Get your own Free Homepage
Good Friday, the summit of the Penitente year, dawned hot and bright. Shortly after the sun came over the mountain, Mosca and Crow, sleeping perched on top of the Morada------ the navel of the world as Crow put it------ awakened to the sound of hymns, twirlers, and the flute. Presently the doors opened, and a procession, led by the piper, his small flag drooping, and the Cristo dragging his cross, emerged, and, whips rising and falling, spattering blood, it set out for the Campo Santo to meet the brothers and Cristo of a neighboring Morada, and then returned.
The day of the crucifixion had dawned.
The Passion Play would reach its climax, and move toward the dénouement.
In olden times, none of the brothers could read.
Today, the elementary school, imposed by the state, has taught them how, but they prefer TV.
And, s0, because they could not read the story of the Passion, or did not read it, the brothers were condemned to relive it.
At high noon, when the sun shone hot overhead, the doors of the Morada opened, and out came the fateful procession, first the piper, then the Cristo dragging his cross, then the Brothers of Light, harnessed with horsehair ropes wound tightly around their chests and necks, drawing Santa Sebastiana on her Death Cart.
"The time has come," Crow pontificated. "She's expecting you. Buzz down there and climb in her ear."
Mosca buzzed down there, settled on her cheek, and scrambled into her ear.
And, inside hir own head, Mosca heard a voice.
"I sent for you."
As Santa Sebastiana swung through her arc, aiming her arrow, first to the left, then to the right, Mosca could see everything, and the thoughts of those standing by went winging toward the question of who would be next year's Cristo, and thusly assured along with his family of admission to Heaven.
"I look for your help," said the monotonous voice within. "We two, we shall help one another."
The procession moved slowly up the Bloody Trail.
"We will smash the world of forms and start over."
On the brothers' backs, sweat began mixing with blood.
"Who are your mother and father?"
"The CIA is my mother and father."
"I'm trapped here in this ugly, crude, loathsome, wooden body, And you, not born of woman, are going to set me free."
At each station of the cross, the brothers paused, and the piper hushed, and you could hear the disciplinas, falling in unison, swish and strike.
"The other statues are dead. This one, my home, is a living idol."
Uphill trudged the brothers, tottering on the skin of the world. "Little Moshka," said Santa Sebastiana, a sudden lilt to her voice
as she moved her drawn bow from side to side. "One year I gathered enough substance to let my arrow fly, and I hit one of those assholes right in the gut. Killed him dead." A merry laugh sounded in Mosca's head. "That's one motherfuck who ate Diocletian's arrow instead of Skygod's cross!"
The summit of Calvary Hill was drawing close now.
"Me, all of me, Santa and Santo, I'm on both ends of Diocletian's arrow, shooter and shot."
At the fatal Third Hour, they arrived.
The chanting rose to crescendo as the Cristo laid his cross on the earth, and stretched his lacerated body upon it.
The Brothers of Light gathered round Him, and the others around them.
Now for the nails.
Big Brother pulled off His trousers, revealing a bloody loin cloth. Nail the son'bitch down!
But no.
The enlightened brethren produced yellow plastic ropes and began tying Him to the cross, drawing tight each knot and turn.
"I always try to get a fat one. I sure did fuck up this time."
A hole was ready to receive the butt of the cross.
"You have doubtless observed, my little Moshka, the chiefs are out of this game."
The thirteen Sons of Light heaved the cross erect and thrust its butt into the hole.
"They stay up there for forty-five minutes. Sometimes they die, sometime they don't."
The Brothers of Light, immersed in a stormy chant, mimed rolling dice for possession of His trousers.
"One thing to say for this holy chauvanistic piggery is they don't crucify women."
Oozing and dripping blood, He hung slack in the sun.
Mosca abruptly sensed an overwhelming rush of wooden tears. "Look at me, Moshka! The Christians did this to Me! To beautiful, eternal me!"
Tenderly, Mosca replied: "I'll set you free."
The forty-five minutes had passed. They uprooted the cross and removed the Cristo.
Amidst great rejoicing, Big Brother declared this Cristo dead. Exulting, the Brothers of Light, carrying the body before the Cart of Death, paraded down the reverse slope of the hill, and with each semi-revolution of Santa Sebastiana's upper torso, her arrow pointed at Big Brother's back.
"Oh, Moshka, I wish you were bigger and stronger, because then you could release the arrow and kill the son-of-a-bitch."
The procession came to a clear, swift-running stream, and, in fording it, rouged its water with dripping blood.
Then they crossed a field and entered a woods and halted before a grotto dug into a hillside and made of stones mortared together.
The illuminati carried the Cristo in and laid Him down. They drew a white shroud over His body.
It became piebald with His blood.
They emerged, and the Brothers of Darkness rolled a huge boulder into the mouth of the tomb, thus sealing it.
And then they all plodded wearily back along the Bloody Trail to the Morada.
