in circles, scrubbing at the exterior of a drinking glass.
Their back stiffened to an anxious peak. But they kept head bowed and music listened to. If they hadn’t prepped for bug-eyed stares, they wouldn’t have come back. They were in for worse, the coming days. If they stayed long enough.
Thought: Don’t let them get to you.
Sadie Crane did up the remains of their sandwich in a cloth napkin. They thought about what they could have been doing, if not this. Where they could have been. As one does after finishing a particularly good tomato sandwich.
Thought: You could have mined. Easy and safe, you know? Well, safe for everyone who doesn’t need to be down there. Nothing good out there, in the mines. Leastways anymore. You could have done that, mining. If you’d been born earlier.
They stood up from the glossed wood front counter, headphones in a loving cradle around their neck. As if they didn’t know what they could have done. They’d wasted hours, thinking what they could have done. It was all bull, what they could have done. Real Punks don’t make room for could have done.
“Hey, O’anna,” were the first words out their mouth, not very Punk of them.
Thought: Oh cripes. Did you forget how to talk to people?
The judgmental eyes of O’anna Eislane-Basalt were on fire, lighting up where they touched Sadie Crane’s skin. O’anna continued to say nothing, being so good about the saying nothing.
Thought: The last names, Basalt and Eislane. Sybil always did Basalt-Eislane, his sibling Eislane-Basalt. You never asked him why. It’s another piece of him you left.
Sadie Crane released a heavy breath along the taut cord of intensely polite silence. That was all they had, just the intensely polite silence. Very Punk actually, intensely polite silence. If the quiet would please stop beating them bloody.
“Room?” they inquired tentatively.
O’anna would have liked to say there were no rooms available, that every café-hostal in Arcadia was brim and if Sadie Crane wanted a stay they should cart all their stuff back to Perant, maybe have a try at one of those overcrowded student homes. There was plenty of floor to sleep on, those student homes.
O’anna reached for the black leather belt cinched tight to a chubby waistline. From it there hung a bunch of keys, the ring of which O’anna fiddled before plucking a small silver one into a weathered hand the color and consistency of a tan brown sofa chair. The key was passed across the counter to Sadie Crane and O’anna gave a slight incline of the head.
Thought: Don’t.
The anarchist gripped at their thick denim skirt, cut at the ankles. They forced out words through teeth gritted into a cadaverous grin.
“Thank you kindly,” they said.
O’anna’s head jerked up, then down again.
Sadie Crane wouldn’t be getting courtesy, not in that sorry excuse. But that was just dandy. Didn’t come back here for courtesy, let alone forgiveness. They deserved none.
Viola M’et-Sepirot-Keita had set up her base of operations in the basement of a small staying house.
Base of operations was maybe pushing it a little. It was a desk, an old beast of scarred mahogany wood with four wobbly trunk legs. Bought off a young merchant for ten silvers. Silver coins. Viola called them silvers.
In the leftmost corner, beyond the wash tubs and strung coils of drying line, there stood a printing press. Some kind of legend–Old Romantic–was cursived to the side, Viola’s grasp of Romantic was too poor for translation and she probably wouldn’t be the slightest bit interested in what it said anyways.
Notebooks stacked along the interior walls, spiral bound in thick black twine. On the desk, a magnificent typewriter with round keys. Each stamped by a letter in stark bleached white. On import. You wouldn’t catch a fancy machine like that in Arcadia. These were for the crowded newsrooms of Ru Divine’s cities or Turaq’s universities. This particular typewriter was a sent home gift from their sibling Fareed, who’d gone to study in Turaq.
That was the whole of it, really the whole of it. The office of Viola M’et-Sepirot-Keita. Formerly the office of Viola M’et-Sepirot-Keita, Sadie Crane, Sybil Basalt-Eislane, and De’afi of the Mother’s Land. Better known as the basement of her staying house, where the wash tubs and drying lines were kept for getting the clothes done.
She plucked a scrap of pale banana yellow paper out the typewriter, fisted it into a tight ball. Something about a vanished merchant ship. She was not writing about a vanished merchant ship, probably attacked and sunk by communist pirates. That sounded bull, Viola never wrote anything bull.
To Do List, Item One. Send that letter to Fareed, thanking him for the printing press. And asking if they could do a visit soon, she’d been on about them doing visits. She couldn’t blame them for not wanting back. If she’d had the mind to go studying in Turaq, she would have done it going on decades.
Her graphite pencil tapped the page. She rubbed the pencil in the crotch dip between two of her fingers. A wince of dull headache pulsed in her frontal lobe. A fair shake of all nights, this past week. Brown sugar coffee and hot milk tea.
The wall in front of the desk taken over, like mold growing up the woodwork. It was plastered with articles and notices lifted from local newspapers. Over six decades of The Alcoast Inscriber, The Sunlight, and other lesser known rags. There were even some cutouts from an enormously biased royalist publication and an equally biased anarchist publication. Both of them had somehow come to the same conclusion that Lord Belmonte should be thrown with weighted stone slippers off the nearest port. No one liked Lord Belmonte. Deserved.
