by William Salsman

Created on: August 09, 2008   Last Updated: September 07, 2008

The Staff

It didn't take much to pull back the hatch on the big orange bathysphere. But he jolted it and it swung open wide and cracked him like a whip. On the face of the opening that came together like pixels merging when the man-creature looked inside, a bluish-white and wisping column of smoke appeared. He pushed his head through the opening and with his eyes he followed the smoke down and it surprised him to see the glimmering logs of a modest campfire.

An old man was lying on the ground beside the fire. He was wrapped in a thin wool blanket and he spotted the man-creature but he kept his lids half shut as he waited to see if the beast would fully enter. The man-creature just stood there with a gaping mouth, bird-viewing the inside of the huge bowl and was awed to see the boundlessness of a dark green forest and the pristine aura that it was bathed in. Though he was large and his eyes red and the skin on his face cracked and dry, on the inside he was not so calloused, but he was frail, fatigued and tormented. As he breathed in the oneiric panorama that grew more convincing the longer he stood, the red of his eyes cleared amid the tears that flooded his face and the blood returned to his breast and his heart and mind were filled with an inconceivable joy.

It didn't last, however. The winds that blew and whipped his back as he peered into the bathysphere grew forceful and he was wrested from the opening and thrown from his feet. The hatch slammed shut. He tried, but he could not get it open. In a flash of recall he saw his father cling in desperation to the rail of a sinking ship, then he felt that familiar rush of raging against the enemy. Out there in the desert the enemy blasted him with gravel chips and filled his eyes with particles of sand. The enemy tore into his skin with frozen rain and pelted his skull with meteoric pellets of ice. On the inside his blood boiled and ran out to the ends of his limbs as he fought to make his way through the hounding of the wind and the cracking of thunder. A blinding charge of lightning fell before him as he leaped upon a boulder, and looking up into the hellish heavens, he cried out with the rage of an entire generation, and shook his fists maddeningly, tormented and tortured, like a fugitive seized from a world of waking, and thrown in with that of the living dead.

Like the bottom of an enormous sea-going vessel, the storm that trashed the sky above him cruised by slowly, and then it was gone. One by one, the stars

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