Realistic or Modern 𝐑𝐎𝐀𝐃𝐓𝐑𝐈𝐏𝐒 & 𝐒𝐀𝐈𝐍𝐓𝐒

[mother of sorrows]

​

 

[cavitea]

• 1

• moses the priest.

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  We’re talking away, I don’t know what — what to say …
  
  Rubber scorched against asphalt, burning down the worn and crumbling strip of blackness as heat radiated down menacingly outside. A singular white line, faded like an abandoned bone separated the moving vehicle from the creeping eyes of the desert in the side of the road. Sand and dirt stretched endlessly, whispers of the death that would come to those that tried their foolish hand at taming it.
  
  Fingers of a wavering heat settled out on the horizon line of the road, the peak of day rising higher in the sky as a lone figure drove along the road, drifting back and forth over the double-striped cadmium yellow lines. No care could be offered to the legality of the situation, hours of aching boredom once more catching up to the man that sat in the driver’s seat of the nicest purchase he had ever been privy to.
  
  Leather seats gave the comfort of his cross-country travel an upgrade, the well-conditioned state of the car a labor of effort and disgruntled love more than the luxury of newness. Now fingers dragged themselves down the steering wheel, a tap along with the rare bubblegum song that played on the curated tapes he carefully created for the purpose of this trip. A movement, they had said, necessary for the church, they whispered. Bullshit, he would say behind closed doors, prayer beads slipping through scorned hands and clattering hopelessly against the floor. Something about ‘changing it up’ seemed too whimsical for somewhere he had been raised and preened in, a perfect example of the deep set roots Catholicism had taken in the small eastern town.
  
  The real reason rested in a name he wouldn’t mention, hidden in a photograph he hadn’t brought himself to throw away, strapped as an unwilling passenger to overhead car visor.
  
  “Billie Jean is not my lover,” Notes that trailed in a fleeting manner through the air, a foot tapping along the floor giving percussion to the words before they were replaced quickly with a stringed muttering he hid from God. “Not now, not like this.”
  
  A sputtering of the engine was a problem he had already foreseen as a needle dipped further and further towards an ‘E’ until the problem could no longer be ignored. Somewhere along this route he had deciphered there was a gas station, the crest of a small hill barely breached just in time for the saved building to rise into view and deny him satisfaction as instead a sputtering became louder and slowed with the haunting words of Michael Jackson cut off.
  
  Immediately it became hot.
  
  It, however, wasn’t the heat he minded.
  
  The sun winked at him mockingly, pressing down on the black clothes he had feverishly considered stripping away as dust and sweat alike stained the shadowy visage. Moses hadn’t waited long within the interior the ticking heat bomb to step out onto the road and towards the gas station that waited for him. He knew the clothes he wore now were a hindrance in the heat of desert but the man had never really been one to accept the jeers of his colleagues to his attire choice. ‘Old-fashioned’ they said, a dedication to darkened cloth as he preached towards the light. Boots crunched along the ground, scuffling in the stinging dirt of the desert and kicking clouds behind him as he walked, red gas canister in hand.
  
  God was funny in this way.
  
  A broken down car just far enough away from saving grace fell with an ironic twinge of blood on his lips as he bit through delicate skin and marched forward.
  
  Slowly but surely he dragged a suffering form closer to the faded building, faltering only at the taking in of the gas station one would have assumed abandoned had it not been covered in poor attempts of cleaning sickly glass, glowing from the inside in a color that invited liminality to invade. Pumps were the same, if not covered in a sheen of dust and despair, a cobweb of ruin that eased no tension in the hand clutched to the canister. “Of course it looks like the last visitor was in the 1800’s.”
  
  Like falling rain the oxygen in his lungs fell forward as he settled the red plastic down beside one of the pumps.He would have to traverse back to the failing building eventually to fully fill his tank so a sparse moment was given to a heavenly power that didn’t request him to haul a full canister back towards his abandoned steed. Fingers sparsely decorated in silver adornments wrangled themselves through an inky mess of hair, shaking free sweat and grime that spoke of desert nights curled up on a back seat.
  
  No attendants sat their moronic selves outside of the main station, peeling folding chairs that carried derriere impressions settled just outside the barred glass door and glimpse into a possibility at refreshments.
  