Among the newspaper clippings, a glossy photograph depicting three adults and three kids. They were all smiling, holding hands in the schoolyard grown rough and wild with blades of greenish-yellow grass. Signatured V.M.S.K in the left corner.
The journalist spread palms out at the wall. It was too much and it was hers now. This life belonged to her, found and claimed. There was no way out but through.
The poster on the wall said STAG in enormous capitals. Outside, rain fell in chill drops onto ruddy cobbles. Inside, flickering candles and bad music. The air stank of burnt coffee, tar cigarette smoke, and wine.
De’afi sat atop a wooden bar stool, nursing a porcelain cup of red cherry wine. Full title De’afi of the Mother’s Land. Ze was native Sannite. And they were big on name recycling, the Sannite islanders. Hadn’t done an original name in over five hundred years. De’afi was the fifth in hir family line to be called “De’afi”, after the original matriarch.
Abakris sat upon the stool to hir right side, coal-dark smoke belching out the tar cigarette in his left hand. Charming as he’d any right to be, like the sultry fatale of a mid-century tragedy novella from Picaresque. He’d been frequenting this club for two thousand days on the rotating wheel. The lemon honey beer his favored drink of the artist. It paired nicely with the tar.
By the wheel, De’afi was older than Sadie Crane. Their birth charts were near identical, give a whole year of difference. Birth charts were a very silly thing De’afi believed in. It was a story and stories were the connective tissue in All Creation’s vast skeletal history.
The artist banged their white porcelain cup of lemon honey beer on the bar. Whitish goldenrod yellow liquid heaved up the sides in broad spray, drizzling sadly on the rough mahogany bartop. Splitter splatter, splitter splatter, sang the lonely droplets. The white porcelain cup said nothing because white porcelain is famously non-talkative.
He kicked at the rucksack near his left foot. The rucksack was made of harsh black leather. He didn’t seem to like this particular rucksack, it must have killed his dog in a past life.
“The galleries in Ru Divine–Suzette–in Suzette, where they got the damn Vreshi,” he said. “Don’t you wanna go?”
He was on The Vreshi again. He’d be there a while, poor thing. De’afi did hir finest job pretending he didn’t exist, while he ranted to high hells about the damn Vreshi.
Ze spread open hir leather-bound commonplace and put down hir right index finger. A complex butterfly of blueprints spread out from hir fingertips, charcoal sketches, quotations in graphite pencil, pressed leaves, and transcriptions off the radio. The outer layer of Reality made up of things and places and stuff to know. And where the veil thinned, spirits. And holes. Holes for things and places and stuff to be sucked into.
“The Vreshi” was the largest on-display piece of artwork in All Creation. It spanned the floor, ceiling, and walls of a fifty by forty square foot room. A big room in other words, yards apart. The piece depicted mountains of interconnected naked bodies in all forms and creeds, thick gangles of limb knotted together like string weaves. The artist–Vreshi–took four hundred days and four hundred nights to complete the work in all it’s flattering detail. De’afi’d been to see it once, to compliment the section in hir commonplace given to human anatomy.
“Think I’m gonna do priesting,” the artist said. “See the damn Vreshi, do priesting. Or join The Baudelaire? Gonna join The Baudelaire.”
Abakris took from the rucksack a letter posted to them days back, from a certain Viola M’et-Sepirot-Keita. It was a concise sort of letter. Right to points.
Sybil Basalt-Eislane called Abakris “melancholy and misanthropic”. They made love in abandoned railway boxes with stained glass windows. The artist left slate gray fingerprints and popping red lip stain on Sybil’s collarbone. He ate their sunrise to the bone, getting poetic about it. They often got poetic about it. Sybil made them forget dreams, forget going overseas to Ru Divine and joining The Baudelaire. Becoming the knighted soldier-cop they were always meant. Perhaps the exalted minister.
“Fuck you sideways,” Abakris said to no one in particular.
He lifted it high, cinched the skinny paper between his fingers and disjointed it down middle of Viola’s handwriting. Snowflake paper scraps fluttered into his crop of curls and gathered dew-like in the cleave of his shirt.
Ze came to the final page of hir commonplace. A fabric pocket stuck to the inside back cover by a rudimentary adhesive. We are happy to report ze called this hir fabric mailbox, where ze put notes–in tiny square fold–for keeping safe. Motivational quotes and reminders of things.
The aviator pinched a torn scrap between thumb and forefinger.
“The Spinners Club,” this one read, in Viola’s handwriting.
Ze took out the one underneath and read that one.
“Sorry, love you,” this one read, in Viola’s handwriting.
The notes were delivered morning last, to the little room ze kept above STAG with Abakris. It was smallish, the room. Two cloth hammocks for sleeping. The latch on the window was broken.
The artist spat more coal-dark smoke from his tar cigarette. Daily number, he smoked about two packs.
