Bart felt the weight of the careworn day lift from his shoulders, as if spirited off to some netherworld of simpler woes by the cool breeze that whirled up off the river on this hot June day. The idiot summer semester was behind him for another 12 hours. He would not soil his mind grading the mush-brained haphazard papers in his briefcase until after a glorious evening, a restful night, and a considered mile on his stationary bike. The muddled minds of the misfit nation he—among a mob of inept others—was tasked with shepherding onto the balance of their perfectly dreadful lives, would not again afflict him until he sipped from his first cup of jo and began his dreary day in the staff lounge, tomorrow—a world away—morning.

For the rest of today, he had Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome to keep him company over an Iron City beer at Primanti Brothers, where he would studiously avoid the gobbling goofs who chomped away at the French fry and coleslaw stuffed sandwiches like the livestock they were. Bart Davidson had better things to occupy his mind with than how many calories could be creatively sandwiched between two slices of bread.

The venue, though, was to his liking. He liked the metaphor of the basement bathroom, and the anonymity friendly bustle of the dining room, though he did have to contend with greasy crumbs and his own unimpressive reflection in the bar-back mirror. It was repose after a fashion, to which he looked forward in his own tightlipped way, just as he looked forward—almost vegetable like—to returning to this cobbled alley just as the searing sun fell behind the Alleghenies and the cool river breeze greeted an evening made for strolling and pondering.

As much as Bart’s discipline told him to keep to Macaulay’s Lays—for there, surely, a mindful metaphor for the current waning days of their own earthly empire resided—for something he must have missed on his third reading, his mind drifted on the dreamy sea of uncertainty within. Indeed, Bart was a little star struck in advance. He was a day away from appearing in a live streamed panel discussion on ‘Race and Society’ opposite Stefan Molyneux and Jared Taylor.

“A godless Canadian to pluck my humorless lyre for a laugh, and a pious Southerner to make of me a compromised Yankee hypocrite! Perhaps I should be reading Aesop to quote for a laugh, or Thucydides to extend a cautionary voice?”

A hard shoulder bumped into his and he was half spun about and off balance in his loosely laced suede loafers as the words of the unlettered future pierced his mind, “Mumblemouth muvafuca, watch where you goin!”

Bart looked up into the eyes of an angry African American youth who glared at him from under prematurely heavy lids. The approving words of lesser primates played all about, as Bart caught his voice, lost it, tried to speak again, then—acting on a conciliatory impulse—stepped up to the brute to extend the hand of friendship, which would not have to contend with the raised voices around him to be understood.

They said, that when Constantine crossed the bridge under the auspices of the True Cross—albeit at the head of a half-pagan horde—that a roiling thunder accompanied his passage in the sky as had the pillar of cloud that shepherded The Deliverer up from Egypt—

“Mothufaca, neva step ta BeeBeeBear—yo hea’ nigga!”

Thunder played across his mind, lightning across the sky—no, his eyes. The chatter of approving apes filing off behind their raging alpha male twinkled into the distance like so many tones of harmonious discord.

Something burned at the base of his head and ran cold down the length of his spine, like a bright day drenched in cold reptilian blood.

He opened his eyes—no, his eye—and saw before him a hard granite street cobble rising from a miniature moat of blood, like the foundation of a castle never to be built. And beyond that grim hopeless foundation rustled the sheaves of the unlearned, the papers he was to grade on the morrow, rustling in the strong Allegheny breeze, out of sight of his single portal on the world, for his neck—if it were truly there—would not turn, either would his hands and feet—if still attached—answer his call to action, a call which languished unheard, sinking forever into the deep well of his murdered soul.

Recently, having found my skittering fiction muse trying to slide under an all too warm mattress in an all too cozy place, I have wrung his reptilian neck, and have replaced him with his grimmer faced cousin who sleeps in the gutter and feeds from the dumpster.

His price was the genesis of a new serial, the story of The Consultant, better understood as the story of Bart Davidson’s Damnation.

I have the intention of making The Consultant my only ongoing monthly serial, with the other fiction commitments to be written to completion one at a time, beginning with the resumption of Hemavore posts this weekend.

Thanks for your support,

James, Friday, June 26, 2015