For Children’s Story and other short fictions and poetry click here: https://bertrock.com/assorted-writings/

The Unfortunate Fate of Baltero Acantilado Piedra III

by Bert Rock (2022)

1

      There was no natural light in the realm of the dead. Torches and cairns dotted the landscape, their flames giving no warmth and little light. Here and there small fires burned from coals made of unknown material. There were few if any trees to be found. Baltero Acantilado Piedra III quietly bemoaned the fact that there were no streetlights, no lamp posts, or neon signs selling anything. Everywhere it was just dirt and the occasional cheerless flame.  

The last thing he recalled before he found himself wandering in the strange land, was a hospital bed. He remembered the feel of someone holding his hand and saying words he could scarcely hear. He wasn’t sure who it was, the medications, the looming presence of Death leaning over him, Baltero could not tell if it was his wife, sister, or son, only that there was still someone with flesh and blood sitting with his body in that hospice room.

“This must be Hell,” he said aloud. “It was real after all.”  

Baltero felt a quick twinge from his head to his toes. Much of his flesh suddenly fell away from his bones, sloughing off like an old garment dried up and withered away. With it went his feelings and memories. Everything from the most recent to things long forgotten like his first scrape, his first lost tooth, his first kiss, and the first time he held his son as a baby. The memories themselves were something physical now, dried up to the size of hardened little peas that rattled around in his skull before falling, tick tacking, their way down his bones to the ground. There, they were lost among millions of other long-ago memories.

By the time the sloughing was done, Baltero was left with only a few scraps of flesh on his body, some of his 74-year-old skin and what was left of his muscle. His right hand had the most–some nerve endings and muscle to hold them in place with a meager amount of skin. He noticed then, a sensation emanating from his hand. It made him think of Morse Code. One press, pause, four presses, pause, then three. This occurred again and again. It was his way of saying, “I love you,” to his son. Baltero always found those three numbers, ‘143’ easier than using the words. Sometimes he felt nothing, and then other times he felt the pressure, the message, strongly. After a while it bordered on annoying.

After walking for some time, Baltero thought perhaps he was not in Hell. After all, he was alone, and that seemed to be a dead giveaway. He’d never imagined much of life after death. To him death was simple – one minute you’re here, the next you’re not.  

He kept himself moving in a forward direction, despite not knowing where he was going.

“Not unlike life,” he mused.

He’d had his head down thinking of all that memory on the ground. Once, he bent down to scoop some up, but they just rolled out of his hands. Somberly, he moved on and noticed finally, a source of some dim light up ahead. Where the rest of this world seemed like a dark smudge all around him, he saw a space of light in the shape of a man.  

“I am sorry Baltero,” the man said. “The bridge is closed to you at the moment.”

“Who are you?” Baltero asked. “Eh, if you don’t mind my asking that is.”

“I am Pedro.”

Pedro was a very big man, tall and thick. He wore a pearl-colored suit. He was the kind of man who guarded doors to important places, as he was now with the one before Baltero. Pedro stroked his dark beard.

Baltero felt the pulsing in his hand again and looked down at it.

“You had someone there with you, yes?”

     “Yes,” Baltero said. “My son. I think he’s still holding my hand. Maybe he doesn’t know I’m–” Baltero paused. It was hard to imagine. 

     “Many are not so lucky,” Pedro said and took a toke off a long, winding pipe that looked curiously shaped like a rooster. “They get stuck there when they go alone. They end up wandering the cold, poorly lit halls by themselves.”

“I wasn’t alone,” Baltero said. He remembered the last words he’d heard his son say.

“I’m here Dad. You’re not alone.”

      “One poor soul floated up into the vents,” Pedro said as though Baltero never spoke. “He rattled around in there for a week before he even knew he was dead. This is why I say it’s better to die outside.”

      Pedro toked on his pipe and put a massive hand on Baltero’s thin, bony shoulders.

“Don’t worry my friend. Dying is the same as being born. In both cases, you leave one place for another, and they’re both painful.”

As he stood with the mountainous Pedro, Baltero suddenly remembered the journey from his mother’s womb to the world. It happened seventy-three years before. That day he went through an impossible door in the dark, to be lifted into the light. For almost three quarters of a century, he’d walked everywhere he was going to walk, smelled everything he would ever smell, heard every sound he would ever hear. He’d seen war, the birth of his children, the death of his marriage, the birth of another, and more golf courses than he’d ever dreamed. Now he was leaving the world for something thoroughly unknown.

“Yes,” Pedro said. “You understand now. Death is not the opposite of birth. It is the reverse of it. Like becoming a deep-sea diver, or an astronaut. Every child born is an explorer, and every person that dies is too. The pressure and pain of birth binds your soul to the body. When you were born, you were given this suit to explore life. Now,” Pedro puffed his pipe, “the suit must come off.”  

The big man poked Baltero’s chest once with a thick finger and at Pedro’s touch. All but Baltero’s bones fell to the floor like an old robe.

“So, what happens now?” Baltero asked. He felt nothing, not even surprise at the fact that he was still standing, reduced to a skeleton with a faint glow running around and through his bones. All flesh and sinew were gone now, save the little about his right hand which still felt the touch of his son.

“Hmm.” Pedro took a long toke from his pipe and regarded Baltero with sympathy. When he blew out his smoke, it formed a small person-shaped figure made of white, who stood on Pedro’s shoulder and seemed to whisper something into the big man’s ear.

“Yes,” Pedro nodded to the little smoke angel. “I understand.”

He toked again, this time the smoke was black, and floated to Pedro’s other shoulder where it tugged on his ear. Again, Pedro nodded. 

“What is it?” Baltero said. He wondered if he’d done something wrong.

