The Pathogen Nursery

 by Shaun Lawton

   Arthur Blair could not have foreseen the actual consequences of the world he seeded. Though instrumental in providing the necessary fertilizer for autocratic dynasties the world over to subsidize their ultimate power over a hapless humanity, Arthur was quite convinced he'd done a bit of good for the future of the world. 

   Mr. Blair was a writer, you see. He came from a lower-upper-middle class English family, raised in a British territory at the start of the twentieth century in an eastern state of India. The middle child sired in between two sisters, with five years in between them, Arthur dreamed of being a famous author someday. 

   As a child he wrote poetry after the fashion of his idol, William Blake. Little did he suspect the seething cauldron of infectious agents at work, suspended throughout every nodal point of the human race, germinating with potential at every crook and turn, during the time of his upbringing. 

   Had he anticipated this morass of fermentation and suspected how it would eventually come to fruition historically over the next few decades of his life, he may very well have seriously considered abandoning his little book project, and forthwith undertaken another profession altogether. 

   Alas, during this particular burgeoning moment of the human species, following in the footsteps of the likes of H.G. Wells was considered a noble endeavor by many. Young Arthur studiously wrote in his journal every day, intent on capturing the vision which danced behind his eyes. 

    How could the young Mr. Blair have considered the ultimate consequences of attempting to warn the world of the disheartening direction their legislature and internal affairs seemed to be working themselves toward? 

   At the time of the writing of his final and most famous novel, a period during the late forties which culminated his career as an author and put the golden capstone on his dream of becoming a famous writer, precious few individuals were in a position to contemplate the complete and adverse effects of such a critical work. 

   The human beings of Earth were embroiled in their second world war. Propaganda on all sides of the war effort was generated in pamphlets, newspapers, and on the radio.  The truth was that no one alive–much less the gifted and starry eyed Arthur–at that time in history could have possibly foreseen the long term consequences of any of their ongoing activities. 

   Such is the near sightedness of our species throughout our daily trials and tribulations. Whether we be professor or sergeant, doctor or critic, farmer or lawyer, working with our fingers stained dark brown by the land, or typing on matte black plastic keyboards with immaculately manicured hands, or middle-aged dropouts, philosophy students, retail clerks or gardeners. 

   What we're all in the process of engendering remains a far greater sum than its millions of remotely oblivious parts could ever dream.  But young Arthur dreamed harder than anyone around him.  He could see just where the machinery of the state was leading the human race.  It wasn't a pretty sight, and he'd be damned if he didn't write about it. 

   Or maybe, we'd be damned if he did.  

    

    

  

 

4-line Stories & Other Tales

folk tale

Satyr Amerind hybrid union dance

shadowthrown in hive chambers of honey light

andromorphous scream in self-sacrifice, reflecting

a dream-visor removed quick for noticing chroma.

caravan

Wind driven, a memory dubbed gaels

licked catlike at our sails; prows cut

dream powered; below decks seven slept;

under in silence the chevron of orca led.

In Other Voids

Everything has its place in the shifting winds,

was said. All of it trapped in the focus of a

magnificent lens, being outer space itself that

curves dreaming souls across to star in other voids.

On Mount Drone

The spectrum: light from fractured dreams

a dream: a piece of carbon. Every sound:

a memory of its having been made, and every

sight: a dream of a time passed away.

gone

Sheaves fold on a sharp wind, slap against

poles as desperate, brief want ads to be

ripped away by an unseen howling whose

chilling message is lost to no one.

Night Transit

It has been three days since I first drank the infusion. Comprised of the starch of a Central American tuber and the crystallized distillation of an element discovered in a meteorite, the slightly effervescent concoction was to feed the developing microflora in the lining of my stomach and lower intestine to reach their peak thriving balance. My twelve year old indigenous guide repeatedly assured me that everything was in order, while he spoke in an incomprehensible dialect with the regional shaman, a nearly gray-skinned elderly man with a thousand wrinkles and a shock of jet black hair that smudged eerily in the diffused moonlight. 

