A Bright New Year

 

An apocalyptic poem by Victoria Grace 

 

 

It was another new year,

 

as soon as it had past, glowed and burned out,

 

it had come.

 

 

Another new year,

 

with old messes finished,

 

fresh ones ready and waiting

 

for the tired,

 

yearning

 

and flat-out tired and numb.

 

 

It was yet again time for things to change,

 

those annoying resolutions would be made;

another year

 

expecting something different,

 

while being at once hopeful and afraid.

 

 

Families throughout the country were gathering,

 

food baking and simmering, pastries and cookies,

 

from pizza to greens--

 

busily swallowing calories and digesting last year's dreams.

 

 

There was an ordinary kind of atmosphere on that fateful night.

The cities were about their business, from New York to L.A., there was the regular

 

bustle, crime and money-changing, the usual love-making and fights.

 

 

 

A woman on Twitter posted funny memes and glittery digital cards,

 

another woman lay alone in her dark living room mourning the husband who left 

 

her, while out the door, he sent his ill wishes and holiday disregards.

 

 

But on the eve of renewal there was a burst, an explosion, in the hearts of men and 

 

women in positions and spaces that most people had rarely considered or sought to 

 

know.

 

 

Death was on the way as the hum of celebration vibrated through sleeping bodies 

 

from broken-down trailers to lavish chateaux.

 

 

It didn't matter that the world had lived since breath, time and birth carrying 

 

humankind's struggle on its back.

 

 

It was just a few kind hours until an invention of man created

 

the void and became man's final attack.

 

 

In the still of slumber and quiet of dawn,

 

the brightness in the sky came not from God's dominion and Mother Nature's gift,

 

but scorched the flesh off bones in moments yet painless and swift.

 

 

The stars as those corpses knew them were exploded memories as ash was the 

 

destiny of destruction the morning broke down to and succumbed.

 

 

Frail, strong, beautiful, innocent, villainous bodies were memories mingled with 

 

that ash, the rest left to malformed generations yet to come.

 

 

The answer to the end wasn't spoken of for years, with remnants of half-alive flesh 

 

who had no time to cling to apparitions and ghosts.

 

 

The business of survival was their moment, the past was the past and futures 

 

couldn't be thought of either, only dirt and grubs stuffed in mouths, while  

 

imagining them as succulent beef roasts.

 

 

Hiding holes were filled with remnants of diseased birth, those who grew up 

 

crawling through forgotten ruins and gnawing on patches of grass.

 

 

There was not much left of the clouds, sky or soul, as long as history was buried and 

 

future mutations came to pass.

 

By the time the last generation came of age, history's remembrance was dead.

 

Then finally, the last two people stood in their coming demise and embraced each 

 

other, weeping at the brilliant orange sunset ahead.

"Another Spirit" A Prose Poem by Victoria Grace

 

As I pass through shadowy paths and places, my mind split and vision disconnected from what should be my reality, I remember that the last thing I knew, I was thinking about what to have for dinner the next night. 

 

Right now as I slip in and out of a recreation of my childhood, all my hunger is gone, for food anyway. My past is the present yet it's warped into different, zig-zag pieces that is nearly impossible for me to figure out. I'm hungry for answers because I don't know why I'm here.

 

The old apartment complex where I grew up is the same but not the same, some simulation of what was the best and the worst of my childhood. 

 

There at my old home, in front of the patio where I sat on the grass reading books that made me want to travel the world, is something that has twisted in on itself into a mockery of my memory.

 

Cobwebs cover the patio, thick weeds overgrown where I'd stretched out like a contented cat, making up fantasies and dreaming of adventure. I enter my old family home, hoping to find where I'd come and what I had to gain from revisiting something that couldn't be revived and I find more shadows and cold spaces where there had been warmth. Calling out for answers bring me no answers as it is just a series of large, empty rooms. 

 

I find it hard to believe that anyone has ever lived there. Had I really lived there or had I just imagined a time when I had? I take another step and go through a door that I don't remember into the last place my family had lived in before death struck us, further into the past before I learned new lessons on what it meant to be a survivor.

 

There is even more emptiness but more than that, a feeling of  malevolence in each room and each moment of what I had known to be the opposite. The old living room was not as how we'd left it, the thick dust coating the floors and walls like something out of a graveyard, which in a sense it was, as sickness had taken root there and planted itself in the backwards part of my memory, erupting as distorted crops.

