And what is the soul of a writer like?

She sat in the highest room of the highest tower and she cried for days. Flocks of geese overhead paused in their flight and circled over the castle, searching for the owner of the voice with such sorrow. The sun rose, the sun fell, and as time passed so many birds had gathered that a steady wind blew from the castle over the forest nearby.

Wolf lifted his muzzle to the leaves. They had not stopped rustling for a week, yet still he could hear the distant sound of a woman crying. "Ah," he sighed, "such has it always been."

Fox, hearing Wolf talk to himself, emerged from his burrow. "Why, hello Wolf," he said, shaking the dirt from his snout. "Were you trying to talk to me?"

"No," Wolf said. "I was listening to the trees."

Fox nodded sagely. "It's really quite silly, isn't it?"

"No," Wolf said. He smiled sadly. "Even the squirrels know something of loss."

Fox lifted a furry eyebrow. "You don't make much sense, old chap."

"What I mean," Wolf said, "is the sense of the woman's weeping. Have you not noticed? Human women have cried before and many more will cry since, but this touches the surface of a sorrow with roots immersed. The geese know it and teardrops follow in the wake of their wings. The trees know it and each has offered a drop of sap in sacrifice. The floor of the forest is littered with gold."

Fox looked around. "Yes," he said quietly, "that is true."

"Do you know why that is, Fox?"

Fox shook his head.

"Because a poet is weeping," Wolf said.

"I do not understand."

Wolf considered. "I do not know if I can explain it. I have seen nothing of this, but I have a cousin named Dog who has seen much of the human way though he does not understand it. He tells me what he sees and does not comprehend, and I sit between the trees following their stories. Most of them I do not understand, but then he will tell me the stories of the poets, and those I can follow as if they were my own. Here is the difference: humans see and know. Poets see and wonder, and every creature, every tree knows it."

"That is all well and good," said Fox, "but why doesn't she look at herself and wonder why she can't bloody stop crying?"

"She does look at herself," said Wolf, "and that is her horror. Poets are hunters of meaning, and on every hunting ground they catch their prey save one, and that is in their selves. It crushes them, it drives them mad. They tell themselves stories for the beauty and the terror of their lives, but that does not save them from its great sorrow. There is only one story that can soften the madness, and it is this that ultimately drives them, each one, to flee forever the glorious misery of this place: that they are peons of a greater existence, fallen somehow from a plane where words have the power to break and to heal, to make worlds. They have watched their words die in their mouths. And so it is that each poet is a fallen angel, and each one is trying to find her way home."

"That's rather sad," Fox said, idly scratching his ear.

Wolf nodded slowly. "Yes," he said, "it is."

Fox scratched his ear and said nothing. Wolf looked away listening to the shuffle of the leaves, the wind laden with the sound of crying.

--December 17, 2004

“No,” Alfredo said. He had quietly sat upright and his shades were perched on top of his head. The fire was a halo in the whites of his eyes. “No, Chris, you’re not crazy, no more than the rest of us and the rest of this sickened world.” A pause. A pause in the easy flow of his words, and Chris straightened. Alfredo continued in the tone fathers used at the end of a bedtime story. “You’re not crazy. You’re an artist. You and me and all of us, we live an artists’ life. We create. We live like a rat on fire tearing its way through the maze, toward an exit it was never meant to find. Artists were born to blaze in the horror of this world’s atmosphere like burning meteors, until the pull of the ocean below is too strong. We need to run. We spend our lives running from beauty to horror in aimless circles because all the time we are trying to escape, we know better than anyone that there is nowhere to go, there is nowhere to hide from the vivid lucidity of this world.” Alfredo had a prophet’s smile, seeing both the end and the paradise that would come after. “Me- I was born to burn. I live for the hundreds of people out there dying after fifty years still wondering what it’s all about. And my only regret- those hundreds of people, they’ve been sleeping through their lives. The comfort of that is, all this has the weight and bearing of a dream. If everything falls apart, if the worst happens, they have the power to forget. It was never more than a nightmare. Could be, the only thing worse than always sleeping is never sleeping. I remember everything. And when the terror seems too dark and the shapes of my nightmares, too real- there’s nowhere to run. The only solution is what you’ve already found: run some other place, and maybe the sharp edges of reality will be dulled by the unfamiliar. Artists, Chris, you and me and Nara- we’re always awake, and our idea of a stupor has colors brighter than what most people feel at their height, when they touch on the verge of waking.”

Alfredo inclined his head to show he was finished. Chris and Nara stared, exchanged glances, turned again to stare at the artist.

“Wow,” Nara said.

“Good speech.”

Alfredo shrugged one shoulder. “I try.”

