SCENE TEN (X)
“какими судьбами”
Pronunciation: kaKEEmee sud’BAHmee
Meaning: how surprising to meet you here
Literal translation:
“BY WHICH FATES”
Set on the Onderdonk Fields between the border of Breuklyne and Queens on Friday morning of the Labor Day Weekend. A warehouse district of tumbleweeds, scrap metal dealers, and the smell of burnt fuels.
Newyorkgrad is sizzling with fete and fever. Thousands of people are about to be gunned down in the streets of Breuklyne. They just don’t all know it yet. Most of the high class Blan are still in the countryside. Most of the Neg have a three day weekend they don’t understand. The sun is shining and also baking us all alive. The late summer humidity. It remains oppressive. The Flushing Avenue highway leads from Breuklyne deep into the greener pastures of Queens passing through a vast industrial district along the border. In a sense it and the Dutch Kills creek are the East to West Breuklyn-Queens border. A heat wave of unprecedented proportions has been ravishing the city for the entire three weeks.
They put that little bitch Greta on TV again, to talk about Global Warming. She mumbles something in Norwegian about no longer using airplanes. But really it’s all just Capitalist Modernity. You can only gang rape the earth for so long before she begins to die inside. And then die outside too.
Dozens of multicolored tents have been erected at the top of a green hill whose perimeter is a steel fence. At its north side is a small Dutch historic home and the rest a campground in the badlands of Industrial Bushwhack. A big band stage is almost finished in erection to blare live Gypsy Latin music is being set up and sound tested. A four day proclamation of lawlessness has been posted, but only the social club staff and its regulars will truly be encamping. At forty dollars a day, it’s a rather pricey venture to go camping in a field in the heart of a barren industrial wasteland between Breuklyn and Queens known for salvage yards, construction material stockpiling, biker gangs, and various front operations. A railroad to a poisonous green river called the Dutch Kills Creek separating Breuklyn and Queens officially.
Slavi, stone faced with black hair until he cracks a jovial grin only to those he knows is Sasho’s brother. The sometimes grinning Bulgarian enforcer is at the gate nominally charging people whom he doesn’t recognize as the spoken for “regulars’ ‘. Justin O’Azzello, “the General Manager ” is cooking up “kielbasa” and barking grinning efficient commands on set up.
“What are the kielbasa made of,” asks Viktoria, who has booked all the bands and done much of the production work to make this Bohemian Festival occur.
“What are they made of Pendejo,” repeats her husband Raphael.
“A special type of chicken,” says Justin with his mouth, but ‘people’ with his teeth and she refrains from trying.
At various points Justin Toomey O’Azzello has come and gone as Mehanata’s General Manager. He’s quit, gotten fired, quit, gotten sober, quit, found HaShem, rehired, lost HaShem, gotten wicked drunk, gotten very sober, and now, he seems to be conducting business well enough and is back in the good graces of the management. Which means Sasho, and maybe to a lesser degree in reporting and accounting; Misha Kishbivalli, but Sasho is the boss. The Onderdonk Fields are now held by a colorful gypsy mafia. Sasho and his young son join a game of football game now underway.
Around 16:00 pm Kawa Zivistan shows up. He’s carrying a large red medical tech bag. The big red bag contains various basic life support that should hopefully not be utilized, and also two bottles of red wine. He joins Victoria and Raphael on the top of the hill by the main encampment. Raphael and Kawa comrades embrace as they always do. They grin because they know what is coming in the next 72 hours. Debauchery punctuated with acts of defiance and sedition.
A large and gregarious man rises to introduce himself as Oleg. A slinky, slender dark brown-haired woman at his side does not introduce herself at all. Also seated in the main encampment at the hill top are Lia Monteleone with her big French tits. Georgie Rabanca and Dasha Andreavna Skorobogatova. Daria ignores his arrival completely, as though she doesn’t know or care who he is. The burly Post-Soviet Oleg with a cropped beard and fashionable dress with a camera around his neck steps up and offers his hand.
“Oleg Medved is my name,” the big Russian fellow says.
“Kawa Zivistan,” Zivistan replies, “this is my ambulance partner Jared Forgetter, medical partner for the encampment, not homosexual lover to be clear.”
Oleg grins and pours everyone drinks. Zivistan takes out a large bottle of Spanish red wine and uncorks it. He passes out real wine glasses wrapped up in socks.