  Sweat prickled in an ugly reminder along the back of his neck at the sight of the building, unease growing in a knot deep in his intestines as something about it screamed the word ‘off’. Somehow he had stepped into enemy territory, at the least a menacing presence he had no right interfering wi—
  
  Moses did not care.
  
  A question was already leaving his lips before eyes could look at surroundings and contemplate the source of unease, a hand that pulled open the doors with the conviction of God and inner unbridled road rage.
  
  “Can I get two gallons on pump one?”
  
  

 

[mother of sorrows]

Then they will deliver you up to tribulation and put you to death, and you will be hated by all nations for my name’s sake, and then many will fall away and betray one another

nebuchadnezzar

A woman sits on the balcony of a budget motel and swats away mosquitos.

The radio spills out in the room behind her and she slaps one bloody. Curses. ''Man wasn't made to live like this,'' she snarls, itching away her pink leg. ''Damn stupid bugs.'' They've thrown themselves in the groaning light of the neon sign and turned it blotched, and still all life out in the desert lapped at the promise of it. Cicadas scream for it and moths let themselves bake till their skin splits.

''Ougha make something that makes 'em all drop dead.'' The woman mumbles, leaning back into the crumbling plastic chair. All the chairs here are plastic and crumbling and she stares on towards the night deeply. The radio pleads;

''- okay? I didn't even drink that much a-and, my sister was in the backseat and she saw him, too. Just a man walkin' around the highway, half gutted -''

A pinch on her shoulder. She smacks it so angrily it startles the owner into squinting up, ashes from his cigarette falling all over his boots. He stands under her balcony, though he does not hear the pleading or the cursing. This is his sixth break because during the day the office is far too hot to work in, and during the night it's far too stuffy. Right now, the night is perfect; it is cold and the traffic is dead. He doesn't like his own work, finding it downright depressing. It's why he smokes.

Down the road, the darkness shifts. The smoking man doesn't notice, and neither does the upset woman. Regardless of their attention, the darkness does truly and well step aside, a figure crushing gravel beneath its weight.

It steps, just barely, onto the parking lot's edge, as if just a tad afraid of the light. Like a group of suicidal angels, the moths turn from the sick light to the figure's head, descending on them with hunger. An insect halo surrounds their head, hiding their face - if there is a face to be hidden.

It's then that the man notices it. He's not alarmed, yet. You see a lot of strange things out here in the desert, when you work with junkies and people whose cars break down at the worst possible times. Probably the former before its the later, 'cause that guy is walking like a junkie. The man takes a drag of his cigarette and watches with a resigned curiosity as the figure takes one step, raising their leg like a ballerina or maybe a dog about to piss, and then shakily taking a second one. It's cartoonishly grotesque, disgusting, and the man shakes his head to himself. Just another night.

After another drag he throws the cigarette to the ground and crushes it under his foot before heading back into the office.

He goes behind the counter and sits back into the sticky-leather couch, leafing through the even stickier car magazine he's been re-reading since the previous AM. There's really not much to it, but just to pass the time he pretends he has any chance at getting these models. Out of curiosity, he glances back up, wondering if that junkie is still walking around.

The light's bad inside the room, but it reflects outside just enough to reveal a face pressed up against the glass door.

Two white flashing eyes and cheeks pressing oily imprints into the glass, framed by two dark-red palms. He could see the barest hint of hair the color of the grass outside, a dirty yellow that should be the host to broken beer bottles; and a smile, big and terrible like an ape's. The figure stared right at him.

The man goes still. Immediately, he feels as if he had somehow made a mistake by not locking the door.

Outside, the figure's mouth opens and closes like a fish out of water, eyes wild and red-shot. For a moment it looked like senseless movement, until the motel owner heard just the tiniest voice;

''Alabama. Alaska. Arizona.''

The door slides open.

''Arkansas, California, Colorado.'' Like a knife dragged along a metal wall, like the wailing of wild dogs, the voice blabbers, whispers, yowls. It's a man, or the resemblance of one - a bloodied leather jacket hangs off skinny shoulders and ripped jeans drip gore along the muddy-ish brown carpet, digging the stains deeper with a pair of sneakers. Their neck lurches to the right with a sickening wound, as if straight from the gallows. It's broken.