“Baltero Acantilado Piedra III,” Pedro said standing straight. “You may not enter here. You must see Mr. Nox.”

“I don’t understand,” Baltero said. “What have I done?”

“I am sorry Baltero. This is out of my hands.”

2

Baltero wandered the Realm of the Dead for what seemed like days searching for Mr. Nox. The whole time, he could still feel his son, Baltero the IV squeezing his hand with the 1…4…3.

At first it was a nuisance, but then became a comfort, and now it was back to being a nuisance. He wondered if perhaps it was this that kept him from the passing the gate. How he could still feel it, being a skeleton now, he did not know, but it was there. Each morning, Baltero would wake up in darkness, push open the lid of his wooden crib, and sit up to see the diffused, amber glow of the afterlife. Time had no place here, there was no changing of day and night, only the dark stain of this realm over everything.

It took a while getting used to not needing to stretch. Baltero set out in search of Mr. Nox. He wandered the dreary world. There were no buildings, no landmarks he could recognize, no cars, or signs anywhere. Everywhere he looked, he found things that had once been alive. Trees were dead and twisted in unfamiliar, and haunting shapes. Rivers were black like asphalt, and when he touched the water, it was more like sludge, thick and lifeless.

He wondered if he’d been going in circles when he came across a ribbon of an ethereal green glow. Underneath it was the black sludge of a once flowing river. The glow made it almost look alive again with foamy ripples. Baltero noticed something else in the ‘water,’ he noticed tiny dots of light that swam with the slow-moving current of light.

Fish! He thought. Ghosts of fish.

Baltero was so mesmerized that he did not notice when someone walked up to stand next to him.

“The river’s ghost,” a deep voice said. “Water is very much alive, and when it dies, it mourns its time in life as well as anyone.”

     Baltero turned to see a tall man dressed in a gray suit smoking a cigarette. He had a bushy mustache in which his cigarette’s smoke seemed to linger. The tall man eyed him up and down with eyes like a stormy gray sky.

     “I didn’t know a river could have a ghost,” Baltero said.

     “Every living thing has a ghost,” the stranger took a drag from his cigarette. “This one’s been dead over a thousand years. Some things just hang on longer than others.” The man raised an eyebrow. His skin was gray. “You don’t believe in any of this shit, do you?”

     “No,” Baltero would have felt a lump in his throat if he’d had one. “I don’t. I haven’t, not for a very long time.”

     The big man took a long drag from his cigarette and eyed Baltero coolly.

“Follow me,” was all the man said as he turned, and started walking along the ghostly river’s bank.

     “Uh, wait!” Baltero called out. “Please! Do you know where I can find Mr. Nox? I was told by the man in the pearl suit, uh…Pedro. He said to see Mr. Nox.”

     The man turned his head halfway and simply said, “This way.”

Having nothing else left except his curiosity, Baltero took one last look at the forlorn river wraith and followed the man. Again, he felt the 1…4…3 in his hand.

Baltero noticed that his guide never stopped smoking. The smoke was, in fact, the only way he could keep track of where the man was going.  

“Excuse me,” Baltero called after him. The man, who for what seemed a very long while, had walked without stopping, or saying a word. “Sir?”

     “Keep up.”

The featureless landscape, broken up only by the occasional sighting of a pile of bones here or there, or the last vestiges of long dead trees, finally came to an end at a door cut into a hill. Baltero wondered then if there were ghosts of trees anywhere to be found. He realized then that the man had stopped at a door.    

     The smoking man turned to Baltero. He gave a mildly disapproving look and opened the door. Inside, there was a table with two chairs.

     “Sit.”

     The room was gray. Baltero sat down, as did the man.

“What is this place?”

“It’s just a room.”

“You are Mr. Nox?”

“I am.”

     There seemed to be no direct source of light inside the room, the gray, it became clear, was not painting of the walls but the color of a fog of cigarette smoke. The smoke itself lit the room. It gave everything a pale hue but made it impossible to see anything beyond. Baltero wondered what Mr. Nox had been in his previous life. He looked like a mob lawyer from the movies, slicked back dark hair, five o’clock shadow that gave his face a steely look and the mustache. His voice was deep but had a strange southern sound to it.

     “So, what happens now?”

Mr. Nox did not answer. He shuffled some papers in a folder that came from nowhere. He took a long drag from his cigarette and read the papers in his hand. The cloud of gray thickened. Baltero might have jumped, had he still had nerves, when a dark, thin figure that looked like a series of pencil marks came through the gray smoke and handed Mr. Nox a piece of paper.

Lighting a new cigarette, Mr. Nox looked up at Baltero.

“Can you feel anything right now?”

“Yes, a pulse, or twitch of some sort. It’s my son, though I don’t know how.”

     Mr. Nox looked at the dark figure again. It nodded his bulbous head. He had no face, no features Baltero could make out. Without a word the figure disappeared into the ether of all the smoke in the room. Baltero noticed something in a corner. There was a coat rack, with a black coat or cloak hanging off it, grayed by dust. Beside it, a long shaft leaned against the wall with a curved piece of silver obscured by the coat/cloak. Had he anything left of his throat, Baltero may have gulped.  

“This happens now and then,” Mr. Nox said neatly placing the papers in his folder. “We call it a ‘piggy-back.’ You are dead, but your son is still holding your hand, and because you had no beliefs before you died, you have jumped onto his. You may have to work through some things.”

     “What are you saying?” Baltero asked. “What do you mean? I’m in my son’s beliefs? How is that possible?”

Mr. Nox took another toke on his cigarette. The orange fire at the end of it was the only color Baltero had seen in how long he did not know. It was mesmerizing.

