The Sovereign Archive

You are dying.  Doesn’t matter how.  Feels so far away now— doesn’t it?  That’s it. Take it easy. Let that last breath slip away, like the warmth that comes in a killing cold. Gentle into a silent night. No more looking up at those crowding, concerned faces; a herd of pale, pained moons.  - - - - - ___________ A dark tunnel. Familiar, but not. You’re welcome all the same. Hands groping, grasping against glassy coolness, stumbling—  Light.  The most perfect, pure sunlight. Every idealized summer, every perfect candlelight and warming fire, all that condescend sun-sure dances across a lifetime of days. It’s mere existence is the most pristine invitation. In illumination alone it says come closer . If you had a heartbeat it would be racing.  Up. Up. Forward. Scuffing, almost tripping. Surging forward, hands outstretched.  You’re here.  The Light. The Light   It’s so— wrong . It’s purity vanished, replaced with an organic and oily sheen. Like firefly glows made rotten, morphed in the shape

You are in a dark forest. Trees entangle themselves in every direction, and the canopy is a furious mass of branches and leaves. You dwell in the gloom.  The forest is vast, and deep; and wears its ages on every knotted trunk, across its treacherous roots. All that you know is it’s dimness, sheathed in fog and in doubt. You wander.  There are paths. Unseen others have passed this way through the grass, left marks where their passage widened undergrowth or sheered branches. Some of it is only the tool of measly hands, already fading into obscurity when you happen upon it. But others have been industrious: cutting and sheering, great trees older than you can imagine felled like the corpses of giants. Unfamiliar sunshine peers through those malevolent gaps, as if you must gaze upon those mighty works and despair.  Sometimes in the night there are voices, snatches of words you do not understand. Whispers in the undergrowth agonizingly near punctuated by unseen tread. Sometimes there are sh

A lone traveler is intercepted in the long night.  Frail, yellowed and thin, every angle of silent erosion is a testament to an epic exodus— and a lonely one. It is a fragile thing, too, all girders and nodules tucked close to a sheltered core. It’s voice is quiet, growing quieter.  But— what’s this?  Something there, something glinting and curious; something meant to be investigated by able, excitable minds. This surface is pitted just like everywhere else and yet it’s golden inscriptions miraculously remain, defiant in the face of impossible emptiness.  A map. A composition. Intricate line work evoking intelligence, tantalizing in their purpose. Two faces that before this sojourn must’ve once looked back upon their familiar makers.  In the silence of the infinite and frigid darkness, the plaque is removed with an almost appalling care, warmth. For the first since it’s encoding, the secrets within spill out under the watchful and enraptured senses of eager observers.   A choice is mad

“But— how does it know  what to do?”  I’ve seen this face a million times, by now. Distraught, confused. There’s an ache in there, and suddenly every tidbit in history class about one era becoming another has a bit more weight to it. This particular face is pale, doughy; almost a cartoonishly exaggerated caricature of old wealth.  He’s looking at the Box— staring, really— like it’s just marched in on its own, found a spot to be planted, and declared to him that it’s here for everything, even his trophy wife hidden somewhere in a far-too-big house in the hills. Sympathetic as I can be at times, right now is not one of them. I have to actually try hard to not crack a cynical smile. It *is* a little funny. Men who celebrated their whole lives over essentially imaginary numbers, whole ecosystems of potentiality and calculated risks, thrown into a world where the tiniest unseen particles can decide the fates of more currency than has ever been generated in human history. Like daydreamers su

Who lies sleeping?  Dreaming stratum dreams, stone thoughts that age by long, long, long ticks.  Who lies sleeping?  Down and hidden in the pages of the mightiest book, where each word is a mountain and every sentence a millennia; across composed works beyond human hands.  Who lies sleeping?  Memories undone by the winds, achievements erased by the lashing sea, defeats forgotten by the hungry flames. The earth swallows, the earth destroys: the earth forgets. Empires vanquished by the enemies that forged them.  Who lies sleeping?  Eggs. Envoys of a nameless past. Embryos fresh and angelic and half-formed, like so much possibility sliding unbothered in their amber stasis. The old-world, the banished world, whispers it’s memories and forgets it’s sins in those fresh minds. Machines of rock and gravity tick, counting every stroke in particle decay. Waiting to raise.  Who lies sleeping?  No one.  Not anymore.

