Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“In the matter of Feodor Pushkov, also known as Feodor Serpov or Feodor Oruzheynik, it is the decision of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution, Profiteering and Corruption that he be stripped of his title and rank and executed.” Lebedev, the head of the troika, peered at Feodor over his glasses and under the sky-blue cap of a Chekist.

Feodor, still wearing his uniform but with the insignia newly torn off, sat in a rude wooden chair in front of the three Cheka members, the most senior of whom was in charge of the entire region. His shoulders were sagged, and he nervously played with worry beads in his hands. “There was a time,” he said wearily, “when you all reported to me as your commissar. Does that mean nothing to you? Does all that I have done for the party and the state mean nothing to you?”

“It has been established to the satisfaction of this extraordinary committee that your actions were undertaken in the context of your role as informer and spy for the Black Army and foreign interventionists,” replied Lebedev, sounding bored. “You yourself said that traitors must be shot without mercy and that terror is the cost of a new utopian state. At least conduct yourself with dignity and hold true to those words.”

“What of Tatyana?” Feodor said. “What of Pyotr?”

Lebedev rolled his eyes. “It has been established to the satisfaction of this extraordinary committee that the woman Tatyana Alexandrovna is under no suspicion. As for the aristocrat Pyotr you mention, the extraordinary committee has sentenced him to death in absentia. But you know as well as I do that there has been no sign of him since the…incident…and that he is presumed dead. We will not waste the bullet to execute a dead man.”

“Very well,” whispered Feodor. “If that is to be my punishment for my sins, so be it.”

He was led away to the execution cells, and the Chekists of the Troika chatted amongst themselves for a time. Lebedev had just been promoted to Feodor’s old post as commissar, and the others were eager to gain his favor and avoid being added to the ever-lengthening execution rolls. Once they left, he turned to the window and his features blurred, revealing the scaly visage and deep-set red slit eyes of Peklenc, the Old God of judgment and the underground.

“Even with so many of us dead, we can make this work,” he said in a soft and serrated voice. “We can use this new order to ensue that those who remain have their fill of blood.”

His gaze wavered, though, as he spied a figure in a window across the courtyard. There, peering silently at him from behind the glass, was Pyotr.

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“It was wiped clean in the space of a few short decades, that which we had spent generations, centuries, millennia, in building. Perun and Veles were cast down, and without the strength of the peoples’ beliefs to sustain them they were unable to respond. Those of us who survived were forced to mime the hateful rituals of the Enemy.” Boris–or was it Triglav?–advanced on Pyotr, his three goat heads leering over the tattered remains of his uniform.

“I don’t understand!” Pyotr cried, brandishing his Obrez pistol. “Why try to make things worse?”

“This is an opportunity. In chaos are always opportunities. When people lose faith, we of the old gods suddenly find our playing field leveled. When people who believe in nothing are in power, we grow stronger.”

“And Feodor…?”

“We need intermediaries as we always have,” said Triglav offhandedly. “Now, since you have proven yourself adaptable, will you join him? The Germans are fleeing, the Bolsheviks are weak and tottering in Petrograd, and we are well-placed to sow chaos and misery and death among those that remain. If you assist us, you will be spared.”

“What kind of god would want to sow misery and death among its own people?”

“Beyond punishment of the people of this land? Simple. We are spirits of this place, and our thirst can only be slaked with blood. For too long have we had to content ourselves with a trickle, and a pious trickle at that. We have worked for many years to undermine the new faith and its defenders, and our efforts are finally about to bear fruit. We haven’t been closer to our return, our rebirth, in a hundred years.”

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“It’s…good to see you again,” said the Baron. “You’ve been fighting, I hear. Avoiding the family name, the family lands.”

“It was the only way to clear my mind of what happened,” Pyotr replied.

The Baron nodded. “Feodor and Arkady, yes. A tragedy at the hands of those animals, the Socialist Revolutionaries. Arkady died a soldier’s death, and I saw to it he had a soldier’s burial, in the family plot.”

