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[honorificabilitudinatatibus]

The Cataclysm

I walked for eighteen years and swam for fourteen nights of hell. I watched as from the heavens swift the tyrant gambler fell unaware that his own name was Atlas and that in the space of the fourteen-night sea Earth’s magma leaked from her molten core and burned to char his shoulders, never to heal forevermore.

And in this fortnight journey as I swam I tried to hide from the deacon preaching sermons about verity in my mind. Because in times untold I fall alone, in silence do I lie with secrets dark as a pharaoh’s crypt clutched to me as I die.

Of all my lives, eight have been lived and from the last I’ll soon resign as my lungs fill up with blood bereft of the dwindling air in the atmosphere and the years I walked before Atlas fell are all that I have left.

[honorificabilitudinatatibus]

Swimming

           Loren wasn’t a pretty corpse. It was all that Thomas could think about as he stared at the carpet of the funeral home, occasionally letting his eyes flicker towards the larger-than-life photo of Loren mounted on a flimsy black easel. Above all, he couldn’t bear to look at the coffin in which his ugly corpse lay, bandages winding around and around the hole in his head from where he had shot himself.

           The voice in Thomas’s head overpowered the sound of Loren’s sister’s eulogy. It screamed at him for letting Loren die one moment, and tried to convince him that Loren wasn’t really dead and that this was just an awful, horrific nightmare the next. But he knew that this wasn’t just some nightmare, because just hours before he had shot himself, Loren left his best friend a souvenir to remember him by.

           The rigid blue cast on Thomas’s arm dragged against the smooth fabric of his black suit. Here and now, he could hardly remember anything before the quarrel that he and Loren had had just a week ago— was it really just a week?—that had escalated until Thomas lay on the cold concrete of his driveway, crying from the pain in his forearm. He couldn’t even remember what they had fought about. His only recollection was the tormented, confused look on Loren’s face as he realized what he had just done. And that he wanted to say, ‘Loren, it’s okay, I forgive you, I forgive you…’, but Loren ran away and shot himself with his father’s handgun before Thomas had the chance.

           The question of why recurred every few minutes in his mind, but of course, no matter how much he speculated, he would never know why Loren decided to beat him up to begin with. Was it out of anger? Or hatred? Did he know how quickly Thomas would forgive him? Did Loren do this because he was already planning on killing himself, or did he kill himself because of this? There were a million reasons that he could have decided to do it, but to Thomas, none of them, no permutation, was good enough.

           No matter why he did it, no matter what his intentions were, Thomas forgave him. Not because he had loved Loren for as long as he could remember, but because Loren had been his friend, regardless of why he had done it. The scar on Thomas’s arm from where the surgeon had put together his shattered radius would fade, little by little, and he would visit Loren’s grave to tell him how much he loved and missed him, et cetera. His forgiveness couldn’t heal the ugly, gaping wound in Loren’s head, but there and then, he thought it could. For just a second, Thomas’s forgiveness resurrected Loren as if he had never died to begin with. And in that moment, Loren’s bandaged corpse looked exactly like the portrait of him on the flimsy black easel.

           A tear rolled down Thomas’s face to his chin, resting there a moment before it fell and left a dark splotch on the funeral home carpet.

[honorificabilitudinatatibus]

A Pinch of Snuff

My childhood reeked of cigarettes. Ever since I was old enough to walk, my mother put me to work as an errand boy in her tobacco shop, and my life became entrenched in layers of musty, stale-smelling clothing, watery eyes from the chemicals and heat, and soot inextricably entrenched in the wallpaper. If I went back to the old house and peeled the layers off one by one, the amount of paper could plaster six more houses inside and out.

               The tobacco permeated through every crevice of my being. The specks of snuff which always found their way onto my shoulders made me appear as if I had pranced about in the dirt. The tiny bits were sprinkled in the corners of every room like a perverse salt used to keep the demons out of our small establishment. Even at night when the shop had closed for the day, the smell of all of the bummed, burnt-out cigarettes drafted upwards and slowly coaxed me into believing that fresh air had never existed to begin with. On the occasions when I left the vicinity of the house, I imbibed this delicacy so abundant to others.

               Before I turned eleven, I was convinced that the insides of my lungs were sable with soot, just as all of my surroundings were, and I decided that I could not and would not operate this leaden establishment when I came of age. Every time I coughed, I imagined that my breath was a cloud of smoke, that I was a human pipe lit with the endless fuel of ambition. My precious dream that I could leave this dank place overtook my pessimism and led me to view my surroundings with a relative brightness.