"Sunday, they'll come back. They won't take me along to their Easter festivities. No. Not me. But they will take the Three Marys, those bitches! Saturday, you come visit me. Crow will tell you how."
The Brothers of Light drew Santa Sebastiana into the Morada and Mosca fled just before they closed the doors. SHe buzzed to the roof to see Crow. Down below, the Brothers of Darkness and their families dispersed to their homes. The insect and the bird looked down on them, quietly reflecting. "Crow, after seeing all this and thinking
about it, I can tell God hates humans as much as I do. He made His son look like one, then tortured Him to death. If that ain't a statement, I don't know what the fuck is. Look me in the eye, you black carrion-eater. That's better. All we have to do to exterminate humanity is get God to help."
"Yes, except for the intensity of His fanatic zeal. When He saw the wickedness of man on earth was great, and that man's every thought and all the inclinations of his heart were evil, He regretted He had made man and was sorely grieved. Yes, oh yes! S0 He said, and now I quote: 'I will wipe from the earth man whom I have created---- man and beast, crawling creature and bird of the air as well---- for I regret that I made them.' That's what that long-bearded charlatan said. Bird of the air! That's me! He forgot to mention flies, but the best theological scholars opine seemingly without fear of contradiction that demons and devils often manifest in muscidaeic form, and s0 he probably would liquidate you too. No, we cannot use Him. No indeed."
"Quite so, Crow. He'd be too fucking thorough." SHe thought this over. "So what's our next move?"
"Our?"
"Sure. Our. You crows ought to help. After all, farmers kill you by the thousand when they dynamite your roosts."
"You know what's next. Go see Santa Sebastiana as she said."
"When they open the door of the Morada, I can zip in. That'll be easy. But then what?"
"The front room is the chapel. The other room is for storage. It has no back door." Crow hunched his wings, vulture style. "That's where they keep their paraphernalia. It's locked all the time. That's where she lives. And . . . don't look so smug----. She's guarded by killer bees."
Early Saturday morning someone leaving opened the doors for the first time. Mosca flew in. SHe found hirself alone in thick gloom cut only by light from a big candle standing on the altar. The walls encompassing this, the navel of the world, as Crow had put it, were splattered with the blood of generations. SHe flew around, scouting, found skulls, candles, crude statues, twists of flypaper hanging from the rafters, crucifixes depicting ghastly agonized bloody lacerated Jesi, and she came to rest on the altar. It was draped with black sackcloth adorned by death heads cut from white denim. And the door at the back . . . yes, a crack underneath.
A formation of killer bees zoomed down and she backed out fast.
About as much chance of getting by these bees as of getting a ball transplant from Oscar the cat.
SHe perched on a skull, and, mining her mind, uncovered a rich vein of thought which she followed to one of hir Flymaster's precepts. Transform the pattern of awareness and motive now in control. Switch your opponents' value set! Sure. Appeal to their deepest depths, their profoundest level of initiative. Yes yes! Hungry, a food-set of values filters awareness and action. At work, other filters are in place. Drink changes the filters. Fear changes them. Anxiety shuffles them. S0 does love-lust. Dreams rise through a mysterious set. Invoke the Muse. The Muse alters and switches filters much as dreams do, mainly by pulling them out, the rods from the atomic pile, and lets life well up from the pool of the nameless through the namable to the named. Social filters? You can sense them being set in place when you hear echoing in your head: Don't do-this, Don't-do-that, as from the mouth of a child. Disciplined spontaneity. That's the stuff!
I'll shock them! I'll smite their center!
Yes!
Back under the door she crept, and, finding their wavelength as they came swooping down, she broadcast:
"Back to the Hive! Back to the Hive. The Queen is dead! Murdered! By terrorists! Catch them! Kill them! Hurry!"
The bees billowed out under the door and were gone.
But for how long?
Mosca pranced in------ into utter blackness, leaving behind a line of light.
Santa Sebastiana's voice rang out. "Moshka, darling, I'm here with no one watching me," she said. "Now I can leave this wooden hulk."
"I''m someone! I''m here!
"You're nothing. You're just a fucking voice in my head." "I'm a fly! You sent for me!"
"Bullshit!"
Can it have been the crows who sent for me?
A gentle then intense glow pervaded, and there, among the skeletons and whips and crosses, beside the cart, stood a radiant woman of perfect beauty who, although translucent, imparted a sense of great strength.
She was seeing Mosca for the first time.
SHe hovered before her.
"Fly! You! Flies flit. You don't. So what the fuck are you?" "And what the fuck are you? Some kind of spook? A flim-flam floozie from the spirit world?"
SHe began to suffer killer-bee angst.
Get Sebastiana to help me and the crows.
"You want me to help you and the crows, don't you, Moshka?" She laughed and caught hir in a cupped hand. She opened it. "I don't know who or what you are, no name will fit, but you were not born 0f woman, s0, as I read our kismet, fate is being fulfilled."
