Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

Divorce came early
He wasn’t a bad husband, just flighty
But his replacement provided a living
And three sons besides
The first child, a daughter, sought him
Found him fading, the picture crumbling
Edges inward, death with a smile
Devout, she sought healing in faith
One last chance to be a family
Perched in Gesthsemene
She on her knees, miracle on her lips
He, descening softy into night
Calling her by the name of the sister
He remembered from childhood
Resurrected in the garden

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They married young
He the strapping star of track and field
Already employed, assembling tractors
She the quietly pretty daughter, held close
Prepared for marriage as her only employ
She brought trunks of books with her
But no children as they grew soft, stooped
He loved her but did not understand her
Slept in while she kneeled before crosses
When the time came for renewal
There was only one option, the holiest land
Rock of ages, renewer of the faithful
He aimlessly cast stones off ancient ruins
As she bowed before Byzantine altars

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Some have called him a walkeing stereotype.
The man of God with soft Georgia twang
He embraces it gladly
For it means people he has never met
Seem to already know him
And yet his brows knit sometimes, frustrated
For it also means people he has never met
Seem to already reject him
Remembering perhaps a soft velvet twang
Wrapped about a mailed fist
Looming in their own past
When you seem like a man already known
You open yourself, a vessel, to the past

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The Drac Asiv counted himself foremost among the Dracs of the Vassalage because his ancestor had been the first to supplicant himself before the Liege. For that, he had been awarded the title of Drac—”dragon” in the Newish promulgated by the Liege. All the other Dracs, created later, looked to the Drac Asiv as the first among equals.

After the Liege died, the revolution he founded became ossified, stagnant. The Vassalage groaned under the Drac’s taxes, his conscription, his willfullness even as father passed to son and son to grandson. The last Drac, who had lost count of the generations, could not even guesstimate.

Speaking only Newish and never knowing the poverty of the Vassalage or the horror of the world it had swept aside, the last Drac Asiv was confident in his place and in his world. He could not have been more wrong.

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Q: How do you know Popeye is Italian?
A: Because he loves Olive Oyl.

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“And here,” said the guide, “we have Tel Ashrad, a strategic site that has been destroyed and rebuilt more than 50 times, including the present-day city you see around you.”

“Dammit,” said God. “You think they’d have gotten the idea after a thousand years. I want that spot for a cedar grove.”

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In the realms of creatives such as we all fancy ourselves to be, there is nothing sadder than a work that is left unfinished. Dickens left one with the Mystery of Edwin Drood; we never did find out who the murderer was. Robert Louis Stevenson and F. Scott Fitzgerald both left novels incomplete when they croaked, though not so incomplete as to escape publication, of course!

But I’m seeing an increasingly vile trend, especially in moving pictures, that represents a completely different form of incompleteness: the incomplete original. That is to say, a movie deliberately left with more dangling threads than a bad tailor specifically because they will be picked up in a hoped-for franchise. It’s not a new thing, of course, but a lot of the old movies that seemed to be waiting for a sequel to resolve things were really just being coy and 1970s bleak with their audiences–The Italian Job comes to mind, the original one, not the glitzy remake.

No, the earliest movie I can think of is The Golden Compass, which has no ending at all, just a setup for two sequels that poor box office never saw materialize. You could argue that the book it was based on had no ending either, I suppose, but that’s immaterial. The Harry Potter people were able to conjure one out of whole cloth when they split their bloated seventh book into two beached-whale movies.

In fact, the young adult genre is littered with would-be franchises that didn’t give the audience the benefit of an ending. City of Bones, Beautiful Creatures…all based on series of books that confidently left people haning without even a perfuntory wrapping-up because the posers-that-be were so confident they’d be the next Hunger Games (which, not incidentally, actually had an ending on the first one, if not so much the following two). I’m sure there are a dozen more in production.

Unless your movies are being made back to back, there’s really only one way to do things: the Star Wars way. That is, the way the first movie handled things, before anyone knew it would be a multitrillion-dollar juggernaut: wrap up the story but leave a few hooks for a possible sequel. In Star Wars, there is exactly one such hook: Darth Vader survives. If the movie hadn’t been a hit, that would have been that, but the movie still tells a complete story and if nothing more were to be made, that would be fine (don’t talk to me about Splinter in the Mind’s Eye, I don’t even know if that’s canon anymore).

I guess what I’m saying is…the transition from book to screen gives all sorts of opportunities. You can make things better than the original or merely rearrange them so that they fit better. If Star Wars, the greatest media property of all time, was willing to put some sort of a bow on its first installment, you should be too. Even if it means changing things a little.

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Newark. The name sounds like a strangled, abortive attempt to say New York, with most of the letters in their proper places but the sound coming out like a drunken hiccup all the same. People make jokes about New Jersey’s lack of sophistication as compared to its neighbor across the way, and it’s Newark where those jibes find their fullest expression: the miniature skyline, the LaGuardia-in-a-can that is their airport…it’s like a Manhattan where all the positives are stunted and all the (many) negatives cast giant shadows.

As a native, I feel justified in talking about my hometown this way, and I’m not alone. You don’t see people with the Woody Allen/George Gershwin attachment to Newark that you do in our cousin. For the record, if it helps, I think that attitude toward New York overlooks a whole of of rotting garbage on the sidewalk and knifings in the park, but people seem to be content in letting them have their delusions, so I won’t argue.

