The Starry Wisdom

by D. M. Mitchell

“Ah, not with your complexion...” Audrey suggests acerbically. Brandy blushes and picks out a Browning Hi-Power 9mm instead.

  Cody works the action of a Dragunov SVD sniper rifle. “O-kay!” she sings out.

  “Don’t play!” the girls chorus back, each striking a pose with her firearm.

  Was it for ten years that Baruka hovered over the dying Earth like a waiting vulture, keenly observing its plaintive cries and tortured throes?

  Yes: “Fucking scum...” he giggled. “I’ve buried you all...”

  Did Baruka float in a foetal position at the centre of a thousand catheters and cannulae that pumped drugs and nutrients into and sucked waste out of his body?

  Yes. The cannulae and catheters were a jungle of slurping vines that filled the chamber, a tangled medusa radiating from Baruka and branching off to various portals and panels throughout the Space Station.

  Is it true that Baruka’s children suffered from episodic dyscontrol syndrome?

  No. They were born-psychopaths, living in a world with no moral guidelines, no social structure and no limitations whatever.

  What happened to Baruka?

  He was killed by his eldest son.

  More detail please.

  A mindless nine-year-old boy stole into the observation chamber where Baruka spent most of his time in a semi-catatonic state. The boy swam through the forest of catheters and cannulae, parting them like fronds of kelp. He found his father asleep at the centre of the forest like an Undine, like the ogre Humbawa. He stabbed a hole in his father’s throat with a surgical trephine and the blood curled out like a snail’s eyestalk.

  Thank you. What happened next?

  Several others of Baruka’s children initiated the Space Station’s self-destruct sequence.

  Did an exaggerated fireball ensue?

  No. The explosion merely crippled the Space Station, knocking it out of orbit and sending it screaming through the atmosphere and crashing into the Nevada desert.

  Were there any survivors?

  Yes, two-dozen of Baruka’s frenzied offspring scattered from the burning wreckage like rats, skipping and cart wheeling across the desert.

  And by this stage these children of Baruka’s were the only living humans on the planet, were they not?

  That is correct.

  Did they interbreed and repopulate the earth?

  Yes. You can imagine where things went from there.

  The good guy was a cannibalistic, animal fucking, necrophiliac pederast, so maybe this story will have to do without a ‘good guy’.

  The equestrian statue rears up on a single hoof, more than rampant. The horse’s other three legs arch through the air over Beatrice and Graham, and the rider throws up his arms in a gesture of ravening megalomania.

  “Back in the 18th Century,” Beatrice explains, “before industrialization, when signs and symbols still counted for something, there was a rule that equestrian statues had to follow. If the ruler or military leader being commemorated died of natural causes, then the statue had to have all four hooves planted firmly on the pedestal; if he fought in battle and died later of his injuries, the statue was allowed one raised hoof; and if he died in the course of battle, the horse would be cast rearing up on its hindlegs.”

  “Then how’d he die?” Graham asks, indicating Beatrice’s great, great grandfather.

  “Ferrine Gebruhnare... The story goes that there were seven Yankee companies to his three, so, either in despair or as an example, Ferrine loaded his faithful steed with saddlebags full of gunpowder. He stuffed gunpowder into his pockets and some people say he even packed it into his mouth and ears and nostrils. Then he lit a fuse and charged the Yankee lines. He was shot to shit and blew up before he got within a hundred and fifty yards of the enemy, but I guess he impressed a lot of people, friends and foes alike. So... Three hooves up means the rider blew himself and his horse to pieces for the greater cause...”

  “...I’m sorry about your dad,” Graham broaches the subject spontaneously.

  “He was old,” Beatrice shrugs. “And to be honest I didn’t know him all that well.”

  “When’s the funeral?”

  “There isn’t one. He stipulated that in his will.”

  “Wow...” Graham says daftly.

  “He was a very unsentimental man.”

  A battered ‘71 Pontiac LeMans, its bonnet ripped away and its engine compartment beaten outwards to accommodate a monstrous thirty-two valve V16, its driveshaft and differentials reworked and its axles lengthened, its high performance tires bulging out on either side of its bloated, rust caked body, its aftermarket exhaust system branching out from under its chassis, its doors cut off and its convertible roof torn and blackened, roars up the gravel driveway towards Gebruhnare House. Apoplectic industrial music screams through its stereo speakers.