''Connecticut. Delaware. A room.'' The man watches with a distant, mute horror as the figure twitches, sticking out a bruise-black tongue as if to smell the air. It unveils two hundred, neatly crumpled and torn at the edges; they leave a trail of bodily fluids wherever they put their hands, pus or intercellular water, smelling like a possum rotting under a trailer. The man, aware that his hand is shaking, slides over a key.

The figure smiles. It turns on it's heel like a mechanical toy and raises a leg again to walk outside.

It leaves the way it came and dissolves into the night, flickering in and out the parking lot lights, a bad dream. He still hears it mumbling, going on down the list. For a long while, the man sits there and does not leave the room.

* * *

The room is blissfully disgusting. An unclean wooden floor peeks through moth-eaten holes in the carpet, laid on by thin strings, and the bedside table has a lamp that does not work, a Playboy magazine and a complimentary Bible. Fungi festers in the cracks too tiny for human sight, but he feels them pulsing with indescribable life. The filth makes this room viable for further infection, but it will do for now.

He lays the body very carefully on the bed slick with human oils, and he goes to work on the broken neck.

It's dying, in the barest sense of the word. The OD and the injuries have done their thing, but Nebuchadnezzar had the luck to swoop in right before the soul left upon its last breath. Like an overexcited parasite, Nebuchadnezzar wiggles between the intercellular fluids and vitreous body, fighting back the white cells that still see him as foreign tissue. The scabs and bullet wound ooze black, thick ink over the foul smelling sheets, trickling like gasoline. 'Very practical of you to take a dying body,' a voice giggles at the edge of his existence. 'It takes much less power.'

Nebuchadnezzar plays at ignorance, even if he knows they see the Truth.

To become human, you first need an Identity - something to cling to that gives your flesh meaning. This is his Eden, his sanctuary before he falls. The body doesn't listen so well yet, not until it heals, and moving it's arms feels a bit like searching though jello; he stutters to grab the backpack he found with the body and he turns it upside down over the bed, searching through the contents. Cigarettes, some already smoked, a pack of ramen, a wallet. Through this he searches, and finds Identity; the same face he's piloting to make a smile stares back at him from a plastic card, though far more alive. Star Levine.

''What a fucking awful name.'' Star Levine's body mumbles through grit and ash.

The end is beginning. Soon, this room will fall apart to nothing, and there will be no fungus or a TV that doesn't work. This bed will be nothing.

But later. Later. For now, Nebuchadnezzar has to shower and rest. With all the love of a feverish orphan clinging to memory, he lays the body on the bed that will cease to be and gets to work.

* * *

The high desert is crueler than the eternity Nebuchadnezzar is used to.

Low-growing shrubbery begs for rain out of cracked, brittle ground that sends heat rays right back up at his face, coating his face in sticky sweat and turning his cheeks a beaten red. He understood the limits of flesh in theory, but nothing could prepare him for the sharp spikes of pain up his thighs everytime he took another step. Thirst lingered at the back of his throat, harsh and demanding. With some embarrassment, Nebuchadnezzar lingers by a cactus. He might have been walking for two or twelve hours, he's not quite sure. Maybe he should have asked for directions.

Nebuchadnezzar gave the cactus an ashamed look, as if feeling its judgement.

It's okay. A human body can go without water for about a month, he thinks, or only a little bit less. But it's an inconvenience to walk all the way to a city; he's seen maybe only two cars since he's gotten here and it slipped his mind to take one. A drifting wind disturbs the sand by his shoes, sending it up towards the mountains dancing in the distance. It startles Nebuchadnezzar out of his thoughts (namely, to rob anyone passing by of their car) enough to notice a building waiting in the distance, right by the endless stretch of asphalt.

Like a kneeling martyr, it stared towards the sky.

With some renewed energy Nebuchadnezzar walks towards it, a bounce to his step; any luck and he'll find a car there, or at least some water and food. It takes another hour or fifteen minutes, but eventually its features come into view. A run-down gas station with sadly begging windows and cracked cement overrun by weeds. The walls were skinned of their color. Only a single beat up truck sat in the tiny parking lot, one that Nebuchadnezzar doubted would even turn on if he tried. He fixed his backpack and stepped inside.

