Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing
Cibolo, Texas
The Flying None
Copyright © 2021 Cody Goodfellow
Illustrations © 2021 Betty Rocksteady
All Rights Reserved
The story included in this publication is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
www.PerpetualPublishing.com
Cover Art by Matthew Revert
ALSO BY CODY GOODFELLOW
Gridlocked
The Man Who Escaped This Story & Other Stories
Scum Of The Earth
Unamerica
Sleazeland
The Snake Handler (w/ J. David Osborne)
Rapture Of The Deep & Other Lovecraftian Tales
Repo Shark
All-Monster Action
Spore (w/ John Skipp)
Jake's Wake (w/ John Skipp)
Perfect Union
Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars
Ravenous Dusk
Radiant Dawn
For Gretta, and everyone who’s had enough of thoughts and prayers.
. . . the Great Man was always as lightning out of Heaven; the rest of men waited for him like fuel, and then they too would flame.
—Thomas Carlyle,
On Heroes, Hero-Worship & the Heroic in History
1
As she always did before making a big life change, on the gray April Monday morning that she was to enter the convent, Gala Murowski stopped at the Texaco station in San Anselmo to call a random person in Ireland and ask for advice.
It was the last working payphone in all of Marin County. A kid she hung out with in high school showed her how it was broken so you could make free international phone calls.
Pretty cool, sure, but long after the novelty of getting high and crank-calling Lagos or Tel Aviv as a kind of global magic 8-ball had worn off, she would go alone and call residences in Ireland, because she liked their accents and the kind working-class folk on the other end would patiently listen to her problems and offer sincere advice while eating Kraft mac and cheese with corned beef and waiting for someone to return from the pub.
She was sure Maeve in Belfast or Noreen in Cork would give her the lilting push she needed to go through with it, but this time, nobody picked up. She’d run to the end of the short list in her journal of friendly numbers and was about to try making some up when she noticed the old woman waiting to use the phone.
She was a prime specimen of the wide-eyed boomer demographic that ran this town— hypersensitive ex-hippie widows who still thought karma was invented by John Lennon.
Gala hid her face and tried to pretend she was putting her call through, but her mind was trapped in a loop of guilt at her snap judgment and resentment at being made to feel guilty. The old woman came closer, wafting tea rose perfume in her face. “Oh dear, you’re crying, what’s the matter?”
Gala hung up the phone and stepped back. “You go ahead, I’ll wait . . . ”
“I couldn’t push you aside, sweetheart. You clearly have something on your mind. If you can’t reach your person, why don’t you tell me what the trouble is?”
Gala almost bolted for her car, but she forced herself to take a deep, cleansing breath and stand her ground. She had a right to be here, she had a right to be. She wasn’t doing anything wrong, if the phone company wanted to let people make free international calls, that was their business, and why was this lady picking on her, anyway? But the woman was still smiling indulgently, just like Rhiannon in Galway would as she steeped her tea and helped Gala detangle her Gordian knot of problems—not like her real mother, who only humored you to trap you later.
The old woman offered her a dainty embroidered handkerchief. Blowing her nose into it, Gala said, “Thank you . . . So like . . . I was going to try to become a nun today, but like, I don’t really believe in God? It sounds stupid when I say it . . . But in like superhero origin stories, the protagonist is always like, record-scratch, exactly the opposite, and then boom! Plot twist!
“I’m not explaining this very well, am I? My last boyfriend was into comics, but he was an idiot . . . I need real answers. I already volunteer at the library, and I do research for my mom’s books, she writes new age bullshit about angels, you probably have a couple of them at home, no offense, but they’re total delusional garbage . . . I still think religion is like that telephone game, where you whisper something in someone’s ear and it goes around in a circle and comes back all garbled . . . but like, I see these signs sometimes, and I know it’s like a defect in our sensory processing to look for patterns in random phenomena, right? But the world is going to shit and maybe something really is out there, trying to make me see there is a purpose and I could be a part of it, if I could just go somewhere quiet and open my heart to it. Sorry this isn’t coming out right, I sound like a total asshole thinking she’s Joan of Arc because she got her first period, but . . . should I do it?”
By the end of her tirade, Gala was shaking with snotty tears and fully expected the old woman to call the cops on her or just vanish in a puff of smoke. Instead, she threw out her arms and pulled Gala close in a hug that somehow came close to filling in for all the maternal affection and support she’d missed in her life.
“It sounds like you have deep unresolved issues with your mother that are clouding your judgment, hon. But if the worst thing you’re thinking of doing is retreating somewhere to meditate and find yourself, you’re doing good. Remember. All mortal things will fail you. People too. Relax, sweetheart, you’ve got this . . . ”
Gala hugged the old woman until she’d got hold of herself. Wiping tears off her face and apologizing for slobbering all over the old woman’s shoulder and ruining her handkerchief, she thanked her profusely and ran to her car and drove directly to the convent.
