Dan Souder's Literary Journal

Calis

Calis battles the demon that sent her to hell.

Attend the horror of the scarab demon! Believe that some future happiness will recompense the annhilation of sanity! It cannot be seen in toto in a glance. It is taller than some hundred horses in a line from nose to swishing tail. To see it is to feel rationality take an undeserving break, like the last dissenter in a mob, when’s perplexity is overwhelmed and shifted into fury. Fear is but a sliver! Panic but a scrap! The sight of this depraved beast erases what is human from the mind, leaving only the blank animality of the buried alive, lying atop loved ones dead below you!

The demon aims its tarsal claw into crime’s sinful bosom, spearing Disry through the back, clamping on his spine. It lifts him to the gateway of its throat, and ends the awful torment of unnumbered severed nerves in its angry mandibles. Tacan cowers, Pelus flees.

“Be after him!” Calis says to Tacan. “I would have his book!”

Calis swiftly runs around its strike, and another, and the next. Neither does the rubble flown into the air touch her. The demon then gives pause. Brave Calis underneath the beast drops to her arms and knees in bowed pleading. She discerns in it a drunken grunt. Scarcely does she lift her eyes to spy the beast in idle victory. It ought to have awaited her final gurgled breath before choosing to ease off her. Instead it falls back in a sit to crush her.

She hesitates, to guide its aim, and then hurtles in a roll from the stronghold of its waste. Just as its abdomen disturbs the earth, Calis leaps onto its side and ascends its spiracles. Her feet inside its breathing holes irritates the beast. Its thorax gives a crack and slides apart. It goes to fold down on her, but her grip is insolent, and she ducks into the unearthed cavity. From within the howling carapace two wings emerge to beat the good from the world. The scarab takes flight.

It zooms about the tunnel in the cliff, spinning this, twisting that, trying to dislodge her. Rather than cling to its solidity Calis crawls onto the wing. It furiously flaps. Her hand slips. The other digs into a vein. The creature squeals. She tries to grasp ahold again. The creature flips. It flies along the wall. It inches her closer. It wants to scrape her off. Now her hand is flailing. It catches a stalactite point. Momentum snaps it off. She makes a fist around it and drives it in its wing. The wing’s joint breaks. The creature cannot fly. It goes into a spin. She slides beneath the thorax. The demon falls to earth.

Tacan watches Calis die. He holds the book, with Pelus at his feet. Just before the strike he turns his back. Had he had more valor he’d have seen the creature smash its face and slide on its belly into the wall. He’d have seen the debris thrown into the air, the piece that’s coming at him, that strikes him on the head. Tacan falls unconscious. Pelus approaches him, unsure. He jabs him with his foot. Tacan does not move. Alas for Pelus, Tacan’s fallen on the book. Pelus crouches, grabs a corner, and tries to pull it out from under, but it doesn’t move.

Something snaps within the demon’s gory back. All that’s ever sanctuary has become estranged. Doomed nuns grasp their chaplets murmuring. They cajole the people, “Turn away.” Pelus is the first to obey. He is delighted at himself and so dismisses witness. The only people wand’ring close are those oblivious. Then rises one whose craft fires the altars of the land. She raises justice, is exultant.

“Preserve trecherous hate,” Calis says pointing at the demon. “You will find it no more here.”

But the demon moves. It shudders, straining to rear up.

“People I call upon you! Fall upon the creature!” Calis says. “It is diminished here before you. Do not hesitate. Avenge yourselves. Together rush upon it!”

The people do. They attack the beast like railmen driving spikes. Calis kneels by Tacan, seeing if he lives. Pelus backs away.

“How blessed he is to be unconscious here,” Pelus says.

“All are blessed today,” Calis says. “For look what we have done.”

The demon’s wreathed in people who beset it. Then the ground stirs. There is the rumble of a quake. There is an explosion from below like a dormant geyser. Then a second, and a third. The triumvirate of demons comes to end the battlements.

.

[Read what went before here.]

Calis

Calis, her servant Tacan, and her guide Pelus have penetrated hell.

The darkness in the cliff of hell sprawled over what words they tried to speak, the charging redolence of spoiled Afghani milk, and the touch of Tacan reaching out for Calis’ hand. Her bearing compelled him do it. Though the bones in his hand felt carious, she reassured him.

“What were your words, sir, I cannot understand,” he said, addressing Calis’ disguise.

