Ron Koppelberger
The Bog
Fast answers to the brave resolution of Wallis K. Nassau sloshed and rolled with the thick morass of quicksand he was neck deep in. Was it preordained he wondered, was he destined for some fateful absolution, a medium of reconciliation with god?
Wallis had intended to throw the garbage bag covered corpse of his wife into the morass. A perfect conclusion to years of miserable garrulous arguing and infidelity upon infidelity. She had turned her back to him as she grabbed for the phone, her accomplice; she was finally asking for a divorce. She had chosen a new lover, a boy in the dawn of maturity, a child barely twenty-one. Looking over her shoulder she had given him a smug sneer of unbridled hate. In that moment the decision was made for Wallis; he grabbed a silver burnished vase embossed with archaic Egyptian legends, it felt good in his hand, heavy and dangerous. As she replaced the receiver he slammed the vase into her head, crushing her skull with a scrunchy crack.
There had been a spellbound moment of fear as he watched the blood pour from her head but it had passed and he had calmly sopped up the blood with a roll of paper towels, then he snuggled her into several garbage bags tying them off with a roll of twine.
Her body had thumped into the trunk of the car with a satisfying thump. He drove the Mercedes near the speed limit as he followed the curvy road to the swamp. Finally he pulled off the concrete two-lane highway onto a dirt two-track. The Mercedes bumped along nearly getting stuck in the muddy ruts. He had stopped the car at a thick knot of tangled vines and briar scrub. Opening the trunk he removed her body spending the next hour dragging her through the Palmetto scrub and pine tree saplings.
He had intended to leave her in the midst of the dense thicket when he saw the reflective surface of the morass.
Dragging her to the edge of the muddy quicksand he hefted her in. Unfortunately the twine around one of the garbage bags had coiled like a snake around his ankle and he stumbled in.
As the swampy grit flowed into his mouth and eyes he realized that the scream of a wild goose was echoing in the forest. It sounded a little bit like laughter, his wife’s laughter.
Ron Koppelberger
Divine Scream
The trooper followed the fugitive into the warehouse; a quality of resonant power jolted the calm eddies of dust in the dark void of the empty warehouse. The trooper paused breathing in the sullied odor of rotting vegetables and lilac.
The fugitive stood in silent phantom shadow between the sliver of candent daylight surrounding the trooper in silhouette and the dusty trail leading to the sanctity of his extraction point. The trooper whispered, “Don’t move.” An exhausted tongue of solstice surrounded the trooper as the spring hinged door swung shut behind him.
The fugitive tilted his head backward, opened his mouth and screamed shattering the silent commune. Legends of ancestral continuum filled the moment with the passage of a few seconds, a few moments of tinctured, piercing sound as the fugitive continued to scream.
The trooper squinted in frozen fear as a brilliant fire surrounded the fugitive. Like the roar of a dragon he thought. The aluminum walls of the warehouse shook and the fugitive levitated to a horizontal position between the ceiling and the dirt floor. His scream echoed shrill and infinite. The trooper watched as the firelight vacillated and rolled in flame. A moment later it was finished, the fugitive spun in rhythm to the pulsing fire screaming, then silence. He vanished near the corrugated metal roof and the gentle rush of a gasping breeze shook the building. The trooper sighed and shook his head in disbelief. His thoughts in secret labor as he forced himself to forget the vision of fire.
Ron Koppelberger
Autumn Age
The burning orange glow of twilight skies and sun burnished paths of eternity, the wind in synchronicity with the rows of wheat bloom and corn shoot, he lifts his arms in supplication to fall coronas of saffron glow and the faded underside of spring. Leaves quicken to brown and crackling exhaustions of billowy carpeting; crunching beneath his feet, flowing in rambling heaps around his ankles they flitter and fold in harmony with the onset of autumn fame. He blinks away the summer sparrow as the echo of crow caw fills the air and suspiring in breaths of fresh satisfaction the cool northern breeze blows like a mythical tempest.
He smiles a burlap buttoned scarecrow grin and moves through lanes of fiery summer to the changing chrysalis of autumn fare, an affirmation of pumpkin angels and concealed serenades of waiting winter wash, waiting in death yet animated seasons of change, waiting for unchained winds to shift in silhouettes of fall fathers and uncanny mysteries of rebirth, evolution, waiting for god’s yearly revolution and the hands of time beckoning the beginning of a new passage.
Ron Koppelberger
Careful Essence
The blush of destiny in wayward courtship of unspoken resurrection, enthralled by the desert gossip , the inhalation of impulse and circles of bare passion. The rave of poise and the western eye endured the parade of dye, an abstract scarlet cast and a teasing cascade of quivering satisfaction, a mind in submitted eternal flux, immortal, fated and disposed to the anemic mischief of restless arrival.
She looped the silver sire around her undying fingertips delicate and honed to perfection. The smoke of mists and ethereal orchid incense filled the hidden secret sashay of sagebrush and matted desert grass, with the fury of thrones and groomed vampire adulation. She inhaled and coddled the charm. Her terra firma, her square quarter her portion of the revolt was in seesaw court, burning and flexing an alliance of one. She had to choose, chaff or wheat, wheat bloom or flame. The suspect innocence and wicked romance of gain and pledge defined her blessing, a sense of excitable means bridled her psychic mystery, the stones, the stones she saw the wolf and the circle of shadow. She enchanted a glance at the depth of garden seed and found natures of spirit. She would mount the current and move west toward the company of a promised purity.
Ron Koppelberger
The Mystic
The distance between hymns of primal myth and the vespers of his evening benediction was often the difference between draggled misery and reverent exhilaration. Cam Initio was a mystic of netherworld wonder in fabulous force. The rumor was that he could even raise the dead. It was not relevant that he was responsible for perpetrating the rumor or the subtle slight of gossip in the rumor, suffice it to say that Cam had once roused the concerns of a once drunken purveyor of the drink to an almost conscious level of existence.
To raise the dead, substance and secondhand life he thought , tantalizing revivals from the silent moments of death and the bliss a new dawn. He flipped one of the Taro cards over and the truth of a mystic revelation was unveiled; “The World” the card read, a world of life and death, fortune, fate and tales of rare precedent. To raise the dead, not some drunken oaf from the county tap, but to resurrect the flesh Cam thought. It was a bit like reading Taro, palms and tea leaves. Living with ghosts, ghouls and phantasms of taboo and admitted forbidden passage. It was a shaded talent that Cam would soon excel in, a candle to the myth and misery of past lives, loves and the adversity of universes, conduits in carefully interposed expressions of fear and love. Cam began reading the cards, resurrecting the dead so to speak with the fortune of the morrow and portents unbidden, unsoiled by past failures in chance. He would read and this time it would count for the wont of an unseen force availing the spirits of the newly alive.
