Week 12 - The Clock on the Wall

The Clock on the Wall

Matthew Ryan Fischer

He kept checking the clock. It was time. He was sure of it. But the phone hadn’t rung yet. He was sure of that too. He had checked that enough times. And so he waited.

It could have been the greatest thing ever. It should have been.

He didn’t know.

He missed her every day ever.

She told him she was pregnant. She thought maybe that would make him stay. But she had said so many things before.

He wished he knew the truth. But he never knew what to trust.

Instead he looked at the clock again. He was sure if was over by now.

If it had ever happened.

His life would never be the same. Either way. Life would never be the same.

Week 11 - Five For West

Five For West

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Money. Things always fell apart when money was at stake. Or more correctly, when there was a lack of it. Many friendships failed and many men died in the pursuit of money. This was nothing new.

The world meant crawling through mud and grime and muck. That was life. That was all that was left. The dirt and filth covered and corrupted. That was the only option available anymore. They were all covered. They were knee deep and infected, even if they couldn’t see it. Their only escape would come from crawling through the mud and the grime and the muck in the hopes of coming out the other side.

The other side was invisible. They crawled, but did not know where.

Marshall looked down at his hand. He was tired. His muscles ached. His hands were worn and cracked. He had blisters and calluses on top of the scars from blisters and calluses. He wanted to go home. He wanted to be so very far from here. He wasn’t sure when he had last eaten. He couldn’t concentrate. All he could do was dream.

They had come too late. That was for sure. There had been big dreams back east. They laughed and smiled and told each other how they were going to be rich. The rivers flowed with gold out west. The five of them had set out. Friends, dreamers; they were going to be rich.

He had been a big man with big dreams, and what had dreams gotten him? Pain and suffering. The bloody flux, malaria, influenza. He had watched friends go home or worse. An accident meant one would never walk again. A pox meant another would do nothing again. He had left everything behind and spent every dime he had.

Big dreams and nothing to show for it. His life was a waste. There had been a woman – Elizabeth. He had loved her but not enough, not in the right way. He had loved her, but had wanted more. He had left her to come west. Three years seemed like thirty. Was she still there? Was she waiting? He had left her with the promise of riches and eventual love. He had promised he would return. He was sure she believed him. He was sure she cared. Still. He hoped he was right. He hoped he would see here again.

Five friends, western bound. The stories promised such different lies. No one said that the promises had an expiration date. No one said that the land was logged and roped off and the only thing left was dirt.

You couldn’t eat dirt. You couldn’t get rich off of dirt. Water and dirt – it was all they had. They had spent a fortune on water and dirt. All water and dirt got you was mud. His world was mud and he was covered in it.

Marshall’s hand’s bled. He worked as long as there was light. And sometimes he worked beyond that. Three years later and he was still at it. His aching arms and his aching heart. He would work as long as he could. That was the only way to redeem his sorry choices. He would pick and sift his way through the mud and find a fortune. Or his muscles would give out and he would die. But he would swing that pick-axe as long as he was able to.

His dreams had been for riches. His dreams had changed. Now he dreamed of work. He dreamed of finding the strength to swing that pick-axe one more time. That was what kept him going. One swing after another. Just one more swing. And then another. And then one more. Swing after swing. That was what his life was – one long Sisyphean repetition.

“William…” Marshall mumbled. He was tired and weak and hadn’t eaten in what seemed like forever. He was lucky to be standing. “W.M.?”

There was no answer. Marshall wasn’t sure if he had actually spoken out loud or not. He might have been talking in his head. He did that sometimes. He didn’t used to, but things were different now.

William was somewhere nearby. He was sure of it. William had been there before. They had been working and W.M. had been right there with him. He was sure W.M. was real. There were too many other ghosts that haunted him, but William was real. William was all he had left. Five had become two. But the two of them kept going. Just as he was going to swing that pick-axe one more time, the two of them kept going.

W.M. hated himself. He hated what he had become. He hated what he had done to his friends. He was the man with bright ideas that weren’t so bright. He was the man with foolish dreams that convinced others to tilt at windmills with him. He had believed in the “West” with all its promises, but all he and those promises had done was get his friends killed.