 

I'm looking around for something of familiarity in a place I thought I'd find peace but there really is none to be found here because this is not my home and has turned into something else frightening. 

 

Now, it's just a hollow recreation of moments looped together with fear. In an inverted  world, I walk down a narrow hallway into my bedroom where I'd been a nine year old kid cutting funny pictures out of magazines and taping them to my walls.

 

 

Smoke comes from the corner by the window and I see the lit tip of my grandmother's cigarette. She's back with no explanation as to her return.  

 

She doesn’t say anything, just smiles at me, continuing to puff, puff away and I couldn't think of what I could ask a ghost when I was still alive. But then again, I wasn't sure about anything these days.

 

Stop that, you'll get cancer I told grandma's ghost. And I wouldn't want to lose you again. But she just continues to grin and fades into the walls along with the smoke I always secretly loved the fragrance of but ran away from in fear for my lungs.

 

 

New odors hit me, the scent of my mother's cooking from the kitchen, but when I walk down grey and distorted halls, I can’t see anything except a cold stove and more hollow spaces. I look around for an exit but there are no more escape hatches to be found and the loneliness is overwhelming. 

 

The concept of finality always has held such dread for me in my life. Sitting on the floor, these are the strung-together sequence of memories, I know, has held together what I used to call 'nostalgia' but which now takes on an alternate meaning.

 

There was just myself to contend with now, no more specters. There was time to deal with the present and the past combined and look for the answers I'd been seeking no one else besides me could give me.

 

There's no sun or moonlight here so I cannot count the days but I've passed through these rooms and seen my dead grandmother so many times I've lost count. I've yet to find the truth but one of these days, it'll come to me.

This Story Hits Hard: A Review of F. Paul Wilson's Mini Masterpiece, "Soft" (a tale about a virus that's the end of everything)

Soft by F. Paul Wilson is a short story that deals in some of the most INTENSE of dread--a person's body collapsing in on itself, bones disintegrating into nothingness. What causes it? A VIRUS that has mutated into the collective nightmare of humanity. I don't know when it was the last time I read a story that smacks the viewer in the face with something so grisly and morbid yet does it so hauntingly, not exploitatively. No line of the dialogue and inner monologue of the protagonist, a virus-stricken single father rendered vulnerable but not yet helpless in a desolate Manhattan, is wasted. Each moment of the story pushes the action forward into new spaces of fear and terrible loss. The indescribable pain that a character must feel in this world where a virus turns the bones into powder, leaving a blob of skin and hair on the ground....wow! It is a story that really crawls under your flesh and lingers there. 

The story centers around a man and his teenage daughter Judy, a former dancer whose whole lower half of her body has been rendered useless and flopping flesh by the ravages of this bone-dissolving virus. He has lost the use of his legs himself and scoots around on cloth-wrapped knees, the pitiful image of that immediately burned into the reader's mind. Manhattan is a ghost town, its residents having crumbled in on themselves a long time ago, isolation being something the father-daughter pair have gotten used to, with their only friend (and helper) being a curiously unaffected man called George. The virus has burned a path throughout the world, the story beginning with a super grisly bit of a newscaster's jaw actually breaking apart live on-air. For most, some of their limbs go first, then the other bones in their body, then it's total deterioration. It doesn't matter that the virus doesn't strike a person dead right then and there. It rapidly whittles down a life, causing multiple breaks, the body literally going "soft" until there's nothing left except loose flesh on the floor. it's the worst kind of hell a person can imagine and there's absolutely no cure for it.

Right away, reading a story about something so horrific during these very hard times of of course, an altogether different, but for numerous people, painful, dangerous and even fatal virus, caused me to look at this story with a fresh perspective. Of course the author of this magnificently creepy and disturbing tale wouldn't have been able to predict that nearly forty years later, the world would be battling a virus that is *for many* debilitating and frightening, striking them randomly, causing varying levels of suffering, but the story hits on a different, visceral level now. Soft is a look at what happens when hope is sucked out of the world, like a vacuum, and all that's left is ongoing, endless anxiety for what awaits.  The future in this is not anything to look forward to but dreaded and mourned. The sounds the bones make in this tale when they're on the verge of breaking are described by the narrator as the sickening sound of rustling cellophane, all these little fragmentations that a victim of the softness can hear before their own collapse. It's one more graphic but oh so powerful detail that drives home the message of how completely doomed everybody is. 