And so, on the day of my sixteenth birthday, I left home to go work in the coal mines.

[honorificabilitudinatatibus]

Tiberius and Caligula-- the Making of a Tyrant

The innocents fell from the cliffs of Capri and spread their arms wide as they soared to the sea. As Tiberius watched and his eyes filled with glee, waves whipped bloated corpses in the salt-ridden breeze.

And Tiberius watched as his protege ran to the precipice stiff as a slaughterer's hand. His boots left crude stamps as he trodded in mud, unaware at this stage that the water was blood.

All-too-aware of his own mortality, Tiberius killed for imperial majesty And the protege, utterly shocked to the core, soon found himself craving and begging for more.

Though the innocents passed as they hit the cold water, they nurtured a tyrant as lambs to the slaughter.

[honorificabilitudinatatibus]

Couplet about Napoleon

The world had not seen such a tyrant since Prometheus’s final shiver; he brought fire to mankind, but like all tyrants, rose and withered.

[honorificabilitudinatatibus]

Tenebrism (Caravaggio)

Mistake after next he had made- to paint but for the cold kiss of fame, to wait for the patrons of the church to learn his name, to end up fleeing from Rome all the same.

Goliath he fell, conquered by his own David, for the pace of his unconscious, arrogant swagger served as not but a double-edged dagger to the dead man and himself. His vanity provided a paintbrush with which he beheaded all he could think of.

Yet, he painted with truth, not didactic! Not with light, but with the tactic of darkness! And he waited until he knew that his fingers would break to ask himself what he could do to be saved— And regretful and lonely, he again came to Rome to beg the good Father to let him go Home— Because he, too, lost his strength in the force of the brawl but refused to hand over his pride to the fall.

[honorificabilitudinatatibus]

Les Invalides- Le Tombeau de Napoléon- Paris, France, 2017

[honorificabilitudinatatibus]

[honorificabilitudinatatibus]

A Sketch of Napoleon

               Born on a pile of tapestry— because that’s what it was. From the moment that the titan Cronos bestowed his dying breath into the infant boy’s lungs, it was evident that— it was not yet certain what was evident, but something about his unmistakable sense of ennui captivated the people around him. When he grew older and began to attend the military school of Brienne, whenever anyone tried to correct him, he simply said, “I know it, sir.” And that was the end of every conversation, because it was evident that he, indeed, knew.

               He was twenty years old when the revolution broke out, and all of a sudden, Achilles, Hector, and Ajax were no longer just configurations of letters in his Iliad and colorful stitches in a lifeless piece of cloth; they were alive on the continent, and their names were Robespierre, Danton, and Marat. The twenty-year old Corsican nationalist went home to find his hero— the godlike Pascal Paoli— but found that despite his apparent willingness and mental capacity, his hero held him out at arm’s length. The young Napoleone di Buonaparte, instead of turning the other cheek for his cause, realized for the first time that he held the unfortunate position of being an alien no matter where he went, and returned to the unstable climate of France where there was no place for anyone anymore.

---

               In the space of five short years, the Corsican didn’t recognize himself anymore, and perhaps, this way, it was for the better. It was, for all intents and purposes, a narrative of five parts.

               I— In 1795, he gave the royalists in Paris a whiff of grapeshot and became a hero. He became bewitched by Josephine de Beauharnais, a beautiful widow six years his elder. He was too in love with being in love with her to see that she resented him.

               II— In 1796, he married her. There was no ceremony—with a batch of paperwork, Napoleon and Josephine became Citoyen and Citoyenne Bonaparte.

               III— in 1796, he took Italy, and learned, at last, that his dear wife was far dearer to him than he was to her. It took a night of her relentlessly pounding on his door for him to forgive her for all she had done to wrong him, but when all had been said and done, he no longer loved her.

               IV— in 1798, forty centuries looked down upon him in Egypt.

               V— finally, in 1799, the coup of 18 Brumaire promotes him to First Consul of the First Republic. The man who once kissed the feet of Paoli, who once worshipped Voltaire, now has France wrapped around his little finger.