  “Jesus...” Graham murmurs. “How can she see anything past that engine?”

  “She probably can’t.” Beatrice takes hold of Graham’s hand.

  Gressil cuts the engine and the barrage of noise dies away. The engine hisses as it cools. Gressil stands and stares over the tattered ragtop at Graham and Beatrice, who are huddled a hundred feet away under Ferrine Gebruhnare’s spiderish shadow.

  “I’m buying a cheap car and driving away from here,” says Beatrice.

  “Where will you go?”

  Beatrice doesn’t respond. She is returning her sister’s gaze, fiercely and fixedly. Gressil turns away and walks up the black marble stairs to Gebruhnare House.

  “Beatrice?” Graham asks softly.

  She looks at him and smiles forlornly “...South.

  Through Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador... I won’t stop until I get to Cape Horn. Maybe I’ll catch a ferry to the Antarctic Peninsula, hunker down in a shack at Esperanza Base with a rocking chair and a shotgun.”

  “I want to come with you.”

  “Why?”

  “...I’m falling in love with you.”

  Beatrice sighs and shakes her head. “Don’t be stupid Graham.”

  A strip of artificial white sand beach, the daytime playground of the self-important and the parasitical and the private property of a dozen boxy hotels muscling in on the shoreline, was were Sesseno washed up unconscious after a three week binge on brain tissues and stomach acids and adrenal fluids. An early morning security guard prodded the rotten riding coat covered lump of ulcerous flesh and rusting metal with his nightstick, wondering ¿Qué el infierno es esto? Sesseno lashed out and sliced through his kneecaps with an obsidian-edged scalpel and the security guard fell onto the beach screaming ¡Oh Jesucristo! Sesseno moaned and crawled onto him and fucked half-heartedly in hair-rimmed culo while blood spread through the sand.

  Afterwards Sesseno stumbled down a bright kitschy souvenir stand lined boulevard, hooves clattering against flagstones. Nearby two handsome gringos with nipple rings in their swollen pectorals and token surfboards wedged under their armpits to accentuate the bulge of their biceps began snickering. “What is it fancy dress day?” one said stupidly. “Must be the Mexican version of Edward Scissor Hands,” the other wisecracked. Sesseno lurched over and cuffed the wisecracker’s head with his left fist of needles and flaying blade and cervical dilator and the gringo’s skull split open and his brains squirted blood into the air. “Aaah!” the other gringo yelled stupidly, and Sesseno backhanded him through a storefront.

  Sesseno dragged the twitching wisecracker behind him for a hundred yards before reconsidering and leaving him on a park bench.

  The stitches in Melissa’s face were not easy to remove. They had been carelessly sewn in the first place, the slapdash job of an inexperienced intern, and then left untended for far too long. Blood seeped up over the sutures and coagulated to form a thick brown scab that completely enveloped the fifteen silk loops. The thread should have been removed after six days, instead the staff of the City Psychiatric Hospital forgot it was there. When two months after the sutures had been sewn patients were complaining about a f
oul odour exuding from Melissa’s face, Doctor Johnson slapped his forehead and yelled “Jesus Christ her stitches!” Johnson removed the rotting silk himself, digging through crusts of dried blood with a scalpel and tweezers.

  Melissa sat still and seemingly insensate on the examination table while Doctor Johnson grimaced and made excuses.

  “Well, all this scab should have peeled away a long time ago, I don’t understand it... Why didn’t you remind us of these stitches, Melissa?”

  “I assumed they were absorbable,” she muttered.

  “What’s your excuse, you fucking clown?” God pissed on the City in great yellow jets of acid rain that crumbled concrete, burned flesh and caked metal in fluorescent orange rust. He drowned the slums, swept away the suburbs and swamped the industrialized countryside.

  Only the steel-supported Central Business District escaped His wroth, an impregnable ivory fortress rising up out of the chaos, a computer-controlled Celestial City, the Garden of the Sons. At its centre, on the roof of a thirty-storey car park, Hank curled up on the backseat of his luxury sports car and slept through the rain. Bags of corn chips and cellophane wrapped cupcakes lay scattered on the floor and dashboard and the body of a ten-year-old girl decomposed in the boot.