“Take the cliff down,” he said. “Ain’t that good?”
Ze pushed the note back into hir fabric mailbox and shut hir commonplace.
“Nah, don’t think I’m gonna,” the aviator said.
Ze took the harsh black leather rucksack with hir when ze left. Abakris didn’t notice. Or perhaps decided not to say.
They had been together over four thousand days of rotation. They would not be together for the next however many turns left on the wheel.
The bed was unnervingly comfortable, a contrast from the itchy bedsheets and stiff mattress of that student home in Perant.
Student homes in Perant were serviceable at best. Perant was stuck, past and present converged into beautiful student homes and enormously ambitious universities. No one would come looking for you in Perant.
Thought: Good for getting away.
Perant had once been fields and trees and nothing at all for living. But that was before the royals, before everything. At Sadie Crane’s youngish twenty-five years, everything before the royals was before everything.
Six arks and Arcadia the smallest, the least special. They could’ve been anywhere. But they were here. Dead gods and spirits alive.
Sadie Crane rolled over in their far too comfortable bed. University was tough, six years of it. Their life at Sparrow and Finch can be summed in Speculative Philosophy, Occult History, and Astronomy. That was it, the bulk of their higher schooling. Suppose it was better than sitting on their beautiful fat ass for next decade.
Thought: Cripes. Thinking about university ain’t getting you dead to the world. Try something else? Something further from home?
Sybil. Sybil with his goofy lopsided grin. He was one of All Creation’s little miracles. Born once and never again. He was beloved, perfect, the hole that just kept on sucking you in. He was relic. All nineteen years of him.
Thought: Into, away, down bad, inside out.
With this thought in their head, Sadie Crane drifted into an uneasy sleep cut through with a singular dream.
A black fox perched on a grayish boulder, the swishing back and forth of it’s tail leaving trails of coal-dark. It’s irises the inky black of a night without stars.
“Hello Sadie Crane,” it said in greeting, it’s voice like the breezy hiss of a patio door. “Do you know when you’re gonna die?”
Sadie Crane knelt in front of the grayish boulder, their fingers stuck pinpoints into the mud. They’d lost something. They didn’t know what it was, but they’d definitely lost something. And if they didn’t get it back, their mother and aunt and dads were gonna be pissed. They were gonna regret suggesting university. What good was all that book learning if you just kept losing things? The respect of the townsfolk, your relationships. And now this. Whatever it was, This.
“I mean, yeah?” said Sadie Crane. “Doesn’t everyone?”
Their eyes stuck into the black fox like matchsticks, they didn’t move. If they just dug around in the dirt a little more. If they followed the scraps of glinting silver–
“It’s big up there,” said the black fox.
Sadie Crane tilted their head up to look into the night sky, pricks of light over a quilt black nothing.
“Yeah, sure,” said Sadie Crane. “You seen the–the thing I lost?”
The black fox gave a small almost invisible shake of it’s head. No, it hadn’t seen anything. It wasn’t in the business of knowing where lost things turned up. But everything did eventually. Somewhere.
“Thanks,” said Sadie Crane.
They were not being sarcastic. They actually meant it.
Thought: Get up. Get up. GET UP.
The room stank of coconut oil and flowery bottles of smell. Their deerskin pack sat foot of their comfortable bed. A wooden desk in the very far corner of the bedroom held Sadie Crane’s denim jacket with the patches, their portable cassette player and headphones.
The anarchist sat up in bed, rubbing at the side of their face and licking their sleep-dry mouth.
They remembered their dream. They never remembered their dreams. Flashes perhaps, on good days. But nothing like this. Alcoast was the sort of place that made you remember things you’d rather forget. Like how your best friend died and everybody thinks it was your fault because they haven’t anyone else to blame. Or that time you ate some kind of strange berry and threw up all colors.
Thought: You’re getting out of this place first thing anyhow. So what’s it matter? The bed’s a one night distraction.
Sadie Crane bathed in the second floor bathroom and dressed in their room, taking from their pack a change of clothes. They put on their trusty denim jacket with the patches and a cloth belt to finish. The cloth belt had fat red poppies on it, real tight about the waist. Pants blue like cornflowers, blue like sky, blue like everything good on All Creation. Ready for the day, better or worse.
They headed down to grab breakfast in the café part of the café-hostal. The tables were mostly empty this early in the morning.
O’anna was standing behind the counter, cleaning a drinking glass and staring at Sadie Crane through round spectacles.
“Still here?” queried the anarchist.
O’anna made an adjustment of the spectacles with one hand.
Thought: O’anna wants you gone, in case that wasn’t clear. Needed at least a week of building resolve before seeing your face again. You didn’t even send a letter. You’re the worst actually.
“What–no?” said O’anna. “Switched out with Barristre, like, five hours ago? And then we switched back, cuz Sheona’s out sick and Jandra’s–hung fucking over.”
