Night of the Jergen

It was past midnight, but that hardly mattered…

In the wastelands, where only the jergen thrived, had learned how to survive, where even the Tuska had never penetrated, the man who called himself Polycarp, although that wasn’t his name, waited.

Jergen were the fiercest predator. The Tuska sometimes told themselves the Danab had adapted so as to challenge them. This was folly. The Danab were Danab before they had ever called themselves by that name. Danab were tall by any standard, but even they looked up when a jergen emerged. The Danab had come before anyone knew dinosaurs had once roamed the planet Earth; this was a different world, a savage world, where their prehistoric creatures hadn’t died away. They had instead given way to the strongest, the largest, the fiercest…the jergen. Who stalked in the wastelands throughout the millennia. No one knew how they endured. Nothing else grew there. Except the jergen.

Polycarp was armed with a single axe. He brought no provisions with him, no shelter, no armor, not even his helmet. He stood truly exposed. He had been in the wastelands for a week. He was at the limit of his endurance. He had begun to hallucinate. As such, when the jergen first reared its head, Polycarp at first thought he had conjured it. At last. He had been relieved.

Then, even he began to panic.

The jergen advanced, slowly, as if dismissing Polycarp. Polycarp knelt in prayer, placing his axe down, voluntarily relinquishing its safety. The jergen sniffed and then snorted, scratching its paw in the sands. A cloud bellowed, engulfing Polycarp, who didn’t stir. 

Then the jergen roared, and Polycarp’s hand reached for the axe.

He swung upward, faster than the jergen could react, slicing into its thick hide, and the jergen didn’t even notice. He swung again and connected again, and the jergen snorted.

It was a cold night. The wastelands were unforgiving. The jergen charged, the very short distance punishing Polycarp his impudence, knocking him over. He held onto the axe. He swung again, across the jergen’s flank, and there he drew first blood.

The jergen paused. Polycarp knelt again. The jergen began to pace.

Then Polycarp threw the axe aside, and leaped on the jergen’s back. He laced his arms around the jergen’s throat, and began to tighten his grip.

The jergen thrashed. Polycarp, weakened by his ordeal, knew even in peak shape he should not have been able to hold on. He did anyway. The jergen bucked, and Polycarp held. He wiped all thought away. Long ago, a lifetime ago, when he was young, his father had told him about the jergen, how in the old days, the Danab had held them as pets. Long ago. Ancient history. The long wars with the Tuska had changed all that. It became tradition to hunt the jergen, instead. To try and prove something.

Polycarp’s reasons were his own. No one knew why he was out here. No one knew he was even here. He could die, and no one would know. 

The jergen slammed its own body into the sands. Polycarp held. Then it was his advantage indeed, since a jergen cannot easily right itself. It had in a sense already conceded defeat. Polycarp did not allow himself to believe it.

Through the jergen’s thick hide, he could feel nothing. The jergen betrayed nothing. Polycarp lost all track of time. He tried to read the stars. He couldn’t feel his fingers anymore. Still, he held.

He became aware that the jergen was no longer struggling. He held still. He held until it was daylight, and then for a little while longer. Then he let go. He couldn’t feel his arms anymore. He circled around the jergen, until he could look it in the eye, and then he knew. He picked up the axe again, and knelt. When he was ready, he swung the axe one more time, severing the jergen’s head, slung it over his shoulder, and began the journey…home.

The Boy Who Grew Up

Marty Sale found himself daydreaming in the middle of a haircut…

He was retired, by then, not from cutting hair, but from his optometrist office, the one he’d had in the city. He wasn’t there, now, in the city, or even in the suburbs, but in the very outskirts, way back in small town life, what he thought he’d escaped long ago. But this was the Midwest. No one ever escaped. You just kind of forgot it for a while.

