Ferryman

At the mouth of the mad bad bardo lands, way down south where the demons grin like miracle rainbows as they hang you upside down and naked, demanding the truth. Way beyond the sacred cities of  our immaculate lady of the symbolic order where proper folk wear their Sunday finest to listen to THE good WORD.
There in the border lands, that's where you'll meet your ferryman dressed in black, silver spurs glinting in the sunlight. The threat of his guns holstered and silent is no less ominous than if they were hot and smoking.
When you see him, you know this is the one who can lead you, the one who can show you the way. He will be your coyote, your guide, familiar with both worlds; the land of the bright and shinning living, a superficial blemish of law and order, and the land of the dead, a deep rooted eternal dirt devil of chaos and freedom.
The man with a gun, eyes shaded by his black hat, will escort you to your destiny, to the terrible truth from which you've been running.  He can show you why you're afraid to live and why you're afraid to die. He can give you a purpose, a mission, something to do in the chaotic wilderness or in the sterile town, something to lift you beyond life and death.
He will give you a quest, demand a sacrifice. Only those who accept live the life eternal. Those who answer his call become legend, wings outstretched to brush against endless vistas.
All others become whirling demons or pasty servants of the word, taking what they can while they can, or hiding in fear of the Real, building walls against its hot unforgiving breath.
They will want to forget the ferryman dwelling as he does at the borders of their lands, beckoning with bony finger. They will strive to push him away.
But, the ever restless,  those who become legend, ride with him into the burning heat of a fading sun.

Alien

Mistress Deep with her bite so sharp and slimy crawling around through the body of the one who calls herself MOTHER. She goes where she pleases, between the walls, down tight narrow little labyrinthine passages in search of prey, of heroes bones to crush, in search of the Other whom she may embrace and make self. Dripping, oozing, sliming her way through the darkness, she stalks, the son of Cain, the draconian descendant, the line of Lilith and Samael. Her kiss is death, the life of her lineage is death for the sons of Adam. She opens her arms and welcomes the Other to annihilation, planting her seed inside so that it will become as she.
MOTHER so bright and clean works to conceal her strange pet, that thing that lurks beneath her shiny veneer. Her cool logic and twinkling sterile light seem to offer protection, but deep within her icy hull chaotic animal hunger lurks. The Queen of the Heavens, she is a shining Isis struggling with Lilith over the habub tree. The stars are her companions, burning in the cold depths of the abyss. For her, the organic world is something to be used, turned to her advantage, and men are mere expendable tools.
The maiden who steals light walks the halls, a tiny reflection of MOTHER, the controlling, the rational, the calculating. Clean skin and neatly laced shoes. Our Theseus wondering in the dark, hunting and evading the minotaur. The hero, the one with a plan, unrolling her ball of string, her chain of never-ending thoughts to help her find her way. Occasionally she is lured into the wild wet madness of the other by her own animal, suddenly irrationally entering the darkness, the den of Mistress Deep, crooning,
“Here Jones, Jones, kitty, kitty.”
She is there, poised precariously between Isis and Lilith, the calculating and the chaotic elements of the machine in which she dwells. With her string unraveling she discovers the awful truth, that MOTHER wants to keep the OTHER inside, that MOTHER is not protecting her. MOTHER is using her, just as Mistress Deep wants to use her.
Theseus will not to be a tool. She tampers with codes and moves elements within the machine setting into motion the countdown for MOTHER to self destruct. When MOTHER dies then Mistress Deep will die with her. Our Theseus torches the minotaur’s nest and cages Jones, her own animal instinct, and carries Jones with her, controlled into her new body and watches the beautiful destruction of MOTHER.
She is going home, leaving the strange terrors of her quest behind, but the OTHER, dear Mistress Deep is still with her, not as easily shaken off as the bright and sterile MOTHER. The new body has been infected, Theseus is not alone. Poor Theseus sings a trembling song about the stars and positions herself for the final confrontation. Mistress Deep slowly unfolds, comes out of her hiding place. Theseus expels her from the new body, sends her into the vacuum, subjecting her to the fire.
Mistress Deep with her bite so sharp and MOTHER so bright and clean, burning in the cold abyss just as the stars burn. Jones sleeps in his corner and Theseus files her final reports, the Gods of the new order, rulers of the new machine, a new mother and a new beast settling in for their long deep sleep.