--from And the Sun Falls, a novel

She cried out again and her throat rasped. How long could she remain here? Did it matter if she had no other choice? The room was as small as it had been, the walls as white and blank and bare, the ceiling as fathomless and darkly malevolent as the bottom of the sea, where unthinkable creatures slithered in the depths. And they watched, and they waited. Five walls could have separated them and she would still be naked in their gaze. She was afraid of the ceiling and she did not look there, she brought her hands up and covered her eyes so the darkness was out of sight, out of mind.

We're still here, pretty little thing.

The writer choked and shoved her face between her knees. She could not look. Above her head the darkness throbbed as if something titanic were laughing there.

But my dear, you are being so silly, so absurd. We are your best friends, can't you see?

"No..."

You wound me, my dear, my lovely little dear. The darkness roiled and the things there laughed.

Because we're just that fucking close.

Yes. We are.

Shadow swirled through the white walls like a tornado descending. It reached blindly for her and she glared as it came closer. Touch the dark, buddy boy. Like the touch of a beautiful woman you've never seen before, inviting and repulsive at once. The walls seemed to glow and the darkness retracted without recoiling- it was there, then it was not.

And so you treat your bread and wine. The dark things that tremble beneath the earth. Did you know, my weakling dear, how long Alice fell before she hit the bottom? You would like to know. Yes, we know, we see. You want more than the view of the tunnel. You want to know when the well reaches the bottom of the earth...

The light faded and the darkness slithered from the ceiling like lightning in slow motion, branching and fraying, twisting, knotting even as it hit the blinding white floor. The writer tensed but there was nowhere to go. The walls were bare and there had never been a door.

Decay regarded her from the center of the room. It had a man's head, lips grinning, eyes streaming blood where the screws poked out. Papers hung from the screws, flapping in and out against the man's cheek with his every breath. The word dangling from the right eye socket: REMEMBER. The word from the left: THIS. "Because because because because," the man with the screws in his eyes sang, "because of the wonderful things he does..."

"You fucking bastard," the writer said.

The room lurched like an elevator with its cord cut, and then it plunged. Even gravity crumbled under the weight of the darkness that clamped over the doorless room, the writer who had no escape, the shifting shadow coming from the ceiling and the writer's ears.

"Mr. Writer," the shadow said. It had become a ghost in the darkness, lines she did not want to make out, a silhouette with a form she knew before she looked at it. Every horror was familiar. So too were the red eyes smoldering in the darkness. "You know this is how it is," the demon said. He had an opera baritone's voice. "And drift and drift and go and go and we are waiting round every corner."

"Every street," the writer agreed.

"It makes my heart sing to see you so glad."

"This isn't what I want to see." She raised her chin. "Show me the other side."

"Other side!" The demon's half-visible wings spread and she dropped her gaze. She wasn't looking at him and still she knew their shape, the color, the chill floating aura-like above the leathery skin. "You've been on the other side, chickadee. White and bland and bare." The demon leaned against a wall and the wings were gone. Now he was six-armed, jackal-headed and scorpion-tailed, eyes rolled beatifically toward the heaving shadow overhead. "Come on, honey. You and me, we could go places. Take a walk on the wild side."

"The other side isn't like that," she said. "The beautiful..."

Plates clicked together on the scorpion tail. Ck- ck ck ck. "Now you're being simple."

"I'm not. The beautiful. Everything I do is because there is some beauty left in this world."

Fetid breath blew over her face, the wind from the killing fields. A skeleton looked puppy-like into her eyes, gray-green strings of flesh hanging from his skull like fringes on a rug. "What about me? I feel pretty! Oh so pretty!"

The writer turned her face away in disgust.

"Now don't be like that, sweetheart. Beauty's on the inside, ennit? I'm a right looker on the inside." Bone fingers tapped over a yellowed ribcage, where rotting flesh piled in a decaying landfill. "Right here, baby doll."

"Don't be disgusting."

The skeleton stood, turned, became a woman with icily beautiful skin and emotionless yellow cat eyes. "An eye for an eye," Omael's shade said. She had the chill perfection of the holy or demonic. "We can meet halfway, surely. This is the way you build your life, magician." The demon held up a severed head by the hair in one hand. "These the bricks." She held a cracked mirror in the other, a silent screaming face filling each shard. "This the mortar. This is your life and your choice."

The writer lowered her eyes. "Yes."

Omael's perfect lips smiled.

You and me, we're like Bonnie and Clyde, baby, we're going places. Because much as we seem to be at odds? Deep down here, where it all counts, we're headed the exact same direction. The walls aren't as bright as you think, baby girl. See? You know what I know. We're just that fucking close.

--January 12, 2005