ocaptainauthor

[ocaptainauthor]

“Casey?”

“Yeah?” Casey asked. He had stopped tossing the coin, and looked curiously at Jay.

“What is God?” Casey stared at Jay in almost sarcastic shock.

“You know the rule, Jay.” Casey pointed to the framed paper that stated the ‘10 commandments’ of Dr. Farhelm’s office. In unison, they read the sixth rule.

“Thou shalt not speak of religion in this office,” the interns intoned in mock reverence, pausing for a moment before laughing uproariously.

“I wonder what happened that inspired that commandment.”

“I know,” Casey remarked. He had resumed his coin tossing.

“Really?”

“Yeah. Remember, I’ve been here longer.” Casey had been working with Dr. Farhelm for six years. Jay had come to the office fresh out of law school two years ago.

“Right. So, Casey…” Jay trailed off. Casey rolled his eyes.

“What, Jay?”

“Did your mother raise you Catholic?” Casey glanced at the wall clock. Farhelm said he’d be back by 3. It was a quarter past one.

“Yeah,” he replied. “Didn’t stay Catholic, though.”

“Oh.”

There was silence in the office for a few minutes, until Casey started and said, “Think fast!” to Jay, before pretending to throw the coin at him. Jay ducked, and Casey grinned as Jay realized that there was to be no aerial onslaught, and glared at him.

“That wasn’t funny, Casey.”

“No shit,” Casey told him. “I’m booooored,” the intern complained.

“Casey?”

“Yeah?”

“Do you believe in God?”

“Damn it, Jay, you know Farhelm’s rules. We’re not supposed to talk about that.” Casey’s tone showed his exasperation.

“I know, Casey, but Farhelm won’t be back for another hour, so what’s the harm?”

Casey shook his head. “Fine. But only because I’m bored, and we’ve got to shut the hell up about this,” he looked at his watch to check the time again, “a half hour before Farhelm’s supposed to be back. Okay?”

“Yeah, okay.” Jay twiddled his thumbs. “So?”

“No, I don’t believe in god,” Casey admitted. Jay’s eyes widened. Shit, Casey thought. This wasn’t a can of worms that needed to be opened. Farhelm didn’t know, but he certainly wouldn’t care. Jay, a born and bred Orthodox Christian, obviously did care.

“Why?” Jay said incredulously.

“Because I grew up and realized that a lot of the religious dogma is bullshit.”

“But…but even if it is, couldn’t you still believe in God?”

“I did, for a while. Then my boyfriend got cancer, and no amount of prayers made a goddamn difference.”

Jay’s eyes got impossibly wider. “Y—you…you’re?”

Casey laughed. “Jesus, kid. I thought it was pretty fucking obvious.” Jay still stared vacantly at him. “You remember last week when you wanted to help me get coffee for Shelia and her interns?” Jay nodded. “I was flirting pretty hard at the barista. He even wrote his number on the receipt. He’s a nice guy, actually,” Casey remarked. “I’m supposed to meet him after work today so we can go to this nice tea shop downtown.”

“I…I’m sorry for your loss,” Jay finally managed.

“Thanks,” Casey said quietly.

“But having faith is still important!” the younger intern retorted.

“I do have faith. Faith in relativity and probability and Murphy’s Law. Just not in an ‘all-powerful’ being. Nothing is all-powerful. Hell, not even the strong nuclear force!”

“Is it because y—” Casey held up a hand.

“I’m gonna stop you right there before you say something you’ll regret. I’ve been doing a lot of talking. What’s your deal, Jay? Why’re you so concerned with my believing in god?” Jay took a deep breath.

“My mother was in a car accident when I was six. She was pregnant with my sister, at the time, and badly injured. The doctors said she’d have a few nights at best, and thought that there’d be no hope for her child.

“She lasted two months, until they were able to deliver the baby. Rhea was thankfully perfectly healthy. Mom died the day after, though.