“How can such answerability be allotted to us?” she asked.

“Are you speaking, sir?”

“How could our any act be worthy of this immense penalty?”

They were having trouble with their balance, holding off the ground’s declivity. Calis heard a somber tapping like gravel shifting in the wind. She realized there were people passing near. Stretching out her other arm she walked Tacan around, but though she could sense the other people almost brushing her, she could touch no one.

Pelus said, “Those who go through the gate, though they stand upon a beach, shall not descry the sea.”

“Yet Pelus stands with us,” Calis said.

When next a shadow crossed his eyes Calis sprung over by him to block the passing person’s way. She tensed, fearful that the person might walk through her. But he bumped into her, and he let out a cry.

“O sir! O! You are the first person I have touched in 20,000 years,” the person said. “O good sir, let me feel that touch again.”

“I recognize this voice,” Tacan said.

“Whenever are so shrill our cries, then favorably opens my arms,” Calis said. “Tell me who you are, dear soul, and what life you had to bring you here.”

“I think that I have never lived, friend, nor mixed an idea with a second to produce a third. Yet I was an adult, seeming scooped from the clay in here to graze where there is never food.”

“Disry!” Tacan said, “My tormentor!”

“I carry in harness all the contemplation, all the deep emotion, I feel exists within me,” Disry said. “How I yearn to fling it from me. The ocean it would make would take an era to explore. How I’d love to row upon it.”

“Attest your crimes instead!” Tacan yelled and leapt upon him. He pinned Disry on his back and jabbed his elbow in his throat. “If there were but the smallest light, the scars you made upon my back would take a tax collector years to count! That you’re already here and lost does not comfort me. I will heave and crook your spine so your further pretty speech will issue from your anus.”

“Away from him, my servant,” Calis said. “That we are in hell is true, whence meanwhile we’re ourselves. I’d forgotten what we are. Though the stars and heavens are unfathomably vast, our slumber climbs all the constellations.”

Tacan stood up and Disry laid there, choking, coughing.

“Perhaps there’s something in us yet to make it rainy here,” Calis said.

“If there were,” Pelus said, “‘twould ever and be fields of birds that chirp in unison, and all the larking bunnies would set their lives to tasks that they must ever do before them.”

“Your guide is a depressive psychotic,” Disry said weakly. “‘s never good.”

“Tell me, soul,” Calis said, and stopped, and did not continue. There was a clicking overhead, of triple-paired legs and disarranging pincers.

“The scarab demon claims you,” Pelus said.

.

[Read what went before here.]

Calis

Calis journeys through hell. Pelus is her guide.

The quiet of the line of men hurt Calis as she passed, Pelus hurrying behind. She would reach the champed and quivered gate and demand that her father, that they all, be set free. A young man called to her. She stopped. From the clustered middle of the line he rolled a pitiable look.

“Coris, it is I, sir, Tacan,” he said, addressing her disguise, “the one who swung you away from the squadron waves. See where my charity has left me. How is it you are not burdened in inertia in this line? Though slight I am a wiry stud. In city and in chamber games I have held down bigger men than me. Have pity on your servant now in his helpless need.”

“Tacan, I thank you with all gratitude,” she said. “You reprieved me from that scarab demon judge. Pelus, pull my fellow from this mass of men.”

“I cannot,” Pelus said. “I tell you that the task I have must bring you through the gate. All these souls you see will cross it in their time.”

“Your speech is all assertions and appeals,” Calis said. “Perhaps it was my father’s time, unselfish Detnen’s too. But Tacan ought to suffer here no more so than I.”

Calis seized the lad and pulled him out of line. Astonished Tacan fell down at her feet.

“Sir you are the moon, the pluck of which haunts demons.”

She raised him to his feet, saying, “Thus courage gladly kneels.”

Another soul reached from the line, his boily hand no lure. Pelus beat him with his book. When he turned at Tacan with it, Calis pointed to the gate. Her guide relented and followed them behind. They crossed a seeming continent of homeless souls, like babies in their want.

“I would stop my ears against the consternation,” Tacan said.

“Even if you cut one off, you would hear the awfulness from where it fell to ground,” Calis said upon their destination.

There was a constellated head of gates at tunnels in the cliff. The one that they confronted, though barred it was in ample iron, did not block the cries erupting from below. There ever pitched the entrails and the moans. Before it sat a woman on a plinth who beckoned Pelus to approach. But Calis called to her.