---

               It took another five years before the First Consul of France (and new President of the Republic of Italy) decides, once again, that what he has— and all he has accomplished— is no longer enough. If consul wasn’t enough for Julius Caesar, his lifelong idol, then it isn’t enough for him. And it wouldn’t be enough to be a king, either. So, on December second, 1804, Napoleon Bonaparte takes the crown of Charlemagne from the hands of the pope, and, as time seems to stop moving in the frigid air of the Notre Dame of Paris, places it on his own head. He proceeds to call himself emperor, and the world follows suit.

---

               What is there to want anymore? At the mere age of thirty-five, Napoleon Bonaparte has the world at his disposal. In his heart he knows that he possesses the competence that only people whose names usually ended in “The Great” carried, but he knows that a brief look at the history of his rise to power would make it evident that the strength in his career really all manifested itself in being at the right place at the right time. He begins to play games to see how far he can go without flying too close to the sun— already, as it is, he stands quite close. He first divides France into 83 administrative districts. He overhauls and reforms the education system. He combines the laws of the land into a single civil code, which is perhaps the proudest of his many achievements to date.

               And then there are the Icarus moments. In an attempt to maintain his popularity, he shuts down every newspaper in Paris except for those that worship him. He appoints his brothers and sisters as kings and queens of lands where they do not belong. And in 1812, seven years after the victory at Austerlitz, he decides to retaliate against England and Russia, the two countries which refuse to fall under his command; in an act of revenge, he decides to invade Russia.

---

               By the time that the great imperial army fights its way to Moscow, the city lays in cold embers at the emperor’s feet. As wind whistles and newly-burnt ruins lay sound, for the first time the Corsican tastes defeat. Leaving scores of thousands of his ever-faithful men to the murderous hands of general snow, he retreats, not having completely fallen into the sea, but struggling to hover with whatever he has left.

---

               Two years later, he abdicates, as is demanded by the coalition of all of Europe against France— that is, if by France, they meant Napoleon Bonaparte. Tasting melancholy for the first time in a long while, he begrudgingly kissed his guards goodbye at Fontainebleau. On the way out of the country that he, the self-made man, shaped with his own two hands, he greets the passers-by at every village he stopped through. And he sees that in his attempts to stylize himself as a god, as a hero, as Caesar, as Alexander the Great, all he had done was shift his own image so out of proportion that none of these people recognize him as their emperor anymore. But being the person he is, he refuses to accept that this is the death of the Emperor.

---

               One year. One year is all it takes for the menace of all of Europe to grow bored with the island of Elba. He decides that there is, after all, a difference between him and Caesar; between him and the heroes of his history books and tapestries. Napoleon Bonaparte was a name that would be savored for eternity, and not because he, like the other, lost in the end, but because he, unlike the others, managed to win one last time.

When he arrives in France again, surrounded by allies and enemies, he bares his chest to the world and shouts that anyone who dared shoot their emperor has the right to do so. No one shoots. It seems a good omen.

---

He remains stubborn until the bitter end of his career, and perhaps that is why, after losing to the seventh alliance, he proceeds to call the Battle of Waterloo the Battle of Mont-Saint-Jean. He has in his mind from the beginning that something will go wrong, but because of the unfortunate fact that he is a human being, he doesn’t know what. The words of advice that he had given to himself not so long ago (for he is his own adviser) repeat themselves in his head as he watches his final, faithful army fall to that of that tyrant Wellesley and his damned coalition. He tells himself over and over that he must be different than the others, that he cannot, under any circumstances, flame out and die young. But the dashing young general who had dominated Italy and Egypt has been gone since 1799.

---

Napoleon Bonaparte, without title, without fortune, abdicates life on the British Island of Saint Helena in 1821, on the British Isle of Saint Helena. In his final six years the once-conqueror spends his days drawing out the game to a finish. He dictates his memoirs in the hopes that someone will one day read them and try to understand him. He spends hours playing chess, reminiscing about the days when the silly board game had been his reality.

He just cannot being himself to live in the present where the empire is lost, the revolution is dead, Josephine is dead, and all he had done and taken for granted in the span of fifty-one years is gone— all gone! As if none of it happened to begin with! Captured only in art and writing which people now know does not represent the reality of the situation! Between the hours of distraction— chess— hours-long baths— entertaining guests in a mockery of what had once been— dying, eventually— he, as the biographers and scholars who will go on to follow his jumbled legacy, asks himself:

What would have happened if he had won that fateful day? Would he have gone on to become the hero he envisioned? Or would he have lost some other way? Will he be at least remembered as one of the great conquerors, if nothing else? Is this the way that Caesar felt as he lay dying? Filled with regret and desperation but with a tiny amount of hope at imagining what could have been?