What does "doom" mean though when there's still love, devotion and the family? This is a good question I feel Soft asks with this father who is so dedicated to shielding his daughter from the pain and at the end of this story, inevitable loss, they'll likely both suffer. The virus has taken their legs, most of their mobility and independence away, but not their determination to keep living. A fragment of promise for them that's been preserved because the bone-dissolving virus has so far only struck their lower parts of their bodies and not the rest of their bone structure, like pretty nearly everyone else who he refers to as "jello". The father feels they can continue on a life of some worth, eventually looking to find other survivors of this plague and linking up with them. At the same time however, a new problem arises where the one untouched human being they know, George, has gone missing. Without him, their lives have gotten that much harder and painful to bear. The twist to this story is a gut-punch and makes you feel that there just may be no real escape for this father and daughter after all...

The desolation of this virus is also like nothing I've ever read before in an apocalyptic tale. We often take our bodies and their functions for granted. We get up in the morning, go about our day, tend to our families and occupations but we rarely ever think about what it means to have this intricately constructed system that is US. It serves our needs so perfectly, propels forward our society in a million different ways--creates offspring, constructs buildings, creates art, writes beautiful music, and so many more aspects of civilization. Where would not only the individual but society itself be if it all that was and ever will be was melted into a pile on the floor, as insignificant as a heap of moldy, leftover food? This story brings forward something deeply chilling because us as humanity, with all of our pride, hubris, accomplishments, intelligence and heart, is shown as being easily dissolved into the depths of nothing. It stays with you. It kind of haunts you and knocks around in your brain for a little bit--the mark of a brilliant writer!

I think what I liked most about Soft is how straight-forward and intensely and tightly written it was. The end of the world is so insidious here. It's not waiting on the bombs to drop, or an asteroid to smash into the earth, just a series of moments of quiet desperation.  The thing about this story is it doesn't neatly wrap up anything, it doesn't offer any elaborate explanation. It doesn't necessarily preach a moral, it doesn't sermonize. There's no neat resolution either, the conclusion being this father and daughter waiting for their relative good luck to run out. It's as I mentioned, a wellspring of DREAD. Some stories are a snapshot of darkness, a peek into a nightmare. But the best of them stay with you, causing you to think about what you would do in that kind of situation. What could any person possibly do in the middle of the end of the world? 

If you want a short, phenomenal apocalyptic read, definitely check out Soft by F. Paul Wilson. You might find yourself a new appreciation for the biological art that is the skeletal structure! You damn sure will be grateful.

You can read the entire story for FREE right here.

"The Dust" A Poem about a dying world

 

From the ground we came and to the ground we'll return.

There has been a collapse in the cities while extant souls endure a rapid burn.

It was only a brief wait for the beginning of the rest, demands for vanishing resources, reawakenings of the oppressed.

I am certain that we are now moving from the last fragment of light.

There's a writing in the sky that concludes our future and flames abominably bright.

It was as if these last few centuries built up this moment here,

we all were making our lives while time was creating this dead frontier.

Allow me to introduce myself.

I am a figure of this present curse.

I can tell of those who have spent their labor hurting and blessing in the last few moments of our piece of the universe.

First it was the crops,

then it was our breath.

These invisible poisons spread in the skin and the land causing silence, bringing death.

Monuments to love and hate were  broken to men and women's desire.

The hidden corners were shared by the weak and the reason of spirit, civilization, was burned by the shattered in one long fire.

We thought we had moved past illness, outlawed untimely pain.

Those before us had suffered so that we could do better for our children, breaking suffering's chain.

But this meaning for sunlight had vanished.

Sunlight was just playing a cruel joke on our heads.

Many struggled through flesh and wreckage, flew through our twilight, while abandoning meaningless words, leaving them unsaid.

Our right to continue this story had been stopped in mid-sentence it seemed.

It was easier to forget the past and close out the future while discarding past and present dreams.

Breath was exhaled of many dead futures as it drained from lungs and minds.

Lying in wait for darkness, that's how it turned out that nature and fate had designed.

I fear it's too much to hope for that reversal of destiny can come to pass.

It's a trial of the worst of us quite frankly, that the rest of us are made to suffer in this short eternity of a trap.