They all then dance and dance and drink and steal and make art and chat about the world. The fearsome, but utterly kindhearted Ukrainian Illubadori gangster Oleg Medved ‘from Boston’ takes a wide assortment of photos of former and Post Soviet models. Victoria has arranged a series of photo shoots and allegedly Alan, who most call ‘Oleg the Bear’ is local celebrity “up in Boston” and he takes tons of fashionable pictures. Kawa in his blue paramilitary-style EMT uniform with a red bandanna arm band is soon dancing the half tango, half salsa with Dasha clad in a yellow mesh cocktail dress with blue Indian war paint under her eyes; it makes for a lovely picture. “I didn’t recognize you in that faded blue uniform and your strange little partisan cap,” Daria exclaims.
The four day Bohemian Gypsy Festival is on Friday day one full swing by evening. It’s a very Old Soul-Old School movement of a moment. They’ve taken a barren camp ground in a bad part of the warehouse district and turned into something of a cross between the Gypsies of Patagonia and or a cold war partisan encampment. Zivistan has little actual medical work to do. Zivistan begins working on a sketch of Georgie and the big French tits on Amelia. Georgie with a laugh mentions he found black and blue marks all over his woman’s body the night she went back to Kawa’s home two weeks prior. ‘The night Dasha nearly killed you.’
“I fell down some stairs,” is all Amelia says. Georgie laughs it all off because he knows Kawa is a very tragic man. A good man but a tragic man. Kawa doesn’t have it in him to have any affairs. We barely even ask anyone to dance. Georgie who is a CUNY Graduate Center professor and also a computer scientist has affairs all the time, but he is not an American, or tragic, or rarely ever sad. However, Amelia’s black and blue marks are from someone fucking her dirty and rough. Not fucking her with love making. Just one week ago.
Georgie wonders when it will be that Dasha Skorobogatova gives him the opportunity for a good fuck. How much will that cost? Admittedly such a conquest seems expensive in a few regards. Probably a grand an hour. Georgie feels sad for Kawa at times. He buys him drinks periodically with an ugly Romanian smile. Recently he became aware of the possibility of the small and short affair between Kawa and another regular Tavern mistress, the French girl named Amelia. He was shocked that any beautiful woman could find pleasure with such a sad, broken man. Kawa can’t dance and Kawa doesn’t ever smile.
Low and behold Dasha and Kawa are dancing up a storm tonight. To the Latin Gypsy Ska Jazz Band Escarioka now playing a cover of the ‘DunDunbanza’. Followed by brass jazz of the Sunny Side Social Club. Their front man blows through coke like a champion snow blower. George has never even seen the ‘Kawabumga man’ dance more than two or three highly forced times. No use of hips at all!
Daria is a woman at the tavern that turns all the heads. Even more so than that American girl Jessica who always takes off her clothes and climbs the downstairs stripper poles. Even more than Amelia who has slept with almost everyone. Even more than the Moldovan twins who kiss all the time. Daria arrived perhaps six months ago and now certainly has a very regular card. Kawa turned his card in for some time and has just begun to reestablish it. A Mehanata regular doesn’t just show up early and stay late two or three weekend days open. They make themselves part of the tavern’s ecosystem. They have riotous affairs. They get into fights with the Shqiptarëtis. They make a huge scene to the scene!
“Now I could not have seen that happening,” says George to Raphael, “he never ever dances!”
“She’s just fucking that hot, Prosto,” Raphael says. Prosto is Russian for simple as can be.
Daria Andreavna is never far from the fact that Kawa not only has steel-toed boots and two left feet. She takes him up on his hand to dance over and over. Kawa is so happy to be dancing again. He aims to do it well. He swore to her on the night she almost killed them that he never dances anymore. So that night before the fall, she made him two-step in a mirror as she watched and pressed her weight against his hip until he came correct.
“Your hips man! Move your goddamn hips.”
He almost crushes her bare foot with a steel toed combat boot dip.
Rafael is wearing a gold baseball cap and sits watching with his wife Viktoria manically trying to direct this shit show. Bands not showing up, nothing going to schedule everyone getting more and more furiously drunk. In yesteryear and future years Raphael commanded men, now he mostly makes life. With his music twice a week at the tavern as part of Bordel Dali and he also makes love with his camera twice a week and always maintains a slave job at a boutique blue jeans fashion repair shop where wealthy clients send their favorite expensive jeans for salvage. But, a revolutionary is a revolutionary and when asked by the resistance three weeks ago to activate his cell and raid the big blue tower to deposit the transmitter for the Fire Switch Station to broadcast orders and shut down government coms during the Labor Day Parade, he agreed. Jumping out of planes, carrying out raids and building non-lethal bombs, or taking hostages is like riding a bike, you never forget how to do it.