I live in Topeka, Kansas.  The sea has come back to reclaim its seabed. My house is at the bottom and outside my window is a neighborhood, encrusted day by day with more coral. A riot of colors, swaying fronds big as cars waving their slow greetings.  Fish in so many varieties, like silvery and ocher waves. Some are big as SVUs that once plied up and down the street, ugly bulldog faces scrunching needle teeth as they prowl.  There are other shapes, too, huge and black and hanging just above my view, illuminated from above by the sun. I shiver at their tremendous passage, catching glimpses: synchronized paddling flippers, massive torpedo bodies, enormous jaws yawning open in silent bellows. Others are mostly neck with small, graceful bodies at the end, twisting and weaving in primordial ballet.  The radio still plays. So I sit, blinds open and watery light splaying across the living room, listening to whatever comes on.

We stay up late. Walk through the tall grass, let it’s fingertips anoint us in quiet summer rites. The disembodied orchestra rings out from everywhere, crickets creaking and frogs tolling and bats chittering; the voices of coronation, our adoring audience.  Sweep hands outward to our sides, catching waves of iridescence. Fireflies everywhere, indomitable omnipresent, and between them and the star-crowded sky above it’s like we float out in a mystical cosmos. All alight. All ablaze.  Home is somewhere far away, beyond us. Lost and forgotten like schedules, like good habits. We’re runaways, self exiles hungry for adventure. We share words, drawn so close by that impossible summertime magnetism.  But at the end of the night, standing up in the tall grass, home is just over there, over the hill and the fireflies are a dim trickle. Inviting stars turned cold, unblinking. We share fragile smiles— the last we’ll exchange.

Nobody has any name for it, not yet. Out of the 33 billion chickens on Earth, only about five percent have experienced the anomaly. A fraction hidden amongst all those clamoring feathers, silly clucking faces so familiar and comforting.  The hens have hidden these particular eggs, a behavior unheard of even in the most unkempt and nearly feral species of fattened bird. They tuck them beneath floorboards, or spend hours kicking and shuffling dirt until near seizure to make odd humped nests wreathed in shadow. When these eggs come, these strangers, they’re unnaturally large. Wide as the palm of a hand with a lingering warmth, a leathery texture.  Whereas the countless clutches will be forgotten and stolen away without so much as an accusatory cluck, *these* offspring are guarded. Jealously, fiercely. More than a few hands will experience their first angry peck, followed by a dozen more, upon the unsuspecting discovery. Strange, green-dappled eggs larger than anything ever previously laid

Something is growing in my basement.  Plump and bold red mushrooms coat the stairs like little crimson forests, and through what little light remains I can see their spores drifting. It’s damp, humid.  When it sighs the whole house shakes, my windows rattling by a wind not from outside but *below*.  I dream of horns, black and curving and many, like bony branches thrust up out of the dirt. Crisscrossed by red roots.  The mailman throws my packages, hurls my newspaper. My neighbors eye me and my home like it’s something mad, something hungry, and when I finally sit at the table to read I can’t help but feel that the floor is sinking under my feet. Listing into swallowing earth.  I know soon I’ll wake up, stiff, entombed by so many blood-colored caps. Tenacious roots spilling over me. The thing in my basement will speak instead of sigh and all that rotting wormwood will come down, down, down. And it will be free.

