Marshsong

by Nato Thompson

  “My god,” gasped Conner. “What is that doing here?”

  Fennel continued, “This is for all of you, for all that you are, for everyone who forgot what mattered most.”

  As Fennel said those words, his eyes rose up above the crowd, shot out across the plaza and looked straight into the eyes of his sister. He caught her look which shrunk the distance between them. Zoomed in and it felt as though she could feel his chocolate breath on her cheeks. She stared back with longing and awe—the twinkle in his eye brighter than the North Star or the firecrackers now exploding in the sky. No matter what pot he stirred, she missed him terribly. She felt his tender messed up heart and wanted to hold him. To tuck him in. To play Battle Ball. To take him with her to the grave.

  And with that feeling came a rushing of the water sound. It poured and grew—the brook into a river, the river into a flood. Water sound poured all over Isabella as the mayhem grew. The crowd sound rose from a mad swirl of delight to the frenetic orchestra of chaos. Out on the docks at the far end of her sight, she saw it—the Drunken Boat, the ship of the mad had returned with its torn sails, ragged gangway and cabins of mercenaries. Now it was going to unload its cargo of humans into the already combustible masses.

  The lunatics descended the gangway in their flour sack robes, their mouths wide and frightful, their eyes alive with the embrace of the frantic qualities. Some couldn’t make it the entire way and lay on the dock weeping. Others refused to even get off the boat. Many were hitting the streets with their bare feet and their arms held out as though to embrace the entire crowd. They rushed with tremendous vehemence onward. The mercenaries on the boat shouted at the unruly mass to get a move on.

  The lunatics raced forward, a mob of perhaps two hundred all told. Their sullied frames plowed into the plaza as the drunken masses leapt to get out of the way of their manic embrace. The movement toppled people over. Children went underfoot. Beers were spilled, cotton candy dropped. Men in beards pushed and punched back. Quite quickly the appearance of the crazies elevated the masses from a crowd to a mob. They became frenzied. Fennel’s assault had taken them aback, and now they were in the midst of a drunken confused rage.

  As the lunatics filtered into the crowd, pushing and shoving, fights erupted as though on cue. Isabella sat and watched transfixed. Everything was happening so fast. Across the way, she could see the balconies of the great Houses evacuate. Their nervousness turned frantic as they moved to get to the back doors where the carriages waited. Their party had become a tremendous disaster. She watched as the Barrenwood police rushed to contain the crowd. Billy clubs came slamming down on whoever was in the way. The lunatics, so out of sorts, took the brunt of the violence with hysterical obliviousness. The police attempted to use bullhorns to bring the crowd to attention, but the madness had reached too feverish a pitch in too tight a space. More than quelling the crowd, the police’s violence only escalated what was a rowdy mob into a battalion. Lines of people began to emerge as the police protected the stage and the great Houses behind it. The crowds heaved and pushed, exhaling the mass into the shields and billy clubs.

  Fennel stood on high looking down at his creation. It was exciting in the extreme. He gave a loud whistle and Isabella knew what that meant: he had summoned Zarathustra. Fennel’s eyes seemed to twist phantasmagoric as the intoxication of the water and his own masterful choreography overwhelmed him. Up next he had hoped to send the poison dart into the forehead of Elinore Castilla: the drought-maker, the evaporator. Fennel’s entire orchestration had at its heart a return of the water, and sure as shinola, he wasn’t going to let the night end without the evisceration of the maker of so many clocks, asylums and burgeoning workweeks. A dullard of the most managerial kind, Elinore Castilla was bound for a most loathsome demise. But as Fennel pointed his diminutive crossbow toward the stage, he noticed, to his shock, that Elinore Castilla was nowhere to be found. He scanned his Raven eyes out across the crowd only to note his prey being escorted by a hoard of men in black into an awaiting carriage. The drought-maker would live to fight another day.

  Castilla escaped at what appeared to be the right time. The city was erupting below. From celebration to riot to perhaps petite revolution, the air became illuminated by the red streak of a Molotov cocktail that came flying out from the crowd, its fiery tail spinning and dripping flame, and splattered flame and glass across the stage. The crowd cheered and the police retreated for just a millionth of a second. The rapid escalation of the event told everyone that this night was now headed into uncharted territories.