               “Who retreats…” he rasped with whatever was left of Cronos’s dying breath, perhaps unaware that these were his parting words. “Head of the army…”

[honorificabilitudinatatibus]

What You Throw Into the Ocean

               When Shiv scraped his ankle on the rock he was climbing, he felt a shiver of panic wash over him before it ebbed into nothingness again. The only things that he carried with him were his cell phone and a bottle of lemonade, and he waited to inspect the wound until he reached the top of the porous surface.

               ‘I don’t want to get an infection from scraping my ankle,’ he thought to himself, ‘so should I pour the lemonade on it?’ He had read a book where a boy disinfected his wounds with wild limes long ago, and thought that the same concept might work on his scraped ankle now. ‘Then again,’ he reasoned, ‘lemonade has sugar, and bacteria love sugar, so I’d better not.’

               Shiv climbed on top of the tall, porous rocks, and spent some time just enjoying the feeling of the heat wash over him as he watched and listened to the waves continuously crashing over the shoreline about just a few feet away. About twenty-five feet to his right sat an enormous rusted pipeline meant to carry who-knows-what out to sea, but from its evident state of decadence, it had been in disuse for years and years.

               This was Newport Beach, which Shiv had read was the most beautiful place in the small state of Rhode Island. He was staying in Providence for another week with his aunt, who was a professor, and had spent the entire past day trying to convince her that he would be fine going to another city on his own, especially since it was touristy and bourgeois enough that it was safe for him to go. And now, sitting upon the rocks, less than a mile away from the accursed Vanderbilt mansion, he felt as if everything was going to work out— or, at least, it would if his ankle didn’t get infected.

               After about fifteen minutes of sitting alone on the beach, a stranger came into his field of vision, and he carefully examined the newcomer for a moment before deciding that while it seemed safe to stay here for just a bit longer, it was better that he leave, because there was no one else around. While it would have been glamorous to come to his premature death in front of the Vanderbilt mansion, that didn’t mean he welcomed the onslaught. Just as he began to leave, however, he noticed the stranger approaching him.

               ‘Well, I can’t leave now,’ he reasoned to himself. ‘I’ll just look awkward if I ever see him again. And judging from a distance, I think I could probably beat him up if I tried hard enough.’ So he stayed, and held his ground as the stranger approached him.

               “Hey,” he said eventually when the other man was in earshot. “Can I help you?”

               “No,” the other man shook his head. “I’m just looking for someone to talk to. I’m Cal, by the way.” He held out his hand.

               Shiv took his hand reluctantly and took the opportunity to size him up. He was taller than Shiv was, but he was fairly scrawny and extremely pale. He wore skinny jeans and a shirt with an emblem of three interconnected legs— the flag of the Isle of Man. Shiv thought that he was kind of cute if he tried hard enough to envision him as cute, and although he was still apprehensive, reasoned that Cal couldn’t be all that bad. “It’s…” he tried to think of a fake name to give to Cal, but in the moment his mind drew a blank on fake names. “It’s Dhaniya,” he finally said. Dhaniya was the Hindi word for cilantro, and somehow the first word that came to his mind. “Why are you wearing a shirt with the flag of the Isle of Man on it?”

               “I think it’s a funny-looking flag, that’s all. No other reason.”

               The way that Cal spoke gave Shiv a further feeling of unease, but he continued to talk to him nonetheless. Their conversation lasted a few more minutes before Cal commented on Shiv’s glasses.

               “I like your glasses…” he mumbled. “Can I…”

               “I mean, I would prefer it if you…” Shiv started to say, but it was too late.

               Under the pretense of examining the glasses, in a single swift move, Cal took Shiv’s glasses off of his face and tossed them into the ocean.

               “Hey!” exclaimed Shiv, squinting at Cal both because of anger and because he couldn’t see more than a foot in front of him. “What the fuck is wrong with you?” he demanded. “Why would you do that?”

               Cal’s only response was smiling menacingly and saying, “Just wait a bit, okay?”

               And, as he was instructed, Shiv waited. He desperately wanted to run away and never see Cal’s shit-eating face again, but because he was effectively blind at this point, there was nothing he could do. It was the first time in his life that he had felt so utterly powerless in his life.