 Mix Up I’m sitting in traffic. It’s rainy. I’m tired. Stacy reaches across me, spins the dial, says something about wondering if they’ll say the big numbers—  A jovial voice begins to read:  “Aaand the winning numbers are—“ Static hisses. Splits the words into pieces, drowns them out. Another voice comes on, a man. His words come out in that paradoxical so-fast-it’s-slow-way, a calm terror. I go very still.  “—- it would appear that all communications with our ambassadors in the Soviet Socialist Republics has ceased. I’ve been told that the White House has been evacuated and— and that we will receive a…”  The voice falters. Stacy is gripping my arm like we’re both overboard, clinging in cold and black bottomless water.  “Nuclear weapons have been launched by the Soviet Union to the United States. You are not hearing me incorrectly. We have lost contact with our correspondents in West Germany, and just now in London and Iceland. We will stay on air as long as possible— God help us.”  T

 Traitors Folly Dad always dragged us to roadside attractions. But, while I’ve forgotten the tallest stack of butter and the fattest cow and a million other tidbits of oddness, I haven’t  forgotten the Monument to Insurrection.  I don’t think I ever will.  Whatever internet searches might have you believe, there are roadside attractions in the East Coast, they’re real common. Of course, I can’t tell you exactly where we were— no one can seem to remember, or doesn’t want to remember. Just that, heading back from relatives in Philadelphia and about five more hours from home, dad was excitedly pulling us into some lot. It was morning, maybe seven or eight, and no one was really there.  “All the better!”, dad practically cheered, and we were out, stretching legs or twisting backs. Dad went on ahead, of course, but not far. I could see him, standing in the shadow of what must’ve been our reason for stopping: a bronze statue of a man, maybe thirty or so feet tall.  He looked like a man from

 Monster Under Your Bed A man  in the room.  He’s come in through the window. Cool summer air tussles verdant branches outside.  One unfamiliar to me. He smells like ash, like drink. Looms over the bed, dirty hands caressing lovingly folded fabric and smooth skin clumsily.  I do not know him. He is not the man the child has the eyes of, nor the woman who has its hair. The whispers he speaks in are soft, but grating. There is no love in those words.  I do not  like him.  I move my bulk underneath the bed and he shuffles, looking around. Pulls the knife from his pocket like it’s a worthy threat. I let him hear my laughter, bathe in the chill of his blood. His stupor, even afraid, is too great to be diminished.   The unwelcome man bends, ducking to look under the bed. To the usual visitors— I am unseen.  But for him I make an exception, and before the scream can wake peaceful, happy dreams, I pull him close into the dark.

 Find Your Own Way Out What if things could be undone before you’d done them? Or after? What if you could be rewritten, and never know it? What’s beyond time, what’s beyond death? What lies out in the places between places, above and outside of places? What’s in the basement and the attic of God, the places he won’t look, won’t open up to us? That’s what the note said in the empty, cold house.  It’s handwriting was rushed, the letters looping and stretched, trying to run away from the page to somewhere else. Somewhere else beyond the ominous meaning, the fate of whoever wrote it.  Water drip-drip-drips  from the faucet. Trying to fill that uncomfortable, hungry silence. Something thumps  in the attic, wood creaking before abating back into the quiet.  There are things in the house. There is nothing in the house.  Empty picture frames that you can feel unseen smiles from. If you’d run your hands across the walls there would be the essence of dust from a place lived in and weathered, but

The City knew it’s invaders had come, out there beyond the wall and nestled amongst dark trees. At dusk and into the night came a red glow, damnation given light as it danced and shivered between sentinel trunks. Sentries looking out into the countryside felt the omnipresent paranoia of being watched by an uncountable number of crimson eyes looking back, and in the day, nothing came from the woods beyond. No birdsong anointing new days, no wild horses nipping at unruly weeds from trees edge— just fog that would not dissipate, just the silence that devoured all sense of safety, familiarly.  It was another night lit by red, earthbound stars when the noise began. A baby wailing. It cracked all that accumulated silence like broken bones, as if the sky itself had shattered into so many shards on the ground. Sentries and waiting armies camped in the shadow of the almighty wall felt as naked as newborns, weapons dropped so scrambling hands could cover their precious ears. The wailing grew, an