Things hadn’t turned out the way they were supposed to. Traveling cross-country. Disputes over claims. Disputes over where to go and what to do. San Francisco had been overrun. The world had descended and there was no room left. They followed the Siskiyou Trail as so many others had. They spent their last dimes and struggled.

Three years of struggle and despair and he was still at it. He had never imagined it would turn out this way. He had been a fool and expected too much, too easily. He couldn’t apologize enough. He couldn’t atone for his sins. No amount of sorrow was going to bring his friends back to life.

But William wasn’t giving up. He was never going to give up. He was going to make sure he paid for his sins and paid for them rightly in gold.

Gold. He was sure of it. He had seen it too many times. He was sure it was gold. His eyes had lied too many times before. Marshall – he needed Marshall. He needed another set of eyes. It was going to be gold. It was going to be true. It wouldn’t change the past. Nothing was going to change the past. Henry and John were gone. But he had been right. He had been right about everything. It hadn’t all been a waste. He would find Jacob and give him his share. Jacob would come back. They would need him to come back. He would want to come back. He and Jacob and Marshall with their strong arms and strong hands – they would pull the future out of the ground. They would master fate and build the world.

He needed Marshall. He needed Marshall’s eyes. He couldn’t see for sure. He needed another pair of eyes.

W.M. turned as he yelled for his friend.

“Marshall—!”

W.M. caught a glimpse – a muddy figure looming above him. His face was smeared with blood, but his eyes were bright and clear. There was madness to them – the bright piercing glow of a crazed and broken mind, glaring through.  W.M. caught a glimpse and was sure it was his friend. Then he caught a glimpse of deliberate motion.

And it was in that moment that the pick-axe struck him in the back. Marshall had swung one last time.

Week 10 - Too Many to Keep Separated

Too Many to Keep Separated

(“In a past life…”)

Matthew Ryan Fischer

They loved to prattle on and on with their mindless banalities; it was the disgusting prattle of the vapid and empty, as if the sound of their sad little voices was the only thing keeping the world turning. They were soulless. Directionless. Miserable wastes of time and history. Droning on and on about their wishful fantasies as opposed to doing anything about correcting any one of the tragedies of their actual day-to-day. Existence was too hard. Existentially speaking. Much easier to pretend and convince themselves the pretense was factually relevant.

In a past life this happened or in a past life that occurred. Everyone said the same thing. They always said the same things. They had to. This was not a place for originality or uniqueness. Everyone told the same story. It was the nature of the beast. They wanted the past to mean something, and to do that, they had to embellish it. And there are only so many ways to embellish something before it all sounds the same. Unique to the point of uniformity.

Everybody always thought they were something special. They knew they had been important. They had lived an exotic life of adventure, sex, wealth or whatever. It was all the same. It was all better than what they had now. Nobody ever knew they had been a piece of crap before. None of them had ever been plain or simple or stupid or ugly or anything at all like real-life. They had all been special someones. They had all had magic and mystery and plenty. They all had their fairytale “once upon a time…”

Jeremiah called it “FLGS,” Former-Life Greatness Syndrome. Nobody ever wanted to be anybody dull, so they told themselves they had been great or famous or successful. Everybody was Cleopatra or Caesar or someone like that. No one shoveled shit in a former life.

There were red flags all around and people with damage to be avoided. Those that suffered “FLGS” were the worst sort. Maybe they were running from their rotten life. Maybe they were delusional. Or maybe they were there because they were actors. Or fools. Whatever the case, it usually meant they were pretty rotten now and should be avoided at all costs.

Jeremiah normally did avoid them. At least in his day-to-day he did. But on a night like this, when they got together in their little groups and prayed for direction from mystical gurus and charlatans, Jeremiah sought them out and played along and listened to them chirp their incessant noise.

Jeremiah sat with his chair backed up just a little bit so that he was sitting just outside of the circle. To be inside the circle meant something totally different. He preferred to sit back and simply listen. He feigned interest on the off-chance that someone actually said something interesting. Usually he had heard it all before. And he would hear it all again. That was the point of the meetings. That was the point of him going to the meetings. He had even said it himself on occasion, once upon a time, because he truly thought he knew something, and then he repeated the same things later, but then  as an attempt to fit in and make the others feel more comfortable.

