Black-Market Manna 2
An occult metafiction in 5 parts
This novella appeared originally in Angry Old Man Magazine, Volume 2 in 2018. It has undergone a few updates and visuals. No further angel meat was consumed in the process. Enjoy!And now whereas my father did lade you with a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke: my father hath chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.
1 Kings, 12:11
The Interlocking Nightmares of Flowerbomb and Bonestorm
“The First Commandment suggests that there are other gods,” Marie dared, washing away any stray traces of her Lutheran upbringing. “It’s the edict of a worried and threatened deity.”
Part Two [Part One]
The three of us sat at an open-air table at a corner café, at a busy intersection. We were discussing the coming winter semester. I was tired from our leisurely reading, which had become anything but leisurely whenever I glanced up from the pages to notice. We agreed that returning to our professorial posts was a welcomed thing. Vespasian and I went to work on salads while Marie had a sandwich. I ate my food and sipped my coffee slowly, stalling the real matter at hand. But the business was right there in the middle of the table.
The parcel was sealed well. I kept hoping Vespasian wouldn’t open it. I was tired of reading. I wanted to know Germany, which roared and breathed all around us.
The waiter came by to ask if we needed anything, and Marie said yes, a clean butter knife. When the waiter returned with the requested utensil and was about to hand it to her, she nodded at Vespasian, who quickly dabbed at his mouth with his napkin in order to accept the knife with a thank you.
“Where was it sent from?” I asked.
Vespasian, chewing a large forking of lettuce, hurried his effort, eyes closed, eager to answer. I stretched my neck forward to read the parcel.
‘Why don’t we open it tomorrow?” Marie suggested. I liked the idea.
But Vespasian, who had finished chewing and swallowing, set his fork down and clutched the knife. He plunged the blade into the middle of the strip of packaging tape and carved the box open with an easy stroke. It made a pleasant, hollow sound, meaning the book must not have been very big. He popped the flaps wide open and laid the butter knife down gently. He was about to take the book out when he thought the better of it, citing unclean hands.
“So tell me, Dear,” he said to Marie, “are you still on the side of Valentinus and his boys? Because I’m not.” That ‘Dear’ was a stubborn vestige of a romance between them that had ended over ten years ago. I remembered how much it had bothered me then when she and I had been involved; now it gave me a certain comfort because Vespasian was sincere in saying it. There was something avuncular to him. His stocky frame, pencil-thin mustache, ponytailed hair, and prescription sunglasses invited anyone on the street to think him either a severe snob or ball of muck, though he was neither. While dating Marie, I despised him with fire after she introduced us. Now he was my best friend.
He was referring to his disdain for some early Gnostic Christians who had loathed the hotheaded god of the Old Testament, Yahweh, who at the beginning of his career was an equal to the city-state idol Baal.
“I am,” Marie said, clutching an isosceles triangle of rye bread and ham. “You are on his side as well, though you refuse to acknowledge it. Don’t you maintain that wisdom is a good thing, that any detractor or denier of it can only be malevolent?”
“It would be divine totalitarianism,” Vespasian huffed, slamming his forkless fist down on the table. Downtown Berlin was too noisy for his outburst to be of any consequence.
“The First Commandment suggests that there are other gods,” Marie dared, washing away any stray traces of her Lutheran upbringing. “It’s the edict of a worried and threatened deity.”
“A rebel offspring,” I chimed in. Marie looked over at me and smiled, nipping a 45-degree angle off her isosceles, breaking down the laws of Pythagoras with her jaws.
Vespasian knew what was going on. He was named after the first-century Roman emperor and enjoyed playing his namesake by taking it to Jerusalem’s Holy Temple. He had enough recreational cynicism to name his one and only son Titus. I was Jewish and couldn't care less about his vehemence. He looked over at me slyly.
As I swirled my salad, I began wondering how I myself would behave had I had the great luck of being a deity. I couldn’t guarantee any benevolence. I might very well give in to the urge to destroy entire populations, selling it as Nature. If I were one of Marie’s archons, I too would be determined to keep the particles of divine light spread throughout the universe as long as possible by promoting procreation.
Officially finished with his lunch, Vespasian wiped his hands before reaching into the box and pulling out the cloth-wrapped book. He tucked the empty box under the table and placed the manuscript down in the middle. Marie slid her cup of coffee away from it.
The Interlocking Nightmares of Flowerbomb and Bonestorm (the Bonestorm version)
It wasn’t as slim a book as we had thought it would be. We were expecting no more than a hundred pages, thinking that it would be the collection of lacunae, Bonestorm’s take on things, and that was it. Instead, it was the exact same size as The Interlocking Nightmares of Flowerbomb and Bonestorm. Vespasian folded back the cloth. It appeared more battered than its brother book, with a brittle spine and missing front cover.
