Ravens Blood
Friday, January 27, 2012
Friday, January 20, 2012
An Opus for Ants
Ron Koppelberger
An Opus for Ants
“Turn away…….Turn away!” the commander said to the soldier. The soldier ant said, “But I have this burden to deliver to the queens guard, a burden of nourishment and blood for the secret birth of our children and the nest.” The commander waved his antenna and spun in circles around the soldier and his burden.
“Danger lays in wait by the rivers edge, for the enemy has the deluge and the destruction of our construct!” the soldier ignored the commander and moved on to the place where his burden would be multiplied by the limits of a possible berth. When the soldier ant had found his cache of bidden sustenance he paused and rested for the return home; in a seconds breath the shadow of the enemy approaching filled the sky and the vision of the ants fear. The shadow passed and the ant counted himself lucky in fate.
Later he returned to the nest only to find it awash in an ocean of water and drown comrades. What of the queen he thought. Realizing he was alone his hunger overcame him and he ate the burden intended for the guard and the queen.
“Confessions of mystery, a war fought at odds with the impossible,” he spoke, “But at least I have a belly full of food and my back to build a road unto the next horizon.”
Within an Ace of It
Ron Koppelberger
Within an Ace of It
Adjacent to the luscious bougainvillea scrub and marigold bushes lay a splintered wooden guide, a separation of daydream barbecues and backyard millenniums. The wooden fence was the defining line between fate and mythical commons of secret hell. Sly’s neatly tended yard, patio and lawn furniture were centered around a large brick pit. Pig roasts and turkey barbecues for the holidays, a cool brew and a dose of sunshine. The sweet smell of flowers in bloom was subdued by the odor of fresh dirt and wounded earth, his neighbors yard was an amalgamate of backhoes and bulldozers, men in plastic overalls and all surrounded by yellow police tape.
Sundays child, he was Sundays child in fortune and happenstance. His neighbor had knocked on the front door on Sunday, “Hey, can ya help me partner, my wife, she’s bleeding.” In reality she had stopped bleeding and breathing weeks earlier. “Can ya help me brother?” his neighbor had called with a feigned urgency through the front door. Sly had considered it for a moment when the phone rang. A gentle whisper across static filled lines, “Snares of homespun hell, homespun hell!” then the line went dead. A call from the other side covered in graveyard dirt, a warning in simple measures of spirit. The call had distracted him long enough, he’d live to breath, he’d survive the monsters call.
“Sure thing!” he said out loud intending to give his neighbor a hand, a good Samaritan, he was or at least he hoped he was; he‘d help his neighbor. The swath laid bare, a rush of forward speed, a drama ensnared……by what….homespun hell? The neighbor had left before he had gotten to the door, returning to his house. The front door was open, unimpeded by the man’s presence. “Can ya help me brother?” he had said. Sly shut the door and a rain of delicate gypsy moths flittering near the sliding glass door caught his eye. Flittering, evanescent scarcely there yet ever trifling with the currents of moted sunshine and summer warmth. He watched the tiny tempest of moths flutter near the wooden fence. A separation between paradise and hell. It was a dark secret, darker than the light at nights deepest dream and worse for the closeness of its chance.
He had tried chance and the forty or so bodies buried on his neighbors property were now in the care of the F.B.I.; he sighed, he had been within an inch of it, an ace and a hair.
The Neighborhood
Ron Koppelberger
The Neighborhood
The disposition of slavery frustrated him and he screamed for release, “YYYYYiiiiieeeeeeeeee!” Rain was falling in exasperating waves of teardrop blessing. The neighborhood was unaware, entranced by the ethereal drama, the presence that defined their true transport, their mode of life, their actual status in the universe, in a prevailing evil smoke of duel reality. The televisions were dressed in a myriad of programs, they saw game shows, but underneath, they saw soap operas, but underneath, they saw movies, but underneath, they saw Sunday football, but underneath lay the truth, the secret reality of a thousand nightmares in scarlet neon.
Juke Sober was watching a movie about Viet Nam, yet beneath his wife was being eviscerated; the action pushed ahead occluding the truth……..and the strange thing was that she was in the next room making a decision between hamburgers and hotdogs. Juke saw up top.
Pepper Holly was watching a western, yet what lay beneath her subconscious and the enchanting dance of a car slamming into a brick wall, a young couple catapulting through the windshield like crimson angels. Flashes of light lit the cotton dander of a cloudy twilight sky. The sound of a woman sobbing drifted across the neighborhood in quiet desperation.
Juke prayed asking god if he was in heaven or hell. The sobbing continued and the mass continued to watch, to act in reverence of what appeared to be their lives, their existence, oblivious to the shadows that surrounded them.
Somewhere distantly a wolf howled in the midst of saffron fields and wheat, in a flash of insight the wolf thought, “ A gilded plane for innocent dreams and waking endeavors unto the promise of what wont pretends.” For a moment they all saw the great garden of wheat bloom.
The wolf rested, waiting for them.
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