“I was someone important... I can feel it.”

Of course you can feel it, Jeremiah thought to himself. You all can feel it. You all need to feel it. It’s what you tell yourself to make yourself feel better about your crappy lives. If you were honest you might not have any other choice but to kill your pathetic selves.

They were all so self-centered and narcissistic on the surface, but desperate and lonely on the inside. What a terrible cookie they would make. No one would want them for what they could offer on the surface and no one would be able to stand what was underneath. They were the pathetic and the miserable. They were the unlovable. And deep down they all knew it. They all knew the things that went on here with the group were complete and total bullshit. They just couldn’t admit it yet, and so they went on with their self-hatred and kept attending, kept pretending there were answers, kept telling themselves they were something more than they really were. Secretly, deep down, subconsciously, they knew the whole thing was a sham. And so they hated themselves even more. Down and down they went in their vicious cycle of denial and hatred and lowliness and longing to belong. As if there really was such a thing as belonging.

Jeremiah knew better than all of them. He knew a truth that none of them knew. While they all hoped and wished, but secretly knew it was bullshit, Jeremiah knew that for a select few of them, it was all very very real indeed. Not true like they were pretending it to be true, but true enough that it would drive some of them mad if they actually found out.

But what Jeremiah knew and none of them knew was that there was such a thing as past lives, that past lives did matter and that for some of them, they mattered a great deal. Past energies could indeed transcend the human body and space-time and have a second or third go of things. Not everyone was someone. Not everyone could get to be a part of the past. And even those that got to be a part would have to confront the hard truth that they were once upon a time no one important at all. There just weren’t enough important people to go around to everyone in the future. The population was always getting bigger, the past wasn’t. It was simple math.

Jeremiah didn’t know all the ins and outs of how the whole reincarnation thing worked, but he knew a few and he was learning. The soul was like energy and when the body died that energy spread like any other type of energy would. There were powerful souls and weaker souls, and they weren’t always based on how big a life the former owner had led. Some people were overachievers and outdid what their soul was meant for. Some souls were lazy or old or their energy was just diminishing and slipping away. A soul could die. Its energy could be used up. And there wasn’t always a time limit or instruction manual given.

For the select few, it was all about catching some of that energy and doing something with it before it was gone. Not all the special few knew they were special. Jeremiah was a lucky one. He knew what he was. He knew he was a built up combination. And he knew a little bit about where some of those parts had been and what had gone on before. Jeremiah wasn’t exactly sure of each and every one of his own personal details though. Some of those still remained a mystery, even to him. But he was trying hard to identify what he could before his time in this life ran out, to help himself better prepare for his next go-round at things.

When one of the special souls burst, the ripples were massive and they broke into millions or billions of little pieces. All you had to do was search out the right parts and pieces. Put them all in a room together, shake, stir, mix and match. Then it was just a matter of seeing who you ended up with.

Jeremiah was making his very own cocktail. He was a spiritual blender. He’d get one percent from someone special and another dash or drop from somewhere else. He was a buildup of little spare parts of a plethora from infinity. He didn’t have a direct plan. He wasn’t trying to put together anyone in particular. That would have been next to impossible anyway. Shattered souls were just too spread out to find them all. He was working on a puzzle that had no lines or images or references. He was just finding little parts that felt “right” and mixing them in. Maybe he’d get a dash of courage left from some long dead explorer or a spot of wisdom from one of the great military leaders of antiquity. He wasn’t building one person or one idea, he was making a better package for a future version of himself to enjoy. Right now he was barely five percent other people. He didn’t know how much he could collect before he died, but he doubted he was going to find enough to make this life that much better. But he was playing the long game, planning for the future. It was going to be a bright and glorious future. He just had to find the right parts now and mesh them so tightly together than they would find their way to their next life joined as one. His future self would thank him for all this hard work, that is if his future self was self-aware enough to realize what had gone into the creation of all this.

