an unrehearsed universe

Spacewaders

Also published in slightly different form in Colin Back on the Ghost Roads 's Spectacular Speculations July 2010 edition.


Tea leaves swirl a bitter pattern only the crone
can read, so the sign says.  Shifty red eyes, the kind you can buy
at any mom-and-pop genetics shop, fill with premonitions or greed. 
Reduced to begging a fortune from the cup,
I listen intently as her flesh flashes
– pop pop green, pop yellow, pop orange, repeating –
with bargain basement prophecies. 

“Out there is your destiny my son. 
Beyond the moons and the stars you’ll find
hardship and heartache, sin and redemption. 
You will love and lose many women,
thin-skinned fairies, winged beasties, large cats, small reptiles,
until you reach your journey’s end.”  One final pop
– orange – and she stills. 

Too late to recall the credits I paid her with,
I shake her hand without malice.  It’s a caveat-emptor universe
anyhow.  Except

I move to leave and can’t, my limbs unresponsive
the way they say happened before, during
the wars, when skinjackers and pool hackers would crawl inside
and make a home in your nets.  Somehow I’ve found
the real deal, an old school latin-beatnik prophet. 

“Be wary, void-walker, what you bring
out of the warp,” she whispers behind my eyeballs,
etching something underneath the lids. 

Too much to hope for that it’s protection. 

“Deliver this onto the Far Ones.  Bring a reply,
should you survive.”  Her eyes blacken beneath the cheap
synth-red, pulsing – an off-world, off-beat syncopation –
voodoo injun style in synch with her skin.

I wake in my cot, colossal headache in tow, feeling
well and truly jazzed.  The itch beneath my skin is the hex. 
Thankfully, if the colonials vivisect me, they’ll see
I never read it.  Being an unwitting unwilling accomplice
might gain me a faster disassembly.  Probably not.  I throw on
some old-fashioned alligator spacewaders,
and suit up for another long day’s journey into the fright.

There’s nothing else I can do really, with the compulsion in place
and the hex burning in hole in my mental pocket,
but deliver her message.