“That was kind of you,” Pyotr said. “A pity you couldn’t be more kind to him in life.”

“I suppose I deserve that,” said the Baron. “Though I hoped that, in the midst of all this madness, that you might understand.”

“What of the family lands? What of Feodor?” Pyotr asked.

“The lands are still ours. I’ve pledged to support the Provisional Government and promised the tenants what they need to get by. The Czar was weak, a weak fool, to let them come to power, but they’re better than the alternative. A bulwark against the Socialist Revolutionaries coming to power.”

“And Feodor?”

“Last I heard he took to the hills with about half of your old State Militia detachment. Joined the SRs, I imagine, though they say that his men took out a German patrol. So they haven’t forgotten their patriotism at least, and are still serving their betters even if they themselves do not yet understand it.”

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“You don’t get it, do you?” snarled Feodor. “I did what I had to do to protect the Baron. He is a noble, he is an important member of His Majesty’s imperial government, and his death would have thrown this oblast into chaos! Those are the kind of decisions a leader has to make.”

“Not with lives,” sobbed Viktor. “Not with human lives, not with people that we love. We fought together, Zinoviy. I would have died for you, and this is how you’ve repaid me? Look at what you’ve done!” He was on his knees, ignoring the still-burning fires from the destroyed automobile, the dead body of his younger brother clutched desperately to his chest.

Pyotr, stunned, could only watch. Rifles cracked all around them as Feodor’s detachment cut the assassins to ribbons. The Baron’s car and the remainder of the motorcade had sped off down the road, not knowing or not caring that his son was still at the site of the ambush with his companions in the State Militia.

Feodor approached Viktor. “I am sorry that he had to die,” he continued in a slightly milder tone. “Truly I am. But the only way to finally squash the Socialist Revolutionaries was to spring their trap, and placing him and the others in the Baron’s car in the motorcade was the only way to do it without endangering the Baron’s life.”

With the speed of a madly uncoiling spring, Feodor leapt to his feet, dropping his brother’s cooling body to the ground. He drew his bayonet–the same cruciform bayonet in the British style that he had made in his father’s shop–and held it to Feodor’s throat. “That’s not true,” he growled. “You could have sat in that car yourself.”

A hue and cry went up, and many of the remaining State Militia trained their weapons. Some aimed at Feodor, others at Viktor, while some like Pyotr simply held their weapons in stunned readiness.

“You wanted to lick the Baron’s boots,” Feodor continued, his words dripping with poison and pain. “Hoping to get him as a patron to better yourself. You used us, all of us, for your own selfishness. Especially him. Especially Arkady.”

“Think about what you’re doing,” said Viktor darkly. “By taking up arms against the State Militia you’re casting your lot in with those that just killed Arkady.”

“No,” spat Feodor. “You killed him. The SRs were simply to trying to wipe his filth off this earth. And you know what? Maybe they’re right.”

With a smooth motion, he drew the blade across Viktor’s throat. Gurgling and spurting crimson, the latter sank to his knees, whimpering as he bled out. Without so much as a glance at his corpse, or at Pyotr, Feodor turned to the militiamen.

“You all saw what happened here, comrades,” he said. “Who will join with me in deserting this rat’s nest and stomping them out, and who will put themselves in the service of those who butcher children for their own advancement?”

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The Dumbarton Oaks Unicorn Lady, erected in Washington D.C. for the International Day of the Unicorn, November 1, 1911. Courtesy Library of Congress.

Today’s post is in support of Unicorn Appreciation Day at Fish of Gold. Be sure to visit to express your solidarity!