He got tired of listening to the babble here. No one seemed to be that important and it didn’t look like he was going to be adding to the pot of soul-soup tonight.

Week 9 - They Built a Wall

They Built a Wall

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Emile was no warrior and anyone that had ever seen him in uniform would safely say the same thing. He was no warrior, but he had however made a life for himself out of service to the military. It had been an era of peace. He had never been in combat, never faced the horrors of war. He had actually seen the enemy, something not everyone on the frontier could claim. And while that was the case, he had never needed to throw his javelin nor shoot his manuballista. He did spend an inordinate amount of time practicing and training with both though, and was a sure shot at practice targets. If sport and recreation won wars, he was ready.

Emile was not a warrior. He prayed daily for peace and was always glad when it came. The gods were generous and Emile had never needed to find out what sort of warrior he truly would be.

Emile was not a warrior, but he was a patriot. He loved the Emperor. He loved the Empire. Some boys his age feared going to the frontiers. Not Emile. He would have volunteered for service, even if it hadn’t been mandatory. It was an honor and a privilege. It was his duty as a citizen and he believed that with all his heart. He was glad when he came of age and could do his part, even if it was a relatively small one.

During his mandatory military service, Emile had been assigned to the trenches. Along the western frontier there were ditches and moats and walls and berms, but Emile had spent his later teen years in the trenches. He didn’t know how or why he was chosen for this particular service, but he never wanted to show anything but patriotism, so he never questioned his orders. His people needed protecting and he would do his duty, even if it meant long stretches of crouching and watching or extended periods of digging in order to do it. Emile didn’t mind the physical labor. It made the time pass and was less dull than the crouching and watching for an enemy that never came.

For three years Emile existed in the world below ground made of dug-out tunnels. To the north and further west things were different. That was where the walls began. The walls were all the rage. Maybe it was because of the terrain and the mountains. Walls were better suited there, while further south, there were more open fields for maneuvering and additional sorts of defense.

Once upon a time, when he was young and his family had the resources for leisure travel, Emile had seen the wall of walls – Hadrian’s Wall. He could see down the side of the mountain and there it was... Hadrian’s Wall. Not the original of course. It was larger and taller and more imposing and complex, but this new wall still carried his name.

When Emile was in the service he didn’t go to the Wall. He had gone to the small walls, the smaller and shorter defensive walls. Many of them were built to bridge the valleys between impassable mountains. There were hundreds of walls, spread out all across the countryside. Tactically it made no sense, and no single wall would have stopped any invading force. But they hadn’t been built all at once. They had been built over years, as battles had raged and armies pushed east or fell back west. Each wall represented a former border between nations. Now there was no true border, just miles of frontier to be manned and guarded and watched.

Soldiers patrolled a series of walls somewhere in the middle. They had been further west before, but there wasn’t much point in sticking out so close to the enemy. No one wanted this land anymore. There was no reason to risk lives and stretch already thin lines. They fell back to the middle territories, establishing a happy medium, lost somewhere in no man’s land.

Emile had spent a season of service at one of the walls, in order to learn just enough to help defend them if need be. This was obviously considered unlikely by their superiors, as the walls were poorly equipped and poorly manned. It was apparent that no one at the walls expected to be in battle any time soon. Even if they didn’t expect war, Emile still applied himself and did his sworn duty. He learned as much as he could as quickly as he could. Emile was always efficient and learned technique quickly. If he had any other desires he might have learned to lead men or taken on a craft trade. As it was, he was content to simply do a good job here.

Still, it seemed like a tremendous and impractical waste of resources. Did the wall really intimidate an enemy? Couldn’t they simply sneak over them, especially if they were so poorly staffed? Was there really something to achieve by that? If the Iberians wanted to attack, weren’t there hundreds of ways to tear down a wall? Or just sail around it?

Emile thought perhaps things were how they were because the walls were so much further away and it was harder to get resources through the mountains. Build a tall wall and have a few men to look over it every once in a while. That was easy to defend. There were fewer men needed, which made maintenance of the status quo easier for those in charge. No one in charge would admit that though.