“Madame I am Coris, son of Chiro. I with my servant landed here. I say it was not just. A brainless demon rent our vessel on the sea. It’s not our time to enjoy your hospitality. We will regain the living world, and my father and his friend. But more will be alotted. You see the line before this gate, the lines of those around. They move with creatures, are alive. They’re forests in an arid place, thriving in the driest sand. They take the sand into their roots, they take it for their food. Thus they ever modify your insubstantial land. Their possession is their voices that they need never hold. They speak with breath that makes a damning breeze. Everywhere that cliffs arise erosion sands them into nubs. We are together and will stay. Send us to the world above or transform everything you know.”

“We do not hear your piecemeal prayers,” the woman said.

“This man is the moon,” Tacan said of Calis.

“Luminous to what?” the woman asked. “Put them through the gate.”

Pelus grabbed them by the neck and pushed them into hell.

.

[Read what went before here.]

Calis

A demon wrecked the ship of Calis and she woke up in hell, in a man’s disguise.

Despite what the man beside her said, she could see well enough, and she was in a room. She took a breath and scratched her nose. The beard was still in place. She could sense the pulse below the scratch that indicated pain. Calis looked around. There were four arches, an altar, and a dome. It was a temple, but one without a fire. She became uneasy. For all the adornment and the walls of artifacts, the holiness was lost. It was a horrible dichotomy. All the sacred things were there except the sense of god. The missing was preeminent. Anxiety wracked her. She couldn’t face the emptiness. She turned around. There was no door.

“I am Pelus,” the man said. “I have a luckless fortune. I must show you the vast gates within.”

“No, I must go,” she said, “It is awful here. If this is a temple, tell me where’s its fire?”

“Where are other creatures, is what I would like to know. I once kept crickets in my room. I bred them there and planted grasses. When they got too many, I thinned their numbers in my teeth. But never those the stockiest, though their meat was moist. The fire, dear sir, is further on.”

Pelus led her toward the altar.

“I worship the open sky,” Calis said.

“My job, sir,” Pelus insisted.

He took her by the arm and pulled at her. Calis was panicking. Awareness wriggled out of her subconscious, lacerating her brainstem with its claws: what should be blessed was barren.

Beyond the altar was another room. This was cavernous, to one side was a cliff. There were tunnels into it and people in two lines. A man called out to her.

“Father!” she said, and ran from Pelus toward him. “O father are you here?”

“I am,” old Chiro said. “It was the ‘syrians. But you are still my Cal. Now give me your embrace.”

“Father, I had done it. I would have made it to the Hindi but a demon intervened.”

“It sorrows me to hear it, my son,” Chiro said on Pelus’ approach.

“I must insist that we are on our way,” Pelus said.

“Then may god guide the way you walk,” Chiro said, “through his wretched aspect here.”

“The rules forbid your talking in this line.”

“Then do not leave this mis’rable root standing,” he said to Calis.

“Enough, you,” Calis said to Pelus. “I will see my father. And see there, Detnen too?”

Standing behind Chiro, the caravan leader gave a tired salute. Pelus in his frustration began to weep. Calis hugged her dad again.

“How well you wear these clothes,” he whispered. “Do not remove them here, but proceed as a man. You do not want the fiend to send you where the women go.”

“Come on,” wailed Pelus.

“Whether this may be our common jointly end, I do swear that it won’t be the last time that we speak,” Calis said to Chiro.

She walked away from them along the line of men, stringing Pelus back behind her, toward the gate before the tunnel’s mouth that went into the cliff.

[Read what went before here.]

Calis

Calis is a woman disguised as a man called Coris. She’s aboard a trading vessel about to capsize.

As though getting to his feet in victory, opponent pinned beneath his paws, a demon sat up from the salty water. It poured off his black and scaly head and turned to steam where it ran into his eyes. He could crush a ziggarut between the pincers of his mouth. His horned appendage, one of eight, had knocked against the ship, splintering a row of oars. This vessel of Lacs had in its day lunged dominant at oceanic squalls, never failing to hand its cargo over safe. Now it was bobbing on its side and would have gone all the way over had a counterwave not struck it to turn it back aright.