  Isabella gathered herself together realizing that she felt worse than ever. Rising to her feet was no easy task and Bruno took her by her arm. Before she turned her attention to heading back into the house, she saw what she knew she would see if she stayed too long—Marty McGuinn. It was just the briefest moment, but she spotted him backstage wearing a straw hat, smoking a pipe as usual, and in his hands he held a pair of shears. She watched as he hobbled his cranky self across the far end of the stage, slowly making his way toward her dear brother Fennel. Marty moved like a dream. Not a soul seemed to touch him though pandemonium was letting loose all around his wretched stinky self.

  The chaos only grew. The crowd had quickly overtaken the police as they retreated back toward the side of the stage. The crowd began to crawl their way up onto the stage in a show of ownership. The stage became a symbolic stage to be conquered. They would make this event theirs. The crowds flew past Marty and suddenly the stage performers were face to face with their audience. The city officials froze suddenly terrified. Defne, the Duke of Revan and Bill Upton were trapped in a corner with nowhere to go. They now stood out like a sore thumb. Three blind mice.

  A momentary pause occurred as both sides considered that something most historic was about to transpire. The next moment took place in the blink of an eye. A group of very large men ransacked the officials. The officials disappeared into the center of this hoard of angry muscular proletarians. And another contingent, one just a tad bit more organized, rushed past Defne and Gaspar, and grabbed the Duke of Revan, who appeared to be halfway to a heart attack. His face was red as a tomato as they tore the robes and jewelry from his body. They dragged him, beaten and distraught, with much of his pride gone like light, toward center stage.

  It was at this point that the entire Ellindale Plaza seemed to go quiet. The crowd took a brief pause in the mayhem to witness a moment many of them thought not possible. An extremely large black man with tattoos all over his shirtless body and a line of teardrops tattooed under his left eye lifted the Duke by his hair to stare out into the crowd. The silence in the crowd was only disrupted by the occasional pop and sizzle of the fireworks still going off above. For this moment, the houses that had lorded over the morass of a broke ass city were in the angry hands of their children.

  Fennel, who was just ten feet from the action, had his eyebrows knit together in confusion. As mean as he was, he hadn’t planned on so calamitous an affair. The entire debacle was far outside his compositional aspirations.

  The tattooed man yelled out into the crowd in a booming voice that all could hear. “Death to the King! Long live the Mortestrate!” he yelled as he pulled from his pocket a long knife. It glinted in the stage light. The two men stood on the stage next to each other, protagonists in an epic drama played out in the present that was the past and future. But the knife was real and it cut through the Duke of Revan’s throat with ease. Blood spurted everywhere, transforming the staged spectacle into a new gore filled reality. The Duke’s body went instantly limp gaining weight as the tattooed man let go of the Duke’s hair. The man, once a king, the Duke of Revan, was now a corpse, lying in a tangled heap—dead as can be.

  Cheers, as well as terrified screams, went up from the crowd. Even a mob remains predominately humane. Blood covering his enormous frame, the tattooed man leapt off the stage with a howl and the crowd caught him in their arms.

  King Gerald was dead. Isabella felt Bruno pull
on her arm. “My god, we should get out of here. We are all in danger,” he said and the look in his eye said it was true. Isabella got up from her seat;, her feet wobbling precariously beneath her.

  On the stage, Fennel remained unflappable. He squinted at the king’s lifeless body and shook his head slowly as though considering this turn of events. Even if the circumstances had surpassed his own chaotic designs, he would simply have to embrace the madness in all its splendor. He marched slowly out to center stage, imagining the audience staring in wonder at the mighty genius of this social architect. Standing directly in front of the corpse, with his small head held high, he began to wave his arms gently in the air as though he was a conductor of some grand symphony—the silent music of the lunatic eve, playing metronome to a somnambulist parade. His arms gently careened in a ballet before him as the crowd continued to yell, fight, blather and squeal.

  While the brawls continued, Fennel appeared to be the one person on the planet caught in an eddy of serenity. A maestro in his element. His hypnosis so thorough, he was oblivious to the pace of the sweating, smoking Marty who made his way slowly across stage to cut him down, his shears dragging along the wooden deck of the stage.