               After about two minutes, Cal pulled Shiv’s glasses, wet with seawater, out of the ocean and put them back on his face. Everything about it was deeply unpleasant.

               He said to Shiv, “Don’t you know, Dhaniya? That everything you throw into the ocean eventually comes back?”

               In a split-second decision, Shiv pushed Cal as hard as he could into the rolling water and scampered back over the rocks of Newport Beach.

[honorificabilitudinatatibus]

For My Sister After My Death

I’m sorry I missed your message from the other day and your formulaic balance of words as you said you missed me, etc. that you loved me etc. and wanted to see me again without an expression on your face that you might have thought of me as anything but a stationary part of your life who never left from the dear old fort, the dungeon where you used to hide.

I’m sorry I only said bad things about you after you left but I love you and you have to understand that behind every bitter remark was a conscious version of me who meant everything I said and said everything I meant; One hundred percent of the jealousy was genuine and weaved through my soul in and out and in again until all of the tears I ever cried wee leaks from puncture wounds inside where I poked then pricked then stabbed myself over and over again through the very center of my being, hoping for the shadows to end so that I could finally see the ceiling, let alone the stars, and so that my sovereign life could finally begin.

The only way to go when I didn’t want to see you was deeper within myself, and deeper into the crevices that contained only the words that led me to where I was now. “You’re a disappointment.” “You’re annoying.” “People only ever complain about you.” “You’ll never be as good as-” and the quotation stopped there. Over and over again until my mind became an echo chamber and I couldn’t tell where the memories ended and I started.

I meant what I said and I said what I meant. Not only to you, but all I ever thought to myself. I perpetuated in making you the villain in my life when I was the tyrant all along. When you stopped listening, I only had myself to blame because I’m Caligula; I’m Napoleon; I’m Julius Caesar; I always put my wrathful sentiments before my duty to be good to you as you’ve been good to me even though I am a station who never moves and never changes rotating in and out again with the same open wounds from before that perhaps everyone was to blame for but for you.

[honorificabilitudinatatibus]

The Blessed (Tsar Alexander I)

An angel in shadows, a sphinx in the light- Alexander the blessed, known but for his might took on an empire, the best of its time, and emerged the world’s sovereign, loved but sublime.

General Snow always stood by his side and gave his empire, his wasteland, his might. He left dear old Moscow, burned her to the ground; while the wind whistled, the ruins lay sound.

Though for his subjects sovereignty he kept, for the loss of the city the sovereign wept. With nowhere to go but promises to keep to the battles and bloodshed he dared not to sleep.

Exhausted and weary and frayed from the fight, the angel so blessed emerged from the blight.

[honorificabilitudinatatibus]

Creepy Crawlies

Into the humid climate creeping, never thinking, seldom sleeping, eating just to keep on breathing, often culled, but never grieving.

Snails cannot think but keep on moving, never gaining, never losing; their brains are simple, needs unique to feeding, heating, hatching, grooming.

With simple minds, they are content crawling to their lives’ extents; despite themselves, the snails live true unburdened by conscious virtue.

[honorificabilitudinatatibus]

The Diplomat (Prince Klemens Wenzel von Metternich)

His death went unnoticed despite his great name, for his faults, not his virtues, had brought him to fame. All who had known him were long dead the same or thought him an artifact deserving of blame.

For Klemens held back fifty years of progression, destroyed all those who fought him in rapid succession with the air of a prince- and the title to match, with his congress and smokescreens, his two vain obsessions.

He never bled for his country and never once questioned so stunting the movements that left him behind. For his power was soft, he never regretted his ethics when death to revolution he signed.

A prince by his title but a diplomat in mind, he only was cruel in his quest to be kind.

[honorificabilitudinatatibus]

The Double-Decker Carousel

Although I despised my mother for her eccentricities, if there was one thing to be said about her, it was that she always kept her promises to us. For the first eighteen years of my life, this was entirely beneficial to both me and my five siblings; she never backtracked on her promises to attend our piano recitals, to take us out for ice cream, and even, once, to not give any of us Christmas gifts. (That year had been an erratic one, with Jennie’s birth, our father constantly away on business trips, and the other four of us constantly running amuck.) However, there was one promise which I had always expected (and hoped) that Mother would never keep: the double-decker carousel.

