macblaze.ca

9:9

Gleaming blades of light piercing through windows and eyelids alike; an aching stiffness in the joints; the rumble and moan of the industrious ants of the colony and that thick and gooey muck that covered every lobe and crevasse in his tired brain: these were the things that morning brought.

He hated mornings. Some people awoke refreshed and reinvigorated and more power to them. But he just woke feeling worse than he had when he fell asleep; nothing in the long list of things mornings brought had any appeal, not the least of which was the fact that in always meant he had to do it all over again.

“It’s like a runners’ high,” they’d tell him. “Wait for it, soon you will be bouncing out of bed and discovering that the early morning can be your most productive time!” Apparently if one just grasped the morning by the horns and dove into it, it would become the shangri-la of productivity and bliss. So far all he’d found was that if you tried to grasp morning by the horns you quickly found yourself facedown in wettest and most disgusting corner of the corral.

“Try harder!” they’d say…

And it looked like this morning was not going to be the breakthrough that those ‘morning people’ kept promising. In fact, all indications were that this particular morning was going to be the poster child of of not-a-morning-person’s mornings; a veritable archetype of blech; the epitome of brain fuzzing, body aching, eye crusting, non sensical, pull the covers over your head and hide ante meridians.

“Gaargh! I hate mornings…”

9:8

Rowan couldn’t believe her eyes. It’s a friggin beaver. A beaver; just like the one Gareth had being going on about. She was sure he’d been pulling her leg with all the nonsense about a beaver and lemon tree. She’d been anticipating a giant guinea pig or something and a good laugh. When they’d got back to the apartment and the tree was gone she had thought he was just taking a joke too far.

Be he’d been pretty adamant hadn’t he? Still, a real live friggin beaver? Well, at least she thought it was still alive. The poor thing was bleeding pretty bad. Rowan stepped back into the apartment and grabbed an old set of sheets from the linen cupboard. The pale lilac sheets had come from her mother’s cast offs when she moved out and she hadn’t used them in ages. She dropped the folded top sheet on the hallway carpet and snapped out the fitted bottom sheet.

The sharp crack of the cotton sheet startled her as it broke the silence that seemed to have pervaded throughout her apartment. Should I wake Gareth up? Silently, Rowan decided to let sleeping boys lie and laid the sheet quietly out beside the bleeding beaver. Gingerly she rolled the limp mass over onto the sheet and quickly wrapped the still form up, trying to apply some pressure to where the blood seemed worst.

After she had the beaver tightly swaddled in the now blood-soaked sheet, Caroline grabbed the edges tightly and pulled. Dragging the heavy beaver backwards to the kitchen was more difficult than she’d thought it was be. This sure as shit weren’t no guinea pig, she thought to herself. One last heave dragged the sheets over the lip and onto the linoleum. Rowan looked up and sighed in relief as she saw there was hardly any blood on the dingy carpet. Well I guess mah damage deposit’s still safe, she thought giddily.

Stepping over the lilac-wrapped beaver, she retrieved the top sheet and some shears from a kitchen drawer. Time to make some bandages: beaver-style!

9:7

Caroline never did find out if her father had found the Malibu parked at the train station 150 miles away. She’d run out of gas and the $50 in her purse wasn’t going to go as far in the tank of that guzzler as it would at the bus station. She parked it at the train station to try and misdirect any pursuit and walked the two miles to the Greyhound. $45 later and she had a ticket heading east and hopefully far enough away from her old life that she’d never be found.

Slouched on the toilet seat in a grimy gas station washroom, she now wondered if anyone had ever even bothered to look. At least after he found the car, why would he have even bothered. All he cared about was his cherished animals and the endless blog of nature he that worked and slaved endlessly on. Her childhood had been an endless nightmare of one torture after another and she had made plenty sure he knew about it. All he cared about was getting back out there and heaping more indignities on her.

Well she we was done with that. She was never going back; she’d die first if that’s what it took. Caroline stood up and leaned in close to the mirror. “It was only a fucking rodent. It probably deserved to die,” she steeled herself. “You care about yourself and not the rest of the fucking world, just like the rest of those fuckers. Then you’ll be golden…”

She wiped her face with her cold hands and then took a deep breath.

“Let’s do this thing.”

9:6

Caroline was having a bad week. She seemed to have hooked up with some bad people. She had one to many bad experiences and now it looked as if she had done a bad thing. A very bad thing.

Caroline didn’t like guns: they were loud, scary and dangerous. People got killed by guns and it wasn’t always the bad people. Although now that she thought of it, after this week she just might be on the bad end of things. And she really didn’t want to get shot; she really didn’t.

There was no need. They were just dumb animals, there was no need to bring guns and there was certainly no need to start blasting away like they were playing Halo. Thank god they didn’t try and give one to me.

“Oh this is really too much,” she muttered at the reflection in the grimy mirror. Oh my god this is too much. I need to get away from this; who knows who they are going to start shooting at next.

It had started so easily. Just follow a few people around, keep an eye out for some out-of-place animals and keep her mouth shut. The money was good, the wretched animals didn’t belong anyway and she might buy herself some time to figure out how to stay in the city. She couldn’t go home. She couldn’t bare the thought of crawling back to that disgusting mudhole.

Caroline shuddered at the memory of that last day she had spent on her father’s ranch. The humiliation of his ultimatum and that fanatical look in his stupid eyes and he ordered her off his land if she wouldn’t join him in the pen. Oh he never believed for a minute that he wouldn’t win; he had no idea. She had turned and run. She made straight for his prized Malibu in the back shop and fired it up. There as no way she was getting in one of the disgusting pickups—covered inside and out with shit and grime and everything that represented this hateful place— and somehow she subconciously knew this would might actually hurt him; she knew here leaving never would.

She fired up the printing muscle car and slammed the hurst into reverse. As she ratcheted it into drive, she could hear her father finally catch on and start swearing and threatening her, but as she floored and the 4 barrels kicked in his shouting was drowned out by the roar of his precious 300 horsepower baby. Spraying gravel across the yard, Caroline left with just the clothes on her back and a car she didn’t own and never, ever looked back.

9:4

June the second, nineteen hundred and fifty

He says I have to practice my script. He says that if I can’t write properly then I can’t think properly; and if I can’t think then I’m just a waste of His time, that He might as well take me back to the bridge and toss me over like my father was going to.

And so I will write for Him. But I will also write for myself. This will be a journal for me and me alone; He will never see it, never judge it, and it will be my secret. Not like that tatty leather book He has. I bet He doesn’t even suspect that I’ve been reading it. And that is justice: I will steal from him as He steals from everyone. And now I’ve stolen a new name from Him too. His book ‘gave’ it to me and who am I to refuse. Let Him call me whatever He wants, for I know someday He will call me it for the last time.

For He is the master of chaos, an illusion of the devil and the very incarnation of destruction, and I will contain Him. I will bring order to the world and lay Him low.

And so here I set out my plan.

Ordo ab chaos
Barnabas