  Isabella witnessed the scene playing out before her in her dazed hallucinatory eyes. Her stomach turned against her in bile and the impending danger to her brother called up a last gasp of adrenaline that shot up into her veins. With a flurry of energy, she flung herself off the balcony ten stories down into the crowd below. Her fall was neither gentle nor lithe, but hard and fast. She hit the cobblestone plaza with a thud and a crunch. Blood poured out of her and spilt on the beer soaked stones. She briefly saw the frantic look of Bruno, staring down from above until his gaze was blocked by a frantic crowd of people who gathered around her. She was in a panic and she was deeply hurt. Her head swam. People were fighting all around her. She wiped her nose on her sleeve and launched herself onto her feet in time to see Fennel turn to see Marty sauntering his way.

  Fennel gave a visible smirk to his disgruntled Master. “Glad you could make it, Marty, my boy. I wanted this to be the last thing you ever did see before you met your extraordinarily belated demise.”

  Marty raised the clippers at the same time that Fennel came charging toward him. Isabella couldn’t believe what she was witnessing. Her brother had lost his mind so much that he was actually considering taking on Marty. To call it a bad idea would be too generous. It was suicide. Marty caught Fennel in his grip while Fennel looked like some deranged dog trying to bite anything it could. Fennel snapped his teeth and struggled while Marty laughed in evil fashion holding Fennel further up in the air.

  This would not go well. Isabella had to rescue her brother and soon. The crowd was too tight for her to move quickly and her view was impeded by the crush of bodies. She jettisoned herself up to the top of the crowd, light as a feather and ran with her failing might across the top of the crowd, her every foot landing on a shoulder, cap or tangled head of hair. It was everything she had left. She dove as hard as she could over the police barricade in front of the stage to land next to the both of them. She grabbed Fennel with one hand and tossed him as hard as she could toward the side of the stage. His body tumbled in a pile while Marty lifted his eyebrow at the appearance of what he affectionately referred to as the she-bitch. Her appearance briefly startled enough—just enough—to jar his dreamy stupor. Isabella ran over to her brother whose eyes were red jewels in a sea of yellow. He was in the midst of a deep hypnosis.

  “Sister, I’m so glad you could make it. How grand is this? This divine symphony.”

  He stood up, dusting himself off, completely unaware of the impending arrival of Marty. He was both there and not there; lost in a dream. Rapturous at the height of his colossal experiment, he was oblivious to all that was happening around him. His soul had ascended to the heavens above where it belonged and, were his body not affixed now to that stage, he would be looking down from miles above at the play he had just directed.

  “Fennel, I’m saving you! Marty is trying to kill you!”

  “Ha! I got that ol’ coot in my grips,” he said, his eyes slightly coming to. Fennel looked back to see Marty nearly upon them. He laughed loud and put out his arms. “Let's give it another shot, you pathetic excuse for a man.” Marty, who was only a few feet away, paused, leaned back and took a puff on his pipe.

  “A man can’t turn his head but a sec. Now look at dis mess. All spillin its beans on da city. Dees shears are heres for a clippen.”

  They could smell his urine-stained clothes. His teeth appeared to still have the remnants of some gumbo feast and his eyes spun around as though inebriated from a travel so messy. He pulled up the shears in front of his face and gave them a good clip to highlight their sharpness.

  “Ha, ha, ha,” his eyes twinkled. “Can’t recon if I ever did see such a mud pit as dis. Scratch stirred up a wild hornet's nest. Sure is fun. Gotta admit. Look at all dees dum dums walkin round not a clue in da heads? Dis a real land o dummies, ain’t it? Glad dey feed us when dey can. But you two ain’t dat different. Look at you. Stupid as de day you was born. Haha, you don’t know nuttin. Haha. Ya bout as dum as dees dummies.” He stared down at them with strange wild eyes. He wasn’t for sentimentality or consideration. He was vengeful, hungry, manic and mad. His voice had a snarl in it that Isabella knew all too well as the preamble to punishment.