“Like I said,” Mr. Nox exhaled. “This happens from time to time, when a family member with strong beliefs touches the dead before they finish the crossover.”

“But what about my beliefs?”

“You don’t have any, remember?” Mr. Nox’ expression was cheerless.

Baltero’s voice might have cracked if he still had a larynx. “I just wanted to rest. I lived my life. I did what I did. What’s done is done. I want to rest now.”

Mr. Nox put out his cigarette and lit a new one. He gave a conciliatory shrug.  

“Well, what are my son’s beliefs then?”

     “You don’t know?” Mr. Nox asked as smoke seeped through the dark hairs of his mustache.

     “No. I have no idea.” Baltero regretted his words as he said them. He looked down. “I guess I never really asked.”

     “That’s going to make this more interesting, isn’t it?”

     The dark featureless figure from before came out of nowhere and leaned down and whispered something to Mr. Nox. In an ashtray that was not there before, Mr. Nox twisted his cigarette until it was out, his face suddenly grim.

“Wait!” Baltero said. “What ‘things’ do I have to work through?”

Baltero looked at his skeletal hand, the one his son had been holding when he drifted away. The 1, 4, 3 stopped and the flesh and nerve that was left on his hand fell away.

“Oh no,” Baltero’s hopes dropped as his heart had days before when it fell from his ribcage to hit the ground.  

Mr. Nox grabbed a pen from his suit pocket and reopened the folder with the papers. “Name again,” he said.

“Don’t you already know that?”

Mr. Nox looked at him with such a coldness in his gaze that Baltero felt it in his bones.

“Sorry, Baltero.”

“Full name please,” Mr. Nox did not look up from his paperwork this time.

Baltero paused as if to clear his throat. “Baltero Acantilado Piedra III.”

Mr. Nox scratched his name down on the paper and closed the folder with a slap that sounded more like a BOOM. He grabbed his endless pack of cigarettes and pushed his chair out to stand.

“That’s it,” he said. “You’re off the hook now.”

“I am?”

“It’s what you wanted isn’t it?”

“Yes. I suppose it is.”

“Then it is done.”

Mr. Nox stood to his full and terrifying height and the room darkened. Baltero felt as if he might be consumed by the sheer size of the man and the smoke and the world of death around him. If Baltero still had nerves, he would have shuddered. He felt nothing when it happened. Without a word or sound, Baltero’s bones fell to the floor in an unceremonious heap. He was still present. Only now he could do nothing but look from his eye sockets as Mr. Nox walked to the corner of the room. There, he moved the shaft leaning against the wall, which Baltero saw now was a sickle.

Mr. Nox lit another cigarette and grabbed a broom.  

Late One Night

by Bert Rock (2021)

Late one night, the hour and the moon are small as a motley crowd fills a tiny third-floor apartment, huddled around a bed and its sole occupant. A man, his beard equal parts red and gray lies in it asleep, and unstirred by the presence of the onlookers. They are all waiting, like the strangest family at a vigil for a coma stricken loved one.

It is not possible for so many to be inside the small space, and yet they are. Men, women, children, and other creatures fill the apartment. They move within and without, down the stairs and on the walkways. There is a pirate ship in the parking lot. It is surrounded by a thick mist, moored amongst cars tucked in spaces framed by neat, white lines.

Inside the tiny apartment, a beautiful woman with a scarred face and half an ear taps on the sleeping man’s shoulder. She has done this many times. She is pregnant, dressed in a breastplate shaped to her pregnant form and carries a sword. She is the captain of the pirate ship.

“This used to work,” she taps him again, harder, but the sleeping man does not stir.

The apartment has a writing desk littered with papers and books and a laptop computer. There is a map of the first world the sleeper created on the wall over the desk, surrounded by smaller maps and assorted drawings. Overhead, where the ceiling would be, is an opening to the cosmos. It is where stories, ideas and dreams all swirl above the sleeper, like a mobile of a vast galaxy. A barbarian wearing bearskin ducks as he walks to the kitchen, slightly bumping a planet made of words out of sync. An enormous wolf cocks his head curiously and wonders if any of the stars are edible. A lion named, Ian flicks his tail and watches the others with the indifferent curiosity only a cat has. 

A dark-haired girl with a tattoo of a crow’s wing on her arm, leans against the wall and flips through the pages of a book. Occasionally, she looks up to scan the room and the others. Outside, an eight-legged horse eats grass while an old knight tells stories to rocks.

“What do you think is wrong with him?” asks a man wearing leather armor and mage robes. He is the Crow Girl’s father.

“He’s lonely,” a young woman with cropped red hair says. She is a soldier in some medieval army.

“Eh, he looks sad,” says a medieval lord with a vicious scar on his face.    

The Crow Girl’s father sits at the desk while the others mill around. He examines the laptop computer as if it were a holy artifact, afraid to touch it as if doing so would disturb some god.

“When will he write again?” someone asks.

“Do you think he will write again?” another says.

The room is alive with murmurs pondering the possibility. In the kitchen Odin makes eggs with Frigga. Thor flips through channels on the television. The great, feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl coils up around a pillow and talks of his brother, Tezcatlipoca. Coatlicue, a goddess fifty feet tall, sits on the corner of the apartment building in deep thought. Her hair is the night sky. She wears a skirt made of snakes.  

A giant, tongueless, and mute, rummages through the dumpsters for something to eat. Nearby a boy dressed in sealskins holds a narwhal-horn spear and waits for an enemy–any enemy. Villagers and knights and healers and lords walk here and there.

