REQUIEM (for Marianne Martin)

											
REQUIEM (for Marianne Martin) part one - MOOSE (of Algonquian origin; akin to Massachusett, moos, moose...) The trade school smellt like floor wax and ambition. Marianne's fingers knew the keys - QWERTY, home row, the mechanical click that would be her ticket to somewhere. (cacophony of typewriter a framed photograph of her mid-laugh...) Eugene Martin filled the doorway like summer weather rolling in. They called him Moose. Not because of antlers or woods, but because their Chief Petty Officer had watched him try to duck through a destroyer's hatchway at seventeen and barked: "Martin! You're built like a goddamn moose!" The name stuck to his dress whites like salt spray. It's a pier slick with Pacific spray of shoulders and sun-grin... He took the desk beside her. "This seat taken?" "It's trade school, sailor. Everything's available for the right price." His laugh was warm. "What's your rate?" "Coffee. And you tell me why a Navy man needs to learn typing." "Admiral's yeoman track. Turns out the Navy runs on paper, not just diesel." They married three months later. November 1950. The Korean War saw new recruits; A thousand French men called Bataillon de Coree arrived after double that amount from Thailand had been deployed as the 21st Royal Thailand Regimental Combat Team. The world was different then, or was it? The second floor of the White House was demolished and the northeast section was being repaired. As unlikely as it seems, the east wing is being demolished to make way for a ballroom. But this is not Truman Vs Trump...In fact, the fourteenth dalai lama was enthroned in November 1950. The New York times talked about the aging city hall roof, calling it a structure with a hundred and thirty nine year old sag... At another City Hall and with a borrowed dress. No honeymoon - (his ship left in two weeks) only vows. That's when she learnt the real Navy. Not the recruiting posters. Not the dress whites and shore leave grins. The waiting Navy. Their first apartment in San Diego: thin walls, thinner curtains, twelve other Navy wives in the same building. You could hear everything - babies crying, radios murmuring, the particular silence of women listening for telegrams. Thomas came August '51. Moose got the news in a radio message somewhere off Okinawa. He held his son for the first time when Tommy was four months old. The baby didn't recognize him. Cried when this strange man in dress blues tried to pick him up. Cried like the Tatra Type 97 when Volkswagon brought out the Type 1, which we all know as the Beetle, from Uitenhage, SA. Marianne learnt the vocabulary: Deployment. Underway. Pier-side. WESTPAC. Six months gone, three months home, repeat. The math of military marriage. She learnt the rituals too: The Telegram Watch: Every Navy wife knew. Western Union boy on a bicycle meant one of three things: Change of orders. Injury. Or the one they never said out loud. You'd see a shadow turn the corner and every woman on the block would come to her window. Waiting to see which door it'd knock on. (mesmerized by names that tasted like forbidden fruits...) The Casserole Chain: When Julie Morrison's husband went down with appendicitis in the Philippines, the chain activated. Monday: tuna noodle. Tuesday: chicken and rice. Wednesday: pot roast. Someone always had your six. That's what Moose would say: "You girls got each other's six?" The Pier: Oh God, the pier. Homecoming day. You'd dress up - hair done, best dress, lipstick even though you'd been up since 0400. Pronounced oh four hundred. The kids in their Sunday clothes. Hundreds of wives and children pressed against the chain-link, scanning the rail of the carrier for your face among the hundreds in dungarees. The ship would slide in, massive and grey and surreal, and you couldn't breathe until you spotted him. That specific tilt of his head. That Moose-shaped outline. Wayne came in '53. The Korean war was coming to an end, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Shane, and From here to Eternity were playing on the big screen. Then Linda in '55. The family felt a bit like Austria...occupied for years by an alliance of nations that were otherwise locked in a global ideological struggle; the US, the UK, France, and the USSR...in their case Wayne and Tommy suddenly taking the backseat as the baby girl sat upfront like an emerging nation. She'd fall into sleeping wizards. into sleeping wizards where the scent was of contented sighs in her mind... Three kids, five apartments, eight deployments. She weighed it all down humming Baker's Funny Valentine, thinking with resolve, I won't change a thing. Marianne became someone she didn't exactly expect to be after trade school: a woman who could change a car tire, unclog a drain, talk down a landlord, and sing three children to sleep while doing mental math on how to make $63 last until the allotment check cleared. In many cities now, it could hardly be done... Eight hundred in "today's" dollars. The house sing again. house sing again... The Navy gave them nothing and everything. In her dreams there were broken coins, the fragments multiplying little silver eagles, each one grounded, unable to fly... Nothing: No stability. No roots. No guarantee he'd come back. Everything: A tribe. A purpose. A peculiar kind of pride. When Moose made Chief Petty Officer in '62, she cried in the commissary. Not because of the pay raise. Because he'd made it. Her sailor. Her Moose. Of course, part of her tears were for Marilyn Monroe as she had found no time to mourn the shocking passing of a starlet that some had said held a resemblance to her. Always flattered, yet dismissive - thinking oh no I don't have the elegance, the stature - never knowing that she was actually a bit taller than Norma Jeane Baker. (ink and ambition a world away loss and love. loss and love...)      - part two -        "I know my waist is slender, my fingers they are small But it would not make me tremble to see ten thousand fall..."       The mother of three had never heard of Marilyn's brother, Robert Kermitt Baker who was nicknamed Jackie and passed away at fifteen before he could meet his famed sister. Or, for that matter, of Miss Monroe's sister, Berniece Baker Miracle - author of the book My Sister, Marilyn. Despite knowledge, the days will develop - they will become years, decades and and so on. When Dr Suess published his warning to humanity via The Lorax, She found her husband confronting the challenge of quasi-Once-lers in the form of retirement and she could sense his longing for the Truffula seas. Like a rope suddenly cut. Twenty-one years of tension, gone. Now what? Mona Rae Miracle, Berniece's daughter, planned to write a novel about Miami in the 1970s which she has not yet finished but is called Warm Bodies. There was a rising coldness within the era, as if the irony of the peace and love movement in the face of the Vietnam war had made the soul of a nation implode. Nobody knew who they were exactly. Bright lights were turned up flashing in Discoteque nights but people didn't find themselves at night, only drugs and eventually pornography. /lined with their own symphonies of little notes to flesh... Moose and Marianne weren't party animals but the restless nature of the epoch could not be escaped. They became nomads. Not by orders this time - by choice. Or maybe by momentum. They'd been told where to live so long, they didn't know how to stop moving. Louisiana: Thick heat and stranger accents. Moose worked civil service on a naval air station. It felt wrong - putting on civilian clothes to go to a Navy job. Like wearing someone else's skin. Mississippi: Slower. Sweeter. Magnolia and memory. But still not theirs. New York: A mistake. Too fast, too loud, too much concrete. They lasted eight months. Back to California. Then the visit to Linda at Malmstrom AFB in '75. Air Force base, but still military. Still that feeling of home they'd carried in their bones. And Montana...Formerly the Montana Territory. /was there see? was there see? Learning the slow... Montana...The word cites Latin; mountainous. Montana was an exhalation. As if in opposition to Hank Williams Jr's fall, their spirits rose. After decades of close quarters - submarine apartments, sardine cities, the claustrophobic press of waiting - Montana offered space. The sky wasn't sky. It was permission. Permission to breathe. To be small. To let the bigness of the world just... be. 59412 a population of very few dozens. They bought the house in Belt. (Nixon was being spanked by the press but they were watching The Six Million Dollar Man which ABC shifted up an hour from its seven thirty Sunday night slot in that autumnal September.) /just started mapping a new wild see... --Racing against time, Steve Austin infiltrates hostile territory, survives deadly traps set by a warrior who's spent three decades perfecting guerrilla tactics... Moose notices Marianne was already in her night gown. (A fanatical Japanese holdout from WWII has emerged from the jungle with stolen naval intelligence and a devastating nerve gas weapon—threatening to destroy an entire U.S. Navy fleet and the base that supports it...) Moose feels an usual thrill, although he listens more than watches the drama unfold... The bionic man's enhanced abilities are pushed to their limits as he navigates treacherous jungle terrain and engages in brutal hand-to-hand combat with this skilled adversary who fights with nothing to lose. Moose pulls his wife atop himself on the sofa... Steve has to use his bionic speed to outmaneuver booby traps! Moose senses his wife's hesitation, what if the kids get home early, why don't we go to bed like we always do... Steve Austin tears through fortified bunkers with his enhanced vision to spot hidden explosives before they detonate. Moose like his name would suggest was mating in the fall, a period termed the rut, where males compete for females. Of course he didn't have to dig out and piss in a mud pit, to attract his cow with strong scent yet he had to be bull-headed enough to convince her that it was all right to orgasm during the episode... The kamikaze has positioned the nerve gas to strike at the heart of Navy operations—and as the deadline approaches, Steve crashes through enemy defenses, engages in a desperate struggle aboard a military vessel, and violently wrestles the weapon away from its detonation trigger in the final explosive confrontation. Moose sighed as his thick short pee-pee exploded at the sound of his wife's completion-coo