  “What does it matter, Marty?” Isabella whimpered, the strength out of her and her near resignation welling up in her. She wanted to escape, but her feet had brought her right to the mangled shoes of her lowly master. “We don’t matter.”

  “Dat much is true. Less dan ever,” snickered Marty. “You shoulda stayed down low in da brush. Now ya out in da limelight sucken da blood like a leech.”

  Marty puffed on his pipe and clipped the shears. “Now yous been oh such a naughty lil ricket. All mixed up inna somethin ya don not know. Now ya makin pups wit da plebs and sneakin outta da digs so deep. I gotta me a pocket full-o-ducats from dat muddy carny and I wassa lookin ta have me a fat whoop up. Now I be a handyman for da whole fat town. Time ta burn dat leech off da blood.”

  “I’m not going, you cruel strange man,” Isabella found herself whispering. She hated him so much—the way he asserted himself over her with all the power and madness of a world so mercurial and without care. His boisterous fickle qualities hovered over her entire life without reason or care. “Never again. I will die if that is what it takes, but I’m done. I’m so done.”

  She began to sob, her body pulsing up and down on the stage. Her tears falling out of her, hitting the wood, and spilling into the blood of a dead man once a duke. Her frustrations welled up in her and she let her tears go. Marty would not care, but neither, it seemed, did the big universe above. She was lonely as all could be and no one it seemed could come to her rescue.

  “Well, you knows me, lil water gnat. I don not take a no for da answer and I could laugh at puttin ya lil tears into a shoebox grave. Time to clip both your wings.”

  Marty gave a quick kick to Isabella’s stomach. She bent over in pain and heard her brother leap forward.

  “Keep your hands off her!” he screamed as he found himself again in Marty’s clutches. The two of them wrestled feverishly as Isabella tried to get to her feet. Marty’s sinuous arms strained against the peculiar vitality of her madcap brother who had no hope of winning. Her strength betrayed her. She could not get up in time. Fennel fell back onto his knees overpowered by the might of their master. She watched in agonized disbelief as Marty pulled the shears out. He raised them up high above his head as Fennel wiped the sweat from his brow in a dazed confusion. And then, quick as a hummingbird, Marty brought the shears down straight into the eye socket of her brother. He screamed in great agony. Blood spurted out and onto Marty. Fennel’s face was a mess of gore as he instinctively pulled the shears out and threw them across the stage. It was all Isabella could do to stretch out, grab her brother’s leg and send him flying
in the direction of his waiting horse. A one-eyed boy went sailing through the air, landing most skillfully on the back of Zarathustra. Isabella stared bewildered as the pair galloped their way to who knows where.

  Marty looked down at her. His rage was beyond reason. He was blind in hatred. He gave her a wild kick that sent her flying out into the crowd. She flew into the mob landing hard on the stone. Her body ached from the blow and twisted into a curl amongst the array of boots and shoes below the bodies of the mob. She willed deep into herself to find the strength to get to her feet as some stranger lifted her up.

  “You okay?” a plumber from the Mortestrate asked, his face hardened from days in the gutters.

  She could not answer but limped her way away from the stage. The chaos was still playing about her with the police slowly making progress. She could see the police billy clubs still swinging to keep the crowd at bay and she saw that Marty was no longer on the stage. She could feel him coming for her. She hobbled her way through the crowd, her head aching with fear and loss.

  “What on earth is happening?”

  She was small in this mob and she slid between the bodies still rustling about. Her stomach was beyond sick, her face pale as sun-baked pearl. She heaved between people hoping to get as far away as possible until the next face to appear was again Marty. He grinned in saturated gums and without missing a beat his foot came flying hard into her gut. Isabella went soaring back into the crowd, her head knocking against the hard wood of a carriage.

  She couldn’t take this. She got to her feet again, barely holding on, leaning on the carriage. Her mouth was bleeding. Vomit rose up in her as well as the end of her strength. Her head swam as she began to lose her grip on these awake moments—the voice asking her to sleep, gaining traction as fatigue made its way toward victory. She was going out this way.

  In a blind series of stumbles, she found an unoccupied carriage. She dragged herself up and inside and closed the door. She lay in the backseat and felt as though she could die.