Artists have varied greatly in their depiction of this fateful moment, with even the most literal interpretations incorporating subtle or garish religious symbolism to infer divine providence guiding Gala’s decision on that ordinary spring day, even portraying the kindly old woman as a seraphic process server delivering a holy subpoena, or as a bewildering extra-dimensional contraption with wheels within wheels and garlands of blazing eyes and commanding hands, and Gala convulsing ecstatically among the cigarette butts and bottle-caps of the parking lot tarmac like a latter-day St. Teresa. Some borderline heretical depictions, such as the controversial fresco in the Galatine basilica of Corte Madera, go so far as to surround the figure of Saint Gala with a halo of howling disembodied souls so thickly that they obscure her face as a foreshadowing of all those who would suffer and die as a result of her decision to pursue a life of quiet spiritual contemplation.
2
Naturally, the internal debate that sent Gala to the Texaco payphone was more complex than she’d represented it to the nice old lady. There were some things that even Gala couldn’t just tell a stranger.
Though she believed in nothing, Gala was genetically hardwired as a spiritual seeker. Against her will, she was still caught up in the whole God thing. Grandma Loretta was a staunch Catholic and constantly nagged Gala and her mother about catechism, conformation, and all that scary indoctrination shit, against which her mother fought tooth and nail.
Mom didn’t believe in vaccinations or the food pyramid and routinely left young Gala in her car seat in the Volvo when she went shopping or barhopping, but she at least spared Gala the attentions of the Church, while lavishing credit for everything good that happened on guardian angels. Gala had come to see organized religion as a Ouija board on which the faithful haphazardly steer the planchette around according to their own selfish desires, and calling whatever nonsense message it spells out the word of the Lord.
When she got her own email address in middle school, Gala began to get spam from her grandmother in the form of chain e-mails commanding the recipients to pray synchronously in order to achieve some immediate real-world goal. That God could be so out of touch that he required people shouting in unison to get his attention was a huge red flag, but even more so because they usually wanted some abortion-loving politician or Supreme Court justice to die before the next election, which told her all she really needed to know. Mom shared her outrage over the chain-letters and cut Grandma Loretta out of their lives, but still forced Gala to dress up pretty and put on a sad face for her funeral.
Any lingering doubts she’d had were laid to rest when she read Paradise Lost in high school. That she was also coming down off her first and last acid trip only drove home the utterly depraved horror of the whole grand spectacle when God, watching Satan descend to Earth to work the corruption and downfall of humankind, tips his hand to Jesus, of all fucking people, about exactly how it will all go down, right up to Christ’s crucifixion, betraying that He is either just another cog in a miserable machine, or an abominable cosmic sadist.
And here she was, moving in with Him.
What she couldn’t say that the old woman seemed to understand when she took her into that fateful hug was that she couldn’t know that she wasn’t just acting out the twin imperatives in her defective genetic programming—the spiritual stirring and the need to reject her mother, and all her fell works, just as her mother had done, before her.
Much as she hated to admit it, Gala could not make decisions without reflexively acting out against her mother’s influence, and thus hopelessly yoked to it. Her mother’s obsessions and grudges were a dark star that slingshotted Gala into eccentric orbits of manic doubt and catatonic conviction, never letting her plot her own course.
To make matters worse, Gala’s mother was the celebrated Angel Lady of Marin, author of three USA Today bestsellers about angels that all but divorced them from Christian doctrine and basically turned them into Caucasian genies or fairy godmothers.
The boat she’d lived on in Sausalito since her third divorce was an angel museum, the ancient oxblood Volvo she’d passed on to Gala still encrusted with fatuous woo-woo bumpersticker sophistry—NEVER DRIVE FASTER THAN YOUR GUARDIAN ANGEL CAN FLY, THIS CAR IS SURROUNDED BY LIGHT, et cetera—and a vanity license plate that proclaimed her ANGLDY. (Until she could afford to switch it back to a regular plate, Gala flirted with rechristening herself the Angle Lady, and covered the bumperstickers with compasses and protractors.)
Gala could never be sure that her headstrong skepticism wasn’t just a response to her mother’s fixation on heavenly saviors, and in spite of the signs, she couldn’t be any more certain that her newfound spiritual stirrings weren’t the first steps towards becoming what she hated most.
She had to be more than the sum of her programming, but how could she know, when half the program was a mystery?
All she could remember of her father was a god-haunted, sad bastard who taught her that “Goddamnit” was a magic word, because he never managed to complete even the simplest task without exploding in profanity. Even in her most expansive, chardonnay-soaked moods, Mom refused to elaborate on this incomplete picture, beyond simpering that he thought he was an artist, but should’ve been a priest.
Mom and Dad met as members of the Breatharians, a lifestyle cult that preached that all physical food was poison, and that one could derive a balanced diet from “mindful respiration” and inhalation of proprietary essential oils and fragrances.
Mom had worked her way pretty far into the program, living on bottled water, multivitamins and whiffs of anise and mugwort for six months while pregnant with Gala, until she caught the head Breatharian coming out of an Arby’s with Horsey Sauce spattered all over his pearl-buttoned western dress shirt. Mom and Dad split up soon thereafter, and Dad drifted out of her life before Gala could walk.