Like a Harrier jet, Mosca lifted off her palm and hovered.
"Who the fuck are you, babe?"
She smiled.
"The mirror of your heart."
She took her bow from the statue, and shot her arrow into its wooden idol eye. Mosca settled nearby. Nipples erect in rich brown areolas, she looked at hir and spoke in a serene voice:
"I am Artemis-Diana. I hold the bow of death that gives life. I am Santa Sebastiana whose bow thrust the arrows into Saint Sebastian. When I take good aim, I always hit myself."
Posturing, wryly smiling, she went on:
"I am the beginning and the end. I feed on myself. I am the androgyne who created all. I am then and now and all to come. I am as you see me."
She turned her back.
What Mosca saw blasted bee-fears right out of hir head.
Santa Sebastiana's back, her thighs, her rump---- all was rotten and showing guts and bone and oozing pus.
"If you're a fly, you'll relish my feculent smorgasbord."
"I don't eat. My fuel is sunlight."
She faced forward once more.
"I don't eat either. What a vile and putrescent addiction that is! What hypocrisy! They eat in public, shit in private." She leaned against the Death Cart, resting her elbow on its solid wooden wheel. "I'm getting tired of this. I want to be free. I want to leave them all to drown in their own blood, or in tourism and TV. This year, the state police are telling people the roads are blocked for a movie in progress. What can they say next year after television has twelve more months to erode sincerity and diminish dignity? It's over. It's finito la commedia! Tourists will come with their cameras and videos and what was once the setting of a rite of intense devotion will become a theme park for plukes from Chicago, LA, Japan. What happens to me, then? Think about it. I'll be abandoned here in this storeroom to gather dust or to parade for the plukes or I'll be sold to some antique dealer. I want out, now! But I don't know how to break the spell the Skygod used to lock me into this clumsy fuck-ass chipped log. S0 now here you are, not born of woman, which I know must be the case with my liberator. S0 you will do it. You will set me free. I don't know how, but you'll think of something."
"And if I succeed, will you help me?"
"Yes."
"Do you swear to help me exterminate humanity?"
"Mosca's the diminutive of Moses."
"Your pledge!"
"You are destined to deliver the animals from human bondage."
"Yes. Do you swear to help?"
"Yes, my dear little Moshka, I do."
"So what's my next move?"
"As a product of genetic control, of bio-sculpture, the art of the future, a proto-product but recently composed, what . . . ? Yes! Yes. Think of yourself as an infant, abandoned and despised. And then do your duty. Oh yes! Here's your mission. Tomorrow, we'll have a real Resurrection. Tomorrow, when they open the tomb, flit in, and fly into Jesú's ear. He lives in zombie state. I covered Him with coma. You go in that ear. Then follow the detailed instructions I'll give you in a moment. They'll show you how to work your way through His brain to central control, which you'll take over. The Fly within's the King within. That's it!. You shall become his inner King------ I mean Quing------ and guide Him to Nirvana."
Mosca buzzed assent.
"They'll go out at dawn tomorrow to get the Body and take It to their secret burying ground. You go with them. At noon, their Easter parade will find the tomb empty."
That night, as the coyotes cried out their mournful yip-yahhhhh, Mosca could not sleep. Flies flit. I don't. I don't know how. SHe practiced flitting, but could not get the hang of it---- the zip. Would flit deficiency betray hir to the CIA sleuths? At dawn, trucks, a four-by-four and two pickups, carrying the thirteen Apostles of Light met before the Morada. The four-by-four, driven by Big Brother, led them onto the Trail of Blood, and they ascended it, without pausing to observe any of the twelve stations of the cross. They went over the crest; then, Mosca flying right along with them, they bounced their way across a field and into the trees where they stopped by the grotto. The Brothers secured a sturdy rope to an iron ring embedded in the boulder, and using the four-by-four, winched it away from the opening. Inside they went, Mosca right behind, and they wound the Body tightly in Its shroud, s0 tightly Mosca despaired of ever penetrating to the ear of destiny. The trucks shuddered and thumped back to the trail and, coming to a crossroad, they turned and followed it toward the penitentes' secret cemetery. On arrival, they parked by a dirt mound beside an open grave. The Brothers of Light removed the sheet and lowered the Corpse and Mosca buzzed down and lit in His ear. Rigor mortis had come and gone, or else the Body was in suspended animation, even as Santa Sebastiana had said. In a frenzy, led by the Saint's instructions, Mosca pressed into the brain, plunging deeper and deeper, urged on by the sound of loose dirt and clods falling onto hir envelope. The shiny side! Buried alive, the CIA will never find me.
And . . . there she was at the nerve center.
SHe dispatched the coded action signals. Cristo, shaking dirt from His scarred face, sat up, then rose from the grave.
Get your own Free Homepage