Marty never forgot the boy. That would’ve been impossible. His folks brought him out to the city all in a panic. The boy had just started school and the teacher was already complaining, saying he was a constant disruption…Not because he was unruly (he surely was nothing like the president’s…son, who certainly didn’t attend a public school, but who, like his father, was…inescapable; Marty’s firsthand experience was because they condescended to using his office, too), which was obvious enough, just from how patiently he sat in the waiting room, how he didn’t even fidget in the chair, how when they brought him back with his new glasses he actually apologized…

No, the boy hadn’t needed glasses, and truth was…Marty never did figure out what was wrong, and in truth stopped worrying about it before too long, but he also couldn’t help but notice…the boy never stopped wearing the glasses. Marty never asked. Would never even had crossed his mind…

He watched the boy grow. When he showed up in the city, as a man, Marty found his name in the bylines of newspaper articles. Otherwise he never saw him. No one did, probably. There was plenty to keep everyone busy, though. 

Marty’s specialty had always been eyes. He never forgot them. He wondered…

What else had that boy experienced? He imagined that even then, the boy could fly. When had it all emerged? Probably he’d always had those gifts. His parents had never let him feel less than…loved. Rare enough. Certainly the president’s son…Too many others. What Marty saw was exactly what he’d always seen in the boy. Being…decent. 

He’d simply grown up. Maybe even as a boy…Some of us, Marty thought, are born grown. That boy was surely one of them. It just took a while for everyone else to notice. Or, maybe, stop noticing. Just started taking him for granted, even with…That paper he wrote for, sometimes about his own…It was just about selling copies. Almost turned into a tabloid, with all those pictures…The editorials, bought by the former president, penned by that son of his…It didn’t matter. Truth and justice, however elusive, and whatever the American way was supposed to be, now…

Marty shivered. The barber asked if he was okay. Marty didn’t know how to reply.

And at that moment, the boy who’d grown up, flew past.

Must There Be a Santa?

There comes a time when…you don’t believe.

It happens to everyone. For some it’s at the very beginning. They never even get the chance; someone made the decision for them. For most it’s later. They think they grow too old, too smart, or simply outgrow the idea.

And I’m not talking about Santa.

So what’s the need for Santa?

Marty was at that point. Santa was presents, of course, he was the very symbol of the holiday, he was the jolly fat man with the reindeer and the impossible task of visiting…everyone, on a single night. But never caught in the act. That was one of the central tenets. If you saw him it was your dad, your mom. Or some guy at the mall, ringing a bell. The real Santa?

That was an act of belief. That was how Marty understood it. Until he didn’t. He started making his own lists, the way these things go, and gradually realized the gifts he found under the tree…didn’t match. So it was your basic disappointment.

This year was going to be different. He’d been obsessing about it all year. It was the running dialogue in his head, the thing he told no one about. Santa wasn’t something you talked about with friends anyway. He wasn’t even something you talked about with mom and dad, not after those first few years, anyway.

No, he was a private matter, something you thought about late at night. Well, if you were Marty, anyway.

For Marty it was a kind of torture. He didn’t need Santa to know there would be presents under the tree. He needed Santa for…What? That was the crucial question.

He was old enough to know what Christmas was all about. He’d seen a few versions of the Dickens story at this point. Good will toward men. Whatever that meant. Being…happy.

But Marty wasn’t happy. He needed to figure out Santa.

If you take away the proposition that Santa exists to deliver presents, what does that leave? Must there be a Santa?

His dad must’ve heard him stirring, because he stuck his head in Marty’s room. Marty pretended to be asleep, but his dad knew.

“Hey, kid,” his dad said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I’m not worried,” Marty said.

“Oh, I’m not talking about gifts,” his dad said.

“I know,” Marty said.

“So what it?” his dad said.

“I don’t understand Santa Claus,” Marty said. “What’s the point?”

“Well, you know the story,” his dad said. “Saint Nick.”

“Yeah,” Marty said.

“Then you know what Santa is about,” his dad said.

“Well, no,” Marty said.

“Okay,” his dad said. “Not so easy. Okay. Let’s see. You want to know why bother with him. Why you ever needed to believe. Well. That’s…that’s a big one. Sure you don’t want to sleep on it?”

