Google “deal with anger.” You can go ahead. The links look ok. They’ve got the right titles: “10 Powerful Ways to Deal with Anger,” “How to Deal With Anger,” but when you click thorough, you find that they’re worthless. They’re all about how to prevent anger. How to “dissolve” anger. How to prevent your anger from causing a discussion to tailspin.
I don’t need that.
I don’t want that.
I want somebody to tell me what to do with my anger when I do have it. I want somebody to put some bad guys in front of me to hit. But that’s no good, is it? I’m not that competent. I don’t have special abilities. Really, I don’t even hit that hard.
It makes me want to take up sculpting. Hammering at stone, pounding until chunks are literally ripped from the block. Except that’s not how it works. You won’t get much of a sculpture that way.
Maybe I should run. Some people run. It just makes me feel tired. Irritable, mopey, instead of angry.
My body is full of a flowing, swelling energy, and I know that I have power like no other time. I can channel this. I can make it something.
But no.
Instead, it slowly seeps away, leaving me sad. Crying is really a step down from feeling like you’re overflowing with power. Now you feel vulnerable. You want someone to care for you, sympathise with you, stroke you, hold you, but you feel pitiful approaching someone like this. Love me, you’d be saying, only less. Tell me I matter. I feel even worse when you say it, because I know it’s not true.
But even this self loathing is not a resting place. Because you know that you do good things. They may not be many, and they may not matter the way you’d like, but you know that you can be competent, and that there are people who have so much more to bemoan – it makes you feel like a thief, stealing even the deserved sadness from the unfortunate.
But something sparks a thought of the topic of your frustration, and a little spark of anger flares, but it does not catch. It turns into a heavy, black coal, seething and tugging at your innards, forever straining downward.
You may need to read this first for context.
“Landon.”
He called up her recent sexual history.
“Landon.”
He took a look at her emotional state. She glowered at him and tried again.
“Landon, look at me.”
He was looking at her. She grabbed his chin and pulled his face toward hers. Her hands were warm. Landon looked at her body temperature: normal.
“Damn it Landon, answer me.”
She looked… he couldn’t sort out how she looked. He pulled up her emotional state. Apparently she looked less angry now, and more heartbroken, more frightened. The colors used to represent emotional states were interesting. Landon changed them. He changed the colors again. He inverted all colors in the visible spectrum and abolished the emotional graph.
“Landon, I don’t want to lose you. I don’t want to lose you like this.”
He pulled up her geneology. She looked a lot like a maternal great grandmother of hers.
“Landon!”
She threw herself against him – tackled him, really. Landon turned, throwing her body around himself, but maintaining a grip on her arm. He used that grip to wrench her back toward him and pin her arm behind her back, lifting at the elbow. She let out a gasp, and Landon checked her pain index and paused. He slowly released pressure and turned her to face him.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
You may need to read this first for context.
“This isn’t going to work.”
“What?”
“Get off, this isn’t going to work.”
“I thought you said it was-”
“-Well, I was wrong! You’re going to have to take them off.”
“Karen, we already talked about this – it’s important that I accustom myself to-”
“-don’t give me that bullshit! It’s not going to hurt you to take them off, and it’s not going to hurt you to admit why you won’t!”
“I… really, Karen, no bullshit, it just makes me uncomfortable. I’d feel naked – wait, no, that’s not what I meant. Uhm, it’s just… I have no idea what’s going on without them.”
“For God’s sake, you’ve only had the things for a week! What the hell could they possibly do?”
“You know I can’t talk about that.”
“Well, I can’t do this with some kind of bug-man, so I guess we’re at an impasse. Look, I’m getting out of here. You know how to reach me if you ever get up the nerve to take the freaking things off.”
Floating untethered among the stars, he knew but couldn’t believe the ship would return. I’m going to die, here, unnoticed. Eventually, he became… not okay with that thought, but exhausted by it.
The ship finally decloaked and his crewmates pulled him aboard. “Well?” they asked.
“It was like dying,” he gasped. “Like I’d always been dead.”
“Okay,” the ship’s engineer said. “Me next.”
The adolescent lay on his back, doing his best to remain still and calm.
At a call from the shaman, the room went silent and everyone gathered around the youth. They knelt and crouched and stood around him, craning for a good view. The shaman held a small metal file in one hand and a thumb-sized rock in the other. He raised the objects high above his head and turned in a full circle, then crouched beside the subject of his ritual.