“Dad always said that Rhea was a miracle, and that Mom lasting long enough to have her was our gift from God. I guess that’s why I have faith. We prayed so much for her to get better, and she never did, but we still got Rhea. We still have Rhea.”

“I’m sorry about your mother.”

“I…uh…thanks. I was a bit too young to remember clearly, but I remember the praying. Always praying, for three months straight, until no amount of praying was going to bring her back.”

“When Gregory wasn’t getting better, I thought that my prayers weren’t being answered because I’m gay,” Casey said quietly. “I asked our friends to pray, but that did jack shit. And that’s when I lost all my faith. When nothing worked. If there was an all-powerful being, why weren’t they answering us?” Casey glanced at his watch, and then at the wall clock. A quarter past two. “You up for coffee and whatever specials Jake’s got today?”

“Sure.”

When they got back, Casey looked up at the clock as he hung up his jacket. Quarter to three.

“Casey?”

“Jay,” Casey said warningly, pointing to the commandments and then the clock.

“This is a quick question, I promise.”

“Ugh, fine. But if Farhelm comes in you’d better shut up.”

“Does Farhelm believe in God?”

“I…don’t know, actually,” Casey replied. “Whenever he brings meals to the office he always mumbles some sort of prayer that sounds like ‘Kevin,’ and he has a cameo necklace engraved with the image of someone called ‘Sister Helen’. He showed it to me once, while Cyril was still interning here.”

“Oh, okay.” They sat in silence for a while.

Fifteen minutes later, Dr. Farhelm came bustling into the office. Casey helped him with his coat, and Jay got out fresh pens.

“Hey, Farhelm,” Casey said, picking up the bag they had brought back from the deli. “We got you some ramen.”

“Thanks, Casey,” the lawyer intoned in his gravelly voice. He squinted suspiciously at the interns through his thick lenses. “Were you kids all right while I was out?”

“We were just fine, Farhelm.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“You kids weren’t talkin’ shit about me, were you?”

“Of course not, Farhelm.”

“Good.”

“How was Erika?” Casey asked.

“Oh, fine, fine. Shouldn’t have to go back for another six months. Now, boys, get cracking on that load of paperwork in left pocket of the brown suitcase while I eat my ramen.”

[ocaptainauthor]

The second episode of Return To Terra, a science fiction serial story I am writing. Make sure to check out the cast page (Dramatis personae under episode notes)!

Episode 002: The Third Planet From Sol

NARRATOR: It is the third Izarian day, of this Quintilis, the seventh Izarian month, in the thirteen thousandth (common) year of the Common Era. Eliya Alaricia, captain of the Regel Explorer TOS-42, sits in her captain’s chair. A routine mission to check on the progress of the harvesting of resources from the planets Aeris and Ducit, their moons, and their star, Truem, has gone awry. The computer insists on sending them to the third planet from the star Sol, in the Via Lactea Galaxy. The third planet from Sol is known as Terra, and long ago, Homo sapiens sapiens evolved there. When they departed from the planet, it was uninhabitable, and hostile towards all forms of life. Ten thousand years later, no one knows what will await our crew as they enter the planet’s orbit.

Keep reading

[ocaptainauthor]

“Blood Ties” by O. Captain

[ocaptainauthor]