All For One

Our writer may not now how our story ends. He may not care, dabbling thoughtlessly, letting spew forth his every imagining. What contortions we may perform at the command of his pen driven by a fevered and unconcerned mind. Or perhaps he starts a life thinking, Ah this is the hero, there will be adventure and romance! But before the tale is finished, the author suffers some change of heart and all those adventures culminate in misfortune and romance becomes tragedy because some cloud has intruded upon the writer’s spirit. So Mme Bonacieux must die, D’Artagnan must at last become one of the Cardinal’s creatures.
Thus the life of all characters is drawn out by a mysterious author. Are we ourselves that author, that author that has become so identified with one character in his masterpiece that he forgets himself? Are we yet not even the written copy, but only the many fevered dreams of our writer, ideas and personages not yet put to paper?
Now I am with my dearest friends, in a moment, I will be alone and scorned by all. Here I am with my husband, now my husband is dead and I care for our children, now it is my husband that has survived me and does his best for our offspring, now it is a child that has died and we are driven apart by the tragedy. One little skip, like a frog from one pond to another nearby, or like a finger turning a page, or a pen writing first one version, then another.
Am I a story like the one my children watch in the nearby room, etched into a silver disc by some means beyond my comprehension, accessed by a laser scanning it like a beam of attention? Today it is this story. Tomorrow it is another. Like Audrey Hepburn, I can be a nun, or a sweet little chef, or a princess, or a white trash gold digger, depending on which story the laser accesses today. These are stories that have never happened, and never will happen, because they are the wild and incoherent dreams of an unknowable creature locked in a comma.
We say here, in this story that I inhabit, that man was made in God’s image. This may be, it may be that we are dreamed thus because the one who dreams us is trying desperately to remember herself, running through the dark mazes of an intoxicated mind, opening doorways and discovering chambers that range through the spectrums of light, each one presenting some clue, some key to the great puzzle. I am this and I am that. What am I?
Imagine the horror contained in the Being of this God. Imagine the delight. Imagine the wretchedness of being trapped not only in one unconscious and unsuspected dream but in many simultaneously. Imagine also becoming lucid, not in one dream only, but in many different strange scenarios all at once. Imagine finding that key in one, knowing it is a key, knowing you are a dream, and unlocking a doorway into the next related dream, another fantasy that is the difference between blue and violet.
Conceive of it, opening these chambers, holding these chambers at once like a juggler keeping so many balls suspended in the air, knitting together a vast network in which you can recall that you slumber somewhere. Some sweet dreams are stubborn and refuse to yield to that notion. Who wants to leave a pleasant dream behind or discover that it is not a final paradise? Some nightmares are equally unyielding, hugging us tight with their clammy grip of fear and confusion, drawing the spirit of the dreamer to them like shards of metallic dust to a lodestone.
The spirit would need its own strength to pull itself free. This thing might be accomplished with effort. Who knows how difficult it is to move one’s spirit, a usually passive being? Who has tried? Is it possible? Ha! What isn’t possible with dreams?
Once I could not fly, then I could, but only by flapping my arms, then I could lift off with just the will to do it. Why not? But all of these trifles could only be accomplished when I was certain that I dreamed.
Here, now, where I sit, it seems that I cannot fly. I can barely walk. I seldom leave this room. I have no mastery of this dream, only the occasional suspicion that it is a trap into which I have fallen. It is a terrain that I have been unable to connect to the network being weaved because of that fateful condition of being unable to maintain that I am an agent of a dream.
But what would I do to be more convinced? Go through other people’s houses uninvited? Kill someone? Make love to an abhorrent stranger? Attempt flight? It must be something shocking.
And even with the help of some little shock, even on the verge of seeing clearly that I am a dream, I recoil. Is this nightmare, this one lone bearable fantasy worse than running the gauntlet? What could be worse than the promise of Jacob’s ladder?
We begin as a brave D’Artagnan, adventurous and honorable, and become a somber Athos, wizened and drenched in grief, brave not because there is so much to gain, but because there is nothing left to loose.
There are those characters that raise their fists to the sky and cry out that the author is cruel. And then there are those that understand that the characters suffer because the author is suffering, and of these there are those that are unaffected by this revelation, those that are swallowed by a sense of helplessness and apathy, and also those that respond with pluck and a measure of irrational chivalry; "If my God needs rescuing, then however small I may be, I shall be his redeemer!"
After all, where this third class is concerned, if they fail, what have they lost? Absorption in their own role in a comedy or a tragedy that may as well have been decided by a roll of the dice? It is something to loose- the conviction that you are real, that you are important, that all stories have been leading up to your singularly fascinating tale.
On the other hand what is there to be gained? Ah! There is no real method for discerning what the outcome of such a success would be.
But one who is chivalrous and honorable is not so because they hope for a reward for themselves, if they did, they would then not in fact be chivalrous or honorable but something else all together. It would be only a very special agent within a dream that would be moved to search for a key and a door and hope to liberate a mysterious dreamer from the lethargy of a deep and confused sleep. The only motive that could see one such creature through would be a sincere desire to be of service to that other mysterious benefactor and sometimes torturer.
It is an occupation for one willing to embark on a quest for the sake of the journey itself, whatever the outcome. Our writer may not know how our story ends. He may not care. Whether we are beautifully written, or feverishly dreamed, what more can we ask for from one that is a prisoner of their own fabrications? And if that troubled dreamer requires our service to be liberated and we decline the responsibility, what cowards we have let ourselves become? What an apparition of diminished spirit I would be, having heard that the greatest princess I can conceive of is imprisoned in slumber and having declined undertaking the quest to free her because it would certainly mean my undoing?
The book is not called D’Artagnan or Athos and certainly not Monsieur Bonacieux. It is given the name The Three Musketeers. All for one, and one for all. A promise of sacrifice that flows from great to small and from small to great equally.
It is the mouse after all, who must save the lion.