Many men fell into the sea. One of these unfortunates was speared on the creature’s thorny dick. Calis was lucky, she clung to the intact paddle of an oar. An oarsman called Tacan saw her fall and catch herself. Just when the sea would overlay her he pulled his oar into the boat. Calis had huddled so tightly against it that Tacan was able to pull her through the fulcrum porthole.

“Sir your instinct flew before your fear. It preserved you from the poisonous,” he said.

“Instinct readies where our knowledge ends,” she said, “and wisdom rises deep the run.”

“Sir I bid you gather strength but here my bench is soiled.”

“Whither is our captain Lacs? No, does the helmsman hide? We can use the gale this demon’s raised to make our getaway. There you see, the mast’s intact. Keep either narrow sail —”

A shadow went across his face and then it covered hers. They looked up. The creature’d opened up its shell. Its back was dyed a much too friendly blue. A pair of barb’rous wings emerged in new horridity. It hovered up into the air. The sea that spilled off from its form convulsed the busted boat. Then as though the weightless breeze had made it feel too free, the creature let its wings relax. It fell down upon the boat and took it in the sea.

A man was tapping her shoulder against her lolling head. Calis opened her eyes.

“Welcome to the lightless desert, Hell,” he said.

Calis

Having fled her home in Asia Minor from the advancing Assyrians, Calis boards a ship for India to begin a new life.

Though Chiro arranged her passage on a trading vessel, he refused to go along. “I will stay in the land of my father,” he said. “This is not the first time its governance will change. Our family are like boulders on the shore. Though the sea will smash against them, they are untroubled, they remain.”

“Father, you will be enslaved,” she said.

“Look, my legs are bound to our ancestral home. As it is.”

Chiro lifted one foot and then the other.

“This shows me you can walk,” she said.

Chiro frowned, and she could not dissuade him. As a family of traders she joined Detnen, a vaulted foreheaded man whose caravan was drawing near the Persian Sea. At night he gave her a tent. She entered it a woman and emerged as a man, in a man’s headdress and garments and a dark bushy beard.

“Hello, sir,” he said. “Have you a handsome daughter you wish to marry off? I am a princely trader and would pay her half my horde.” Detnen had watched her grow up.

“Sir, men speak of your fair dealing and I see they do not lie. A wife of yours would gain an extra lifespan. Yet my daughter kneels before the disconcerting Hades. You may call me Coris,” and she bowed.

The imitation carried her across the docks without a single sailor casting her his eye. She met with Lacs, the captain of The Blacksmith, who would give her passage on her way. She introduced herself as Coris, son of Chiro. Lacs was unmoved at her provenance but accepted silver coins.

The boat went out with the morning tide. Stretched wavebeats reined the fish from leaping to the air. As the men sung dirty songs around her, sour Lacs joined her at the prow.

“The sea was once a single river pooling in a hole,” he said. “Its bed resents living in unbroken damp. It throws up reefs to cut and scar the water.”

“Granted they are difficult, for ships to cross and fish to navigate,” Coris said. “The red foam is their blood where they are impaled, on low-lying company shores.”

“Yes, the seabed would forbid our using of the water. But man is master, all.”

“Careful.”

“Do not worry, friend, for demons have outgone in weariness from me. “

“You must tell me that story.” Coris faced the horizon. “How long to India?”

“The prophet foretold long coasts,” Lacs said.

Scarcely shepherding a sheep, the head oarsmen beat his fellows’ backs, straining them in time, relentless time. His name was Disry, a sound that for the sailors meant blood and wave with cable. His standing dreadful urges had their dry tongues licking sweat beads from their lips.

Then half the starboard oars snapped and came apart. The vessel pitched onto its side.

Though a newborn cannot speak he has an artistry.

I figured out what causes him to cry:

Reading “Our Choice” by Al Gore to him.

Calis

Assyria will be no more an extrasolar land. In father’s time, a caravan, the phases of the moon. Camels ambled in a line. They started at the lunar smile, ignored it when it turned to frown, and when again its smile was wide they knew that they were there. Proud Assyria with its boastful. Every man a hero, they try to prove it every day.

Father Chiro traded with those men, bronze for cardamom. They took the metal for their wheels. They whipped the horses through the grass, towards the circling birds. It was there the prides would be, their bellies heavy with meat, in sleepy indolence. The men would stampede from the edges of an X. The swifter lions ran, but there was always one engorged that was trapped between them. How the men of twenty summers hooted at their kill. They returned home brandishing, the mane and tail about the leader’s neck. He was feted, was heroic, wore a gory proof. Artists carved the hunt into stone relief. The kill was easy, the art gave it grandeur.