The tone of voice told Sadie Crane that Jandra was frequently hung fucking over. The four of them held this café-hostal together like cross-stitch. Most of Arcadia was held together by cross-stitch, since the king died. One dead king and your whole ark threatens to go bang boom.
“Tough,” said Sadie Crane. “You, uh–you good? Keeping on? Or you need–?”
Thought: Stop. You don’t know what O’anna needs. And it ain’t like you’d give it. What O’anna probably needs is for you to not be here. To not be seen talking to you. Like a normal person.
Sadie Crane shut their mouth, they played at the flat wood top. For something to keep hands busy, to stop themself from screaming. They could yell. They could yell and not end five thousand years. Gods alive. Gods cold dead.
“Hey, you know–,” the anarchist started, their voice cracking tremulously.
O’anna shoved a plate of toasted honey bread across the counter top, spread with berry compote. An interjecting screech rattled Sadie Crane’s teeth.
Thought: A bribe. Nice.
A big hearty bite of honey bread spread with berry compote arrested their early morning dry mouth.
Out the corner of their eye, a mass of coal-dark shuddered and writhed. Their vision spun with tiny porcelain flashes. They skittered a hand up to grip at their arm, blinking away threads of bone-white. Turned their head in a slow creaking motion that reverberated strangely in their neck and lungs, towards the café tables. This all took place a minute, give or take a few seconds. It’s hard to keep track.
They’d been seeing that coal-dark for ages. For years on years on years. Perhaps haunting. Perhaps old spirit. Perhaps losing their head, last and longest maybe.
Thought: Grieving process. Of never having a normal life. You’ve been dead since you were born.
There was one other person in the café at this time of very early morning. A woman sat hunched at one of the wooden café tables, long dreads of dark hair roped down her shoulders and back. Her skin toned a warmish very dark brown. Attired in a light blue drape of cotton dress, which was in truth just an awfully long shirt flowing over where her plumpish knobby knees stopped. She had on a knit of stockings, indigo blue almost pitch dark, snug over rest of her legs and plumpish knobs. Her inside slippers were soft and pointed slightly up at the tips, a shade known on the color scale as “passion red”.
Thought: The red of dreams. Of ambition. Of fighting for change.
In no time at all, absolutely no time, Sadie Crane finished their honey bread and slid off edge of their stool. With one last glance at O’anna, they made quick to the table. “Yeah, I know it should’ve been me,” that look said. “So very sorry.”
The woman jerked her head up, the graphite pencil dropping in a heavy clatter onto the tabletop. For a split, her eyes had this wild fear in them like a cornered feline.
“That you, Viola?” the anarchist queried with unabashed pleasure.
Viola M’et-Sepirot-Keita picked up her graphite pencil. She was a year Sadie Crane’s junior and birthing parent of an almost tragically orphaned pet project she titled The Origin. If she’d given birth to this radical Punk-themed band, it was Sybil Basalt-Eislane, Sadie Crane, and De’afi–in that order–who’d feasted on the placenta.
Thought: There is love in her eyes. And they are so so tired.
“I don’t like strangers,” said Viola.
Her voice was full-bodied and melodic, like a well-worn lullaby. It soothed a longing in Sadie Crane’s head, hushed their brain out of another tenuous break. They loved it, not being hated on sight. They should have more of that, not being hated on sight.
Thought: Don’t get used to it. You got all that out your system at university. Back to reality.
“Ain’t a stranger, sunshine,” they said. “Name’s Sadie Crane. You know that.”
Viola’s shoulders moved up and down. A pocket of soft chub around her middle slightly protruded her shirt. She’d gotten round in places, deliciously beautifully round. The whorls of hair on her belly must have been magnificent, like a field of spirals. She was an absolute stunner every day alive, the anarchist thought with reverence.
“Viola M’et-Sepirot-Keita,” the journalist said. “Leastways for today.”
She said the whole thing, with the implied hyphens between her three last names. The first name was Divine, from the ark of Ru Divine. But her three last names were Arik (M’et, Keita) and Runic (Sepirot).
Thought: Single origin names are rare in this day and age. Ain’t nobody from just one place.
Her fingers moved in nervous patterns. Three of the five fingernails on her left hand were chewed down to skin, a fading smear of milky yellowish polish faintly visible on the nail plate of her left thumb. The fingers of her right hand showed signs of a recent manicure. The light free edges of her nails smoothed down to a glossy curve.
“I got something to tell ya, space cadet,” she announced.
She assumed the position of someone ready to argue her point, her fists on the tabletop and eyes turned straight up to look Sadie Crane right in the face. Her eyes were an attractive muddy brown. They were meant to be fallen into, those muddy browns.
There was a crick in her right wrist, her fingertips smudged with dark from holding the graphite pencil. Right side of her chair, a brown leather rucksack full of writing utensils, art supplies, a jam sandwich wrapped in thick brown magazine paper, a small canteen of water, the key to an upstairs bedroom of a staying house, a pair of thick round-lensed reading spectacles that made her look very smart and very pretty.