Inside, a naked, gray skinned man scarred from head to toe, with tattoos of weapons on his body covers himself with an old shirt and sits in a corner. A wooly centaur, the last king of an arctic land attempts to hold council with some of the others. They do not listen. The giant wolf and the lion watch each other from across the room, each one quietly sizing up the other. A young knight, with a look of affluence and malice twirls a dagger in his hand. Standing by him is a golem encased in plate armor. It is eight feet tall with four arms and a head shaped like a fist. They are all waiting.

The room full of strangers and friends murmur and mingle a little, but mostly they stay to themselves. Outside an elephant trumpets and two ravens call.

The Crow Girl’s father looks up at the map on the wall, “This is it!”

Everyone in the room turns to the man at the desk.

“What is it?” the Centaur asks.

“The map. This is where we live isn’t it?” He looks down then, at the laptop, which appears to him like a slab of obsidian. Next to it is the mouse–a small, ruby colored device.

“What is that?” The Centaur points to the slab of obsidian. “Some kind of spell tome?”

“Whatever it is, he commands it,” Crow Girl’s Father points to the sleeper. “Of that I’m sure,” he looks again at the map and then the desk. “This is where it all happens.”

“How does it work?” Quetzalcoatl asks.

“I don’t know,” the Crow Girl’s Father says.

The Old Knight who told stories to the rocks outside walks through the door with a young boy, whose hair is like sunlight.

“He misses you, you know,” the Old Knight says, and everyone turns to him.

“Who?” asks the Pregnant Pirate Captain.

“All of you,” the Old Knight sweeps the room with a gesture.

“Even me?” three voices speak in unison.

The Old Knight flinches. The voices belong to three witch women, chained together at the feet, and sitting in the corner with bowls of mead. When they speak everyone in the room inches a little further away from their corner. The Old Knight replies with eyes wide and his disgust barely hidden.

“Yes. Yes, yes,” he nods and looks around the room at the others. “Like I said, all of you.” He takes a step further from the witches.

The Young Knight, a murderer with an unrepentant chin, looks down and says, “Well, we miss him too.” He digs the toe of his boot into the carpet.

Nods and murmurs of agreement fill the room.

“How do you know he misses us?” the Pregnant Pirate says.

The Old Knight looks quizzical and shrugs. “I don’t know how I know,” he furrows his brow. “I just know.”

“What do we do then?” a brawny young man asks.

“I think we wait,” the Scarred Lord says. “I mean, do we really have a choice?”

“We’ve been waiting,” the Pregnant Pirate says and is met with a chorus of agreement. “Some of us longer than others.” She looks at the Old Knight.

He puts his hands up, “I only mean to help.”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to write anymore,” the Crow Girl slaps a book shut.

Everyone looks at her now.

“Maybe he doesn’t care. Anybody thought of that?” she gestures toward the Sleeper.

“The old guy just said he misses us,” the bearskin wearing barbarian says, as he takes a beer out of the refrigerator.

“Maybe he dead,” the Sealskin Boy says. People try to avoid his narwhal horn spear.

“He’s not dead,” Crow Girl says. “Maybe he just doesn’t love us anymore.”

“What’s that got to do with anything?” the Bearskin Barbarian says, beer froth falling from his beard.

“Everything.” A man so wrinkled, he looks like a human shar-pei speaks.  

The room looks at the shar-pei man.

“Without it we are nothing, we would not be here,” he looks around the room with disgust, “Wherever here is.”

No one speaks for a time. Then, the Crow Girl’s Father, sitting at the desk, nudges the mouse with his knuckle. Everyone in the room holds their breath. Nothing happens.

“That doesn’t do anything,” the Boy with Sunlight Hair says. “You have to turn it on.”

Everyone turns to the boy.

“I know you!” the Crow Girl says. “You’re the new kid.”

Her words have an edge. Crow Girl’s Father gives her a look. She sticks her chin out defiantly but says nothing. The boy gives her a shy look and speaks to her father.

“It’s a computer,” he says and steps forward, eyeing the centaur, the lion, and the wolf as they watch him walk through a gauntlet of fantastic characters. “Here, let me show you.”

The boy flips open the laptop and turns it on. everyone in the room gasps at this when the screen flickers to life showing a sketched charcoal drawing of a dog. The boy turns the mouse on and clicks. In his peripheral vision, he sees some of the wonderous people flinch.

 “Oh no,” he says.

“What?” Crow Girl’s Father asks.

“I don’t know the password,” he looks at the old knight and then to the others. “Does anyone know the password?”

The room sighs. Many put their hands up, shake their heads and go back to their conversations, and ignore the boy. They go back to watching the writer as he sleeps, all of them somehow fitting into his tiny apartment. The boy watches them as they argue, unable to agree on why the man won’t write, or whether or not he can. It’s like an odd gathering of the world’s strangest children in a classroom with no teacher.

“Oh, I have an idea!” the boy says.

“Speak,” says the Scar Faced Lord. He sniffs a container of food and grimaces as he places it down on the kitchen counter.

The boy looks at the sleeping writer and summons his courage. He turns to Crow Girl’s Father and puts out his hand.

“Hi,” the boy says. “I’m Simon Smart. What’s your name?”

The man smiles and glances around the room as he takes Simon’s hand.

“I’m Marmac,” the man says. “But you can call me Mac.”

“Nice to meet you Mac.”

“Pleased to meet you Simon,” Mac said. “What did you have in mind?”

“Maybe we should all just talk to each other. We all have a story, right? We could share them.”

Simon smiles and the room gets brighter.

Marmac nods. “That’s a great idea.”

The Crow Girl taps Simon on the shoulder.

“Hi,” she says. “I’m Faunie. Sorry I snapped at you.” She smiles and puts her hand on Simon’s shoulder and points to the pregnant pirate woman, “That’s Izra, and over there is Borgo the Bear, this is Inkasu,” she gestures to the boy with the spear. “Oh, and there’s Tom Jonney, and…” her voice trails off as she goes around the room and introduces Simon to the rest of the people there. Barbarians, knights, witches, and gods all start talking to one another, sharing their strange and wonderful stories.