Once Assyria was far off. Now when Calis daughter of Chiro reached the age he was when she was born, she could see the distant haze. It was the dust of chariots. Assyria had grown, stretched unto her father’s land. Soon it would absorb it.

The cats once hunted on his land. The fear of growls attended Calis as she aged. Oxen vanished in the night. Their morning marker was a ribcage and a smear. She sat inside the white remains playing sailor, playing jail. Now that she is old she doesn’t have this fear. Wisdom and experience did not do it down: the infiltrations ended. The lion-killers killed them all.

She expected one would claim more than the land. Calis walked along the water where the fruit was full to bursting. The pleasant odors seeped into her mind. She put her back against a trunk and saw the branches blurred. Spinning still the mulberry intrigues told the daughter, “Transformed become the vines. One which hisses in the wind is attendant to the serpent. Mountain coral dotes upon you, daughter, but hear the wheels squeeking on their axels. Destruction has their sexes and deprives them of the love. What predictions we may make are similarly torn.

“The lion-hunters come, for father and for child. This thunderbolt visits more than conflagration. Their own debauches own them. Do not take the trail of Chiro. The raven has refused to have a cave.”

So Calis walked south to the sea, and took a ship to India. Green cardamom reminds her of her home.

———————-

Though Chiro arranged her passage on a trading vessel, he refused to go along. “I will stay in the land of my father,” he said. “This is not the first time its governance will change. Our family are like boulders on the shore. Though the sea will smash against them, they are untroubled, they remain.”

“Father, you will be enslaved,” she said.

“Look, my legs are bound to our ancestral home. As it is.”

Chiro lifted one foot and then the other.

“This shows me you can walk,” she said.

Chiro frowned, and she could not dissuade him. As a family of traders she joined Detnen, a vaulted foreheaded man whose caravan was drawing near the Persian Sea. At night he gave her a tent. She entered it a woman and emerged as a man, in a man’s headdress and garments and a dark bushy beard.

“Hello, sir,” he said. “Have you a handsome daughter you wish to marry off? I am a princely trader and would pay her half my horde.” Detnen had watched her grow up.

“Sir, men speak of your fair dealing and I see they do not lie. A wife of yours would gain an extra lifespan. Yet my daughter kneels before the disconcerting Hades. You may call me Coris,” and she bowed.

The imitation carried her across the docks without a single sailor casting her his eye. She met with Lacs, the captain of The Blacksmith, who would give her passage on her way. She introduced herself as Coris, son of Chiro. Lacs was unmoved at her provenance but accepted silver coins.

The boat went out with the morning tide. Stretched wavebeats reined the fish from leaping to the air. As the men sung dirty songs around her, sour Lacs joined her at the prow.

“The sea was once a single river pooling in a hole,” he said. “Its bed resents living in unbroken damp. It throws up reefs to cut and scar the water.”

“Granted they are difficult, for ships to cross and fish to navigate,” Coris said. “The red foam is their blood where they are impaled, on low-lying company shores.”

“Yes, the seabed would forbid our using of the water. But man is master, all.”

“Careful.”

“Do not worry, friend, for demons have outgone in weariness from me. “

“You must tell me that story.” Coris faced the horizon. “How long to India?”

“The prophet foretold long coasts,” Lacs said.

Scarcely shepherding a sheep, the head oarsmen beat his fellows’ backs, straining them in time, relentless time. His name was Disry, a sound that for the sailors meant blood and wave with cable. His standing dreadful urges had their dry tongues licking sweat beads from their lips.

Then half the starboard oars snapped and came apart. The vessel pitched onto its side.

———————————

As though getting to his feet in victory, opponent pinned beneath his paws, a demon sat up from the salty water. It poured off his black and scaly head and turned to steam where it ran into his eyes. He could crush a ziggarut between the pincers of his mouth. His horned appendage, one of eight, had knocked against the ship, splintering a row of oars. This vessel of Lacs had in its day lunged dominant at oceanic squalls, never failing to hand its cargo over safe. Now it was bobbing on its side and would have gone all the way over had a counterwave not struck it to turn it back aright.