The journalist squinched her lips together. There were bags hanging out from under her eyes, like bats nesting. She’d kept journals. She’d written for independent newspapers. She’d lived in the cracks.
“You remember the first song you ever heard?” she queried.
Sadie Crane nodded their head up and down.
“Sorta, yeah,” they replied.
Thought: We’re All Down Together by Sid the Devil. Black Sparrow played it for you, off her guitar. You always liked her guitar. When she gave it to you. It’s another of your left-behinds.
They were taken swiftly, to the staying house and the makeshift basement office. They forged quick opinions on the afore-described space. There were limited ways to describe this place without sounding absolutely down bad for old memories. They were kids. Eighteen and seventeen and nineteen. Dreamers. Before shit hit the windsweep at terminal. Sadie Crane guitar, Sybil guitar, De’afi drums, Viola singing.
De’afi of the Mother’s Land sat folded arms open heart at Viola’s desk. Upon the arrival of hir lesser-seen colleague with Sadie Crane in tow, ze violently wrenched the knob of the radio to make it shut up. The sparks of static had just begun stitching themselves into words, the disconnected fuzz shrinking into bleak quiet with a curl of De’afi’s fingers on the knob.
Ze was tallest of the three, with legs that went up forever and ever no stopping. Hir forever and ever legs were at present fit into dense gray pants and a black faci peacoat that was absolutely percent one hundred stolen. Must have been. Ze’d replaced all the murder badges–the accolades, for a job well beaten and killed–with buttons featuring slogans like Dead Pigs United and Give Us Justice, Give Us Peace. That was definitely a crime on top of a crime. Stealing and defacing faci property. Double crime. Sadie Crane had missed De’afi of the Mother’s Land like crazy.
Hir ink wasn’t visible in the jacket, but Sadie Crane knew from hours spent tracing each and every with her fingers while they lay giggling naked on the floor of De’afi’s room at STAG. A tattoo of a snake wound it’s way up hir left arm, across hir back, and kept going to hir right forearm where it stopped in a surround of whale sharks and swallows. Hir back was painted with an enormous intricate weave of leaves and flower petals interlocked by lengths of skinny vine. It was a family tree, each petal and leaf representing another member of hir extended blood and bones. Hir neck bore a complicated inked pattern of overlapping scales. Shoalian in design, specifically the ark of South Shoal.
Thought: Looks like a scorn, a tattoo worn by deserters during the war between South and North Shoal. Nowdays, it’s mostly anti-war activists of Shoalian descent or heritage.
“Back from the dead, back from the god-damned dead,” the aviator said cheerily.
Despite spending hir mornings and afternoons bent over scale models and diagrams of flying machines, hir light brown skin had the lively warmth of regular exposure to sun. And ze was built with arms for centuries, like a shot putter or someone who lifted and put down heavy things all the live long. Hir hair was shaved skin either side, a long snake of braid down hir back.
Thought: Kindness or hostility, what’ll it be? You always got that choice.
“How’s flying?” queried the anarchist known by their friends as Sadie Crane.
“Got no complaints,” said the aviator who was called De’afi.
De’afi tossed hir long legs over side of the chair and got to hir feet. Hir black leather pack was hung by it’s band over back of the chair. It held, of foremost value, hir commonplace and two paper packets of unspent matchsticks.
Thought: Ze wanted to draw comics for the newspaper. Once upon.
The journalist tugged a crate out from under her desk. At bottom were items of clothing and books checked out from the local bookhouse. The top layer comprised her own personal research hoard. She was well-prepared for this conversation two months in the making.
“It’s about Sybil,” she said easily. “I been nosing around.”
Her friends winced as if scolded. The first time in over six years they’d heard the name said out loud, with all the associated bile and baggage. Viola was the lone among three who could do that.
“Cripes,” the anarchist said bitterly.
Viola sat herself down at the desk. She wasn’t one to believe in spirits, but she sure as shit believed in names. Names had a power to them, this ancient sorta magic. They could summon, they could unmake.
“Kinda been doing this–like–whole thing since it happened,” she explained. “Since you’ve been gone. I got to thinking. About him. About this. About all of us here.”
Thought: About the same age you were. Does everything just–change when you’re that age? Your whole life forever?
Her shoulders jerked a shrug. Her eyes were keen and ruthlessly smart. If you could tell a lie, it wouldn’t be to her. She’d come into them by birth, the keen eyes. She used them in ways of the mundane. To the disgust of her three guardians, faci officers by trade. Law enforcement. It’s pronounced fashy.
De’afi raised hir eyebrow, crossed arms over hir chest to clutch at hir shoulders, quirked hir head to the side. Hir family was in theatrics, a troupe of acting folk. Out on travel at the moment this was happening, in their horse-pulled caravans. Ze’d been meaning to get back traveling. Perhaps ze should have, before ze heard that name again. It was all better taken on the road.
“It’s a Sybil thing?” ze tried to square. “For real, no fooling?”
