The Battle of Oh Chronicles vol II

Even white magicians must have days like this, clouds growing thick overhead, stacks of books rendered cold and meaningless, and the heart swollen from the remote pain for a girl I’ve never met. Oh well. It’s too convenient to think that your state of being in the present must be permanent, for better or worse, for a bowl of cherries bartered off the Dalai Lama or a stubbed toesie. If I reach inside often and persistently enough I know I can find infinity where nouns of various shape and quality that I’ve never even heard of reside and how I might run naked in the middle of the road on a hot day, waving my arms frantically at traffic or just lay down, rough black asphalt warm against my backside, and feel the crunch of my head as a tire rolls over it. I am not suicidal, but full of whimsy and wishing for a warm day and blue above and green below and how I might sometime be at liberty to hold the girlie beauties in loving grace, “darling, how I would like to sell you a jack rabbit.” That ruins the mood and she pushes away saying nothing, though I can see the taste of “freak” or “dweeb” on her lips.
That’s what’s really going on in my head when I wake up in the graveyard back in the clusterfuck Battle of Oh, trying to re-establish the warm feel of her body against my arms and wiping away floppy jack rabbit tears from my ghoulish face. Okay, what’s the scene now, as I get up and gaze across the rows of headstones feeling lonely for some reason and affirming that sentiment in my observations. Where was the battle? Where was the party? I head off in what I think is West for what seems like miles of graveyard before I find anyone. First it’s the commander still wasted in a cheerleader skirt of pleated blue and yellow, blond wig on crooked and the dregs of a bottle of vodka in his left hand, mumbling about karate mouse next to a heap of smoking rubble that was probably once some grandfather’s tombstone. The ghosts of innocence cluster around him, scary as shit. I can’t even look them in the face, completely vacant and completely untouchable, ready to reflect even the most subtle hostile feelings back into the deepest regions of your soul. I continue West, then, only a few paces when out of the fog of war emerges what’s left of the party, the farmers and avant-gardists still squared off and taking cover behind dead trees and elaborate statues of hiphop artists and evangelists. They take a few blind shots at each other with bb guns and .22 rifles, enthusiasms burnt out, lust for war gone, really, such that Patsy Booker, the most obsessed of the whole lot, just looks more the buffoon pitching spider grenades at both camps until little Ellie sneaks up behind him with a rope and drags him down by the throat. I intervene, remembering how the story went before, and insist that the proper thing to do would be to castrate the fucker. So the League of Angry Women descend out of nowhere like ninjas and pin him down all force and fire, making burn marks on his skin with cigarettes. I take out my pocket knife, which has grown extra long and sharp for the occasion, hand it off to Ellie– who really should do the honor after all– who only lingers for a brief moment, small fragment of her old compassion, before sheewwrut splat! cuts his nuts right off and tosses them to the Dogs of Nihil. She licks my blade clean and gives it back with a thankful nod. That done, I need only to check in on the Business Camp where I find the lawyers, bankers, politicians and realtors have all been torn to pieces, air choked with fabric of three-piece suits, limbs strewn about a grand pyramid of ribs and hollowed skulls, heads full of pennies, and the Buddha singing, “avarice is the sin of the world. IAO IAO.”