  Far below, on rivers that had been roads and channels that had been streets, Baruka cruised between flooded buildings and hydroplaned over submarine houses in an amphibious assault vehicle that had been a fire truck. Joe used the vehicle’s hydraulic ladder like a ship’s mast, clinging to the top rung, hollering deranged chanteys and firing a Tavor-2 assault rifle at anything that moved. Beneath all else Sesseno swam through the dark, filthy water like a giant sewer rat.

  Tanaka floats in the lotus position surrounded by a cluster of silent children.

  “Brutus?”

  Tanaka addresses her eldest son, a sullen young man with a mop of black hair and bloated red eyes.

  “Yeah mama?”

  “Would you be a dear and go kill your father?”

  “Yeah mama.”

  “Destruna?”

  Tanaka addresses her eldest daughter, a languorous girl with a great drifting mess of dirty blonde hair, blood red lips and ink black eyes.

  “Yeah mama?”

  “Could you go and initiate the self-destruct sequence? It’s time we were going home.”

  “Yeah mama.”

  “Where’s home, mama?” asks Leo, a wide-eyed toddler and Tanaka’s youngest child.

  Tanaka smiles at him. “Home is where the heart is, dear.”

  Red strobe lights pulse silently along the white corridors. Sisko, a quiet girl with intense eyes and her father’s poisonous red hair, browses the mainframe jukebox and selects a song by Abandoned Toys.

  Ethereal music susurrates beneath muffled booms and piercing metallic yawns.

  Brutus returns to Tanaka. Lashings of blood mark his chest and stomach.

  “It’s done mama.”

  “Good boy.”

  Destruna returns to Tanaka. Long strands of her hair have burnt away.

  “It’s done mama.”

  “Good girl.”

  Brutus moves behind his mother and grabs her arms.

  She struggles against him.

  “Brutus!” She yells.

  “Destruna –” Brutus addresses his sister. “Eat mama’s face.”

  Destruna smiles dozily and floats towards them.

  Tanaka kicks and writhes but Brutus is too strong.

  “Where’s the heart, Brutus?” asks Leo.

  “How the hell would I know?” Brutus grunts. “Piss off you little shit!”

  Fire erupts at the further end of their module and the whole cylinder tilts crazily. Destruna bites into her mother’s cheek and chews through to the bone while the Earth’s atmosphere burns against the windows around them.

  After that fuck in the face of a funeral I hightailed it back to my rip-hole in the sky and in the cavernous slashed open vein of the broken elevator shaft what should I find but a green canvas bag overflowing with polypous odds and ends, all tangled together and pale and pink and stinking and splashed with gore. My favourite fucking doorman was standing nearby and looking disconcerted about the whole scenario of wrecked penthouses and rape and orgies and body parts in duffel bags, so I relaxed the tension by brightly exclaiming “Oh goody! I’ve been waiting for this delivery!” Up in the stabbed vagina of my penthouse home I tried to liquefy the bits and pieces in a blender, but got instead a thick, pulpy soup. I strained this pinkish, brownish shit and pressed it in my hands and also for no reason I can think of slopped it on my cock and masturbated with it until it was a thin, piss yellow liquid in a puddle on the floor that I could suck up with a syringe while I cradled a phone between my chin and shoulder. “Hello?” It was Fene’s hollow voice. “Hello, could I speak to Bressil please?” CLICK “Hello?” It was Bressil’s sweet icy voice. “You’re gonna be brushing your teeth with my dick, you hear me bitch?” I told her. “I’m gonna make you floss with my pubes and gargle my cum.” I hung up and smashed the phone a bunch of times.

  I really had to go over to the Gebruhnare’s and thank them for their making good on our deal, so I put the goo filled syringe in the stinky green bag that still had dried up little pieces of vein and gland stuck to its insides and put with it a short barrel shotgun and a CornerShot 40mm grenade launcher. I jumped in my bright orange Bugatti Veyron and as I drove to Dalintober I thought about the Gebruhnare’s little brown maid and the rape baby in her womb and I rubbed my dick that was encrusted with dry white adrenal fluid and organ juice.