“For real, no fooling,” Viola said back earnestly.
Thought: No one has said that name out loud to you in over six years. You tire of it. Immediately, you tire of it. It grinds shut that little space in your skull where his memories sit, untortured.
“My best friend died, you know,” said the anarchist suddenly, as if it was being spun out of them. “And no one believes my story.”
It was liberating. Saying out loud. The next few breaths came out easier, something unfurled in their throat like a colorful banner at the yearly Samhain festival.
Confession, first and foremost confession. Tear streaks all down their dirty cheeks. The stench of forest stuck to front of their wrapped shirt, solid gray wool. Somewhere along the sprint, they’d lost their white fur-lined outside slippers. Their feet ached, the soles freckled in dirt and small cuts. They would have those looked at, their feet held in the rough hands of an elderly priest while the other adults talked in loud voices. They did that half night, talked in loud voices. Some adults came with lanterns and got the others, about sunrise.
Gathered up into the priest’s arms, told sweet little lies about how they were going to be alright. He gave them clothes to change into, rubbed some kind of stinging aloe solution on the soles of their feet and stuck on bandages. All the while smiling and telling them again, it was going to be okay.
“‘You ain’t a liar, I know that,” the aviator said in present day.
The words Sadie Crane had been waiting to hear that whole night so many years ago. “You ain’t a liar.” So easy from De’afi’s lips, so why not from others? From their guardians?
The aviator tossed hir long arm over the length of Sadie Crane’s shoulders. Hir days and nights were flying machines. Sybil Basalt-Eislane was not a flying machine. The past years, it was a mercy to remember that.
Thought: No one believed you. They were right not to.
“I’m not, yeah,” said Sadie Crane. “It’s–cripes.”
Sybil Basalt-Eislane had two talents he kept hidden in that big mushy brain of his. His talent for lying and his talent for setting things on fire. These he gave to Sadie Crane freely. He always told his tales with a straight face. He kept matches in his bag, never burnt his fingers.
The lucky jackalope’s foot was his originally. He found it, three days prior to his untimely passing. He gave it, open palms and shut heart, to Sadie Crane. He said it was of the woods, whatever that could mean. And Sadie Crane was never able to ask, what that meant or why he’d given it or why it smelled so deep and earthy and old.
Dreams of leaving Alcoast turned nightmares of staying. Last of the bitter left-behinds. The newspaper headlines proclaimed it “the biggest tragedy Alcoast has ever seen”. The tantalizing promise of an exclusive tell-all interview with the victim’s friend. The victim’s best friend. The one who should have been taken that night.
“He was–like, dunno,” they told. “Upset about something? Breakup? Got into it real bad with his folks? Dunno, whatever. He wanted getting gone. Always. And–guess I kinda did too? I was having a bad week.”
They couldn’t be sure who said things like the woods or hiding out, where the trees grew wildest and barely anyone thought to live. In that abandoned old shack made by weathered hands long ago lost to All Creation, where Sadie Crane and Sybil would escape when the stress got too much. In one version of this story, Sadie Crane found matches in White Doe’s dressing box and suggested they go out camping a few days.
Thought: The pants were soft. You remember. And for a momemt, you felt like you’d never touch them again.
In another version of this story, Sybil discovered the matches while digging around in his wool traveling bag. Along with several ticket stubs and a pack of coffee cigarettes.
“I was just fooling,” the anarchist kept on. “I was like–hey, why don’t we start a fire?. You know? But Sybil’s never–”
Sybil never took a joke. Sadie Crane wasn’t sure he even knew how.
Thought: No, you’re sure he never did. And it wasn’t the fire. Whatever attracted that Thing, it wasn’t the fire. You know this. A feeling.
They were paraphrasing the confession they’d given that night, to the bored-eyed faci officer who took their statement. Nothing was done. They’d never suspected anything would be done. It was over. Sybil Basalt-Eislane was gone, there wasn’t a damn thing to do about Sybil Basalt-Eislane being gone.
“It had, like–antlers,” they squared. “And a deer skull head, head of a–like a deer. But a skull, you know? It was tall. Nine–cripes, I dunno. Eight feet? Nine? Taller than Black Sparrow and she’s six feet everything. Whatever. Real tall. Kinda loomed over us, right outta darkness. Wearing this, uh–cloak thing? All over it’s body? Like what those–the Penitents wear to mass. It had antlers, just antlers. Big and long like gnarled branches and white as bone.”
What happened next couldn’t be described, but Sadie Crane tried their hardest. They tried to get across what they saw, best they could. Best they did to the priest, best they did to the journalists and the teachers and their guardians. But it came apart in their head. The adults said it was trauma. They didn’t believe in the old spirits. In the waking. They believed in their gods, in what lived inside the walls of their churches. But there were more things. Out in the wilds of mind.