Today is World Unicorn Appreciation Day, and in recognition of that happy fact, here is a list of other unicorn-related days throughout the yearly calendar:

January 11: World Unicorn Appreciation Day – The 5th Annual Congress of the Mythological Animal Preservation society declared January 11 to be World Unicorn Appreciation Day in 1905. In their statement, conference chair Dr. Stanley Einhorne said that “the time has now come to honor these majestic creatures and to stop the indiscriminate slaughter and disbelief which have bedeviled them since the advent of modern magic-piercing ammunition.” Adoption was slow, and nations which hadn’t attended the Congress have rejected the date, which was chosen by the delegation based on the American date reading of 1/11.

April 4: 幸運的柒柒柒龍吉祥麒麟一天肆兩黃金 – Proclaimed by the Kangxi Emperor in 1664, 幸運的柒柒柒龍吉祥麒麟一天肆兩黃金 (lit. “Lucky 777 Dragon Auspicious Kirin Day With 4 Taels of Gold”) was the very first day associated with unicorns to be proclaimed anywhere in the world (aside from perhaps the Minoan “Horn Festival” which many have interpreted as celebrating minotaurs instead). Created specifically to celebrate the one-horned Chinese Unicorn or kirin, (獨角麒麟 or du jiao kirin, lit. “unicorn kirin”) which had long been a symbol of good luck, prosperity, and auspiciously arranged furniture. Traditional celebrations include offerings of gold to kirins, the wearing of elaborate kirin onesies, and of course the traditional 紫麒麟purple kirin lanterns. The holiday was suppressed by Mao Zedong between 1949 and 1976 and the slaughter of kirin for food was encouraged, but the population has rebounded and the government currently enforces the death penalty for kirin poaching in an effort to encourage unicorn tourism.

A woodblock print of a Chinese Unicorn (Kirin) from De Tomaso’s Cor Sinarum (1668). Courtesy Library of Congress.

June 1: Einhorntag – Proclaimed by Kaiser Frederick III in 1888, Einhorntag was the first official protection/preservation accorded to the Eurasian unicorn. Perversely, from 1888-1914, Einhorntag was the date of Kaiser Wilhelm II’s annual Einhornjagd, when a team of virgins would beat the bushes to flush out unicorns for Wilhelm to shoot one-handed to prove his manliness. After the German Revolution, the Weimar Republic restored Einhorntag to its conservation roots. Strangely, the Third Reich continued the practice and did not harvest its own unicorns for the war effort, relying instead on captured French and Polish unicorns; indeed, considerable propaganda material of the Führer riding or being sought out by unicorns survives to this day.

July 10: Australunicorn Preservation Day – The rare australunicorn (“loarinnacon” in the native Parlevar tongue) was granted official protection on July 10, 1937–two months after the last known specimen in the Hobart Zoo was mounted by a virgin and disappeared into the bush. Hunted due to the perception that they competed with introduced Eurasian unicorns on Tasmania’s famous, vast, free-range unicorn farms, no australunicorns have been captured since then. Sightings persist, though, and with the rediscovery of the Tasmanian bunyip (thought extinct since 1908), authorities use Australunicorn Preservation Day as the occasion for an annual search with volunteer virgins.

November 1: International Day of the Unicorn – Dissidents from the CMAP conference held their own meeting in 1906 to declare November 1 the International Day of the Unicorn. This alternate date gained currency worldwide for several years, and to this day many commemorative plaques and statues list dates of 11/1 (especially confusing when one considers the differing American and European methods of writing out dates). A grand celebration held on 11/1/1911 attracted almost a million people, but the world wars eventually caused this day to dwindle in popularity. It’s still officially observed in many Spanish-speaking countries as “Día Internacional del Unicornio,” though, as the January 11 date conflicts with Día de Eugenio María de Hostos and Día Internacional de Gracias.

A print of the newly-discovered Australunicorn (Loarinnacon) in Cooke’s Codex Australis (1702). Courtesy Library of Congress.