Emile had read about the history of the walls. He understood that they had been built as a tactical response, a show of strength and a military answer to the enemy’s wall. The enemy had tall walls, so Roma had to have tall walls as well. No one built like the Romans could. Construction was their pride. The world knew it. The Egyptians had their pyramids and the Greeks had their statues and pillars. But those were old and in ruins and mostly forgotten. No one built like that anymore. No, the Romans could build anything and they aimed to prove it.

Emile could understand it was a matter of pride. It was a matter of showing off and proving their rightful place to the rest of the world. He understood that in the context of the times. But why now? Why maintain symbols of a lost legacy? The great wars were over. They had been over since before Emile was born. The Iberians stayed on their side of their wall and that was that.

At least the bunkers and the trenches made sense. Those could be used if war actually came. Here, there were fields and open space and cities nearby. Here there was need for more than just some poorly manned walls. They needed several types of reinforcements to slow invaders. They needed options and variations. Wars needed to be flexible here, nearer to the populations. No one cared about rocky terrain with little resources. There was no need to invade or defend that so adamantly.

Here they needed men to fight, to hunt, for reconnaissance and for raids.

That was, they would need all of that, if there really were any battles to be fought.

The battles between them seemed like ancient history.

After his mandatory service concluded, Emile tried to rejoin society. There was nothing there for him. It wasn’t that he was particularly vicious or violent. He didn’t long for the chance to kill someone. But the trenches made sense. He had friends there. He could sit all day and think and talk and not have to worry about anything. They fed him. They clothed him. They told him what to do.

Emile joined the Accensi and became a reservist. It was a low position that came with no respect. Emile didn’t mind. He wasn’t in the military for fame or notoriety. He was a poor man and couldn’t afford much equipment, but the military was happy to have him. After each war, the Accensi were phased out. But on the frontier, where the potential for war was an everyday reality, a newer Accensi had risen. He only worked part time and only received enough food to not starve and a place to sleep. But that was all he really wanted – a job and a chance to serve his country. He was cheap labor, and a cheap soldier, and he made things easier for his superiors. He was “trained” and had “experience.” He could show the new recruits and mandatory youths what to do and where to go and how to handle themselves. He never expected to fight. He could tell by the looks on the newer faces that neither did they.

Complacency was a dangerous thing. Even Emile realized that. Complacency and lack of an enemy never served any army well.

Out of boredom, Emile began to tell stories to the younger soldiers to help pass the time. Lies mostly. They didn’t know any better, and it made for a better evening that listening to them moan about what their lives had been like in the cities and what they would rather be doing than this “honor” of protecting the Empire. Emile had no patience for listening to that sort of rhetoric. For him, serving to protect was an honor. One of the highest. There were boring evenings, lots of them, but Emile was a patriot. He believed in the Empire and the Emperor.

Emile told tales of his confrontations with the Iberians. Everyone grew up hearing the horror stories of the past and had nightmares where Iberians were storming their homes and burning them to the ground. They were wild beasts and little boys knew from birth that someday they would have to do their duty to protect the Empire and do battle with the darkness. Everyone knew to be scared. And there was good reason to be. But after a decade of service in one form or another, Emile knew the reality. He had seen an Iberian, but that was practically an accident. And he was a far cry from the tales Emile had heard as a boy. The Iberian looked like a beast of muscle and mass, but he was still a man, and he was hardly a devil from below. But the fresh and young soldiers didn’t know any of that. They still had fear in their eyes. They still believed that death was just around any corner.

So Emile told them the tales he knew would scare them the most – he told them the stories they wanted to believe.

Emile made up battles. Iberian incursions across the frontier. Confrontations and skirmishes. The men in the trenches were heroes. They had turned back attack after attack. They had stopped an invasion and the complete destruction of the Empire. Emile told how the Emperor himself had come to congratulate the men in the trenches just two years ago. Emile explained that these stories had been kept secret because no one wanted to frighten the citizens back home. The men in the trenches laughed. The boys weren’t sure what to believe.

But the stories passed the time, so Emile made more of them up. Every night he spent in the trenches he spent telling tales of war and heroics. Emile never made himself the hero or focus of the stories. He was a humble observer. He always knew someone who had faced the enemy or heard a story from another soldier who had seen some fantastical fight. Emile didn’t need to be the hero. He didn’t want to be a hero. He knew no one would believe his stories if he claimed he was some great man of great heroics.