At the center of them all, the writer begins to stir…

The Cork That Saved Humanity

by Bert Rock (2017)

When Colonel Si-Woo Sung received news that the Supreme Leader’s DTA task force finally created a missile that could reach America, he wept. It would be a day of celebration, he knew, so he unlocked his secret wine cabinet. He could see the Supreme Leader now, dancing around in his ridiculous pajamas while some poor coquet watched anxiously. There was never any telling what the man would do.

Si-Woo remembered the father’s reign. Before his death, the previous Supreme Leader was a man of singular vision who hated all things not Korean. He was a bad man, but a predictable one, and at times even reasonable. The same could not be said for the current Supreme Leader, an impetuous man-child whose mind lost its mooring. He was stupid, and terrifying. He owed everything to his father and saw even his many failures as successes.

Si-Woo looked in his wine collection and considered what vintage, what flavor would sing on the palate as they fired their missile, chanting the task force’s name, “Death to America!” A smoky cabernet sauvignon? A peppery merlot with hints of blackberry?

“Perhaps a port,” Si-Woo said to himself. “He’ll want steak afterwards. Once that fat finger hits the button, we’re all doomed. He’ll want something bloody.”

Si-Woo ran his hand through the collection, turning bottles as he went, unsure if his indecisiveness on making a selection was emblematic of his hesitance for the occasion. They were going to start a war. It would be the last war, the one to end them all.

Finally, he came to the cooler with the chardonnays and Rieslings. He’d been given the dubious title of “Master of Celebrations,” shortly after his young daughter died over two years before. The Supreme Leader seemed to think the title would cheer him up and even had a wine cellar built onto his house. Si-Woo opened the door and felt the frosty air on his face and saw the one.

“Ah. Champagne. Of course.”

Later, in the observation room they met. The Supreme Leader ordered streamers and dancing girls in bikinis and pageant sashes to pass flutes of bubbly around to his chief advisors and scientists. Si-Woo looked at the girls; the fear in their eyes was gone, replaced by the frank resolution that some lives, their lives, had no meaning. He thought of his mother standing up to his father. Women, he realized, were the bravest.

As they moved, he noticed powdered makeup fall like dust off their arms where it was generously applied to hide the bruises.

We’re a country of lambs, Si-Woo thought. We’ve been waiting for the knife our whole lives.

He walked around the room with all its gauges and meters and blinking lights. He’d once seen an American movie, The China Syndrome. Originally, he’d thought it would be a movie about Chinese zombies only to find that it was much worse. The room reminded him of that film.

Finally, the Supreme Leader announced that the time had come. Si-Woo had cradled in his arm the bottle of Champagne from his wine cellar wrapped in a tiny version of their flag.

“At last we shall show our might!” the Supreme Leader said pointing a pudgy finger in the air as though it were a mighty sword.  

Colonel Si-Woo placed the champagne bottle on his thigh. He removed the muselet, the tiny wire cage holding the cork in check–six turns as tradition required. He shook the bottle, just enough. He would have to time this for the exact moment.

He’ll want this to go off like some phallic metaphor once he hits that button.  

The room fell silent as the Supreme Leader approached a wooden platform. It had been put together so fast that the heads of nails stuck out of the wood as if they too wanted to peek upon the momentous occasion. There the almighty button waited–the button that would end the world. Si-Woo watched as their Supreme Leader unsheathed his mighty digit in anticipation a good ten feet from the platform. Si-Woo suppressed a snicker as the portly dictator held his finger pointing up, taking one profound step at a time.

The silence was heavy, the leader’s walk, tedious, deliberate and slow, as if the moment could be any more profound. They were going to send a nuclear ballistic missile right into the heart of their great enemy. Si-Woo’s hand was getting sweaty and the bottle’s condensation made it slippery. He wiped a hand on his trousers and shook the bottle once more, hoping the pressure had not died down thanks to the ridiculously slow goose-step walk.

Finally, the Supreme Leader was close to the platform. The bikini clad dancing girls watched, their pale chests bearing the weight of worry for their people and their lives. The generals watched too, their chests heavy with medals earned in no war.  

Si-Woo felt a bead of sweat slide down his temple. He made eye contact with one of the girls in a red bikini. She was lovely, even beautiful in a girl-who-has-to-smile-while-her-family-is-in-forced-labor, sort of way. He allowed a smile to cross his face as they shared that one final moment before the world would end. She smiled back and… POP!

Si-Woo’s thumb had slipped and the cork shot like a bullet, hitting the Supreme Leader in the eye. The despot let out a porcine squeal and flailed about as he stumbled. He was the kind of man for whom pain was a novelty, something given (by proxy) but not received. If he stubbed his toe, the nation held its breath.  

None of the generals or the assistants or the bikini clad girls moved to help him. When his over exaggerated cries died down, the room fell silent. Si-Woo bit his lip and looked to his comrades, waiting for the moment they would point him out, and his life would be over.

The Supreme Leader held his hand over one eye and looked around the room, turning red with anger. Si-Woo thought he heard a snicker, and then another. His eyes wide he shut his lips tight. Then the Supreme Leader saw him.

Si-Woo froze and closed his eyes.

This is it. I’m dead.

“You!” The Supreme Leader shouted.

Si-Woo did not open his eyes. he felt the hateful gaze of the man’s one good eyeball on him, the eye in which his destiny now lay. The leader shouted something else, something profane but Si-Woo couldn’t hear it anymore. He only heard the sound of a piano playing, the ivory keys lightly touched by his daughter, Lee. She’d been playing a lovely rendition of Beethoven’s, Moonlight Sonata. She’d been dead two years now. His wife had told him, as the Supreme Leader would not let him go home to be with his daughter when she fell ill.  