The thing with antlers kinda–bent over Sybil, it reached out bone-white skeletal fingers to stroke at Sybil’s face. The gesture was so tender, so without malice. Sadie Crane sat there and said nothing, their eyes tracing the pattern of those bone-white skeletal fingers and shallowed breaths coming out their parted mouth. Maybe if they’d shouted real big, if they’d made a noise other than this breathy whine they released after Sybil toppled forward onto the ground. Maybe. But there were no maybes in hindsight.
Thought: It wasn’t a person. If it was a person, you would have done something. He’d be alive.
“We didn’t–we couldn’t have known it’d be there,” they whimpered. “The woods that day, just–just this thing. I dunno. This thing that–”
“Ended Sybil’s life” was how that sentence was meant to finish, caught in the heavy swallow of another burn in Sadie Crane’s throat. The weeks after had been isolated and frantic, reading through sympathetic descriptions of the Victim in local newspapers and magazines. The slow deflate of realization, of how much they were making it about them. Rinse and repeat. Every morning for three months after.
They stayed there all night, long after the Thing with Antlers vanished into the pitch dark. Next to Sybil’s unmoving body, like a part of them thought he might get back up. No, not a part. All of them thought he might get back up. The unreality of those hours, the impossibility that a thing–a spirit, an entity–had come out the nothing around their mediocre campfire and ended Sybil’s life. That was the stuff of bad fiction, it didn’t happen to real living breathing people.
By the time Sadie Crane gathered up enough nerves, the fire had gone out hours ago. Light was peeking in timid bursts over the treetops. Sybil was still as the grave, they tried for a pulse and found nothing.
They ran out the woods, back into town. Straight to the church, where they knew the priest was getting people together for morning prayers. Their guardians held them, held them tight against and let them cry fifteen minutes before anyone tried to get it out of them. And that was when the sympathy turned to whispers and disbelief and suspicion.
“He had–he had a future, you know?” said the anarchist with pleading in their voice. “Like–Plans. Capital P, right? So I gotta–I had to–you know? You get it?”
Thought: Tell me I did the right thing, okay? Tell me I was right to leave. Tell me all those months I spent torturing myself over his death were worth it. Tell me Sybil would have hated being a research assistant in La Mort, like he got planning for. Tell me I ain’t outta my gourd.
The adults got him out the deep woods next morning early, doornail dead. Anyone knew what went down, they weren’t talking. It made the local rags, word got around. Rumors abound and no one believed a damn word out Sadie Crane’s mouth. Sybil Basalt-Eislane was dead and no one knew for what or for why. The anarchist screamed “The old spirits are waking! The old spirits are rising!” on deaf ears.
They left for university in Perant a year after the incident. They traded lively community centers for student homes. Six years away.
Viola did not speak freely, for a moment anyway. She did not believe in old spirits, but she believed whatever Sadie Crane said happened happened. In whichever form that took.
De’afi squeezed hir fists and eyes very tight. The first time ze heard everything, not just pieces filtered through town gossip. Ze bit off contact after Sybil died. Couldn’t square with all the bad feelings.
Thought: We will get out of here some day. All of us. We just need a place to go. Take a train. Then a boat. We go far enough, we won’t get sucked back.
“Damn, that sucks bad,” ze said. “Sorry.”
It seemed the most prudent reply to give. Ze looked down the wall of clippings, hir lips pursed together in wondering.
Thought: We all come from tragedy.
“What’s all this, what’s it gotta do with Sybil?” Sadie Crane asked.
Viola pulled from the crate a journal bound in thick brown leather. The journal said AFTER GRADUATION in aggressive capitals, circled in smudged coal-dark pencil. Statistically unlikely to miss with two working eyes.
She opened it, showing page after page of close-together scribbled writing in a shaky hand difficult to read without a good tenacious squint. Over the inside front cover, blotches of yellowed sticking solution held a photograph in place. Shot on one of those fancy newfangled instant cameras from the ark of Eudora. The kind with an alien eye lens, proud jutting brow, and slit mouth from which it spat photos.
The photograph told a story for the ages. Viola hunched up sitting on the desk all pretty-like, her dreads tight-pulled into a bun over back of her head. The style made her face appear more filled out and serious. You’d never guess she’d dropped a line, seconds ago, about how much she loved those chocolate pie things the traveling merchants brought. Rightside of her, De’afi with hir mullet of curls and dressed in a battle jacket ze stole and altered to hir tastes. FASH FUCKS DIE HARD in big paint splattering lettered up back of the jacket and the sleeves taken off and fronted with a bunch of pins declaring HISTORY BY THE VICTORS, FUTURE BY MY OWN BLOODY HANDS. Leftside of the desk, Sybil with his long rope of braid coiled over shoulder and chest.
Thought: The Before. The time when he was here, when you were here, when you were all here. In place. Where you could keep each other safe.
“We were gonna tour,” said Viola. “After graduation, remember? We were gonna play at The Spinners Club. No big plans, just gonna take the wind wherever.”
Thought: But you scattered. Dust.
They extracted the journal out Viola’s hands, fingers stroking up and down the pages.