As the seasons passed Emile’s stories changed. New recruits meant fresh ears, but Emile didn’t want to bore the men that had already heard his tales. So old adventures were revised. New heroics with new twists of fate. Emile would adapt or change ideas based on how the new recruits reacted. If they wanted horror, he added horror. If they wanted blood and killing, there were suddenly new and epic battles.

Slowly, the focus began to change. The men knew what it meant to be a Roman soldier. They knew what Roman heroes looked like. They had heard legends and read histories their entire lives. What no one knew about were the Iberians. The Iberians had been behind their wall for over a hundred years. None of the boys in the trenches had any idea what a true Iberian even was. Were they civilized at all? Did they speak a common languages? Pray to common gods? What was it like to look them in the eye? What was it like to kill one?

Suddenly Emile became the world’s leading expert on what it meant to be an Iberian. He knew their culture, their language, their laughter and their loves. There had been accords during holidays where the men in the trenches shared their food and beliefs with the Iberian warriors and in turn learned about the Iberian way.

People loved the Iberian stories. Emile was mostly illiterate, but several of the other men could scribe, so they began writing his stories down. The stories were passed amongst the men and made their way to the other soldiers. Men in the other trenches loved them. Men on the walls loved them.

Then people back home started hearing about the stories and reading them too.

Tales of the wars that never were.

Emile had become a mythmaker, famous, but unknown. Everyone began hearing about the feats of military might. Everyone began hearing about the strength of the Roman soldier. Emile’s name was left out. Mostly. The officers knew where the stories had begun.

Emile was told to stop. He was giving people false hope, false heroes, false ideas about what things were really like on the frontiers.

The military was getting too many recruits. They couldn’t pay them all. The military didn’t know what to do with all the bodies.

Senators were beginning to discuss whether or not Iberia truly was a threat and whether or not it might be prudent to invade and conquer. They were planning an unwinnable war based off tales of fantasy. Emile was liable to get tens of thousands of men killed.

There was a false sense of pride on the streets of Roma. People were becoming unreasonable. They were beginning to believe anything. Emile’s stories were going to take the entire Empire down a very deadly and dangerous path.

Emile listened and he understood. But he also knew that telling the stories he told was the most interesting part of his day and possibly of his entire life. He wasn’t ready to give that up and he was sure he was right when he believed that the stories were a positive thing.

And he told his commanders that. They told him for the sake of the nation he had to stop. He told them they were wrong.

“I would think you’d want me to do exactly what I’ve been doing.”

“And what is that?”

“You say you don’t have enough money, enough resources. But what if everyone in the cities realizes there have been no wars here? Just how much funding would you receive then? And what if they believe the frontiers are as boring and tamed as they really are? Will they feel safe? Complacent? There will be no reason for them to spend if there is no war. But we are at war. We are always at war. We are at war to protect and preserve everyone’s way of life, including our own.”

“You want me to lie.”

“I want you to do what you think is best. I am here to help protect the Empire. It’s not for me to determine what the best way is. What if we all go home and then the Iberians do take up arms? What if there are no soldiers or walls to protect the people? What if the Empire falls and collapses? We have all sworn to do our duty. If we fail to preserve this balance, and hold onto the one thing that keeps the rest of the world safe, then none of us will have done our jobs at all. We will only be remembered by our failures. Instead, we can all be remembered as heroes.”

After he stopped writing stories, life in the trenches got a lot more boring. He wondered what things were like on the other side. Maybe they were just as bored as he was.

He had been given a reprimand and was sent back to the trenches. He was told that there would be a review and perhaps more discussions before any final decision would be made. In the meantime he was expected to keep his stories to himself.

Two months later he still hadn’t heard any new news or reply. He did hear that the Senate had approved additional funding to build a new stretch of walls and defensive embankments to the north. That was something, he supposed. Perhaps he would ask to be sent back to the walls. Doing something with his hands to pass the time would have to be better than sitting in a ditch all day.