You first meet her in the hallowed halls of your father’s palace. In the depths of the Underworld she glows like a star in a vast void. She is too young to be a queen, but your father assures you that she is. His queen, but not really, he says. Somehow, you understand what he means. Her laughter sounds like the sun rising, and in the chill of the halls her breath makes fog clouds. “You should see her when spring comes,” your father says, his cold hand upon your shoulder. He smiles at you, and you are reminded that the heart of winter is the crackling of a fire in the hearth and the company of loved ones. They are a striking pair, the king and queen of this place. She drags you into her garden and teaches you how to make flower crowns and complains about her mother. The lilies you weave for her crown are a purple-red, her favorite color. She gives you small white lilies, calls you “valley flower.” One supper, while your father is away, having some urgent meeting, she reaches behind your ears and brings out two coins of glittering gold. She lays them in your palms and they are warm like her hands. “Shh,” she whispers, “don’t tell the ferryman.” You never think to ask if she’s one of them. She can’t be, not with the tiny sun inside her eyes. She’s friends with them, as much as one can be, and side by side you’d never entertain the thought of her being anything like they are. She asks you, when the time has almost come, if you’d like to leave with her. You glance at your father and he smiles, says something like, “go on and steal my queen, why don’t you?” But you know this is his blessing. She takes you by the hand, and you feel the sun on the earth above, the snow bowing, making way, the early buds peaking above the thawed soil. You land in the dirt and she pulls from the ground a perfect pomegranate. “Stay for the spring?” she asks. You find that spring is cruel. She is as merciless aboveground as she is merciful below. She calls back the frosts once, twice, thrice, and the new spring shoots quiver in unexpected chills. In the Underworld you were your father’s daughter, his last and only priestess, but here you are nothing but a subject of her capricious will. Her sunlight goes from blinding to a dim oil-lamp in moments. She flickers in the rain she sends cascading onto your head. Some days you lie out on the grass and she reads your palms, telling you the breaks in your lifeline are your visits to your father’s realm. You don’t believe her; your father told you that in his kingdom you were never really dead. She laughs, and tells you he was sparing your mortal sensibilities. She lies, she lies, she lies. In summer she drifts away, as another claims the skies and scorches the earth with her fiery roar. Sometimes she visits and she paints your nails and mutters curses at the sun, and complains about her mother. (You heard her curse the earth once and for a week she was pale and almost, almost human. She never uttered unkind words toward the soil again.) She takes you to the Wild Hunt of her cousin, and only turns you into a deer twice. Her cousin smiles, rolls her eyes. It is so easy with them, to see the family resemblance. Her cousin asks you if you are like them. You shake your head, and the Mistress of the Wild Hunt looks quizzically at you, and then at her. She grins at her cousin, and the Hunt continues. She is gone for most of the season, and you miss her, try to find her sunlight eyes in passing strangers on the sidewalks, try to taste the light she brought the world in every fruit. She sends you pomegranates, sometimes. It’s a little joke, between you and she and your father. Your nails match the color of the fruit and you laugh because she knew, she always would. She returns as the leaves change, and she dresses accordingly. On Samhain, she opens a portal and your father waves. He tells you to take good care of her. You grin and nod. Before the winter comes she takes you to a faerie ball, and you remember the benefits of having someone like her in company. She is so inhuman, with her deft steps and effortlessness in all that she does. She stretches a hand to a tree and the leaves turn, and she looks green for a moment, and smiles sharply. This is where the green goes, you think. This is why the light dies. She braids leaves into your hair and presents you to astral royalty as the heir of the Underworld. They are impressed but unimpressed with the mortality of your body. She saves you from death, again, again. The ground cools where she sits. As in spring when she radiated warmth she now takes it back, bleeds the earth dry of sun-energy and breathes out the last warm wind of autumn. She is no more monster than the seasons but to see her glowing while the trees are hibernating is unnerving. She is both the mother and the executioner of sunlight. The earth turns, and cools, and she will be the first one to breathe snow upon us all. Days before your father’s chariot arrives to reenact her mother’s deepest tragedy, she has covered the earth in cold. She is still so, so warm. She is glowing, full of sunlight in her bones. She cuts her hand on a branch and where the ambrosia drops a sprout arises. She kills it, drawing the warmth back into herself. You find the autumn may be crueler than the spring. Your father is the one to call you back for winter. She must go, you are invited. She gives you little choice, still with her hand clasped in yours. A cold hand falls upon your shoulder and dark horses take you below the earth to the first home of every living thing and the last place they shall ever go.

a study of persephone, by O. Captain.

