Excerpts From Nonexistent Books

“And why should this one speak to you of anything?” sneered the gob. “You mules could never understand our plight.”

Myn pressed the knife to the gob’s throat. A single drop of blood wept from the tip. “Try me,” she said.

“We gobs are created by, beloved of, and cursed by Muolih, the Spreading Darkness, the Murderer of the Creator,” the Gob squawked through the chokehold.

“Yeah, yeah. I know that. My mother wouldn’t shut up about it. He’s as imaginary as a mule father.”

“No!” cried the gob, with shocking vehemence. “He is real. Lodii, our leader…she learned of a place the orcs call Rait Tirat…the Tomb of the Rebel. There, entombed, is Nyir Rvi, the Murderer of the Creator.”

“Fairy tales,” Myn said. “I didn’t come all this way to hear bedtime stories meant for particularly dumb children.”

“Believe what you want, mule,” said the gob. “Lodii marches the Gob Legion into the heart of the ancient desert to find our creator and master. Lord Eyon may have freed us, but it is Muolih who will save us.”

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You love your land
They love your land
Both for what it was
Both for what it must be
Differing only in details
So you speak to them now
Reading from their book
Their hearts open, minds open
Pockets open
Does it matter whence help comes
When you have so few friends?
To save the land, or to redeem it
You are fellow-travelers
Ignoring the reckoning
That must eventually come

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They come by the droves to the desert
From another desert far away
These Texans, so anxious to climb
Holy mountains, holy tels
Tracing the footsteps of a man
Your people revile
They pay well, very well
They lap up the stories eagerly
Even a little bit of their religion
Thrown in like strong spice
Elicits rapture, hallelujiah
But at every turn from every group
The question eventually comes
What must we do to see you saved?
What do we have to do to send you
Home with a brand new religion?
If you take their money
You must take their wine, their bread

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Traitor they called him
Apostate from the faith
Cast out from the chosen
Banished from the elect
A powerful symbol for those
Who would see his nation saved
A powerful warning for those
Who would see it intact
As he preaches on the mount
Covered with bodies of his nation
Does he feel a twinge of regret
Or see only the gold-gilt dome
That sees both the he that was
And the he that is
As equally guilty

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Godly women are so very rare
The preachers on high proclaim
So when grey hairs crept in
Three men who had never met
Had godly women mailed to them
One from islands that had been America
One from a land America once warred for
One from America’s younger brother
It was equitable, they were saved
Shedding the Mass of youth for
Full immersion and comfort
Devout they were, devout they remained
But meeting on the holy land’s streets
While their men knelt and prayed
Talking in their adopted tongues
They wondered what might have been

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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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