If New York is the abusive codependent that you keep crawling back to no matter how it mistreats you, Newark is the uncle that hits you with his belt but also draws the only paycheck in the family so he gets away with it. My hometown gets things done, shipping and flying and such that beknighted Manhattan wouldn’t touch with a barge pole. We take in people who can’t afford the dream across the river, give them menial jobs, and spit them out like used chewing gum.

It was at the tail end of my own personal chewing and spitting that I was asked–well, told–to move something rather sensitive from the airport in Newark to a waiting fancy hotel in lower Manhattan just off Wall Street. I had one hour.

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The Sepulcher of the Creator is the primary religion of Pexate, specifically the Revelationist branch as opposed to the Incarnationists prevalent in Layyia. “Sepulcher” is a word for tomb, and that is in fact the purpose of the various religious buildings dotting Pexate, from the Grand Royal Sepulcher in Simnel to the ramshackle “barn Sepulchers” in Ioxus.

As detailed in the Epitaph, the Creator fashioned the world-that-is out of abiding love and the desire for something to lavish that love upon. Neither male nor female, It was all-powerful and all-knowing and all-good, and It wrought many beautiful works. The Creator worked alone and was Itself self-created–the details on that point have never been particularly important.

At one point, the Creator decided to fashion a group of Children for Itself. Rather than the children that were every living thing on the world, these Children were far closer to the Creator in nature. It took aspects of Itself and made them independent, using these children as servants and confidants in ways that mere mortals never could be. The Revelationalists believe that It was trying to create new worlds, each with their own Creator, as a final and logical next step after the triumph of creation. The Incarnationalists insist that the Children were an experiment, preparation for raising mortals to the level of demi-Creators themselves.

In either case, it was not to be. The Creator’s Children rebelled against their progenitor, to a one, and elected from among their number one to lead them against the Creator to unseat It and take control of the world-that-is for themselves. This Child was the only one of their number to have the audacity to take a name and a gender: he became known as Muolih the Spreading Darkness, and in this act severed the silver cord that had once bound him and his fellow Children to the Creator.

Sorrowfully, the Creator did battle with Its rebellious Children. One by one they were slain in great battles spoken of in the Epitaph, until only Muolih himself remained. In the fair fields of Noaad, they met one final time. After combat lasting a whole year, in which the land was blasted into a barren desert, Muolih and the Creator each struck a final blow simultaneously. They killed one another at a stroke.

Before the battle, though, the Creator had appeared in a vision to St. Xarius, the founder of the modern Sepulcher. The Creator, having forseen Its own death, assured Xarius that It would not truly die but would, instead, dwell in deathly dreams for an eon until, healed, It would return. The Creator promised that, even in death, it would hear supplications. On the day of Its rebirth, all would be granted, and all souls who had waited in the afterlife would be ushered into paradise. Until then, the Creator promised to work only subtly and dreamily for the betterment of Its loyal children.

St. Xarius took these visions and collected them in the Epitaph, bidding all those loyal to the Creator to build It grand tombs that It might not fade from their memory. And, in turn, adherents claim subtle miracles worked by the dead and dreaming Creator on their behalf. Of Muolih, nothing more is written: if the Spreading Darkness had a similar plan, it was lost or hidden. But to this day, the Sepulcher of the Creator forms the largest belief system in the world-that-is. The elven Eternal Way and the dwarven Dual Throne do not proseletyze, nor do the goblins who revere Muolih as their fallen champion. Only the orcish Hamurabash and the Way of the Three rival the Sepulcher, and many would argue that neither is a faith in the same sense.

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I’m a ranter by nature. That’s my thing, my raison d’etre. I don’t often rant about politics, mostly because I am far outranted there. Anything I can say has been said a hundred times better and a hundred times louder.

But today, reading the news idly and watching horrifying news trickle in from the various elections, I had a thought. And it’s one that I haven’t heard articulated before, so forgive me from departing from my usual spiel for a moment. I promise I’ll be back to ranting about pop culture and movies soon enough.

Andrew A. Sailer is a registered Republican, which often surprises people as I travel in circles where saying one is a registered Nazi would generate less scorn. The reason for this is coming of age in the Clinton era, when there seemed to be no accountability for any number of moral and ethical failings so long as the stock market stayed high. I stay thusly registered because of a strong streak of contrarianism–telling me that all the cool kids are doing something is a great way to get me to never try. I also have a strong fiscally conservative streak.

But that’s neither here nor there. My point is that because of this iconoclasm, I often get told exactly what people think about the Republican candidate de jour. And it’s usually that the candidate is a dangerous radical who will start a world war the second their finger is on The Button. I’ve heard it said that everyone from Reagan to McCain was a trigger-happy fundamentalist, even such milquetoasts as Mitt Romney. It’s become such a staid refrain that among my relatively few friends on the right, being vehemently attacked has become something of a badge of honor: if you’re being shouted at by people you disagree with, you must be doing something right.

But something’s happened now. My pals on the left have cried wolf once too often. So now that there is a candidate who really is their worst fears given life and physical form, they’ve got nothing. He’s as trigger-happy as they said Reagan was, as intolerant as they said Bush was, as bullheaded as they said McCain was. But since it’s all been heard before, and hollowly, it falls on deaf ears. It seems like the old refrain of “if they’re attacking them, they must be onto something.”

When you cry wolf one too many times, no one heeds you when the real wolf is at your political door. And then, ladies and gentleman, we are all devoured.

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