Many men fell into the sea. One of these unfortunates was speared on the creature’s thorny dick. Calis was lucky, she clung to the intact paddle of an oar. An oarsman called Tacan saw her fall and catch herself. Just when the sea would overlay her he pulled his oar into the boat. Calis had huddled so tightly against it that Tacan was able to pull her through the fulcrum porthole.

“Sir your instinct flew before your fear. It preserved you from the poisonous,” he said.

“Instinct readies where our knowledge ends,” she said, “and wisdom rises deep the run.”

“Sir I bid you gather strength but here my bench is soiled.”

“Whither is our captain Lacs? No, does the helmsman hide? We can use the gale this demon’s raised to make our getaway. There you see, the mast’s intact. Keep either narrow sail —”

A shadow went across his face and then it covered hers. They looked up. The creature’d opened up its shell. Its back was dyed a much too friendly blue. A pair of barb’rous wings emerged in new horridity. It hovered up into the air. The sea that spilled off from its form convulsed the busted boat. Then as though the weightless breeze had made it feel too free, the creature let its wings relax. It fell down upon the boat and took it in the sea.

A man was tapping her shoulder against her lolling head. Calis opened her eyes.

“Welcome to the lightless desert, Hell,” he said.

——————————-

Despite what the man beside her said, she could see well enough, and she was in a room. She took a breath and scratched her nose. The beard was still in place. She could sense the pulse below the scratch that indicated pain. Calis looked around. There were four arches, an altar, and a dome. It was a temple, but one without a fire. She became uneasy. For all the adornment and the walls of artifacts, the holiness was lost. It was a horrible dichotomy. All the sacred things were there except the sense of god. The missing was preeminent. Anxiety wracked her. She couldn’t face the emptiness. She turned around. There was no door.

“I am Pelus,” the man said. “I have a luckless fortune. I must show you the vast gates within.”

“No, I must go,” she said, “It is awful here. If this is a temple, tell me where’s its fire?”

“Where are other creatures, is what I would like to know. I once kept crickets in my room. I bred them there and planted grasses. When they got too many, I thinned their numbers in my teeth. But never those the stockiest, though their meat was moist. The fire, dear sir, is further on.”

Pelus led her toward the altar.

“I worship the open sky,” Calis said.

“My job, sir,” Pelus insisted.

He took her by the arm and pulled at her. Calis was panicking. Awareness wriggled out of her subconscious, lacerating her brainstem with its claws: what should be blessed was barren.

Beyond the altar was another room. This was cavernous, to one side was a cliff. There were tunnels into it and people in two lines. A man called out to her.

“Father!” she said, and ran from Pelus toward him. “O father are you here?”

“I am,” old Chiro said. “It was the ‘syrians. But you are still my Cal. Now give me your embrace.”

“Father, I had done it. I would have made it to the Hindi but a demon intervened.”

“It sorrows me to hear it, my son,” Chiro said on Pelus’ approach.

“I must insist that we are on our way,” Pelus said.

“Then may god guide the way you walk,” Chiro said, “through his wretched aspect here.”

“The rules forbid your talking in this line.”

“Then do not leave this mis’rable root standing,” he said to Calis.

“Enough, you,” Calis said to Pelus. “I will see my father. And see there, Detnen too?”

Standing behind Chiro, the caravan leader gave a tired salute. Pelus in his frustration began to weep. Calis hugged her dad again.

“How well you wear these clothes,” he whispered. “Do not remove them here, but proceed as a man. You do not want the fiend to send you where the women go.”

“Come on,” wailed Pelus.

“Whether this may be our common jointly end, I do swear that it won’t be the last time that we speak,” Calis said to Chiro.

She walked away from them along the line of men, stringing Pelus back behind her, toward the gate before the tunnel’s mouth that went into the cliff.

——————————

The quiet of the line of men hurt Calis as she passed, Pelus hurrying behind. She would reach the champed and quivered gate and demand that her father, that they all, be set free. A young man called to her. She stopped. From the clustered middle of the line he rolled a pitiable look.

“Coris, it is I, sir, Tacan,” he said, addressing her disguise, “the one who swung you away from the squadron waves. See where my charity has left me. How is it you are not burdened in inertia in this line? Though slight I am a wiry stud. In city and in chamber games I have held down bigger men than me. Have pity on your servant now in his helpless need.”

“Tacan, I thank you with all gratitude,” she said. “You reprieved me from that scarab demon judge. Pelus, pull my fellow from this mass of men.”