Colonel Si-Woo squared his shoulders and braced for the end. Perhaps now he would be with Lee, hear her play again. He opened his eyes to face his fate when he saw something he’d not expected.

The Supreme Leader came at him and he saw his life play out before his eyes to the tune of his late daughter’s piano talent. The Supreme Leader moved aggressively toward Si-Woo and stepped on the Champagne cork. The cork rolled underneath the man’s weight causing him to lose his balance and fall back flailing until his head smacked the corner of the wooden platform’s base and sprang a crimson leak.

Their leader was down. His head at an odd angle, poured red from his temple on the stark white floor as the cork rolled to rest against the tip of his button finger.

Colonel Si-Woo looked around the room at the faces. No one moved for several painfully quiet moments. Then, one of the women, the one in the red bikini picked up a champagne glass and walked over to stand before Si-Woo. It took him a moment to realize she wanted him to pour her a glass. He did, still eyeing the lifeless body of the man whose temper had made so many lifeless bodies. The woman smiled and walked away.

Then, one by one, the bikini-clad girls and the generals all took a glass, stepped before Si-Woo and he poured them each a taste of Champagne. Then, they all raised their glasses, and with a nod to the Master of Celebration, drank them dry.

The Wolf Who Would Bite the Moon

by Bert Rock (2019)

Urhain loped through Bonewood Forest–a landscape of tortured trees, their limbs reaching for the sky like broken fingers.

Something flapped overhead. Urhain let out a low growl. His heart had become an old, chewed bone buried deep in his chest. Urhain looked up but it was gone. Was it Loz? Was it the gray raven, come to gloat again? He remembered Ionoor’s touch on his shoulder, the familiar squeeze, and ruffle of his fur.

“Whatever happens,” Ionoor said then, “do not interfere.”

Ionoor, Sun, Day, Light. He was gone now. It was one time Urhain wished he had disobeyed. Even the memory of his voice was different now. It no longer sounded like the god, but like his own voice.

Urhain wandered through the night, until the moon was low in the sky and he thought he might bite it. He heard the flap again and it came with a smell, it wasn’t a smell as much as the lack of one, like a shape cut out of the night with nothing to replace it.

“Still looking are you?” the voice did not startle Urhain. The huge wolf heard Loz before he’d neared the forest again.  

“What do you want?”

Loz perched on a branch in the form of a raven with feathers the color of a stormy sky.

“I’m curious. Do you know how long it’s been now?” Loz asked.

Urhain lifted his weary head and gave Loz a baleful look. The other Gods called Loz the, “God in Between,” he was the twilight before night and after day–the gray light before dawn and after night. He could be anything or anyone he chose, sometimes changing from male to female and back again at a whim. Urhain did not hate Loz, but he did not trust the gray God.

Loz was a dark shape against the moon on the branch. Urhain did not want to talk, but then, he’d not talked to anyone else since the day and he was lonely.  

“I’ve lost his scent,” Urhain said.

Silence sat between the god and the angel. Finally, Loz fluttered down from the branch and when he landed was in the human form of a gray-furred fox.

“I didn’t think he had a scent,” Loz said. “None of us do.”

“Not to each other perhaps, but to me, to the Ur’Him, you all do.”

“Really?” Loz cocked his fox head to the side. “Well, what does our lost God smell like anyway?”

Urhain thought on how to answer the question. He’d never spoken to Loz for this long and it was unsettling to see the god in a shape he could easily devour, though he knew not to try.

“He smells like the sunrise, like the world waking up to a new day after a long night. The way grass smells when the dew starts to burn away and every living thing that waits for the sun wakes.”

“And what does She smell like?”

Thaana, Moon, Night. Urhain did hate her.

“She smells like the world without a sun.”

“Dare I know what my scent is?” Loz, the fox that was just a raven asked.

The giant wolf looked at Loz. For an instant, Urhain felt the power of his size compared to the small animal before him, but he knew better.

“You smell like nothing,” Urhain turned and walked away.

“Nothing? You mean I have no scent?” Loz said.

“I mean your scent is nothing,” Urhain answered over his shoulder. “Now leave me. You may be a God, but you’re not mine.”

Urhain raised his woolly head and gave a lonesome howl. The cry was long and loud and rattled the fragile trees. When it was over and the echo of it faded from his ears, he looked down again. Loz, the fox that was a raven was gone and Urhain could not help but feel more alone.

Blue Bear

by Bert Rock (2019)

Borgo picked dried jerky from his teeth as he stared at the western sky. He flicked the meat from his beard, which surrounded his face like a thicket of brambles. The Black Teeth Mountains with their jagged peaks looked like they could bite the sun as it fell for the night. There was a sound behind him, his horse, after so much time together he knew the crunch of earth beneath Stew’s steps. The big barbarian turned to see his horse, larger than most men had seen. Stew had to be to bear Borgo’s weight.

“What do you think boy?”

Stew nudged him with his big nose.

“Food,” Borgo shook his head. “Always food with you. Here.”

He pulled a carrot from his bag and gave it to Stew, and rubbed the big horse’s neck as he ate. He liked asking Stew what he thought. Sometimes Borgo thought those big brown eyes contained the wisdom of the world, though the horse would never say. A sour smell curled his nose hairs. He looked about but there was no one else around. It was his bearskin tunic. It was caked with dirt, chunks of mud, and dried blood, it gave off a pungent stench. How long had it been since he had bathed? A few pats with his big hands and dust billowed off surrounding him. Borgo took it off and hung it over a branch on the closest tree.