“Sure,” Marty said.

“Sure you don’t want Mom to handle this one?” his dad said.

“If she needs to,” Marty said.

“No!” his dad said. “I mean, it’s okay! I can handle this…He’s kind of the spirit…You know what that is, right?”

“Yeah,” Marty said.

“He’s the spirit of the thing,” his dad said. “Not like…a mascot. Angel. He’s like an angel. Hark! And all that…Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Maybe?” Marty said.

“Saint Nick,” his dad said, “And then…Well, Christmas as we know it is kind of…a pretty recent invention, really. We imagine Santa to be very old, but in…ah…relative terms? He’s actually quite young. But that would be…weird. A young Santa would be weird, but kind of cool, if you thought about it…No, he looks the way we imagine him to look. He’s not an idea…Don’t get me wrong.”

“He could be an idea,” Marty said.

“Sure,” his dad said, “but he’s not. Some ideas are too real to be imaginary. You know what? Never mind, that’s…a little much. What I mean is, he’s the version of the story that makes the most sense to us, so that’s…that’s why he exists. Maybe in another hundred, two hundred years there’ll be a different need, and…Santa will get to relax…Now? He makes his visits…to bless us. You know, like the Ghost of Christmas Present. That’s…ah, the real gift. Not what’s under the tree. Do you understand?”

“I guess,” Marty said.

“Listen,” his dad says, “give me a hug.”

“Sure,” Marty said.

It took him forever to fall asleep. But he wasn’t anxious. He thought maybe he really had understood. 

Voice of God...

In the beginning...

She didn't speak of it.  She never spoke of it.  She couldn't...

The day that changed everything, that changed humanity forever, right from the beginning, when Eve spoke with the serpent, who convinced her to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, she was shown...everything.

She felt instant shame.  That was what God had wanted her, and Adam, and humanity, to avoid.  To remain eternally...innocent.  Innocent wasn't the same as pure.  Innocent meant to be free of the burden.  The serpent had attempted to be cunning, to convince her that God had meant to coddle them, to keep them docile.  But Eve had lived in Eden.  She had seen everything there was to see.  She simply hadn't understood...

He had shown her everything.  In fact, in his pride he really had...and it had nearly overwhelmed her.  He had shown her everything possible.  He had shown her...everything.  What had so blinded the serpent was that it had seen everything, too, and it hadn't understood.  It had blinded itself, perhaps, or perhaps it had been incapable of such comprehension, such things.  She had, though.  Oh.  

She had been second.  For a very brief moment, Adam had been alone, and then God had decided there should be more, that Adam needed a companion, and so he had drawn Eve from out of him, and...Without the serpent, perhaps, even then, humanity would have run its course.  The serpent showed Eve such a potential, and perhaps, in all the possibilities, it had shown her lies, because, of course, all possibilities are lies, and the serpent didn't know that, had believed its imagination spoke truth, and that was a kind of truth, if it had imagined with wisdom, so of course it had not.  Only what happened was true, and only one course was true, and in its folly, the serpent had shown Eve not only possibilities, but the future, the one true course, and it had shown her...

A manger, and a man and a woman, somewhere down the course of history, what, in the beginning, would have seemed magic, impossible, what to God was simply another quirk of existence, what to the serpent was folly, and to Eve, capable of being grasped, at least for a moment, a fleeting glimpse, and a baby...

What child was this?  

Later, Eve very much wanted to explain all of this to Adam.  Surely not in the moment, not when Adam felt shame, not when God spoke to them, banished them from the garden, when they had lost all their innocence...

And what was that?  What was this thing they now had to fill their days attempting to contend with, to understand?  