December 29: Yedinorog-Den (единорог день) – Russian delegates were absent from the CMAP congress that declared World Unicorn Appreciation Day due to the Revolution of 1905, but adopted it informally later on. They celebrated it on December 29 of the Julian calendar, and it remained on that date even when the new Soviet government moved to the Gregorian calendar in 1918. It was celebrated as a propaganda holiday as a way to cover up the USSR’s massive state-sponsored unicorn farms, which ruthlessly processed unicorns held in inumane conditions to obtain elixirs for the nomenklatura and horndust for use in tank armor and anti-magic artillery shells. The RDS-U1\11C0R1\1 Anti-Magic Ballistic Missile was the ultimate product of this, and its first test was on December 29, 1967.

Check out these other celebratory posts:
L. R. Badeau on Being a Full-Time Unicorn
Presenting Horace Swindley’s Unicorn Droppings
The 301st Fighting Unicorn Division
The 302nd Fighting Unicorn Division
The 303rd Fighting Unicorn Division

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“I’m descended from Alexander Cooke, who worked his way up from an indentured stagehand to an actor in the King’s Men, alongside old Bill Shakespeare.”

“Who?”

“Our Cervantes,” said Cooke. “I imagine the plays and poems haven’t been translated yet, but they’re terrific at cheering you up if you’re in a bad mood or darkening your mood if you’re too cheerful, which is a very neat trick common to great scriblarians.”

“If he’s anything like Cervantes, your ancestor was a lucky man…even if he had to laugh through his tears,” said María Nereida.

“He was lucky,” Cooke said. “His son–also Alexander–was able to turn his inheritance into a plantation in the New World. He was also able to use it to get away from his wife in London.”

“I sense that your mother was not appreciative of that,” María Nereida said.

“I think she was less appreciative of that than the fact that she wasn’t my mother,” laughed Cooke. “My father took his son with him to the New World and then met my mother when he bought her in Jamaica. It was quite the scandal.”

“Why is that?”

“You have to understand that we Englishmen have a different and much less enlightened view of such things than you Spaniards,” Cooke said. “As the child of my father’s property, I was property myself. He was a good man, more or less. He freed Mother and I even as he kept her kinsmen in bondage, and he brought my half-brother and I up as equals and educated us in the running of his plantation.”

“But things surely did not stay happy, or else you would be there and not here.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” Cooke laughed ruefully. “When Father died, Anthony wasn’t content with a half-share of the plantation. He took the whole thing, and added to his profit by selling me.”

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When the Great Work was complete, and Q’idaa was as his own lush and eternal garden, I’ozru summoned his children to him one last time. Then said he to the gathered R’de “four shall be your number, and your number shall be four.” He laid forth the precepts binding the Four Castes.

First were the R’odue, the Keepers of the Bonds. They were given power over workplaces, governments, and other organizational tools. Their edict was organization and cohesion, but not at the expense of love.

Second were the R’idye, the Reshapers of the Bonds. Their sphere was that which could not be organized and resisted cohesion. Theirs were the artists, the dreamers, the thinkers, the architects, and their edict was to form new and exciting things, but not at the expense of the old.

Third were the R’adue, the Movers of the Bonded. All that moved and worked was theirs to keep and maintain, and they were to be the craftsmen, workers, and soldiers of the R’de. To them was given the edict to reshape their world, but not at the expense of harmony.

Last were the R’ydae, the Viewers of the Bonds. At their feet was laid the great task of planning and orchestrating all the others, of visions and plans and overall harmony. Theirs was the gravest edict of them all: to ensure the survival of the R’de and by extension their world, but not at the expense of other groups or other worlds.

In doing so, the R’de were split into their castes and the rulers of the great Houses were selected and their membership decided upon. The last words were a warning: above all, no caste was to be held inviolate and none was to be raised above the others. It was deliberate that the R’ydae, from whom the heads of the Houses were chosen, were numbered last and lowliest though theirs would be the most visible power. They were to be servants as base as those R’adue who toiled in manual labor.

