Flash Fiction Story Inspired by Contradiction by Michael Cano

My name is Mother. My name is Proserpine, Ceres, Rhiannon, Frigga, Epona, Isis. I am encompassing and brutal, an ocean that covers all the world. I am the flame of life licking and dancing inside your fleshly heart, your throbbing brain. I am the softness of your mother’s embrace and the warmth behind her eyes. I am the singer of the song of the world—life, death, life, death. Over and over and over I spin in this heady dance.

            The cycle is everywhere, in everything, and it never ends. It never changes. And so I fell in love with you, you who are as inconstant as the dawn despite your own slavery to the cycle. You have loved me in return, returned my protection tenfold with fervent devotion. You gave me my names, my faces, the smell of blood and death curling up from your sacrifices.

            In the newborn spring, I like to be Proserpine, the maiden of death who comes back from the other world to bring life to the earth. I like to walk in the form of a beautiful girl amongst the green trees, my feet bare over the tiny, sprouting flowers. In this fashion, I met a man.

            He was beautiful and tall like a slender sapling, with black ringlets for hair and dark, pondering eyes set deep in his skull. And when he saw me, oh, how those eyes widened till he looked like a little fawn! How his brows raised till they were hidden by the fringe of his soft hair. He ran to me, overcome with the tumultuous devotion still lingering in the hearts of mortals. No matter how much the world changes, or how much they change, that need or us, for me, is always there. He took me in his arms like I was that harmless girl, and not the primal, ancient force behind the turning of the seasons. I melted into him. There is nothing like the pure warmth of human skin, their crushing, insistent love.

            I don’t know how long I kept him there. Perhaps an hour, or a century. Time means nothing to me. And yet I am always acutely aware of the seasons. And yet in his arms, I could not even feel the wind brushing past my face. I could feel nothing but the blood pumping in his heart.

            As all gods do, I got bored. You might think me cruel for it, but that’s only because you can’t fully grasp my nature. I am nature. I can love, but in the end I am only the wind, the earth, the rain. I am not a thing that can stay entranced by flesh and bone and warmth.

            I sank into the cool earth, the dark soil soothing and cool. I stretched, and I dozed, listening to the lullabies of earthworms and ants.

            Eventually, I awoke. I rose, and walked about the earth again. It was winter now, and everything was dead and silent. White glittered everywhere, blotting out all the colors of life. And by chance, it caught my eye again.

            The figure of a man, kneeling, keeled over, shrouded in dark, tattered clothes. He looked so bony underneath them. He didn’t move, his back didn’t even rise and fall with his breathing. And as I approached him, I realized that the curly hair had disappeared. Like everything else, there was only white now.

            Only the white of his skull. That is all that is left of my beautiful acolyte with the black ringlets for hair.

               

The Curse of Tyrion Lannister

Often our heroes are marked with a unique physical characteristic to set them apart and signify their importance. Sometimes that only mark is outstanding attractiveness, but it can be a bit more interesting. Frodo has the scar from his brush with the witch-king of Angmar which can never heal and pains him for the rest of his life. Although this mark brings him misery, he can at least easily hide it underneath his clothing. Tyrion Lannister of Game of Thrones is not so lucky. To the disgust of most of his family and the bleak world around him, he is a dwarf. Had he not been born into nobility, his fate would be to humiliate himself for the entertainment of others or serve as a slave somewhere across the Narrow Sea.
     So why did George R. R Martin make him a dwarf, when he belongs to a royal house and is such an important figure in the politics and drama?
     I kind of think it's to give him a hard time. Martin loves giving people a hard time. Well, I suppose I don't really think that. Perhaps Martin thinks that being part of an abised minority gives Tyrion insight and compassion he doesn't know he has, which is why he is so concerned with providing for the commoners during his short reign as Hand of the King. Maybe Tyrion's dwarfism gives him an edge that the other players don't have.

The World Is A Vampire

     When you think about it, there's something of a vampire in all of us. And rather than an undead monster that stalks the night for human prey, I'm referring to a dark, more primitive part of our nature that seeks to exploit others, to "drain" them of their vitality in order to take it for ourselves.