“What’s it called?” Marie asked, carefully hoarding her cup of coffee to her mouth to steal a sip.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Vespasian said. And before either Marie or I could howl despair, he elucidated: “The bookseller knows what he sent me. I told him exactly what we had in our possession. He knew there was a counterpart. I kept asking him if he was sure. He insisted yes.”
It was then that a mass-transit bus zoomed by. The pages caught the second wind of the bus, swirling and drifting and wafting out into the busy intersection.
“Oh, no,” Marie said.
We upended the table and began frantically snatching at pages, leaping into the air with outstretched arms, dodging honking automobiles, bumping passersby. I slipped on a manhole cover while trying to maneuver myself to snatch floating pages from all sides of me. Vespasian was way over on the other side of the intersection, fumbling around with what he had managed to snare into his arms. Marie was on the other side of the street from him, crawling under a table, hauling in pages. Traffic stopped. The drivers came to halts more out of bemusement than wanting to make it easy for us. Some people began helping us, and after what seemed forever we had all but four of the pages that had blown about.
Back at the lunch table, where the rest of the book had obediently remained, Marie asked Vespasian, “What the hell is this?” She produced the frontispiece, which read The Interlocking Nightmares of Flowerbomb and Bonestorm. Vespasian held his hands out and shrugged. I smacked a hand against my face. People around us whispered and murmured in chthonic German.
We walked back to the hotel in single file, dejected, not speaking a word. Marie, who had been peering at a crumpled page, said, “Vasmatzidis, this book is not the same that we have back at the hotel.”
She was right. That copy of The Interlocking Nightmares of Flowerbomb and Bonestorm that we lugged down the street was not identical to the one she and I had read and reread. The books were identical up to the point where the twins—or lovers, or friends—began reading a book that is not mentioned in our copy, simply because its title ended up each time somewhere in the parentheses that stood for entire missing pages that comprised Bonestorm’s side of the story. We had those lacunae now.
Vespasian was down about what had just happened. “My antiquarian friend said it was the only existing copy. There are several of the one you two have, but of this other, that was the only copy.”
Marie and I didn’t share his chagrin. Rather, we were excited to read a story contained in the book called Carnivorous Butterflies. Two of the pages we lost were from the first half of the book, all of which we had in duplicate. The other two, however, were not redundant. It would be months before Vespasian admitted to returning three times during his stay in Berlin to that intersection.
Sitting on the hotel room’s loveseat, Marie and I read about Flowerbomb and Bonestorm read about a banker who, sometime during the nineteenth century, had wandered through their park. He was as avaricious as Crassus, employing similar schemes in the amassing of wealth. Through back channels, he hired arsonists to compromise three churches, two libraries, and one university. A fire brigade would be given the go-ahead only when the building owners relented unto his lowball figure to buy them out. He was quick to subsidize whorehouses, though, and loved to inundate his mistresses with cash and gold-inlaid lingerie. His loathing of art was almost a disease. He co-opted would-be painters and poets into shady business ventures, thereby breaking them of their aesthetic propensities.
One day this banker wound down the park’s paths and, having got to the very area where I had found Marie sitting, came upon a swirl of butterflies. He loathed insects as much as he loathed poetry and religion, and began cursing them aloud for being in his way. As if hearing his maledictions, the butterflies at once turned on him, nipping at his skin like so many airborne piranhas. He swatted and kicked, thinking they would disperse. Instead, they kept up their attack. He figured a dash out of the park would rid him of them, but, alas, he did not make it out of the park. They set to mauling at his limbs and neck, ripping at his worsted suit to get at his flesh. Their jaws worked with the corrosiveness of acid. He pleaded for help, but besides one eyewitness, no one was around to hear.
Much of his flesh had been torn from his bones by the time he fell into a ravine, where the butterflies proceeded to pick his bones clean. There were two or three more accounts of the meat-eating butterflies assaulting parkgoers, though details were wanting. A public sanitation officer and exterminator were sent into the park to clean it up, but the insects were nowhere to be found.
Thank you for reading Third-Eye LASIK. If you like what you just read, why not check out my brand-new novel? It’s an LA noir mystery with an alcoholic private detective, vegan crime bosses, guys who cut cocaine with borax, and AI Charles Manson.
Suicide by Jiu-Jitsu? Hmm. Tequila? Of course. Crushed Trachea Blues is live and livid. You in?
this is so engrossing and i love the characters. really great storytelling.
Am I a butterfly dreaming of being a poet, or am I a poet dreaming of being a cloud of butterflies swarming over victims to tear them into small shreds of flesh?