A firestorm of tornadoes

 This is how it happened. The dark and the glory of it. The sky swirled with shadows. The storm was upon us in fire light dance of fury that was the storm of raging skies. A firestorm of tornadoes,

I saw the ship enter into the atmosphere the cathedral like ornate and baroque lines flickering with flames as the mothership off in the distance as large as a medium sized moon. The shadow of a future and the memory of the past. This is the Wizard Tusk see it out there is eyes with rage and hatred. It’s mouth open with ships coming and going from it’s belly.

Arthur Oliver is my name and like all stories mine will fade. What telling of a tale is there if not the ramble that gets us going. If not the hurly burly of language carrying past the bad poetry in the endless corridors of the collective unconscious? This is that storm but not that storm. This is the the madness of the Wizard Tusk. The celestial star cruiser that be swallowing up whole civilizations. I was not one of the lucky ones… the ones left behind. The one dreaming about a better future not in the belly of a shark.

I look up at the sky and think of all them families it took with it and me a little thing, an insignificant thing am I. Still here dreaming and thinking word circles and spirals. Dances in the language of an insignificant uncertainty. Of a darkness inside my own heart. I hear you wandering what is the wizard tusk? And I tells you I can’t reduce it to a understandable sort of palatable Bedtime story.

Dwarf they call me… a jester in the city. The city is a planet sized hive. The city is not my friend the local officials using me as laughter, a punchline. They tell me I am a joke a simple mistake in the punchline of a tall tale… or a short one in my case.

“See how these things work” I said but not even to myself. Not to the universe. Not to the Lord in heaven. No this was a reflection of my spirit! A bubble in the cauldron of universe.

I wish that celestial cruiser would choose me! Carry me off into the distance, of foreign stars and new worlds where ever hope may still be found.

“Who is that little man?” Said some some small child as I walked by Intentionally arrogant and doing my best to seem oblivious. Yet here I am recalling the past obsessing over and documenting the opposite of what I intended to communicate.

My jester outfit and candy clown paint. The top drawers gave my role, my clothes, My daily calories from bread. All of this is from my masters.

I wanted to be a science fiction writer. To be a wizard of the future. Of starships, galactic sword fights… space pirates. You know cool shit. Balancing the scales with sardonic wit. But here I am a midget for the rich. Whenever I say something intelligent it is quoted back to me. When I point it out the words I am told “you are compensating for your low stature with a lie.”

Some king bragging to his female slaves about the amount of men he killed on safari in the slums. How as his property he could do the same to them… and more then once I have seen them do it. Wrap there hands around a young slave and strangle the life out of them… and then go to another slave and use them to satisfy the hard-on they got from the murder.

Once I screamed “I want some fish!” Right before a young women was going to be beheaded. I thought if the king laughed maybe he would spare her. Alas no…

“Then let me gut this one for you!” said the king.

I think what bothers me about sex slaves is the slow eroding of the soul. Fed drugs and orgasms. Starved and coerced their spirits are broken. What they lose is a sense of self. There very identity is stolen from them. Until the drugs and pain hide their soul away. Is it fetishistic for me to try to understand their psyches as they devolve in cultural acid?

What am I to do? Here I am laughed at as much by them as the Citizen of a Autocracy. I am just some midget to them some impotent wannabe science fiction writer. Watching them get fucked and beat and murdered.

Hope is painful and sad. I long for the wizard tusk to take me away, like it took so many others. It carried them away in the belly of that starship.

It carried them to dreams and nightmares I can not fathom. All those souls and me with a nostalgia for a life I never lived. None of them know about me. There is no life for me but my own.

My life is nothing more then what I said, and yet, here is the punchline this is all a metaphor for the world you live in. Except the wizard tusk which is indeed my own invention… I am not a dwarf I am disabled paranoid schizophrenic. I am not a jester aspiring to be a science fiction writer. I am a science fiction writer aspiring to be jester. To point how little hope we have and how much we need you to do the best you can. If only because your children are being fed into the a machine that treats them as inhuman property. Not in the distant past but today. Not some foreign alien world of some distant land but every corner of your own. This is the new dark ages and you are a citizen of diabolical king and the associates who protect him from the justice that only truth can reveal. Here is the kicker, the truth can only be faced by you reading these words.

“Roses are red 

and ready for plucking

Your sixteen

And ready for high school”

- Kurt Vonnegut.