The knowledge that they had to worry about consequences...That they could choose to ignore them, to be crippled by them, or to use them as guideposts...And who was that child?  God, as Adam never failed to remind them, was no longer a step away.  He was an eternity.  They were cut off forever.  Or, perhaps, not.  Eve, in the very back of her mind, saw the thread.  She saw her children, she saw the murder, she saw the communities of mankind, she saw the struggles forward, the denials, the betrayals, the...hope.  Not for what they would someday have again, if they were good.  What they might have, if they chose to do good, what it might mean in their everyday life.  

It wouldn't be easy.  They would certainly need guideposts.  In her moment of weakness, Eve had already proven that.  Too easy to be led astray.  But her moment of weakness had shown her, as would always be true, what strength could look like.  

The child she saw was God, and the clarity that what they'd lost...They could reclaim.  Not like before.  They would have to rely on...faith.  Not faith to make their lives better, as if through magic.  Faith, so that they could navigate the guideposts, make the right choices.  Had she made the wrong one?  God had already seen it.  He had seen everything.  The child had already been born, since He was God, and even before His birth had been in existence...And Eve had seen that, too.  She had seen Evil, and she had, surely, seen Good...Evil, the chance to use her thoughts for selfish reasons, Good the chance to...

In the days after the expulsion, she kept all these things to herself.  Adam forgave her, and they made a family, and in the years that followed, when they had understood death, she wondered about...pride.  If she would be...remembered.  If she would be condemned, if she would be understood...

She supposed it didn't matter.  She had glimpsed a new beginning, somewhere very close to the beginning, and also very much in the middle of a drop in the vast expanse of eternity...A light in the darkness.

The Colorado Kid’s Haven

“Cos not.”

Of course not.

Most of the other times Marty spoke he would’ve elaborated in his calm, almost academic manner, at length, and that would’ve been that, but on this occasion…he just didn’t have the patience to get into it. There was just too much, and it wouldn’t have been near as simple as when he’d explained why he no longer shot squirrels (surely his best, simplest story), and…this one was really for him, and that was kind of the point.

He was a widow, now, and these things were important. The years weren’t advancing anymore, they were in retreat. Some things you kept to yourself. When you’re very young, nothing’s yours. Then you get a few years, and you almost live for the idea. Put a decade or two under your belt and most people forget…But you remember, late.

And so he remembered, for himself.

A great many years ago when he’d been one of those kids, when his folks had taken him on a vacation somewhere off the coast, on an island, where a lot of Mainers thought the real life of the state existed, and most vacationers, at that, he’d made a friend. 

A somewhat long story short, later he discovered his friend, who had also been on vacation, but from way out in Colorado, had had a son, who was very happy with his life, except his dad had died, a phone call happened, and that’d changed everything.

This man sounded nervous. They didn’t know each other, the man had never heard his dad talking about Marty, had only discovered his existence in an old scrapbook, which featured a picture of the two, Marty’s name, and the name of the island that had improbably introduced them. The man had done some digging, and while Marty himself and few enough of his acquaintances thought of him in relation to a job, that’s how the man found him. And arranged to meet, on that island. Or near-abouts.

He had clearly been nervous. He’d never done anything like this before. He had a wife and a newborn son…But he didn’t talk much about them. He just wanted to reconnect with his dad…or the closest he could. Which would be Marty.

Marty arranged everything. The man showed up hungry, practically twitching. As it happened Marty had a friend who lived on the island, who agreed to let them stay at his home (this was decades before anyone had thought of airbnbs, mind you), and that’s where Marty prepared the steak, but the man, being so nervous, had insisted on eating at a diner, and so the steaks cooled in a refrigerator, and Marty and the man had fish and chips. 

The man showed Marty a pack of cigarettes he thought Marty might enjoy, but Marty hadn’t smoked in decades. Played around with one to be polite, set it aside when it only made things more awkward. The man showed Marty a coin that had belonged to his dad, just some silly knickknack…

And it ended badly. They moved things to the house, and the man, late at night, went trudging through its dark interior, and Marty listened as first the fridge door opened and then the front door…

And then later, when he was back home, in that lonely place where his kids were all grown and his wife’s side of the bed was cool…he learned that the man had choked to death.

