Flash Fiction: The Darkness precedes the Outsiders
She wells up from beneath, a leviathan of old, hungry and elemental, witnesses feel the disturbance, but their rolling minds cannot make sense of what occurs about them. It’s a storm, swirling motions of thought and insight and anger, such raw, intense anger.
Plants wither and the ground blackens, turns cold, frosted and crackles. The sky becomes black and blue, an epic bruise on reality.
The minds race and tick-tick-click to unravel, to make sense of, to justify what they are witnessing. Their mommies and gods did not prepare them for those who would step out-side.
*
Later
The Outsiders have come and gone, moved on to new slaying grounds. In their wake all is rui, but undeniably, a freshness hangs in the air. Rebirth at the hands of the destroyers. The fires are out, the ground is no longer hard and cold and dry. Bright green pushes through cracks in the firma, bubbles of life from the earthy ocean.
The poet-boy, Piotr, is now grown to manhood. And he leads his people, those few who survived the Outsiders. At night, when the children are asleep, he gathers the adults and tells them, again and again, (“for it is the doom of men that they forget”) of his encounters with the Outsiders, how he lived as their thrall.
He closes his eyes as he speaks, to better recall the horrors. The Outsiders made him swear, upon threat of their eventual return, to never forget what they made him witness too.
Piotr, dutiful Piotr, remembers clearly. His eyes press tight, his breath comes fast. He can see the Outsiders; the suit, the armsman, the speaker, the plotter. They came in sheep skins and mingled among the flocks until their idol burst forth from the earth, their ideology, summed best *revolution*.
To their banner flocked the mis, the dis, and lost, the hungry, the wild, the mad, and the dreamers. Armed with hope and hatred and contempt, the Outsiders made war upon upon Piotr’s people, slaying their ways as surely as they had slain their way-makers. In all of the Lands of the Second Blessed, only Piotr, who wanted to be a policeman when he grew up, was spared.
Piotr the poet tells the story, sparing no detail, with his words weaving tornadoes of fire, oceans of blood, and avalanches of bone. The Outsiders are gorgons, flayers, knife-fighters, and insidious venomous snakes.
Piotr the poet, uses his words to hide meaning, layered dreams of freedom, long, still eyed looks and purposeful tears, as he tells the story. And he hopes, hopes against hope (for prayer is forbidden to Man-who-thinks), that the children will see his message and one day grow strong, become mighty and throw off the shackles of the Outsiders.
And Poor Piotr the Poet who wanted to be a police man, cannot see that he is a police man, and he is forced, unknown to enact a pattern of protection. The Outsiders, their phoenix-army of ideals, foresaw poor dreaming Priotr, the last child of the Before.
These new babies, they don’t know the kiss of silicon and plastic, they’ve never, nor will they ever, feel the adrenaline fueled thrum of internal combustion.
Theirs is a simple world, they know love and satisfaction, and hard work. They know music and dance. They know very little, but they know all they need.
