New Fiction from Chapter 9: Falter by Daniel Smallegange

Dawn is a strange and alien event.

Outside and standing in a bathrobe and nearly nothing else. It's blue satin and Felix's and I miss him, staring off into the wastes and watching the winds at play, stirring up trouble, among other things. Something Felix was best at. Feeling now both elated and crushed, alive and dead, awake and entombed, feeling free though we walk fettered in heavy-thick-dark chains. They go well with the bathrobe and I look handsome in the dawn light. Cutting it against the grain and smoking on a cigarette.

Hard blinking and Corvina is there and an embrace and I am lighting her a cigarette now. She looks good too in the dawning light. She is brunette, petite, and quite charming with her long eye lashes and short bob-type haircut, elegant with those sharp, squared bangs framing her pale, freckled face. Her lips are magnificent, as is the steel in her eyes and the curve of her frame.

We have not slept in three days. The steel in her eyes is beginning to rust.

She comes up and we embrace and kind of cling to one another as the winds pick up and whip around us and dust flies away, everything flies away from us, moving along those winds that are cool in the morning, not yet hot enough to do anything but cool us and whip us, though they do scare us into the shelter of the house.

'Worry not about gods, or they will worry about you, and that, if history is accurate, can only mean bad things.'

'Bobby, you shouldn't say things about God, or Gods, or anything. It makes me worry for you.'

'Not to worry. It's just talk. I told you, I killed all them gods already in my travels, in my dreams, like David with a sling.'

'And I am telling you, you shouldn't blaspheme so, Bobby.'

'No, no, I shouldn't. But I do. It pleases me. A man after all needs enemies. How else would he know he exists?'

'Ha, you need enemies. Try every waiter and bartender in the state.'

Another fleeting embrace, this one awkward.

'Hey, I tip well.'

'Sure, then you puke on their shoes.'

'That only happened once...'

Time moving fast like the spectre of death approaching, and time's got better things to do, places to be. A few days passed with the lovely and beautiful Corvina, though her love and her patience is eroding. It's those damned desert winds.

We are on the outskirts, out of the city, at a friend's place, Pascal's, who lives most of the time in Montreal, being some political guru or some such nonsense. But he is alright, for a Canadian.

Boozing and laughter, but our time is limited. We are not of kind or kindred, but alien. And she is wilting and she is burning, and so soon must she leave or else. We need and seek and wish only, to set her free, let her be, let her live.

This is no world, and no place for living.

By: Daniel Smallegange