[ocaptainauthor]

Poetry Found in Diaries, by O. Captain.

This series is for every girl who wrote about wanting to kiss girls in her diary.

[ocaptainauthor]

“8 steps to knitting needle witchcraft” by O. Captain

[ocaptainauthor]

“A Letter to Beyond,” a Martian poem by O. Captain

[ocaptainauthor]

Race You to the River Styx

It was summer, and it was hotter than it had ever been, the weatherwoman said. Hot enough to melt your brains, to make you do something stupid, as Rica’s mom said. We found the river then, in the hot and early days of July, behind the bowling alley.

Rica dubbed it the River Styx, and laughed when I didn’t understand.

“Someone hasn’t done their summer reading!” She taunted, cheerfully. She nagged me about it for the rest of the afternoon, but caved before eveningtide, and told me the tales of Ancient Greece, of their gods, their heroes, their river of the dead. If I’d been as clever as Rica, maybe I would’ve told her to pick another name. But I wasn’t, and the name stuck.

It’s August when we first see her. She’s nestled up against the tree, just across the river. She looks up when she hears us, and gives us a wave. She doesn’t take her headphones off, and turns back to the computer on her lap. Rica and I move downriver.

By the beginning of September, we know her name, and a few things about her. Her name is Lenore, and she’s got a sister our age, Annabelle. She goes to the river because it’s a quiet place to write. She’ll be seventeen come October, and she’s wicked smart. So smart she’s already got her GED.

“That means I don’t have to go to high school,” Lenore had explained, smiling. I didn’t know then, but you don’t just drop out of school and get a GED because you want to. There had to be “extenuating circumstances,” according to my mother, who smiled at me when I asked, but it was a terse smile, tight lipped and worried.

Once school starts, Rica and I don’t go to the river as often. I go when I can, but Rica has excuse after excuse for why she can’t make it. So I go without her, and there’s a little ache when I do, like a piece is missing. Lenore is there, when I go, on the few days that Rica can make it. We talk a bit, get to know each other. She asks me about school, and she tells me about her writing. She reads a bit to me, and it’s all sad, all broken. I hadn’t seen it before, but then I do. The cracks in her tired smiles, the breaking look hidden behind her eyes. It scares me, a bit, and I think of what could have broken her.

Summer’s there again, and so is Rica.

“Race you to the River Styx!” She yells as we run out my front door, racing towards the bowling alley. She’s laughing, she’s here, and the ache is gone, like it was never there.

Rica’s freaking brilliant, I know, but I’m faster, stronger physically. I beat her to the river, most days. She smiles and accepts defeat graciously, helping me up from where I’ve collapsed, sprawled out on the riverbank.

Lenore puts her computer away some days, and talks to us. We’ve all become close, close enough to disclose cell numbers. Rica, eccentric, wonderful Rica, insists on using code names in the contacts.

“Why would we need codena—“ Rica interrupts me, pressing a finger to my lips.

“Because it’s fun,” Rica says emphatically, and Lenore raises her eyebrow and curls her lip into a half smile, but doesn’t say a word. Rica chooses the codenames, and I don’t try to protest.

I’m Jaguar, and Lenore is Charon, ferryman of the dead. I looked at Rica quizzically, wondering why she doesn’t keep the animal theme. Raven was a name that fit Lenore perfectly. Now I understand more about Lenore, and more about Rica. But then, I wondered why. Sometimes I wish I didn’t know.

It’s two weeks before school starts when Rica stops texting me. I go to the river every day, but she’s never there. I’d try her house, but her parents don’t like me much. Lenore is still by the river, and she has a haunted look in her eyes when I tell her that I haven’t heard from Rica. She hadn’t heard anything either.

The Monday before school, Lenore isn’t by the river. It shocks me, and fills me with an unnamable dread. I don’t stay longer than a few minutes.