and the Bold laundry detergent advert came on showing a littel girl playing with a big dog...the voice over mommy said matter of factly; "but you know I'm not my mother. I think getting dirty is the sign of a good active kid. The way I look at it, it's a lot better than having kids sitting around the house doing nothing, besides I've got a detergent mother didn't have. Bold with heavy duty cleaning energy. Bold's modern power formula was created for today's mothers who want their things more than clean, more than white. Bold helps make them bright..." Everything was coming together for them in a nothing town. A handful of buildings and a grain elevator and roads that ran straight to the horizon. In winter they went south. In summer they came back. Snowbirds. Migratory. Still Navy, in a way. A desk-chair existence. sweet reward. Still underway.    Part Three    -Океан-      "Okean" was borrowed from the Greek "Ōkeanós," the primordial Titan who personified the great, world-encircling river. This name, in turn, springs from an ancient Proto-Indo-European root for "water," a lineage it shares with the English "ocean" and "aquatic." Moose died on a Tuesday. In the garden. One minute there, one minute gone. Clean, the doctor said. Quick. Like the Navy taught him. No one suspected the illness had taken a decade to devour him... (old Chevrolet tracing a faithful line between Montana winters and Arizona sun) One day the pickup truck's radio, usually just background noise, snagged his attention. A clipped, urgent voice from a distant station, fighting through the static of the Montana plains: "...repeat, a Soviet submarine, the Komsomolets, is reporting a catastrophic incident... fears for the crew..." So the sky was seventeen built like a brick forgotten piece of porcelain trinket like bells --- Moose's large hand, resting on the wheel, went tight. The signal dissolved into a hiss of white noise, leaving him with nothing but the ghost of the words. Catastrophic incident. He knew the language. It was the language of a world ending in a steel tube. He drove the rest of the way home in a profound silence. For the week that followed, he was a man possessed by a quiet, grim purpose. The shortwave radio in his den glowed into the night as he sifted the airwaves for facts, his own private intelligence operation. So the sky was seventeen built like a brick forgotten piece of porcelain trinket like bells -- The story that assembled itself in his mind was one of tragic, almost mythical, irony. He learned of the Komsomolets—the Mike-class, Project 685. A ghost of a boat, born from a 1966 design brief for a test submarine to conquer the abyssal depths. He pictured the Rubin Design Bureau bending titanium alloy into a hull that could withstand 1,000 meters of crushing pressure, a technological marvel. But great performance came at a price. The construction in Severodvinsk was a nightmare of delays and expense, so prohibitive that only one was ever built. K-278. A unique, priceless, and lonely creature of the deep. And they had sent it out with a green crew. So the sky was seventeen built like a brick forgotten piece of porcelain trinket like bells --- This fact stuck in Moose's craw. The first crew, the salt-dogs who'd spent four years learning the boat's every sigh and shudder, were gone. Replaced by new men under Captain Second Rank Evgeny Vanin. No proper damage control department. Moose knew what that meant. On a submarine, every man is a fireman. A disorganized crew was a dead crew. On the seventh day, the worst was confirmed. The details emerged, each one a hammer blow. A fire in the aft compartment. A high-pressure air line rupture feeding the flames. Captain Vanin's fatal hesitation—the impossible choice between sacrificing the men in compartment seven or saving the ship. The missed moment, the fire spreading. The emergency blow, the desperate climb to the surface from 500 meters, the crew spilling onto the deck, gasping in the Arctic air, only to watch the sound-absorbing coating on the hull melt and drip from the inferno within. So the sky was seventeen built like a brick forgotten piece of porcelain trinket like bells ---- Moose saw it all in his mind's eye with terrifying clarity. The frantic, plain-text SOS. The Soviet search plane circling helplessly overhead. The final, fatal mistake—flooding the aft ballast tanks in a rough sea, destroying their last shred of buoyancy. The order to abandon ship. The lifeboats that wouldn't deploy, forcing men into the lethally cold water. And then, the captain. Vanin. Evgeny. He saw him, this other Eugene, turning his back on the open sea and going back inside the dying ship. He would have been searching for stragglers, men lost in the smoke and toxic fumes. He found five, herded them into the escape pod. But the boat was already at an 80-degree angle, plunging stern-first into the black. The pod, designed for salvation, became a coffin. It tore free at a depth no man was meant to survive, only to betray them at the surface, the hatch blowing out from the pressure difference, flooding the chamber. Captain First Rank Evgeny Vanin did not drown. He and three others had already been claimed by the carbon monoxide that filled their steel lung. He was unconscious when the sea