“I think we should go,” said the journalist. “The Spinners Club. And rest is–rest is wind. We’re free birds. We don’t need to stay here.”
Her eyes were glowing, almost luminescent.
De’afi barked laughing, hir fists up in the air.
“The tour to end all tours!” ze shouted. “Road trip for the ages! Hell yeah!”
Sadie Crane tossed the journal onto the desk.
“There’s no Spinners Club, sunshine,” they said harshly.
They’d talked Tour of the Ages a whole hell of a lot when Sybil was there. About getting out mostly, but also about what a gas it would be to actually do it–the road trip to end all road trips. That would put them on the map, make them true Punks. If they left Alcoast for good and, in Viola’s words, rest is wind.
But the Spinners Club hadn’t been a thing since five years back. They’d read in all the papers, how it was a dead scene and all the Punks stopped going and the music dried up and now it was just some building middle of dick-ass nowhere. Sadie Crane felt as if Sybil’s ghost had something to do with it, taking the last skinny vertebrae of Punk with him. He’d kill the whole world if he couldn’t be in it.
“I wanna fix it up,” Viola squared. “Put it back. It ain’t gotta end like this, space cadet. We can put it back. Turn it into like–a memorial. Our reason for getting gone.”
Thought: We can put him back. That’s what she means.
Gods alive. Didn’t they stop talking about this after Sybil croaked? Wasn’t that the whole point? The Spinners Club was Sybil’s idea foremost, of course it was off the table now he’d gotten himself dead. They’d made the collective decision to never go there, long as they breathed.
Thought: Puppeting his corpse for scraps.
They stared down the others for agreement, hoping beyond hope they’d come to senses.
“I got stuff to do,” Sadie Crane tried with minimal success. “The farmhouse–”
“And what about after?” the journalist replied.
“Where we gonna go then?” the anarchist shot back fast as lightning.
“You got buddies in La Mort, right De’afi?” said Viola. “Reckon we could bunk with them. Not like they got a buncha stuff going. And then we’re out, go wherever we damn well.”
De’afi didn’t say anything back, having dumbed hir speech to enthusiastic fist pumps and furious air strumming.
Thought: You have stretch marks and dark curls of hair on your stomach. He did too.
Inside a staying house in the town of Alcoast situated within Arcadia on the spinning rock known as All Creation, a thrill of dread spidered up Sadie Crane’s spine. That could mean something. That could mean anything.
Sadie Crane let that could be expand in their chest for eight whole seconds, pushing out past their lungs and rocketed up into their throat. Ah, there it was! A sentence! Exciting, isn’t it?
“Nothing’s gotta be this way,” they said. “Lotsa magic and spirits in this place, since the king got dead. The royals took it all for themselves, but–we can get it back. It’s gonna come back.”
Smatterings of coal-dark ran corner of their vision, dripping and dropping like inky smears down ceiling to floor.
It’s not as if Viola M’et-Sepirot-Keita, De’afi, and Sadie Crane thought they were revolutionaries. They were Punks, music makers, dreamers.
“So it’s–it’s been this, for a while,” the journalist articulated best she could. “The hurt’s been–here. It’s been here. Don’t you think that’s gotta stop?”
She swallowed visibly, her eyes shut and she thought of the egg coffee her baba used to make her once a week for their shared meal. Rice cookies or sometimes those little cakes with the sugary melt icing glaze. She’d lost a part of herself, when Sybil passed. She wanted it back.
The loneliest Punk in All Creation. Sadie Crane got used to the feeling bad.
Thought: You’re not a Punk. Punk ain’t a thing. You’re just a dream-chaser, trying to resurrect a dead part of yourself because you think it can–what? Save you? There’s nothing left to save, Sadie Crane. You can’t put out the fires. You can’t undo the circumstances of your birth. You can’t un-hear the jackalopes. The world is dead, whether you’re in it or not. All the original Punks have vanished off somewhere and do you know why? Because they saw the writing on the wall. Punk is Dead. And so are we.
“Our life’s a fuck,” said the aviator in bold letters.
Sadie Crane swallowed a hot lump in their throat. The last time they saw Sybil Basalt-Eislane alive, his eyes were laughing. Lines creased in his face. He was saying it was all pre-destined, so why bother?
“Kinda, maybe–yeah?” they said. “It’s like–we all got divine destiny.”
The journalist scraped her nails impatiently on the desktop.
“No such thing as divine destiny,” she objected by reflex.
Thought: There is. Missed yours a long time ago.
Something burst in Sadie Crane’s chest, a swell. A single drawn out note of music. A water droplet skittering down a fogged over pane of glass. The adoring purr of a motorbike engine. The pillars of All Creation. The sharp release of a breath, a smoke puff lipsticked sunset pink. A tar cigarette dropped from two rugged fingers, a turn and laugh into the night.
The three shared a smile. The smile was kinship, a shared isolation. The loneliest Punks in All Creation. It wasn’t much, but it was honest living.
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