The pronouncements made, the new heads of the Houses were each given a final, private audience. I’ozru gave unto them his last wisdom and departed from the R’de never to return. His words, known only to the heads of the Houses, guide the R’de through the ages even unto now through prosperity and adversity, want and plenty, war and peace, suzerainty and enslavement.

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All jetliners accumulate oily residue near their exhausts. It’s rarely a serious concern, being as it is mostly carbon that can’t be burned any further, but the vagaries of air travel in the jet age are such that planes can’t be washed often. It takes an eight-hour layover at an airport with the right facilities, meaning that hardworking airliners are lucky to get a bath once every two months.

Aircrew and ground personnel are sometimes known to scrawl graffiti in the residue, much like a merry prankster wiping the mud off a dirty car to write “wash me.” It’s frowned upon, obviously, and much more difficult in the post-9/11 era, but earlier aircraft often went aloft with a variety of crude or humorous temporary tattoos inscribed where (hopefully) no passengers could see them.

In 1979, a Lockheed L-1011 TriStar belonging to Midwestern Airlines (MSN 1251, registration N983MW) had one such message discovered by its ground crew at 6:32 AM during routine preflight checks. The message, “LOOK OUT BELOW,” earned eyerolls from those who saw it. The pilot for the flight, Capt. Laudner Bellow, found it even less amusing: he’d been known as “Lookout” Bellow in his years flying Linebacker raids over North Vietnam. He angrily ordered the crew to scrub off the message before departing for Baltimore.

On its final approach to Baltimore/Washington International, a cargo door on N983MW blew open, scattering items from the cargo compartment over a wide area. The plane landed safely, and the incident was traced to a stress fracture in the locking latches. Despite some suspicion of Capt. Bellow for sabotage, the incident was quickly forgotten and N983MW was repaired and returned to service.

Six months later, another message appeared at around noon just before a trip to Chicago: “MIND THE BUMP.” The ground crew chief at Baltimore, Ernest “Bumpy” Washington, Jr., took the apparent joke in good humor but noted it in the log. That afternoon, N983MW encountered severe supercell thunderstorms midway through its flight, causing violent turbulence that injured three passengers whose seatbelts had not been properly secured. There was no question of “Bumpy” Washington having cause the turbulence, but rumors began to swirl among Midwestern Airlines staff about N983MW.

The situation was not improved when, a month later, “OUT OF GAS” appeared written in the residue that had accumulated since N983MW’s wash after its Chicago accident. The crew, superstitious, insisted on a full preflight check, which uncovered nothing awry. The delay forced a temporary route reassignment, and as a relatively new jet N983MW was reassigned to fly the LAX-Honolulu route for a month. On its first flight, Hurricane Fico forced the aircraft to circle for hours before landing, and the captain estimated on touching down at Honolulu International (on two engines, to save fuel) with less than ten minutes of powered flight time remaining.

It becomes difficult to separate fact from fiction at this point, as it had become well-established around the Midwestern Airlines watercooler that N983MW was cursed and its misfortunes predicted by preflight graffiti. No doubt many pranksters took it upon themselves to add to the legend with their own scrawls, and jittery crew chiefs marked down patterns that may have, in retrospect, been mere coincidence. Midwestern, for its part, simply tried to ignore the issue and scheduled M983MW for more cleanings than usual.

What is known is that on June 2, 1981, the message “GOODBYE” appeared near N983MW’s tail. The captain and flight crew refused to board the aircraft, prompting Midwestern to fire them all for insubordination. Three other crews also refused and were written up for insubordination before the staff of N946MW out of Detroit agreed to swap. The flight, a short hop across the Chesapeake to Richmond, was widely known as a milk run.

N983MW disappeared from radar twenty minutes into its flight, and the first debris washed ashore several hours later. The accident, along with another on September 22 of that year, caused a fatal loss of confidence in the TriStar as an airframe, leading to slashed production orders and the eventual withdrawal of Lockheed from the commercial aviation business.