“I like to see him pretending to be happy,” says Raphael to Viktoria.
“They are too tricky. A thing moving too fast,” states Viktoria as she watches out of the corner of her eye. Viktoria is very happy with herself for it was she who made this four day festival come together. It is mostly out of control, of course money was never Sasho’s aim this time. She has no idea her husband and most of the Peruvian Ska band Eskarioka are about to stage a raid on the tallest building in Queens. She has no idea that Oleg Medved and Yulia Romanova are poisoning half the camp with vodka based neurotransmitters. She has no idea there is a dead hooker in the tent next to hers. She has no idea that an Iranian sleeper cell is carrying a bomb into the heart of Times Square to black out the city in an electromagnetic pulse early Monday morning. She has no idea that 2 million black women, men and children are coordinating their revelry amid an armed uprising. She just isn’t aware of those things.
Viktoria doesn’t know about all that many of her husband’s affairs. She certainly doesn’t know he used to lead a guerrilla band in Peru. Called the ‘Bolivarian Hotshots’. They had gunned down many capitalists in the Fujimori Years. She loves Raphael, her husband with all her heart. She partially likes Kawa Zivistan as her tragic brother. She loves but also hates Sasho who gives her a platform for her fashion, art and music. She came to this city and got a job at the Tavern as events producer and tavern has taken over most of her life and time. She doesn’t see the world like Raphael does, or Kawa did before his friends put him into sleep. ‘Sleep is the cousin of death’, but not physical death. It is simply reducing the size of the world one can see, third, fourth and fifth and sixth dimensionally.
Kawa and Viktoria can only really see a couple days into the past and future. Whereas people like Raphael, and Dasha Andreavna can see things much further back and forward, see things happening in other realities. It makes them very, very functional in this reality. The more one drinks, the less they see. If Viktoria Contreras was aware of any of the danger near her, she’d have a baby heart attack. Probably move back to upstate New York where the world is a bit safer. Back to her hippy parents’ Alpaca farm. Way out of the coming crossfire.
“She can’t be tamed by any man or any other being,” declares Raphael in Spanish.
“He will try, but when he fails I’ll have to pick up the messy pieces yet again,” states Viktoria. She’s already had to coax him gently from his old Russian geisha Ms. Maria Parsheva. As well as his Yelizaveta Aleksandrovna and then to freedom and then through the affair where he broke the French girl Amelia’s heart. It’s now back to the bondage of his wanton reckless emotions from the look of it. Kawa’s habit of loving early and often is the source of his exceptional art and writing. She admires that about him though, she’s a hopeless romantic herself. It is Viktoria’s shoulder where Kawa does his most cathartic crying over the past three years since they all met on Floyd Bennett Field at the original Bohemian-Gypsy-Tabor festival on the abandoned tarmacs of the abandoned Idlewild airport. A cool breeze breaks the city’s August humid heat wave.
“Spin me even faster man!” commands Dasha. He is under her spell.
She feeds him still more red wine. He can be known to drink in uniform when a General like Sasho gives him the green light to do so. Kawa has at least some discipline, but like a regular rank and file loses this discipline if the drinking lets him and the front seems far. And surely it takes a lot of drink to render him incapable of splinting extremities or dealing with overly intoxicated people, the most likely of injuries. But now, he’s really not good for much but chasing this woman. He knows nothing of Nikolai’s “great big hectic job.”
As a card-carrying ‘Banshee member’ he has several local ambulance crews on speed dial, worse comes to worse. There are endless bottles of wine and vodka miraculously stashed away about the encampment. All need more than tasting.
Kawa Zivistan is no obvious martyr today, or yesterday. Obviously for all his past mountains of zeal he’s built up, he saw the loveliest girl in the camp teach him how to dance and then try and kill him two weeks prior. He cannot be unaffected by the contrasts there. And if he was aware that his closest circle is up to something very large and possibly violent, he “is asleep.” He is out of the chain of command until reactivation after his paramedic graduation. Which is in Nivôse.