There are things you can’t explain. Did Marty feel a twinge of guilt, as if he’d abandoned the man during some midlife crisis? Cos he did. But these are the things you keep to yourself.

Cos they are. That’s life.

He wasn’t about to have a whole conversation about any of that. He moved on to some other topic. Most of life was like that. Some things anyone can find out. He gave that man’s wife better peace not explaining any of this. Her and everyone else. A kind of safe haven. Even if the mystery of it seemed otherwise.

He's Dead, Jim: Ballad of a Redshirt

There was a significant gap, or so I grew up believing, between our ages, my brother and me.  It kept growing, the older we got, seeming less when we were younger, more, later.  When he successfully enrolled in the fleet, I was still in high school, and he was already aboard the flagship as I continued my education at Coon Prep, counting down the days to graduation.  And he just kept stealing all the attention, up to and including the day we were informed of his death.

     My name’s Donny Silo.  It seems crass, even to me, still living down a relic of an imagined rivalry, to continue thinking of it that way, given what happened, and my attempts to make sense of it.  I continued chasing him, right into the fleet, doggedly pursuing the same path, never failing to mention my ambition to serve aboard the flagship, always hearing all about my big brother, never feeling worthy, never having found out anything about his actual service, until the day I was given the assignment.  Well, both of them, including the red shirt.

     Red shirt, as in security.  Engineers and communications also wore red shirts, while command wore yellow, and the sciences blue.  My red shirt could’ve come up with any number of duties, but mostly it was waiting around to be needed, waiting and listening.  Everyone talked about my brother.  Not the captain, not the doctor, and certainly not the alien (I don’t mean to sound xenophobic or anything, but aboard that ship, while I was there, anyway, everyone else was human, and it was just the one alien, and the way I heard it, even he was half-human, though you wouldn’t know it by how he behaved), not the holy trinity of elites aboard…But everyone else?  They loved my brother.  He was a legend.

     He was also, as I believe I’ve already stated, quite dead. 

     All the security officers volunteered for missions aboard this ship.  They were eager, I guess, to share time with the trinity, desperate to prove they were worthy to be there, too, just as brave, or maybe even more brave, than even the captain, who didn’t need to expose himself to so much danger, so much unknown, to the mysteries of space, and all the variables of civilization we were meant to explore, along with the stars, and yet kept doing so, every chance he got.

     A lot of security personnel chased this dream to their deaths, my brother among them.  There was a legend that the doctor had grown so inured to this constant stream of death he merely stated the fact and they all moved on, until the mission was completed, enemy conquered, friend made, the fleet once again made safe for the future of humanity (and everyone else).

     The rest of the crew wasn’t so resilient, I guess.  They came up with all manner of explanations, and there were memorials to all the fallen, and my brother was prominent among them.  This time it wasn’t just me; in the mess hall even when I wasn’t there they talked about him, and I’d hear about it in the corridors, in the lifts, in the sickbay, the armory…everywhere.  No, the big three didn’t think much about him, but everyone else did. 

     And it had nothing at all to do with how he died, or his willingness to volunteer, although he’d racked up an impressive forty-seven missions in his time, including the last one. 

     No, he treated everyone with respect, with dignity, he took others under his wing, even when his mood was dark, which apparently had been often, or so it seemed, and he was difficult to be around…He never stopped taking the job seriously, though, and when he was gone, they all knew because suddenly there was so much more work to do…A hole to fill, a void.

     Tough shoes.  I wasn’t up for it, and nobody expected me to, either, but they were happy to see me, because I was his brother, and for a little while it was easier to forget what they’d lost.

     The longer I stuck around, the more I saw past the illusion, found my real brother, the one I’d never allowed myself to meet, the one they never talked about.  Most of his missions were grunt work, no danger at all.  He’d merely showed up.  He was easy to take for granted, until he wasn’t there anymore.  They didn’t miss him; they missed him taking up the slack.  Well, honestly, that ended up how I viewed it, anyway.