No cause for the crash was ever determined.

Inspired by this news story.

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I have to admit I’d never heard of Charlie Hebdo until it became the epicenter for the worst terrorist attack on French soil in two decades. It would be like the offices of Cracked or Mad had been raided here in the States, though Charlie Hebdo was certainly far more openly political and leftist than those safely zany lampoons of pop culture. But even if the comparison is imprecise, to see such a publication attacked by violent zealots, leaving its best and brightest minds bleeding out on fresh newsprint, is a kind of directly censorious assault that leaves the mind reeling.

It was censorship of the most direct kind, practiced since Mark Antony had Cicero’s severed head and hands displayed in the Forum, and like all such acts it was designed to breed censorship of the most indirect kind. Self-censorship is the ultimate goal, to get the satirist to give up attacking a sacred cow before they even begin.

Now here’s the thing. People have already begun responding with hashtags and solidarity to the barbarism, which is always welcome and a good sign. But ultimately it won’t be the person on the street or even the government that decides how much self-censorship will come from this assault. It’ll be the lawyers.

It’s all well and good to loudly proclaim the virtues of free speech in the face of terrorism designed to intimidate people into self-censorship. But what of the next generation of satirists and cartoonists, the magazines and rags that are struggling or yet to be born? What happens to them then they try to incorporate, to get insurance?

I can see it now: an insurance underwriter denying a satirical publication coverage after they refuse to self-censor. A staff lawyer preemptively putting the kibosh on a potentially inflammatory issue for liability reasons. Remember just a few short weeks ago, when The Interview was pulled from theaters? “Liability” was the fig leaf there, too.

And it’s not just a fig leaf for a satirist or cartoonist. Imagine if you, uninsured and unprotected, publish something that gets someone on your staff–or, hell, even an innocent person elsewhere–hurt or killed. In today’s climate, that’s a huge liability and you could find yourself on the hook for expenses that no modest income could cover.

That’s my big worry out of all of this. Not just that there will be self-censorship, but that it will be perversely driven not from ideology or fear but simple liability and actuarial charts. I hope that’s not the case. I hope that, whether through the use of new media or decentralized distribution, such prosaic issues aren’t enough to kneecap people’s speech and especially their humor. After all, such wasn’t the terrorists’ intent–they aren’t that smart. A suppressed bullet and car bomb are all the subtlety they know.

I hope that we won’t allow mundanity and prosaic interests to do to us what naked fear cannot, but I’m afraid I’m just too cynical to believe it will be so.

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“I’ve seen the ledger, Trevor.” Callie thumped the book down on the kitchen table. “It’s right there in black and white. Payments from your account once a month since The Deboutique opened.”

Trevor was unfazed. “Of course,” he said. “I made an arrangement with your landlord when you took over the lease. I paid 90% of the cost each month off the books, and in return the full cost wasn’t on the bills you got.”

“But why, Trevor, why?” cried Callie. “If I’d had to pay the full rent, The Deboutique would have gone out of business in six weeks. I wouldn’t even have started it.”

“But don’t you see, Callie? That’s just the thing. I knew from the beginning that there wasn’t a big enough market for a boutique selling expensive clothes and knickknacks here in town. Even with all the students, there’s no way for it to make enough to meet rent, especially during the breaks.”

“Then why not just give me the money up front? Why let me try the fool’s errand of running a shop in the first place?”

Trevor’s voice was condescending, indulgent. “Because you needed a project to keep you busy and occupied, sweet pea,” he said. “You wouldn’t have put half as much effort into the place if you hadn’t thought it a success. And we’ve had so much benefit in your stature as a wife and mother and pillar of the community.”

“So that’s all it’s been,” gasped Callie, sinking into a chair. “That’s all it’s ever been. A lemonade stand to keep me busy. Girl Scout cookies.”

“You say that like it’s a bad thing, sweet pea.”

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