I don’t go back until Thursday. Lenore’s back, and I relax a little. And then I see her. It’s Rica, unmistakably Rica. But her body is limp, lying in a boat.

“A ferryboat,” Lenore confirms. I shut my eyes, and draw in shaky breaths. When I open my eyes again, Lenore speaks, but the voice is not her own. Her mouth moves, but the sound is otherworldly.

“Have you a drachma?” the voice asks. I’m confused, and whatever it is that inhabits Lenore sighs. “Have ye a coin, to pay for her passage?” I shake my head. I didn’t bring any money; the bowling alley was a minute from my house. Lenore digs in her jacket pocket, and pulls out a gold coin. She places it in Rica’s cold fingers. “Thankee, girl. We’ll be off now, lassies. G’day to ye.” The presence leaves Lenore, and Rica’s boat begins to move, upriver, towards the wood, pushed by an unseen spectre.

Lenore sighs, and opens her mouth to speak, to give explanation. But I don’t want to hear one. I run, all the way to my house, all the way to my room. I lock the door, and I don’t cry.

I don’t go to the river at all that year.

But July comes, and my feet find themselves at the riverbank. Lenore is there, with a backpack, and a tent. She looks haggard, weak. Still, she manages to crack a wry smile.

“Hey there, Jag. How’s it hanging?”

I look at her, and I don’t know what to say. She looks like she hasn’t been home in months. Maybe she hasn’t been home since… I don’t let myself finish that thought. Instead, I ask, “Are you alright?”

Lenore laughs, a dry, barking sound. “Not even close, Jag. But I ain’t dead, and that’s what matters. How’ve you been?”

“Have you been living here? Did you run away?”

Lenore grins at my questions. “September Mahara, I asked you first,” she says impishly.

“How did you—? Never mind. I—“ I stutter, and Lenore pats the ground beside her. I sit. “I—I’ve been ok, considering…” I don’t have to finish my sentence. She nods. “Now it’s your turn to answer.”

“Yes, I’ve been here. Since the start of spring. Naw, I didn’t run. Folks got tired of me just hanging about and just ‘bout threw me out. Said to come back with the cold weather.”

“Is Annabelle really your sister?” I try to change the subject. Lenore narrows her eyes.

“My, my. You’re perceptive. Must be that Jaguar vision. Naw. Cousin.” She closed her laptop. “You just come here to pester me with details about my life?”

She’s not letting me walk away from this. I sigh, resignedly, and tell her, “No. I wanted to, I guess, apologize to her, for finding the River, for letting her win the race.”

Lenore chuckles at this, a dry, dark laugh. I turn to her, surprised by her callousness. She wipes her eyes, clearing them of tears I hadn’t seen. “You thought she was invincible, eternal. Never dying, never weakening. You thought that you’d win the race. Competitive mortals race to their deaths. Poor things, if you race to the River Styx, you miss the life you could have meandered through. Some burn fast, flames go quickly, like supernovas. Others, others like us, we can’t ever catch them, not with our slow flames, our dull burn.” She says the words like they’re a dream, a spell. She turns to me, and the spell breaks. “She called me Raven. When we were younger, we had our own River Styx.” She gets the faraway look in her eyes again. “I thought I’d go first, I really did. Then I met her, and it was together or not at all. But she was always faster, always. I thought I could be there with her, but she didn’t want that. We both couldn’t be winners. In this race, someone had to lose.

“I lost.

“The family was away on vacation, and they’d left her alone in the house. She…she…” Lenore squeezed her eyes shut. “Gods-- she was only fifteen.” She doesn’t cry. Lenore never cries. But she comes pretty damn close. I squeeze her hand, and she looks at me, smiling sadly. She squeezes back.

It’s evening when I make to leave the river. I don’t think I’ll be back there again. Lenore rises with me, and hugs me. “I’ll be gone from here soon,” she says. “You should go too. I’m off to college soon. It’s a scary thought. If I don’t see you again, well, I’ll see you on the shores of Styx.”