  The most VERBOSE sunset the world had ever seen blasted down through a swollen clutch of ovoid chemical green clouds on May Eve of the year 3 million *. Spotlight sunbeams of a dozen Crayola colours swung across a shattered megalopolis that was two parts Venetian and three parts Venusian and transformed a sea of rank floodwater into a giant tub of melted rainbow ice cream. A capsized mountain of black Cumulonimbus cloud, wrapped up in a net of squirming pink electricity, rumbled above the drooping green ammonium hydrosulfide Mammatus. At 6.30 pm the thunderhead split in two and a rotten eggplant sun rolled down to the Earth through a lightning filled gulch of ragged cloud. The Mammatus fell onto the City like giant stink bombs, but the sun, paling from red-violet to orchid to thistle, sucked up the reeking green mist and the City basked in its dying light. At 7 O’clock the sun dropped below the horizon, the thunderclouds disintegrated, and a spider shaped Actinoform scuttled across the twilight sky.

  The Monster of a thousand Cunts and Phalluses emerged sighing and oozing from kaleidoscopic water and lurched up the two-thirds submerged cancerous concrete grand stairs of City Hall.

  “Niggers shall not be tolerated!” The Mayor screamed at the monster as it crawled past him. “Niggers shall not be tolerated!”

  A dozen government frogmen paddle through darkness towards flickering candlelight.

  Besides the guttering candle Gressil Gebruhnare sponges her honey blonde dreadlocks with a sudsy rag and sings softly to herself, chingado, chingado, Soy puta del Diablo.

  Her pale silk slip is mottled with gunge and her sunken eyes are vacant.

  Follada, maldito, Soy puta del Diablo.

  Squelching shadows clamber up a spiral staircase and creep towards her.

  Black water eddies around the ruin of Gebruhnare House in a slow spiral, undulating over submerged topiaries and equestrian statues, sluicing through split walls and broken windows, cascading into collapsed passages, tilted corridors, rotting hallways.

  Gressil is curled up like a millipede on her trundle bed, dreaming of her dead family. Her head lolls over the side of the mattress and blood trickling from her nose patters on the floorboards.

  A thin, membranous tentacle uncoils across the room and caresses Gressil’s face. It slides down her body, curls around her skinny legs and enters her vagina.

  Gressil stirs. The tentacle whips away in a grey blur and disappears through the open window.

  The
monster of a thousand cunts and wisdoms glides through the floodwater, the fertilized egg mined from Gressil’s uterus tucked safely inside its mantle cavity.

  Child stares down through glistening tunnel and sees a thousand spindly legs segmented by cancerous knots radiating from a clutch of bloated poison sacs and hissing mouthparts scrambling up through darkness towards him.

  Dripping fangs enter his face and venom pumps through skin, flesh, porous bone, wrinkled tissue of brain, upward through hair follicles that turn the colour of blood as spasms rack body for the rest of his life.

  The diseased sun, which might have been a green cube or a purple goldfish flapping across a sky of shit and rotting flesh, glew drippily on the three quarter mile cindering SKYFORTRESS wipe out, a burning scatter pile of twisted metal and melting Plexiglas and exploding chamber stocks and bubbling UltraFoam. Brutus and Destruna crawled out of a cuntish spot valve that dripped a hissing mercurial liquid. Destruna wriggled out first and behind her Brutus groped her blonde fuzz covered cunt that bulged through a crudely scissor cut crotch gape in her nylon-spandex spacesuit.

  Brutus stands behind Destruna and wraps his arms around her and plays with her cunt with both his hands, stretching out the labia and letting them flap back. Destruna smiles and her mother’s blood drips off her face. Brutus voids his bowels and the shit drops onto the ground.

  SKYFORTRESS burned through the night sending waves of shadow and red light across the desert. Sparks showered down on dead brush.

  Sisko finds a pair of horn-rimmed glasses amid the rubble and splintered wood of a building’s foundations and dons them, pushing fronds of her violent red hair up behind her ears. Later she kisses Brutus’s shoulders and black, scaly serpents squirm up through his fibrous deltoids. They lash and hiss and spray thin jets of venom into Sisko’s face and Sisko’s face swells up behind the horn-rimmed glasses and turns a bruised blue. After a day the bloated tissue deflates and the discolouration spreads over her entire body. She splays her cerulean labia in front of Brutus and Brutus stops wrenching loose his brother’s ribs and says, “let’s fuck.”

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