After his work in Haiti, they brought him to the bathhouse. They submerged his consciousness in the great waters of a temple buried in the earth; and to keep him safe they closed his eyes and made him aware only of what was around him in a small circle of seeing. A hint that there was a close bout with death has been made. Did our protagonist antagonists actually plummet to death off a rooftop? The night Daria and Kawa boxed ferociously after he yanked the cigarette from out her mouth, she shoved him off a roof. That was two weeks prior from the night before the Blue Moon now. He grabbed out for her and they both died falling into the deadly drop pit. She did shove to kill, but rather than make suicide assembled he pulled her along, to death. They definitively toppled off the roof into that pit of death. But angels quickly and immediately came to their rescue, in some form. Only Nanoseconds after lying broken and dead in a pit of death having killed each other over nothing. Over posturing and arrogance and lack of respect for physics. For the pair reality reset. ‘The angels’, on behalf of ‘the spirits’ , took their two souls from their corpses and went back in time five seconds. Put the souls impolitely into two new bodies of Kawa and Dasha, waiting in a clear blue-white chemical bath. It took just five human seconds to reload them. A near-death experience was now a vodka-based-near-life experience. Because ‘the spirits’ were protecting them both.
Panting hard, as if post-coitus she grabbed his right hand. Daria then bit down into his right index finger to draw blood. He made no reaction; his animal soul hasn’t fully absorbed itself into his new body. Then they lay panting by the edge of the precipice staring each other down, bitten hand clasped and bleeding; and then she confessed to him things that were highly unnerving. Some were true. And some were white lies.
Now, back to the festival!
Now, “she remembers nothing” and keeps urging him to explain their first night of misconduct under the good night almost blue moon and tell her what happened on the “roof of the financial district.”
Had they fallen into that pit having no spirits or angel to aid them you could have taken their bodies out a side basement door and it wouldn’t have even been real news. Senseless tragedy only bothers all of the living as everyone is missed by someone. So now they dance and self-seduce, she would say she is incapable he is above it, so they self-seduce. They are engaged in a passionate stare down, but it is more playful than hot. She is very used to drunken men desiring her. He is very used to being a sober gentleman and sometimes also a drunken man.
Viktoria Lynch can see the steam and glow from the tent camp at the top of the hill. It reminds her vaguely of the wild passion that came over her several years ago when she wrested Rafael from the arms of a wealthy temptress and got the ring of marriage around his ways.
Kawa is a marvelously incompetent, albeit enthusiastic dancer. Dasha drags him off here and there and they imbibe relentlessly without even seeming to stagger.
Night comes and the darkness falls.
“Tender to see you saving the life of Sasho’s son,” Dasha had whispered earlier, making a dry Russian joke out of his earlier handy work.
He had put an ice pack on a not that sprained ankle of the eleven year old son of the club’s owner. But, it was a smash hit. Calling an ambulance can cost between $475.00 and $4,000.00 in Newyorkgrad.
“Saving lives is much easier than taking them,” he says with a grin, “in the long run anyway.”
“So what happened again on your fateful roof! Tell me the whole fucking story!” she demands.
“So no one meta died, or really died. Only almost died. Because when dawn broke two weeks prior we were still standing, I called you a cab and we begrudgingly agreed to meet again, only by fated coincidence, as we are both members of the same social club.”
“Fascinating talk!” she says, staring out into the bonfires of the encampment. Pouring perhaps the fifteenth glass of wine. Knowing behind her bluff they were about five three dimensional seconds were warm, bloody broken and dead.
They had gotten quite drunk on wine, then Astika, then Rakia and then Russian Standard Vodka, eventually.
Again she pressed him for, “The whole of the fucking story blat.”
“We boxed out. You drank hard and boxed me harder. Then we fell twenty stories to our deaths in a sub-basement pit,” he explains, “Prosto.”
“And now we dance like two lovers who could have been just two separate funerals, in two separate languages, with Raphael Rafael and Victoria being the only overlapping guests of note,” she notes and winks at him.
The festival has become an alcoholic blur to all involved by midnight thirty.
Dasha and Sebastian dance, dance, and dance like they almost died for nothing just a week before. Under a bog moon taking shape in the night sky above the border between Queens and Breuklyn.
Earlier in the day Oleg Medved took a good many pictures of her and the three lesser former and Post Soviet models from Bucharest, Bulgaria, and Transdeisnester Republic. And also of lovely Victoria who always looks lovely and charming and caring for this rowdy band that gravitates to the tavern. While refusing to let the sometimes dirty laundry of her marriage ever be aired in public views. Though there have been improvements lately.