But as long as I breathe with the memory of a knowledge that will soon fade from collective view, my mind is still sharp and I can guarantee that my witness is true.

Had we forgotten the memory of those years before who'd  been buried, it might've made it easier to understand.

But nobody had learned from the dead and the buried.

Sorrow and ignorance had become the reigning demand.

I tried to tell those after me what we had gone through many decades before, some who joined in our echoes, but there were screams, curses and warnings of war.

Distractions were in the eyes, heart and face as well as phenomenal rage.

The inevitable became that much closer, man against woman, race against race.

It made it all that much easier for the young to go first, then the old, then the strong.

It wasn't going to be a question of if but the fury of waiting and the notes of the dying's song.

As it slid by, there was no food and a silencing of the debates.

The loudest voices became soft whispers then silence, radio silence, as I remember the phrase.

But you see, I'm remembering too many phrases of no particular consequence from my past and childhood years.

Time has wound down and I don't have any further sorrow.

I've  cried out all my tears.

There will be no more fourth, fifth chances or births of joy or despair, only disappearance of feeling and obsolescence of prayer.

There are few things left for me to remember and say.

I think it's time to finish this archive, just words on the dust, and call it a day.

"Newborn" A short tale by Victoria Grace

 

I was born in an instant. I was born in a hot flash. I was born because my papa was lonely. Somewhere from the light or the dark, I don't know which, I came alive.

My eyes snapped open just as my papa was slicing at a hunk of wood, talking to himself about what a beautiful "marnet" it was going to become for "the bambenose". I don't know what a "marnet" is, but from the way he smiled, it must have been something good. 

He stood there slicing, slicing, with little bits of the wood flying everywhere around him. I just sat, watching him, smiling. Above his head were little hanging people. They didn't talk like my papa did and I wondered if maybe I could play with them. I tried to walk off of the table I was sitting on top of, but I couldn't control my body and I landed below, making a loud noise and causing my papa to stop his slicing.

He turned his head around and yelled out, asking who was there, but I couldn't answer him and say "It's me, papa" because I had landed face first. When I didn't say anything, he went back to his slicing and I tried to get up. It wasn't easy because my body felt so stiff but I managed to push myself to my feet which, looking down, were small wobbly brown things--not like my papa's which were big and white. I hoped that after my papa saw me, he would get me better feet.

I tottered over, saying "Papa, here I am! Here I am, Papa!" and hugged his legs, looking up at him, knowing he would laugh out loud and scoop me up.

But something else happened. The tool he had been using to slice, dropped from his hands and he stared at me, his mouth open and his eyes popping out. I was waiting for him to pick me up, but instead, he started screaming and clutching his chest. He kept shouting, "il lavoro del diavolo! il lavoro del diavolo!" over and over again before he fell down, with his eyes staring up and his mouth open.

I didn't know what to do. Had I said something bad?

I walked over to him, a little bit better than before (my body was getting easier to move), and tapped him.

 "Papa? Papa? Wake up. I'm sorry that I made you mad" I said.

I stood there, tapping and poking him for a while until it had turned black outside, but he still wouldn't move.

When I had been brought was just a moment ago. But then I started wondering about the who and the where. What kind of reason was there to come alive for papa if he wasn't going to be there to BE my papa? I knew I had no answers for these questions and maybe my head would've been too dense to understand the answers if I'd been given them. So I sat there for hours, curling up my stiff knees the best I could, staring up at the ceiling at the little dangling feet of the hanging people. Smiles were frozen on their faces. I really wished one of them would've talked to me, letting me know when everything would be better again, when papa would wake up. I was there until the morning, waiting for one of them to speak to me, hoping they would be my friends, but it was just me, silent papa, and the blackness that took over the small dusty room.

I stopped trying to move him after a few hours went by. Papa had gone to another place. Maybe it was the place I had come from or the one I was going to end up, I didn't know. But I knew that I needed help.

I felt a sadness in me because all of this happened because I accidentally did something terrible to my papa. I hadn't meant it. I loved him, but maybe he didn't feel the same way about me and that's why he had gone from this place of wood and dust and strange hanging people who just smiled and grinned at me without answering my questions.

I put my hand that I knew somehow was his handiwork, on his pale face, but I didn't feel anything, no sensation on my fingers.

 

 

"Goodbye Papa" I said, 'I'm going to meet others like you. I hope they won't all fall down and leave me. I need a place to belong, I hope you understand. Sleep well."