“Another day gone,” Borgo watched the sky turn from orange, to blue to black.    

They’d been alone, just he and Stew for weeks now, ranging in the eastern Hollow Lands, looking for the Headless Men.

They’d found a small mountain jutting up from the plain and camped by it. The fire waned, and Borgo felt himself ready to drift to sleep. His battle-axe rested next to him, as did the one handed axe he kept close. As the last ribbon of gray marked the horizon, he thought of Obar, his father, who was a giant of a man. Borgo remembered once when his father held him up on his shoulders to watch the last bits of sunset as he told him about their god. He wondered then, if he was as big as Obar. Almost seven feet tall, he had no one from his family or village with which to compare his massive size, or his worth as a man.

“Your God’s name is Brothon,” Obar said. “He is mountain and he is rock, but it is not he who holds up the sky.”

Borgo remembered being surprised by this. There were many Gods, some greater and some not, but he did not expect that his could not hold up the sky.

“Who does?” he’d asked.

“You are a Blue Bear,” his father said. “And do you know why?”

Young Borgo shook his head. He recalled a gleam in his father’s eye, perhaps at the prospect of teaching his son something new.

“From the Silver Sip River to the east, all the way to the western Hollow Lands, that is your sky, and under it is your earth,” his father said and shifted his weight while his son sat on his shoulders. “The Great Bear holds it up.”

“The Great Bear?”

“Ton-Tan-Banak is his name, Brothon’s friend, and his steed. He is so big that he holds the sky on his back, and when he gets tired, he puts the sky down for the night so he can sleep.”

“But why are we called the ‘Blue Bear?”

“The sky was painted by the Gods,” his father said. “Ton-Tan-Banak holds it up, but the paint’s rubbed off on his fur. We give thanks for his burden by honoring him with our name.”

Borgo’s people were gone. His father went off to war and never came back, a duty common to fathers in the Hollow Lands.  

Borgo touched the small leather pouch around his neck, rubbing it and feeling the contents within. Eight small teeth, the first ones lost by his five sons, and then by the three girls who followed. All his love rattled inside. He had another child on the way, and yet here he was with Stew looking for death.

The moon came out with a few stars to peer down on them. Borgo said a prayer for his father, his children, and their mothers. Then he cried for the first time in not that long of a time.

Every Word

by Bert Rock (2019)

Marmac stood at the oldest door in Runestone Tower. It was a plain door, raised from the very bedrock the tower was built on a thousand years before. Back then, the first Maji agreed to raise a structure to protect what was within this room. Behind the thick door, as Marmac knew to be the greatest power there was; the power of the word. It was the power to name and bind all things, the power to know and free them.

Imbued with protective runes and spells to keep the contents within safe, the door had one inscription:  “Here be every word ever spoken, n’ every word never said or broken.”

The sound of a little girl’s laughter echoed through the halls above. Marmac couldn’t help but smile.

“Faunie.”

His daughter was playing host to their guest, Izra Moonborn, the Northwoman from across the sea. It was because of Faunie’s new friend that Marmac had come down to the center of the tower, to check that the door was sound. Izra was found weeks before on the shore of Magestone, wearing an iron breastplate made to fit the form of her fully pregnant belly. There had been no shipwrecks within miles of shore, nor any storms to wreck them. Marmac had heard the story of the fisherman who found her. He’d said a host of hard-shelled crabs surrounded her unconscious body, claws out, as if they were her protectors. One of the kennel master’s hounds nearly had its nose snipped off by one when it went to sniff her.

Since she arrived, Marmac noticed odd things occurring in Magestone. She’d been in a long sleep when she first arrived, a sleep that lasted for weeks. The first strange thing was the dogs. It seemed every one of the city’s dogs had held a vigil for her while she recovered, for weeks in old Pyram’s tower. Hundreds of mutts and hounds howled at all hours of day and night, as if they could wake her.

Marmac put his hand on the door and could feel the hum of power behind it. A sound came from the stairwell, boots shuffling down the dusty stone stairs.  

“Still locked?” the voice belonged to Gion, the master of Flamestone.  

With his size, his wild red beard and his hair he looked more like a barbarian than a Maji.  

“Gion.”

“Drink?” Gion joined him by the door and offered his flask of fiery ale.

“No,” Marmac waved off.

“Worried someone’s gotten in the room?”

“No. Just felt like I should check it.”

“It has protections you know.”

“Haven’t you noticed anything different since she’s arrived?” Doesn’t any of this bother you?” Marmac asked.

“What are you talking about Mac?”

“Things are different since she arrived. You haven’t seen that?” Marmac took Gion’s flask and took a quick swig. “You were there, you heard about the crabs. Then the dogs and even horses seem to react to her in a way I’ve never seen.”

“Is that what you’re worried about?” Gion chuckled. “Horses and dogs and crabs?”

“What about Allgar?”

Marmac had noticed that the Archmaji had visited Izra more times than he would have expected.

“What about him?” Gion scratched his beard.

“Doesn’t he seem, I don’t know…younger?”

Gion laughed. “Probably. She’s new and she’s pretty. You get to be seventy-something and tell me how you feel.”  

“Alright, alright.”

“What’s gotten into you?” Gion put a hand on Marmac’s shoulder. “Faunie seems to like her. They’re laughing it up.” He motioned up the stairs.

“I know. It’s just–something is different now, I can’t quite put it into words.”

“The word Maji can’t put something into words? That’s ironic.”

“I’m serious.”

“What’s different?”

Marmac thought on how to describe it. It was true, he could hardly think of the words to say what he meant. It was easier when he had only his thoughts, but now he had to fit them to a word, and that did not always work the way he wanted.