She always expected us to be younger, better versions of herself, and this was evident in the way that she named us, with her name Noelle, my name Noelle, my younger sister Noël, and my younger brothers Noel and Nolan. My youngest sister’s name, however, is Jennie, because she was always exempt from the standards which befell the rest of us. Instead, she was merely mother’s pet, the “darling girl” whom she could spoil while the rest of us were forced to do her bidding. Those years, I wanted nothing more than to leave my restless home and watch the world transform into something other than my mother’s eyes. These places which I had never been to and would never end up going to all sounded like unfamiliar blends at a tea store: Prague, Teotihuacan, Rajkot, Shanghai, Reykjavik. Instead, all of our family trips were excursions to Paris; it was the only place I had ever gone that was more than ten miles away from my own house.

But I knew that no matter how badly I wanted to leave this tiny manor, it was impossible to escape, because I had no way to make a living for myself. I was never a perfect version of Mother; I was my imperfect self, and unlike Noël, Noel, and Nolan, I made no effort to change this. I had no reason to appease mother, if she refused to do anything for me in favor of her delusional fantasies. I had always known that she was never one to break a promise, so why had I expected her to break this one?

On the day of my eighteenth birthday, my mother forced me out of her dwelling and out of her life, sending me out onto the streets with nothing but a clean shirt in my right pocket, and of course, the double-decker carousel.

I hate the carousel. I hate the music it plays, audaciously ignoring everything surrounding it. I hate the sparkling, giddy faces painted on the horses and zebras as they mindlessly rotate themselves around an axis of frivolity, and I hate myself because I couldn’t bring myself to destroy it. I have tried, many times, to take an axe to the structure and turn the grand palace into a pile of wood chips and metal, but every time, I collapse onto one of the peacock benches, a weeping mess. I have never climbed the stairs onto the second floor, because the mystery of the second deck is the summation of the anticipation running my life. This carousel is not only all I have left, but it is also the summation of all I have ever had; my mother never broke her promises to herself, and no amount of anguish could affect her promise to value me as nothing more than her own frivolity; as nothing more than a double-decker carousel.

[honorificabilitudinatatibus]

A sketch of Peter Stephen

"Hell,” mumbled Peter, the word almost unheard amidst the tumult of his surroundings. ”Just hell.”

He took off his dirty spectacles and tried to clean them with his equally dirty uniform shirt, knowing that nothing would happen except for the soot swirling in a different pattern than it had been before. It didn’t hurt to try. When he slipped the grimy things back on his face, he was met by the angry scowl of an older man glaring into his sweat-ringed eyes. Peter immediately straightened his atrocious posture.

“Stop lazing around and get back to work,” the man said. Peter felt small flecks of his saliva land on his face. “Can’t you see that we’re losing men?”

“But I thought…”

He didn’t let Peter finish his sentence. “That wasn’t our cannon. That was us being cannoned, so if you’re not going to contribute to the cause, then either help the infirmary with the corpses or join them yourself.”

“Ohhhhhh…” Peter stumbled back a few small steps before catching himself, beginning to grow lightheaded. The weeks of paltry rations were beginning to take a toll on him.

The other soldier, seeing his lack of presence, placed a hand on his shoulder. “I didn’t mean…” he started, but when he realized that it was a lost cause, he took the opportunity to excuse himself from the scene.

Even though he’d forbidden himself from shedding a single tear since he’d left his home in France, Peter now felt one rising in the corner of his eye. He wiped the tear away, leaving a streak of clear skin amidst the impermeable grease of the rest of his face.

“Ohhhhh….” he groaned again. Why had he left in the first place? Of course, all he’d had in his hometown was the predetermined destiny of being a priest. Peter didn’t like theology, but was it worse than this? His parents had drawn him out of military school because his eyesight was just too poor to be useful, and oh, how they would laugh if they could see him now- an aide-de-camp to a man who had gotten exiled from Europe on grounds of sodomy, surrounded by Americans who wanted their freedom, of all things. In Peter’s opinion, there were worse things to live without than freedom.

After stumbling about for a few more minutes, he finally took to leaning against a nearby tree for support; in the sheer heat of this day, he felt as if he was drowning, and soon grew even more faint. Peter was unconscious before he hit the ground.