The temperature change was enough to make him almost trip on his own sneakers. From boiling to a crisp coldness that made him feel like a yoghurt at the back of the fridge; it was pleasantly welcomed, with Nebuchadnezzar raising his arms into the air in appreciation. The building was no better inside than outside, with only a few aisles stacked with color and plastic. The floor was moist. A cashier sat at the strict left, giving Nebuchadnezzar a look that he thinks must mean 'I'm perceiving you.' There was no music, only the hesitant buzzing of an AC.

Nebuchadnezzar gave a smile. He made sure to show all his teeth, to be friendly.

He trailed through the station aimlessly, picking items on a whim. A few bottles of water, chips, sandwiches - he stacked them on the check-out and pulled out his wallet. The cashier was some grimy old man, wearing a wife beater that's yellow under the armpits and brown on the stomach. His eyes didn't leave Nebuchadnezzar for a good while before he started scaning the items.

''Did you walk over here?'' He asked, voice hoarse from smoking.

Nebuchadnezzar gave a vague shrug. The cashier's eyes narrowed, just the tiniest bit.

''20.45 dollars.''

Nebuchadnezzar pulled out five dollars and two cents. He could practically feel the cashier's eyes boring a hole into his skull.

''Uhhh, hold on, I got more money right here...'' Nebuchadnezzar had, in fact, no more money. Fuck, why did he hand it all over at that motel? Brain damage is no joke. He didn't panic, but he was quite a good deal sheepish about it; with one awkward, self-pitying smile, he pretended to look through his backpack, knowing there was nothing to be found.

The cashier looked thoroughly unconvinced. They exchanged a long, hard stare, both of them knowing he's not good for it.

''Look,'' The cashier started, ''fella, you're gonna have to -''

Nebuchadnezzar dropped the bag on the crusty linoleum floor, jumped over the counter and punched the man right in the face.

The impact sent the man falling backwards into a glass drink display, a spray of blood splattering across the reflection. It all happened too fast for the man to complain much, especially after the second punch; actually, he didn't complain at all, only grunted and fell to the floor in a great big 'humph.' The easiness of it pleased Nebuchadnezzar; really, he was happy that he got out of this so well. The man was still alive, he's sure; only unconscious behind the counter, his bald head hidden by the desk. Nebuchadnezzar put his hands on his hips, proud at how easy this was.

Maybe this journey will not be as terrible as he imagined it to be.

It is then, after he thinks that, that the door swings open.

“Can I get two gallons on pump one?”

...Somehow, he didn't calculate the risk for other humans stepping in right at this moment.

Nebuchadnezzar turned around with a crab feeling steam, mouth set in a perfect O. It was a man that stepped in - a man set with a strict spine, stormy eyes that speak of eminent danger and robes that remind him of wailing nights. Like any good demon, he flinches from the priestly collar first and from the glare second.

For a good long minute, or perhaps ten, there is a silence that could devour a kingdom.

The priest stands. Or perhaps awaits something. A hound smelling a fox? Had Nebuchadnezzar more sense, he would think on how ironic it is, to stumble on a shepherd his first day on Earth, would know how to charm past godly defenses and run with his skin intact. What are the chances, to stumble upon a priest after committing a sin? A demon should find this the beginning of a tasteful joke.

Sadly, Nebuchadnezzar has never been known for his abundance of intelligence. As it is, he's painfully known for a lack of it.

He shifts like he's been caught by a giant pair of pliers, all stiff bodied and unsure, his expression more akin to someone that's just been dunked into water. He starts to sweat despite the artificial chill, staring at the flash of white among darkness.

''Oh, heyyyyyy.'' He begins, looking around as if searching out company; it doesn't work too well. ''Uh, sorry about that. Nobody's working here.'' He doesn't dare step closer, hesitant with holy fear and the pure rage that the priest is wearing bright on his face. He looked as exhausted as Nebuchadnezzar felt, a bit dusty and very much menacing; when did he pull up? Nebuchadnezzar heard no car.

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