“Sunlight,” he snapped his fingers. “It’s the sunlight itself.” Seeing the look on Gion’s face, he continued. “Ever since Izra got here, there’s something about the way the sun touches the bricks, the cobblestones and everything around the city…it’s different than it was before.”

Gion’s brow creased as his lips curled slightly. “Uh, different how?”

“I’m not sure,” Marmac thought about it for a moment. “It seems brighter.”

The Musings of Lord Librarian Sage Vanis Snarmat

by Bert Rock (2019)

Part One

Two men in mouse-colored robes, one with skin riddled by time and the other in his twenties sat in a fisherman’s hut. They could hear the roar of the Heart’s Wine River outside. The hems of their garments were torn and caked with mud, their faces grizzled by time away from the comforts of the great library of Magestone. When they came upon the fisherman and his son, they were starving, and not a little surprised to be alive. How they’d managed to escape the city would be a tale of its own, when they were ready to tell it. With his advanced age, the Lord Librarian was likely presumed dead when Magestone descended into darkness.

The Fisherman, who never gave his name, sat in a hammock and smoked his pipe while his son tended to the fire. The mouse colored men sat together by the fire. Sage Vanis Snarmat, the Lord Librarian struggled to eat his soup as his companion, Ormen, scratched words into a book of blank pages.

“I met Izra three times in my life,” Sage Vanis Snarmat said. “When I was just a hungry boy, she gave me food to feed my family, but her beauty gave my heart a hunger. Then again when I was a young man, she gave me work, and the last time I was you see me now, withered and old.”

He paused a moment and looked into his soup. Huddled in a blanket of wolf’s fur, and sitting by the fire and he could not stop shaking.  

“What else did she give you?” asked Ormen, his quill ready to write down the words.  

“Eh? What was that?” Sage Vanis Snarmat said.

“You said she gave you something when you were a boy and a young man,” the Fisherman’s daughter chimed in. “Did she give you anything the last time?”

“Why are you writing this down?” asked the Fisherman. “He’s an old man, and his wits are half gone. He’ll be dead soon. What does it matter?”

“He’s not just some ‘old man.’ He’s the Lord Librarian of Magestone,” Ormen said. “He’s the keeper of wisdom in the Tower of Knowing. And he’s had a life worth writing down.”

Sage Vanis Snarmat continued as if there were no interruption as he wiped his chin with a trembling thumb.

“I fell in love with her the first time I saw her, when I was just a scrawny boy scraping for food on the shores of Mythazos.”  

“How old were you Lord Librarian?” Ormen asked.

“Eh, maybe that,” Sage Vanis Snarmat pointed a shaky finger at the Fisherman’s son. The boy looked to be ten.    

“She gave me a sack of bread and onions,” he continued. “I fed my mother and sister with it. Izra was strong, tall, like a hero. The kind you read about in stories. She’d come from the north and traveled alone. I asked to come with her, but she said no, I was needed by my family.”

Ormen was the Lord Librarian’s Page. He’d been trying to chronicle the Lord Librarian’s story for almost a year. Events of recent months had made it all but impossible, and yet, he found the practice helped to calm his ever-fraying nerves.

“The second time,” Ormen prodded.

“I was a man, a sailor. I was about your age then and eager to see the world,” Sage Vanis Snarmat said. “I’d been in Saltstone then, biggest port city in Mythazos when I saw her again. Her belly had grown a little, but she was beholden to no man. Couldn’t see her taking a husband. She was the Captain and men followed her. She had a strong northern jaw and a beauty like no other. She feared no man, and the lot you find in the taverns of port cities are some of the hardest men you’ll find to be sure. When I saw her she didn’t recognize me, but then why would she? It had been fifteen years since I’d been a little boy. And here she was in front of me, looking almost as young as she was the day she first stole my heart.”

Sage Vanis Snarmat’s voice trailed off a moment but came back with a snort.

“I swabbed the decks and emptied the bilge and did whatever work they gave me. It was just enough to be on the same ship as her. She was as bright as the sun. I stole every look at her I could, like a thief taking a bag of gold one coin at a time. Her hair was like yellow fire. If she walked by you could feel the warmth from her skin. She was strong too. Stronger than anyone on board, well, except for Big Bardin, but he was the size of an ox. Still, she beat them all in arm wrestling. Izra the ‘Iron Mother’ they called her. I asked once why they called her that and they told me never to talk about it again. She was pregnant they said, and she’d been with child for as long as they’d known her, over twenty years. I didn’t believe it, but the men there were convinced it was true, and who was I to question them?”

Sage Vanis Snarmat looked into his bowl of soup for several moments, then gently put it to the side.

“I noticed,” he said. “That wherever we sailed there always plenty of fish for us to eat. Once, I saw the nets fill before they hit the water. Fish just jumped into the rowboats or the nets and we never had to work to get em. Whales swam unafraid and breached often in full view of us, as did the dolphins. They followed us everywhere.”

He coughed a hacking, wheezing cough that shook the Lord Librarian’s slight, old frame. After a moment recovering, he continued, though his voice was weak.

“One day, I noticed that the crew was not like any other crew I’d sailed with. I’d been with a few, but I hadn’t seen one that never got sick before then. Sailors, mind you, often die of disease. It’s a fact of sea life. I’d heard of ships listed dead in the water with all her crew having shat their lives out on the deck, and then when someone healthy goes aboard, they bring the sick with them. Not this crew, not with her, with her everyone was healthy, always.”

Click on the following link to read my story, The Gods of Night and Day up on Wattpad. It’s the story of a god’s search to understand humanity and ultimately himself.

https://www.wattpad.com/715069787-the-gods-of-night-and-day-the-gods-of-night-day