 The infirmary, like everything else, was sweltering hot and full of dust. The patients were housed in a tent-like structure. The massive brown sheets of fabric were draped over the makeshift poles, which at least saved the less-unfortunate from the cruel sun. Along with the few doctors and nurses scurrying about in their uniforms, there were several women as well, dressed in rags and doing menial tasks such as washing clothes and cutting bandages.

When Peter finally woke up enough to gain some sort of thought process, he propped himself up on both sore elbows and tentatively rubbed his eyes. Although his uniform was the same grimy cloth as it had been, someone had gone through the trouble of washing his face. There was a wet rag on his forehead which smelled of the vinegar they had gotten so accustomed to using. He tried not to look into the neighboring cots, which reminded him that he’d gotten off lucky; from the corner of his eye, he could see the shallow rise and fall of the chest of the soldier next to him, which he guessed was soon to stop based on the blood dripping from the ragged flesh where his right hand should have been. He couldn’t see the face of the comrade to his right, as the gossamer sheet had already been drawn over him. To distract himself from his surroundings, he began to concentrate on counting doubles in Latin.

“Unus, duo, quattor, octo, sedecim, triginta duo…” He had gotten up to one thousand and twenty-four before he heard a nurse call, “One’s alive!” and rush to his side. Considering the excitement in the nurse’s eyes to finally see a patient waking up, it had been a bad day at the infirmary.

He held up four fingers. “Will you please tell me how many fingers I am holding up?” he asked. The nurse was older than Peter, but he was still shockingly young. Unlike other medical personnel Peter had seen, he didn’t have any creases under his eyes from stress, and despite his surroundings, he managed to remain optimistic that with any luck, a few of these people would make it out alive.

“F-four,” replied Peter. The nurse handed him a small skin of cider, which he finished quickly before handing it back to him. His glasses had also broken at some point since he had passed out, and it was all he could do to keep them from falling off now. “Would you happen to know who brought me here?”

“You’re lucky,” the nurse said. “I believe it was a man named Laurens. Youdn’t’ve lived to see another day, weren’t for him.”

John had brought him here! Of course he had; John was smart enough to lead men into battle, but he wasn’t wise enough to know what was good for him.

“We’re losing?” asked Peter.

The nurse then nodded, albeit sadly. “We’ve had twice the influx of men since  you were carried in.” He looked around, and then added, “most of them dead.”

Peter shuffled his way out of his cot, holding onto his glasses so that they wouldn’t fall off. He gestured to his face as he asked, “You wouldn’t happen to have anything to fix these, would you?”

“I’ve got fish glue.”

“Good enough. If we’re losing men, then I ought to go be useful.” There was a loud crashing sound coming from the outside, which Peter assumed were more cannons in proximity. “Never mind the glue. I have to go.” He fled before the nurse could say another word to him.

[honorificabilitudinatatibus]

Terrae Mater (Mother of Earth)

An ember splintered from hands and set the sun ablaze when a cooling wind beside her coaxed the sparks into a fire and the pristine running water could not quench the noble flames.

When she turned towards outer space fell from her lips cascades of dust which formed satellites around her. Those asteroids and clouds of dust, they drenched her molten heart until the magma of sheer passion became interspersed with islands, separated with crude valleys in which molten lava flowed.

The comets saw her beauty and spent years trying to chase her; they adorned themselves with platinum, fanned out their tails in vain endeavor, and sailed by her once again, not noticing when she ignored them.

Quelle jolie vaniteuse! Quel corps célestiel! Those white eyes with no iris, composed of pure clear light! The molten lava heart with the barren island jewels! The hands of bony embers, emitting sparks to those who touched her! The skin composed of blue-red stars which glittered as they died!

But when away she stretched her hands, no others did they meet. A single step a decade, on she marched for thousands of years in search of a being like her, through the velvet folds of time and life but found not even a murmur. This barren, empty universe with comets and clouds of dust expanding in every direction held nothing but her own. She only knew her whereabouts by her trail of pumice stones.

“Alone,” she cried, “Alone!”, she cried, startled by her sound. The first word in the universe’s language echoed through the space from the sun she had created to her comets, to her callers, to the satellites around her and the fabric upon which she stood.

She stood for a millennium, waiting for a call; for a screeching to resound or a whisper to come around but despite her noble patience, no satisfaction came. Again she melancholily stood, now gazing at nothing before her, now blowing at the dust, and mouthing at her pumice feet, “Oh, how I am alone.”