A stream of smoke blurred in sinewy patterns through the air from a burning stub of sage gripped in the shaman's left hand. He moved it from palm to palm while reciting some incantations, and eventually dropped it on the packed wet sand we each sat upon cross-legged, while the surf washed in curved ridges of foam drunk up by the thirsty granules belying our foundation. 

My thoughts on substrata drifted to the abstract, and in so doing, settled on the idea that this firm beach we sat upon was itself supported on an even more substantial platform, and my thoughts fell away in between the cracks of this imagined spatial webwork, until I swooned with vertigo. 

The shaman's vocalization once again drifted back in to my awareness, this time in the sibilant tones of a trance-like song. Strikingly onomatopoeic ululations arose from his lungs and throat, carried on sussurating vibrations not unlike that of a chorus of crickets chirping at a much lower octave. One small constellation amid the many sprawled overhead appeared to be twinkling in time with the venerable man's song. 

When he ceased his curious chanting, that one portion of the night sky continued scintillating at a rate randomly corresponding with all the remaining stellar configurations; but when he resumed his soliloquy, oddly that one cluster of sprinkled spots stood momentarily fixed, almost as if burning brighter while frozen above, as all the remaining heavens sparkled and reeled about it. 

The longer his song went on, the more evidently did this small grouping of stars continue to brighten and focus with each subsequent stanza warbling from his windpipe. I looked over to my young guide, but he was nowhere to be seen. I was left alone on the beach with this old croaking man. Eventually I joined in with his vocal intonations, at first timidly mimicking the rising and falling timbres, until after several measures, when I could feel precisely where the microtones focused on the lone star system beyond, that I began weaving in earnest my own computational elegy to the firmament sprawled out ahead of us.

At last my canticle reached an apotheosis of crescendos while all the surrounding stars blurred out along whirling arcs like the spinning grooves of a vinyl record, and my pin-pointed little constellation froze dead center before me while steadily growing larger. I  detached myself from my still-harmonizing bodily framework and managed to turn a ghost mirror echo of my head to look at the ancient gray shaman, only he was no longer there either, just the hard packed glossy beach reflecting astral twilight, until it was no longer sand I sat upon but rather a smooth warm bright and highly polished obsidian reflecting colors of an unknown spectrum. Suddenly my resounding voice, which had been issuing mercurial from my larynx, warbled into an erratic repeated pattern of insistently stitched-together cacophonies, as if a myriad different articulations had melded into one singular chorus, which after somehow escaping from my esophagus, came to an abrupt end. 

I lurched up onto all fours, gasping for air as it gradually entered my lungs with a newfound purity reminiscent of undiluted oxygen from scuba tanks. My head swam for a minute and then clarified while I slowly came to my senses. There was something different about the way the stars were configured about me now, but I didn't fully realize what it was until I observed that the small familiar constellation that I had been serenading was no longer anywhere to be seen in the perfectly still multitude of stars sprawled out in front of me. 

Feeling a bit unnerved, I looked up and down the beach I was on, failing to note any difference in the layout or along the treeline of jungle flanking it. It wasn't until I arose on both feet to firmly stand upon the lustrous volcanic surface that I first noticed the difference. Instead of the glimmering night sky meeting the distant ocean horizon as before, there was now an imposing dark rugged mountain range merging into the cerulean darkness out across a gently undulating sea. It was a coastal landscape that had not been there previously. And there was something else, nearly inaudible yet quite distinct in the distance. It was a humming drone-like sound steadily becoming louder, as if a swarm of winged insects were approaching. 

As I turned my head in the direction of the buzzing escalation, I realized my night vision had become superb. Where the impending throng of insects should be located, there was nothing at all. An intensifying scent I couldn't quite place became evident. Soon enough the ambient resonance dissipated entirely as if soughed away on an indiscernible wind. Looking down at my feet I saw the glossy groundswell fading away like an afterimage to be replaced by an unusual form of purplish fractured crabgrass crawling with infinitesimal bioluminescent organisms.