     It didn’t seem so glamourous anymore, this flagship.  Oh, don’t get me wrong.  I applaud the heroics of the captain, and his best friends, I see what they contribute, what they mean to the fleet, to everyone, to all the people who will probably never even hear of him, even though to those who work under him, he’s inescapable.  Ask anyone in my hometown, they’ll remember my brother as well as anyone who ever met him, but the captain?  Not a chance. 

     Which is how I’m going to try and start thinking about it.  In the end, you have the friends you make, but you will always have your family.

     I started putting my name up for missions.  I’d avoided it, afraid I’d meet the same fate, how my brother died, all those faces up on the wall, the ones the officers in the other colors never even think about, or so it seems.

     The alien, when I boarded the shuttle, asked me some questions about the mission, nothing personal (although even with his friends he never seemed overly involved, except to acknowledge the implied intimacy, the only thing he shared with the doctor, the name they used to refer to the captain, which no one else did), and I checked my equipment, just to look busy, and when we landed on the surface of the planet for this assignment, I headed out immediately on my own, which I thought of as taking initiative, but was really what all the red shirts do. 

     And I walked around, took scans, secured perimeters…and that was it.  I never saw the big trio, until it was time to head back, and I listened to their banter, and that was it.

     At the debrief, they never so much as called on me, and I was a bit player, and I wondered, for the first time, if that was how my brother felt, which I had never before considered.

     Actually, it was kind of comforting.

     Then I waited to do it all over again.  I didn’t plan on putting my name up for the next one, or maybe I would simply be assigned, and anyway, it didn’t matter.  I headed to sickbay for the obligatory post-mission physical.  The doctor was there, and while he didn’t take charge of my examination, he nodded in my general direction, and when it was over, stopped by and asked why I looked so familiar, and I muttered my brother’s name, and he paused a moment, dropped his head, and then looked me in the eye.  He didn’t have to say anything.

     In that moment I found peace.

Wonder Woman: For the Man Who Had Everything…

Steve Trevor grew up without a mother.

In fact, even both his grandmothers had been dead before he was ever born. He had no aunts, no nieces, and certainly no sisters…He inhabited, in some respects, fully a man’s world.

In school, his good looks made him popular with girls, but he always kept aloof from them. He fled to the army life in an era when there were few enough women serving in the United States military. He lost himself in the fraternal life, had never known anything else. 

Then one day he crashed a plane into Themiscyra, Paradise Island. Home of the Amazons, where no man had ever stepped foot. And he met Diana.

Meaning, you understand, their story was parallel. Steve, when he brought Diana to Man’s World, where she became known as Wonder Woman, was quickly overshadowed. Diana herself never forgot him, but the rest of the world did. She considered them soulmates. He was made liaison, a token gesture. If there was a romance, it was never consummated. They never married. They never fought, either, never danced around the exact terms of their relationship, hopelessly intertwined, something they both just understood, the hole they had both plugged in their lives, the exact missing shape.

Wonder Woman became inescapable. Steve followed in her shadow. He never put on a costume. He was never accepted by her family, never welcomed as part of it. He became an outsider in both worlds. He wasn’t even welcome in her heroic community.

He never resented this for a single moment. 

You might find this hard to believe, I know. Somewhere in that heart surely lurked a chauvinist. Where did his story go, in his most private thoughts? Where might his deepest yearning have gone? Could he really understand, let alone accept, this woman suddenly thrust into his life?

For the man who’d had everything, only to discover, in a sudden shocking revolution, what he’d missed, his eyes filled with…wonder. Not at the idea. But Diana herself, so full of power, and also, so…humble. Because of Steve, thrust into the world, learning all of that, so much of it…alien to her. Learning what men were like…and what women were, in Man’s World. And wanting it to function as well as, well, Paradise.

And Steve, who had grown up in a world without women, to integrate the idea in the most perfect way possible. He couldn’t ask for anything more.