     Victorian literature saw an onslaught of gothic fiction, sensational stories of strange horror its readers had never come across before. And the monsters that continue to spook us today have lingered for years because of the many complicated, often inexplicable feelings they can evoke. Vampires, among other creatures of the gothic night, are sensual as they are dangerous and became so popular in part because they were the sexiest things you could read about at the time. Even though Dracula is a monster in every sense, he still has gravitating seduction powers that enable him to prey upon young girls and bring them over to the dark side. Symbolically, we're talking about an exotic older man who seduces innocent virgins and corrupts them, transforming them into creatures their rightful suitors can't peruse themselves. And so, Dracula is destroyed by a band of young, red-blooded Englishmen, the perfect foils for his otherworldliness.

     Vampires choose their living victims, drain their blood, and either leave them for dead or turn them into their undead fledglings. Every day humans, in turn, often prey upon each other in such a manner. Blood is a natural symbol for life, which doesn't have to be literal in and of itself. "Life" can simply mean virility and energy. Therefore, anyone can be a symbolic vampire rather than a murderous beast. Anyone can engage themselves in toxic relationships with "vampires." Now I'm referring to any relationship in which one participate is only engaging with the other in order to take something, which can be a physical, emotional, or even psychological.

     People will always be selfish, and this can sometimes even be helpful. But to exploit someone in order to rob them of something you don't have is an altogether darker thing, which is why monster stories from hundreds of years ago can still resonate with the modern reader.

Of Questing

    To open up this book, Foster has chosen a topic we see often and in many forms throughout literature: questing. Or, rather, a brief study of the true nature of questing, for the hero never aqcuires the "stated" object of their desire. The more important Holy Grail is discovery of the self.

     While I read about heroic quests all the time, I'm not sure if I was ever aware of this neat secret before now. I must have been on some level because the idea didn't surprise me at all. It makes plenty of sense: Frodo's quest for Mount Doom is also the search for personal deliverance from the evil of the One Ring, just as it is the search for all of  Middle Earth's deliverance. Another observation I had was that the journey awakens an inherent nobility and gritty heroism in the outwardly quaint and introverted hobbit. It becomes more apparent than ever how much Frodo belongs with the elves in their own, separate search for peace after the Ring is destroyed, so much so that he joins them across the western sea even though he's found a very happy little life once again in the Shire. So, while the Heroic Quest initially seems to permenately damage Frodo, marking him with an inexplicable yet ever-present state of depression that drives him away from domestic bliss with Sam in the Shire, I would also argue that it brought out amazing qualities in him one wouldn't expect to find: unstoppable inner strength, determination, wisdom, courage, ect. The Quest brought forth his true self.
     This makes the Quest that much more important, I think. After all, who really wants to read about a Quest that's only about a holy chalice or golden fleece or some small, rocky island you once called home? Although these objects may be of varying importance, what the journey brings out of the character is far more interesting and important. Characters are our little literary spies, working from the inside, keeping us in the know at all times. Naturally, we get to know them pretty well, sometimes even the entire geography of their souls. That's why I've come to believe in the significance of their inner-quests.
     Another inner-quest book I've read that I'm a little more reluctant to admit to reading (and enjoying completely ironically) is The Vampire Lestat by Anne Rice. Our hero this time is, not surprisingly, a vampire named Lestat. He's a character the world first encountered as the rather pathetic villain of Interview with the Vampire (which revitalized the vampire genre for better or for worse back in the 70's) but now claims to be a fabulous, swashbuckling hero who spends immortality traveling the world and searching for the origin of vampirism and the meaning of his new life. Unfortunately, even though he does discover what started it all, he leaves his holy grail empty--his immortality still has no meaning, and as humanity goes on, the literal evil of vampirism also loses its place in the world. And so, Lestat becomes more and more self-indulgent, reckless, and vain, rather like a teenager who feels like all the world's a not particularly funny stage, a transition I'm still struggling with myself. This of course begs the question of what I will find at the end of my inner-quest. Personally, I'm hoping for secret superpowers.