Kawa kisses Dasha’s hand at the end of the song, then lets her swoop low and he catches her in his arms as she gets an inch from the ground with her long golden locks. It is not a smooth or graceful motion, but he tries the best he can. They nearly topple over.
Then she has her lips pressed to his neck. And they eye into each other, taking in the passion that they are generating without necessarily acting any further on it.
“I will call you Sebastian!” she declares. “My name for you from this point out will be the name on your passport. The name you were given at your Trinidadian birth.”
“I will call you Dasha. As I have from the very beginning.”
“You are like a devil, you have way too many strange names,” she smiles.
Drunkenly they declare what each had planned to name to the other already. Then more dancing, dancing and more dancing; sway and grind like they almost died for nothing. Kawa kisses her hand at the end of the song, then lets her swoop low and he catches her in his arms as she gets inches from the ground with her long golden locks. For the second time now with not much more grace than before.
Then she has her lips pressed to his neck. Again. I could fall for her quite hard, he thinks, but he obviously has thought such thoughts before. A rather ferocious amount of wine first. Then the Russian Standard Vodka Oleg the Bear has in a large Casque and also numerous Astika beers are consumed. These are not amateurs by any means.
“A little party never hurts nobody! An Old Illubadori slogan of the night,” says Oleg.
Finally around 3 am the camp gets quieter, the Bohemian festival dies down enough for Dasha and Kawa to sit almost on top of each other, leaning in, coloring the sketch he’s made of their near fall and of her beauty over two pages of his black archive.
Daria then colors away at his sketches enthusiastically. She smiles radiantly and takes each color rendering his work into a superior rendition via the brightness of the combined war effort. Then they go and dance their asses off.
Finally around 5 am the camp gets quietest, the Bohemian festival dies down enough for bonfire calm without drumming. Rafael , Dasha and Kawa sit at the edge of a terrific fire now also dying down. They are quite drunk. “Derangedely” speaking on the subject of “phantom physics” and “meta-reality”. Kawa is waxing philosophically, as Dasha’s eyes roll, on the theoretical possibility of parallel reality and past lives. He pulls this from somewhere, according to Dasha, “His own ass.”
A little faux-intellectual rant positing his personal theory of existence.
Raphael Contreras nods in agreement, adding his own deductions. His own Mayan prophecies mixed with some Peruvian socialist folklore of the Arequipa Province.
“What if there are other lives running right alongside this one!” exclaims a dazed and inebriated Kawa Zivistan, “other possibilities, other potentialities had tiny little digressions been made on the course we follow in this waking life? What if, mind you, the slightest digression and decision had yielded a vastly different outcome from what we experience now? And, what if there was some way to step from one reality to another. Moving about time, changing your body while keeping your soul and memories intact?”
Ironically, as if he had ten thousand spoons and all he needed was a knife; Kawa Zivistan has in his drunken stupor articulates exactly what has happened to both he and Dasha just two weeks before.
“Fascinating talk boys before we die,” remarks Dasha yawning.
It is to Kawa Zivistan like one of those grand conversations he once one had in the East Village coffee house Yaffa Cafe over red wine when he was younger. Or on the Golan Heights hills in Syria. Sweet and danger-filled mental nostalgia.
“Do you believe in your past lives?” asks Rafael .
“Well certainly! It’s so primitive to think this is all a showdown between god and the devil over souls, one person, one life, one try! How pedantic!”
“So then you believe in alternative realities, and also reincarnation?” Rafael asks.
Dasha makes faces at Kawa as they go on. The fire continues to die down.
“Tovarish Philosopher I’m tired and need to be put to sleep,” she says.
“Soon, soon,” Zivistan says.
“The Old Soul is what I heard it called once,” says Rafael , when I was a boy in Arequipa Province, “the body is but a vessel my father and mother said. Like a suit for the soul strolling across time, across many lives. An Old Soul remembers these lives and in doing so has a mission to accomplish, what the Hindu call a dharma.”
“Boys! To bed!” yells Dasha.
Kawa asks her for five minutes to finish his idea. She scowls and gives him three and takes off in a pout.
Raphael Rafael with a devilish smirk says, “Speak of reality later. Go after her or I will.” Kawa catches up with her mid-hill and takes her hand.
“Lie down with me,” he says.
“That conversation was a lot of bullshit, you know,” she says.
“It’s fun to speak about this bullshit sometimes.”
“Where will there be the best sleep for us?”
“I have a blanket,” he says, forgetting about the inflatable mattress.