Why do men fear reptiles?  Why was the first temptation, seductive and familiar, whispered by a serpent? Why, in ages past, did men slay almighty dragons and claim their ever-fire for his heart?  Why do sacred places both welcome draconian angels and banish ground-dwelling snakes, why do we recoil from the bottomlessly black eyes of reptiles?  We see monsters, in them. We call the depths of our minds, self-centered and unnervingly aware a lizard brain  the control center for motives better served by those mindless, primordial drives. We fear the lizard brain, the cool calculation somewhere far down inside.  We dream of dragon power, we fear serpent sin. It is in  us. Medusa, who could kill with a stare, slipping across ruined marble, her living hair and lengthy body alive with reptilian horror. Men measure infinity itself in a snake eating it’s own tail, fruitless and potent and eternal, all at once, all a reflection of a reflection. Black temples that are artifacts on wonder today wer

The sickness came in the spring. It came little by little, red faced and thin people like odd unsteady flowers, emerging from the cold. Hustle and bustle, like a busy hive, washed onward. Inevitable as the tides. Who would notice a thinning there, a lessening here? Who had the time?  Summer embraced. Everything was green, and alive, and quiet avenues at night practically shook with animal aria. Windows lit by candlelight, throwing intimate vignette shadows here and there where whispering shapes hunched over them. Far away storm clouds loomed heavy and bruised, like they’d taken the souls of everyone perished.  Chilly night by chilly night the candles lessened, the whispers stolen away by mourning breezes. The leaves were vibrant and showy, mountains of rioting color like the trees wanted their last act to put sunrises and wildfire to shame. No one raked, no one cleaned. In the endless silence, wind played its game.  Snow enveloped the world. Embryonic whiteness that turned everything i

This town is dust. Wooden buildings turned to half sand-submerged memories. Rusting train tracks to nowhere, empty, their iron horses like so many beached metal bones. Wind whistles between gaping doors, across barren frames. ___________________________________ Lights blaze up and down the Highway, islands of illumination standing proud against so much desert emptiness. We pass them one night, surprised how crowded the emptiness has suddenly become, but we’re too keen to stop and press on. Maybe later, we say, laughing.  We pass them again the next four nights, the exact same buildings.  Their lights are harshly bright, glaring.  On the fifth night, shadows of backlit forms stare out from their windows. The radio hisses with hostile static and the sun refuses to rise. We can’t see any stars. There are no stars. Just the lights, the shadows.  —————————————————————— “ Any volunteers?”  implores the Man on Stage. His grin is big and white, almost leering.  Hot, dry wind blows. There are w

There’s a man at the door. He’s dressed in too many layers of black for the warm summer evening, and his sunglasses are thick, almost plated. Clark can’t see any eyes behind them. Just the black spots looking down.  There is a car, idling on the road, a sparkling black. It’s undeniably new with the way everything shines, all that unmolested leather looking so clean that Clark can practically smell it. It seems, Clark thinks to himself, like it’s freshly rolled off from the factory floor, and he imagines that’s exactly how that model would’ve looked thirty years ago, when they were indeed so freshly born. Clark does not know how he knows the inside is clean bordering on clean-from-lack-of-use because the windows are tinted to be almost as black as the suit the man is wearing. Neither can he see whoever else is sitting in the car, but the boy can sense them, looking back.  “I know you”, says the man at the door.  Clark says nothing. He looks up into his own reflection in the glasses, loo

Governor Laslow brought a piano.  It was heavy, a pain to lift and a terror to see swinging over the side, looking like some clumsy black angel against so much grey sky. But, it was the pride of the Governor, what he’d chosen to bring even over his own wife from so far away, and so the crew was gentle with it.  The piano touched new ground before any colonists disembarked.  Sky. Sea. Stone. That was the essence of this place, unfinished by God and then cast away to an especially desolate ocean. It was all giant, broken cliffs and menacing mountains swept bare by furious winds. What little that did grow was hard and harsh, stubby shelled plants clinging to usually frozen soil. Of the animals, people knew little and saw less, and more than a few sailors whispered amongst themselves that whatever lived here could not be natural, instead having been the transformed remnants of ancient castaways made into beasts. At night, when the Moon came from behind so much cloud to scowl at them in sil