“I cannot,” Pelus said. “I tell you that the task I have must bring you through the gate. All these souls you see will cross it in their time.”

“Your speech is all assertions and appeals,” Calis said. “Perhaps it was my father’s time, unselfish Detnen’s too. But Tacan ought to suffer here no more so than I.”

Calis seized the lad and pulled him out of line. Astonished Tacan fell down at her feet.

“Sir you are the moon, the pluck of which haunts demons.”

She raised him to his feet, saying, “Thus courage gladly kneels.”

Another soul reached from the line, his boily hand no lure. Pelus beat him with his book. When he turned at Tacan with it, Calis pointed to the gate. Her guide relented and followed them behind. They crossed a seeming continent of homeless souls, like babies in their want.

“I would stop my ears against the consternation,” Tacan said.

“Even if you cut one off, you would hear the awfulness from where it fell to ground,” Calis said upon their destination.

There was a constellated head of gates at tunnels in the cliff. The one that they confronted, though barred it was in ample iron, did not block the cries erupting from below. There ever pitched the entrails and the moans. Before it sat a woman on a plinth who beckoned Pelus to approach. But Calis called to her.

“Madame I am Coris, son of Chiro. I with my servant landed here. I say it was not just. A brainless demon rent our vessel on the sea. It’s not our time to enjoy your hospitality. We will regain the living world, and my father and his friend. But more will be alotted. You see the line before this gate, the lines of those around. They move with creatures, are alive. They’re forests in an arid place, thriving in the driest sand. They take the sand into their roots, they take it for their food. Thus they ever modify your insubstantial land. Their possession is their voices that they need never hold. They speak with breath that makes a damning breeze. Everywhere that cliffs arise erosion sands them into nubs. We are together and will stay. Send us to the world above or transform everything you know.”

“We do not hear your piecemeal prayers,” the woman said.

“This man is the moon,” Tacan said of Calis.

“Luminous to what?” the woman asked. “Put them through the gate.”

Pelus grabbed them by the neck and pushed them into hell.

———————-

The darkness in the cliff of hell sprawled over what words they tried to speak, the charging redolence of spoiled Afghani milk, and the touch of Tacan reaching out for Calis’ hand. Her bearing compelled him do it. Though the bones in his hand felt carious, she reassured him.

“What were your words, sir, I cannot understand,” he said, addressing Calis’ disguise.

“How can such answerability be allotted to us?” she asked.

“Are you speaking, sir?”

“How could our any act be worthy of this immense penalty?”

They were having trouble with their balance, holding off the ground’s declivity. Calis heard a somber tapping like gravel shifting in the wind. She realized there were people passing near. Stretching out her other arm she walked Tacan around, but though she could sense the other people almost brushing her, she could touch no one.

Pelus said, “Those who go through the gate, though they stand upon a beach, shall not descry the sea.”

“Yet Pelus stands with us,” Calis said.

When next a shadow crossed his eyes Calis sprung over by him to block the passing person’s way. She tensed, fearful that the person might walk through her. But he bumped into her, and he let out a cry.

“O sir! O! You are the first person I have touched in 20,000 years,” the person said. “O good sir, let me feel that touch again.”

“I recognize this voice,” Tacan said.

“Whenever are so shrill our cries, then favorably opens my arms,” Calis said. “Tell me who you are, dear soul, and what life you had to bring you here.”

“I think that I have never lived, friend, nor mixed an idea with a second to produce a third. Yet I was an adult, seeming scooped from the clay in here to graze where there is never food.”

“Disry!” Tacan said, “My tormentor!”

“I carry in harness all the contemplation, all the deep emotion, I feel exists within me,” Disry said. “How I yearn to fling it from me. The ocean it would make would take an era to explore. How I’d love to row upon it.”

“Attest your crimes instead!” Tacan yelled and leapt upon him. He pinned Disry on his back and jabbed his elbow in his throat. “If there were but the smallest light, the scars you made upon my back would take a tax collector years to count! That you’re already here and lost does not comfort me. I will heave and crook your spine so your further pretty speech will issue from your anus.”

“Away from him, my servant,” Calis said. “That we are in hell is true, whence meanwhile we’re ourselves. I’d forgotten what we are. Though the stars and heavens are unfathomably vast, our slumber climbs all the constellations.”

Tacan stood up and Disry laid there, choking, coughing.

“Perhaps there’s something in us yet to make it rainy here,” Calis said.