He rested the stone on the youth’s chest and began to file it. The work caused the rock to dig into the boy’s white skin, and he winced, but he did not move. The shaman worked steadily for some time, scraping away. Flecks of stone littered the youth’s torso, dotting his neck. Finally the shaman stood holding up the large fang he had carved, like that of a wolf. He turned in a full circle and then looked down at the boy from his feet.
“Have you eaten of fish and crushed their bones that you might strengthen your bite?” he asked, in the tongue of their people.
The boy nodded.
“Have you sucked the marrow of your prey that you might take their strength and harden your teeth?”
The boy nodded.
The shaman turned to the crowded circle. He looked at each member in turn, and each nodded. He straddled the boy’s chest and took the file to his lower canines. Already some what sharp, these two teeth were quickly filed to a point.
The shaman moved above the youth’s head and filed at his upper canines. Without the weight of the shaman on his chest, it was harder for the boy to stay still, but he did his best, and managed to keep still enough that the shaman took no notice and remained undistracted.
When the upper canines were fully filed the shaman moved on to the final test. As he drew the file across the boy’s incisor, the youth’s chest began to heave irregularly. He took in wheezing gasps of breath, held them for a few moments, and then exhaled. His fingers dug at the hard floor, bloodying his fingertips, but he did not cry out. The scraping sound of the file on his lateral incisor filled the room. This tooth completed, the shaman paused before moving on to the other side of the boy’s mouth. He repeated his actions on the incisor next to the boy’s other canine, and still the boy did not cry out. When, finally, the scraping was done and the youth’s throat raw from particles of enamel, the shaman stood.
The young man’s father stepped from the crowd and took his left hand, and his mother took his right. Together they lifted him to his feet. They acknowledged him in turn, mother, then father, by clasping the back of his neck and touching foreheads, and, for the first time, the man raised his hand during this greeting and clasped their necks as an equal.
“Keep your doggy pants on,” I called ahead to Oneiros. “I’m not as quick as when we met.” The great grey wolf whined.
I leaned against a tree to catch my breath, my heart racing. Oneiros bounded back to me and caught my gaze with his, his blue eyes tearing up. His voice whispered in my mind, “You need not be my familiar forever. I release you.” Then he leaped down the trail and turned back to watch me.
I felt freedom surge within me. “Well, I may age seven times faster than you, Wolf-God. But I can still keep up with you yet.”
Oneiros smiled toothily, and I followed his wagging tail.
Did these each in about ten minutes for writing prompts with a local writing group. I should probably try to finish/expand the Godworm story.
Also, this blog has been a little sleepy lately. I need to write things that don’t belong as 55-word-stories more often.
On to the beginnings:
God used to only eat mountains.
Once every generation, His great snake-like body would
(more…)
Ten-fifteen. The garden sprinklers whirled up in golden founts, filling the soft morning air with scatterings of brightness. The water pelted windowpanes, running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titantic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hand raised to catch a ball which never came down.
Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the earth. It has been night for a long time. The hovels that encrust the river’s edge have grown like mushrooms around me in the dark.
We rock. We pitch in a deep current.
Behind me the man tugs uneasily as his rudder and the barge corrects. Light lurches as the lantern swings. The man is afraid of me. I lean out from the prow of the small vessel across the darkly moving water.
Over the engine’s oily rumble and the caresses of the river small sounds, house sounds, are building. Timbers whisper and the wind strokes thatch, walls settle and floors shift to fill space; the tens of houses have become hundreds, thousands; they spread backwards from the banks and shed light from all across the plain.
They surround me. They are growing. They are taller and fatter and noisier, their roofs are slate, their walls are strong brick.
The river twists and turns to face the city. It looms suddenly, massive, stamped on the landscape. Its light wells up around the surrounds, the rock hills, like bruise-blood. Its dirty towers glow. I am debased. I am compelled to worship this extraordinary presence that has silted into existence at the conjunction of two rivers. It is a vast pollutant, a stench, a klaxon sounding. Fat chimneys retch dirt into the sky even now in the deep night. It is not the current which pulls us but the city itself, its weight sucks us in. Faint shouts, here and there the call of beasts, the obscene clash and pounding from the factories as huge machines rut. Railways trace urban anatomy like protruding veins. Red brick and dark walls, squat churches like troglodytic things, ragged awnings flickering, cobbled mazes in the old town, culs-de-sac, sewers riddling the earth like secular sepulchres, a new landscape of wasteground, crushed stone, libraries fat with forgotten volumes, old hospitals, towerblocks, ships and metal claws that lift cargoes from the water.
How could we not see this approaching? What trick of topography is this, that lets the sprawling monster hide behind corners to leap out at the traveller?
It is too late to flee.
