Other Worlds Presents: Incorporeal
[Chapters 1-5] [Chapters 6-9]
10
Grables. How are they? A bit like dogs. Like winter dogs, not birds. A kind of musketman trodding home that millionth mile. Like a dull knife. And an angry wife. You do not want them on your trail.
11
So I picked up a grable as I left The Pit. It followed me, nipping, but I have nothing to nip. So it was nothing. The grable kept nipping even as it passed, then caught another whiff, and went after.
I heard the screams and drifted along.
Bland Supper at a dry house, and some word about a shadow that dances to a rhyme I hear.
12
Shadow goes, who knows. I say, what do you say? Dark tickle turned sick fickle, Shadow says, whirring black fez. I go, oh no. Oh yes, into the cess. If you wanna find them, I hear the shadow say, gotta go without asylum to the place where the mad dead play.
A small collapse, like a folded blanket. I’m off.
13
Vis Saffron, that’s what at the bottom. Chomp chomp and right outta here. Down the muddy way to the bleak nothin’, ain’t it, that’s what it says. Bleak nothin’ has a map. Map reads north is the way to deader pastures, north is the way to your home what was not gone yet. Not all the way. That’s where your baby is. I say it’s not my baby, but what was my mother’s. Bleak nothin’ ain’t got it. Bleak nothin’ says we belong to each other.
I take the map, like a daisy in my old skin, and drift out the nothin’.
But nothin’ says watch for the pikes. Pikes on the way, one from the north, one from the south. Gon stab at the east and west, with bloody bits and stringy shadows in the middle parts.
I don’t know. I float on.