So it was in her blood; so what? Not that recognizing the trap had set her free; she’d like to see the person who, genetically cursed with Rachel Murowski’s tightly wound nervous system and perversely dyspeptic intellect, could forget her traumatic upbringing and go her own way.
And then there were the signs.
In compiling grist for one of her mother’s puff-piece articles (16 Secrets Of Highly Holy People—Take Our Secret Sainthood Survey!), she’d learned that many saints, sadhus and gurus were said not to decay after death, and even to emit a sweet, spicy post-mortem perfume. Soon after, Gala began to notice her own burgeoning natural smell. Her B-O contained notes of cinnamon, cardamom and apple blossoms. Whenever she sat still in one place, ants gathered and crawled all over her; random guys came up and asked her if she’d been baking something, usually followed by a crude double entendre; and woodland creatures came into her room like in Snow White, though they didn’t so much team up to adorably clean the place as wreck everything, shit everywhere and eat her food.
Some people endlessly proclaim they’re not of this world, and some have otherworldliness thrust upon them. Gala had just enough experience with the snares of this world—sex, gaming, drinking, drugs—to know that she had little aptitude for, and derived no enjoyment from, any of them. Beer made her sleepy, weed made her manic, she sucked at everything except Tetris, and she’d only ever successfully orgasmed once, alone, in the bathtub, and she’d nearly drowned.
In spite of her best efforts to be of this world, it clearly didn’t share her commitment. Her body was less reliable than her old, crappy car. Machines broke down at her touch, relationships never worked out, and no fewer than three places of employment burned to the ground between the time of her initial interview and her first scheduled day of work.
She volunteered at the library and was terrified they’d try to pay her, because the Fire, the timeless, semi-sentient force of entropy that had consumed the Library of Alexandria and London in 1666 and Hiroshima and Nagasaki would come for the Marin Civic Center, too.
All too often when she was lost in some repetitive task—shelving books at the library, drawing or coloring or cleaning while listening to music—the world disappeared as if a veil was lifted and she was surrounded by light, and she felt like how that guy in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave when they led him out into true sunlight for the first time, except she came to a moment later no more enlightened than before, and sometimes she peed herself.
Mom was sure she must be epileptic, but Gala was equally sure her condition was arcane and unique, perhaps someday to be named after her. But a battery of EEG’s, MRI’s and whatever failed to disclose any abnormality. The doctor suggested she must just be really susceptible to autohypnosis, and then hit on her mom.
With everything she’d seen of God, Gala had to agree with Richard Francis Burton, who observed that man had only ever been worshipping himself; and yet, she could not escape the nagging sense that the real thing was out there, whispering to her in a voice she could only hear if she turned out every other sound in the world.
3
As nunneries go, Saint Candy’s seemed like a pretty sweet set-up.
It was not an accredited Catholic institution, any more than Saint Candy was a recognized canonical saint. Candace Scofield was the black sheep of a Marin lumber clan who suffered a nervous breakdown amid a family fight over her father’s estate in the late 1970s, rebuked her privilege and vanished from the public eye to live in a lean-to in the woods surrounding UC Santa Cruz, basically cosplaying a Medieval hermit, fasting, praying
, and growing herbs.
A harmless eccentric in a community that doted on such weirdos, Sister Candy became a local legend when she intervened in a sexual assault on the campus, pelting the assailant with rocks and carrying the victim on her back to the campus medical center, only to be fatally struck by an ambulance.
When the martyred nun was identified as the missing heiress, the surviving Scofields rallied for another litigative grave-robbery, but Candy’s will prevailed, pledging her untold millions to the creation of a shelter for stray and feral cats that was also a non-denominational retreat for women of any religious background to pursue a life of quiet contemplation and service to a horde of stray and feral cats.
Mother Mildred, the prioress? Nunnerist?—called it a “spiritual pot luck,” but at least it looked like a proper convent, with a chapel, a huge kitchen, vegetable and herb gardens, and half a dozen spartan cells in a cloistered courtyard. Far from the freeway and any commercial airline flight paths, it was as quiet as she could have hoped for. The cats had the run of the place, contemplating themselves and serving none.
Saint Candy’s imposed no dress code, no formal vows and no spiritual indoctrination beyond the informal “share sessions” the sisters put on after each meal. As Mother Mildred explained the rules, or lack thereof, Gala, who’d done a ton of research on Hildegard von Bingen and torrented Agnes Of God, Black Narcissus, The Devils and the entire Sister Act franchise, found herself a little dismayed at the lack of rigor in the mise en scene.
Even as she stressed the commitment to banning any technology that didn’t exist five hundred years ago, Mildred had to shout over the sound of someone running a leaf-blower in the courtyard.
A fucking leaf-blower! Hildegard would’ve burned these people at the stake.
After showing her around the (non-vegan!) kitchen, the gardens, the chapel and the common area, she ushered Gala into the cloister. All the other “girls” were enjoying quiet time, though she distinctly heard irritating folk music leaking out of one cell and what sounded like someone whipping themselves with a leather belt from another.
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