a journal in short bursts that might occasionally even rhyme |
Also published in slightly different form in Colin Back on the Ghost Roads 's Spectacular Speculations July 2010 edition. Tea leaves swirl a bitter pattern only the crone can read, so the sign says. Shifty red eyes, the kind you can buy at any mom-and-pop genetics shop, fill with premonitions or greed. Reduced to begging a fortune from the cup, I listen intently as her flesh flashes – pop pop green, pop yellow, pop orange, repeating – with bargain basement prophecies. “Out there is your destiny my son. Beyond the moons and the stars you’ll find hardship and heartache, sin and redemption. You will love and lose many women, thin-skinned fairies, winged beasties, large cats, small reptiles, until you reach your journey’s end.” One final pop – orange – and she stills. Too late to recall the credits I paid her with, I shake her hand without malice. It’s a caveat-emptor universe anyhow. Except I move to leave and can’t, my limbs unresponsive the way they say happened before, during the wars, when skinjackers and pool hackers would crawl inside and make a home in your nets. Somehow I’ve found the real deal, an old school latin-beatnik prophet. “Be wary, void-walker, what you bring out of the warp,” she whispers behind my eyeballs, etching something underneath the lids. Too much to hope for that it’s protection. “Deliver this onto the Far Ones. Bring a reply, should you survive.” Her eyes blacken beneath the cheap synth-red, pulsing – an off-world, off-beat syncopation – voodoo injun style in synch with her skin. I wake in my cot, colossal headache in tow, feeling well and truly jazzed. The itch beneath my skin is the hex. Thankfully, if the colonials vivisect me, they’ll see I never read it. Being an unwitting unwilling accomplice might gain me a faster disassembly. Probably not. I throw on some old-fashioned alligator spacewaders, and suit up for another long day’s journey into the fright. There’s nothing else I can do really, with the compulsion in place and the hex burning in hole in my mental pocket, but deliver her message. |