The door of the little room was cracked open and I squeezed through. It was very different on the outside and looking up into the blackness I saw a shiny white circle that one day many days later, I overheard someone call the moon. Down at my feet were little yellow flowers standing straight up. My sadness went away and I started giggling, grabbing a few. It was all so pretty and I was so amazed by everything that I didn't even hear the furry creature come up behind me until I heard its panting. I turned around and looked into its shaggy face with a pink tongue hanging out of it. Thinking at the time that this was maybe one of the "bambenose" I heard my papa talk about, I reached out to touch it, but suddenly its sharp teeth sank into my arm, taking a chunk out of it. I looked in confusion at my arm and at its furry face. "Why did you do that?" I asked. It didn't answer, though--just spat it out and ran off. I started feeling sad again. It didn't like me like my papa didn't like me. 

I went on, walking, looking for a place where I could meet more people who I could ask questions about the beauty and the wonder of all that was around me and why I had come alive, but everything was dark and there wasn't anybody around. 

I sighed and decided to wait for the next day. I sat down in a large, green corner and patiently waited for the people to come out. The next day, another big round thing came up in the sky, which unlike the moon, was orange and I later heard, was called the sun. I peeked out from behind and saw lots of people moving around--big ones like my papa and ones with long hair holding the hands of even smaller people. The even smaller people I really couldn't stop staring at. They were kind of like me, but their bodies were white and softer than mine. Were they the bambenose? I saw that they were being picked up, like I had wanted from my papa, hugged and given brightly colored things to eat. The big people and long-haired people holding their hands didn't scream at them, but talked to them real nice, and gave them kisses on their faces. I started thinking about my papa again and wondered if I should go back and promise to be extra good to make up for the terrible thing I had done that had caused him to fall down and go away. Maybe, just maybe, he would wake up!

I was about to turn back when I saw a person with long black hair up ahead, sitting down on the grass. The long-haired person had a small, really TINY person that sucked at its chest. I watched, amazed, and got closer and closer, until I was standing right in front of them. The long-haired person was looking down at the tiny person, touching its head and smiling. I stood there, not saying anything, for a little while longer, until I couldn't stop myself from asking "Why are you doing that?" The long-haired person lifted its head, still smiling, but when seeing me, shouted, their eyes wide and popped, then began screaming things at me that didn't sound too nice until other people, both big and smaller ones, came running towards us. 

"Hello. I was just born last night. Can you tell me where I am and maybe where I can get new feet?" I asked. 

They didn't answer me, but like my papa, started screaming, "il lavoro del diavolo!" at me and the big ones, with their red faces curled up, began kicking at and stomping on me.

I was very frightened because bits of me were chipping and flying off of my body and they would not stop.

One of the big people dropped me and before I could get stomped again, I ran as quickly as my wobbly feet could go and I kept running until I couldn't hear the people screaming at me anymore. I found another spot in another green place far away from all of them and I curled up, looking at all the damage done to me. They had taken a lot off of my body and there were holes and little chunks missing. I still didn't feel anything on the outside, but there was a strong feeling moving up inside, where nobody could see or know about me. I felt like the only one of its kind in all of the land around me, and it didn't feel good. I felt alone. It only became worse when I looked down and saw that one of my legs was dangling, about to break off. I snapped the whole piece off and threw it aside and tilted my head back, looking up at that "moon", which had appeared again. I can't sleep like my papa so I just looked up until the sun came back, big, bright and reliable. I began to consider the moon and the sun as friends of a kind. They gave me warmth and cool and were beautiful to see. And best of all, they didn't yell at me or break my body. Of course, they didn't say anything at all but they were still comforting.

I wished that I could have understood what I was doing that was bad and made the people shout and get red. If only I had known what bad thing I was doing, what the purpose of coming alive was all about, my papa wouldn't have gotten mad at me and fell down, and he could have picked me up, smiling and happy like I had wanted him to be. 

Ever since my birth day, I stay away from all of the people because they scare me. I get around okay with one leg and hop from one place to another, sometimes still peeking out of my corners at all of them, hearing them talk, laugh, and picking up new words. They all look so happy. Like I want to look. I miss my papa and it's been a long time since I've seen him, but I finally understand that he's gone forever and there is no going back.

The thought has occurred to me that I might not ever get new feet.