Dasha and Kawa sit almost on top of each other at the top of the hill under the trees. He pulls a black and green Arabian blanket from his rucksack. She finds another bottle of wine as if out of thin air. Pours them both glasses. Watch him prepare the bare accommodations. She pages through and returns to late-night coloring the sketch he’s made of their fall and of her vastness over two pages of his black archive.
She stares into him with Old Soul eyes.
“Will you be my sweet Tovarisha for the whole of the festival?” he asks her, “We can share our wine and food and I will watch over you.”
“Ha, ha! Tovarish is gender-neutral. It is not changed to “Tovarish-a” for women. We are not Hispanish! We were all equals in Soviet Russian. Only word in Russian without gender inflection. Also, I need not be watched after. I am always safe!”
“Be my Tovarish then and look after me then.”
“We will see. For now; this is just an okay plan. I will leave you in the morning.
They draw closer into a cuddle and then complete a spoon. She wraps herself within his arms and he holds her like it is his duty, but it is also a thrill of some buried passion. He holds her tight like a little partisan as the trees whisper and the two double blue moons that are out late can blot out reasonable doubt. He likes to hold her. They curl together on an inflatable mattress and a green Arabian blanket. They are both, for a variety of reasons unaccustomed to the perfect fit of a well-intentioned cuddle.
They fall into what passes as sleep, her first. As if on demand.
“We almost died for nothing,” he says.
“What if I just kill all your hope,” she mutters in a foreign tongued whisper.
“What if I love you until you know just what hope is truly so good for?” he responds to her in a muted tone. Possible in Hebrew.
“Don’t speak now of such goddamn stupid and impossible things,” she whispers.
They lie together in that Gypsy camp draped into each other on the air mattress and floating on a dream the only two partisans without tents. He dreams of escaping the struggle against the reaper to be forever in her arms and she dreams of a big black cat with a fiddle while a man on the moon plays the world’s smallest violin just for her little Amerikanski. No, that’s just a romantic little literary device. He dreams of her and she dreams of nothing at all. Nothing at all she will ever, ever talk about to a man. And that nothingness is subjective, but not the objective of her “inebriations”.
A good night for Kawa is not to dream at all; his dreams are clusters nightmares. She has thus rendered him peaceful. A good night for Dasha is to drink and dance until the night is a blur of happy smiling, swirling dance movies and escaping in a peaceful haze. He watches the moon and feels her breathing heavily against him. He is reminded of some great peaceful moment. Whether that is because a beauty lays in his arms, or something more ephemeral, magically real forms an underlying narrative, he cannot say.
“We will leave these bodies and make our way to higher ground,” is the last thing she tells him in primal low Ivory. Almost Aramaic. Strange that she speaks any Ivory at all. Being so fucking Russian and surly. And mad. And also quite Blonde.
She snores at him just a little. Makes unintelligible little cute moans. The last thing he thinks holding her looking up at the huge blue moon is that if some hideous monster or bandit came from the tree line, if bad men, werewolves, monsters or devils came to hurt them, if they sky fell out above them, if the blue moon became a meteor, he’d never, ever leave her behind. He’d fight on whatever level he had to keep this woman safe, to marshal every ounce of his abilities to deliver her from any impending strife.
It all felt like a terrific overpowering déjà vu, as if it happened a few, or perhaps very many times before this very moment. Daria sleeps indifferent to his hold or his guard. Daria has survived a nation of thieves to get here and scuttled through a den of vipers since arrival. Sleeping in a park, with or without “protection”, with or without a mattress or a pillow, these are not so high on her hierarchy of concerns.
Amid many other pressing troubles, the Vodka and his many yarns sung her eventually to sleep. The big blue full moon lit up the sky marking on the lunar calendar the end of an epoch and beginning of a functionally existential war for what will ultimately be the fate of this backward species. So much work to emancipate a mostly self-interested race of violent monkeys with space guns.
The partisan Kawa Zivistan, named such by the Arabs and Kurds of Rojava who’s American passport documents say he is also “Sebastian Adoneav ” has also an Ivory name. So does Daria Andreavna Skorobogatova. Amid all the slumbering carnage of the Gypsy encampment, two old souls are reunited. Their breathing synchronizes chest to chest. Their beating hearts match up, and then. Then, there is no beating, no breathing and also no heart beating anymore. Two very attractive husks clasped to each other. As if they had done it so often, for so many lives it was now just a drill. To die and become reborn wherever and whenever they pleased.
WALTER SEBASTIAN ADLER 