“If there were,” Pelus said, “‘twould ever and be fields of birds that chirp in unison, and all the larking bunnies would set their lives to tasks that they must ever do before them.”

“Your guide is a depressive psychotic,” Disry said weakly. “‘s never good.”

“Tell me, soul,” Calis said, and stopped, and did not continue. There was a clicking overhead, of triple-paired legs and disarranging pincers.

“The scarab demon claims you,” Pelus said.

Damsels in Distress

Whit Stillman’s new film is odd. The characters are of his ongoing concern (college-age people). They grapple with their relationships and their place in the world. It (Damsels in Distress) is heavy on the dialogue.

But these comparisons with Stillman’s masterpiece, Metropolitan (which got him called (for a time) the next Woody Allen) should probably end soon. M was earnest, serious (earnest). DiD is neither. And while both films are intellectual, his approach to it in DiD is from a (whole) nother intellectual tack. DiD is part Napoleon Dynamite, in that it’s hyperreal, and part Hairspray, in its naive exuberance (and dance numbers).

DiD is funny, but its humor is not spelled out. As with Napoleon, we gradually realize that everything the characters say is ridiculous. It sort dawns on us by the time Xavier (the doomed and dreamy foreign boyfriend) stops the heat of passion with Lily to say he is religious. He follows the Cathars (the Dark Age Christian sect) and so can only make love according to their precepts, in a once less but increasingly more traditional place (the butt).

This is only one of the complications faced by Stillman’s four heroines. They run the campus suicide prevention center (the prevention part keeps falling off the sign). Greta Gerwig plays Violet (the leader) whose philosophy of treating suicidal students is to give them a donut and get them dancing. (She gives a class there in the center.) On the surface, she makes sense. Get some sugar in a person and get him moving around and he’ll likely cheer up. But as this is the extent of her thoughts on palliative care, we begin to question her naivety.

But because she is good-hearted, and says sensible things, we keep rooting for her. (Though it is bigger than her brain) Violet’s heart is in the right place. When her boyfriend dumps her and her own depression takes over (“I prefer to call it a tailspin”), she snaps out of it by realizing an everyday object (a bar of soap) is amazing (it smells like ambrosia). Telling the waitress at a diner, she proudly holds it out for her (and the highway workers in their reflective vests) to smell. They put it to their noses and inhale. Their faces light up, their eyebrows raise. “I know,” she smiles.

But just when we think Stillman’s intent is to mercilessly satirize the not-quite-smart, he gives them something to say. Typical of campuses is the question of the fraternity system and the problems it can cause (like the sublimation of identity) (my observation). The newspaper is all for abolishing them. Fratboys are not just stunted, they are stunned. But Violet stands up. To abolish the system would mean kicking all these students out of their (frat) homes. Surely even they deserve a place to live, she says. (When they get kicked out anyway, she lets one chapter move into the suicide prevention center (and then crushed beer cans and hacky sacks are underfoot during dance lessons).)

Stillman then shows here a broader picture of the world as it is than he did in his portrayal of the debutantes of M. What he seems to be saying is every situation has its silliness, everyone too is silly, and everyone (even the guy who doesn’t know the names of colors) has something worthy in her to contribute. Which (let’s face it) is pretty funny.

For an end to his picture, Stillman goes the Hairspray route. Violet reaches her life’s chief goal (starting a dance craze).

All her dreadful inmost stares have hitherto pitiably restrained a knowing spirit and broken its mountainous return, in that instead of dashing them to marble floors her introspective eyes have stealthily stored the mosaics of cruel stations that adorn her churchly soul, such that it, her cowing spirit, meets that guile in fingernails of color, consumed by the seascapes of mosaic and what speaking creatures abide within them, who have wreathed their rites around her hanging head, laid confident by these characters assured of treachery, so that neither the clamour of a friend nor preservation of the self was enough to coax her stare away from them to friends to whom she sent the alms that hath made them poor, while the figures of the stations crept too innocent, and gave themselves away, acting much unlike themselves, and for this reason she came to view them fresh, these figures in mosaic, whose sway of heaven’s power had petrified her eyes, yet it delayed enough a moment, then another, until often and often the beams reflecting off the outer world sent her their serene sense, and me, away, darkling sails, she said, and fire of recompense, for the altar’s off’ring has awoke, depictions no more requisite, and the action of the crime itself absorbs its sufferering.