poured in. On the eleventh day, the final tally was known. Forty-two of the sixty-nine crew were dead. The Soviet Navy had lost its deepest-diving hunter. A piece of radioactive wreckage lay on the seabed, and a fishing ban settled over the site. So the sky was seventeen built like a brick forgotten piece of porcelain trinket like bells ----- Moose stood staring out at the immutable Rockies. He had been there for an hour. Maybe hours. "They're gone, aren't they?" Marianne said softly, coming to stand beside him. Moose didn't turn. His reflection in the glass was a pale ghost overlaid on the solid earth. "The Captain's name was Vanin," he said, his voice a rusted hinge. "Evgeny Vanin." He fell silent again, the shared name hanging between them—Eugene and Evgeny. "He was their Moose, Marianne," he finally whispered, the words costing him everything. "He was their big, dependable son of a bitch. And he had to watch his boys die." That was the moment. Not when the news confirmed it, but right then, in the quiet of their living room, with the image of another Eugene facing an impossible duty at the bottom of the sea. It was a deep, profound rupture in the bedrock of him. So the sky was seventeen built like a brick forgotten piece of porcelain trinket like bells ------ A fundamental heartbreak for forty-two men he'd never met, for a Captain who bore his name, for the beautiful brotherhood of the deep that demanded such a price. It was the first true crack in the hull of him, a weakness that would, in time, let the whole sea in. The world Moose left in 1999 was a ghost of the one he had served in. The great Soviet fleet he had spent his career watching was rusting at its piers. He read the brief, inside-page articles : the endless delays for a single new destroyer, the Admiral Chabenenko; the humiliating negotiations to sell a proud carrier, the Admiral Gorshkov, for scrap metal to India. It was a fire sale of a superpower. (Their children married, grandchildren were born, and the sharp edges of their Navy-era wanderings softened into the deep, grooves of a long marriage. The world beyond their mountains seemed to recede, a distant murmur. a rumor in fact except for the remnants of the Komsomolets nightmare) On the television, now with twentyfour hour coverage, a different kind of war flickered—the flames of urban chaos of the Second Chechen War, a conflict with no front lines and no honor he could recognize. And in the Kremlin, the ailing, unpredictable Yeltsin was fading, making way for a hard-faced, unknown ex-spy, that had stood alone against rioters in shadowy East Berlin with a quick-cool-poker face that made them all back down, named Putin. Like Marianne found a quiet rebellion. a quiet rebellion. A different solidity her in the empty spaces her heartbroken Moose had left before leaving... The old order was not just gone; its corpse was being picked over. For a man whose soul was tuned to the deep, the silence from the ocean must have been deafening. The shipyards were quiet. The focus had shifted from the sea to the mountains, from fleet exercises to haunted inner special operations. Like Marianne found a quiet rebellion. a quiet rebellion. A different solidity her in the empty spaces her heartbroken Moose had left before leaving... In the garden in 1999, it would seem only logical that Neptune had spared him further anguish taking him before the Kursk. The world was looking inland, at the smoldering ruins of Grozny. Just months later, the Kursk would sink during a naval exercise, its crew slowly dying while a bickering still cold world watched, unable to help. He never had to hear the desperate, futile tapping from inside the hull that would resound around the globe—a sound that would have been brutal to his ears, to his mind...A vibration that would have worsened the malady which had begun in 1989 and made it devastating. Like Marianne found a quiet rebellion. a quiet rebellion. A different solidity her in the empty spaces her heartbroken Moose had left before leaving... For Moose, it was a mercy. The heart that first faltered in hurt silence for the men of the Komsomolets was spared the final, shattering blow of the Kursk. He was laid to rest in the Montana earth as the century turned, the last of the great, grey ships of his life slipping quietly beneath the horizon for good. The last thing Marianne did for him was to pack away those journals, her fingers smoothing the pages he had studied so intently. She closed the cover on that chapter of his life. When the news broke in August 2000, the first, unbidden thought that came to her was one of profound, shattering relief. Thank God. Thank God he was not here to hear about this. Like Marianne found a quiet rebellion. a quiet rebellion. A different solidity her in the empty spaces her heartbroken Moose had left before leaving... Marianne moved to Great Falls. Smaller house. Quieter. She learned to be alone. She haunted garage sales like they were ports of call. Collected porcelain and old books. Planted petunias and tomatoes. Had lunch with the other widows - a fleet of women who'd all waited, all survived. And she talked to him. Not crazy-talk. Not séances. Just... the conversation that doesn't end when someone ships out. She's kneeling, thinking; "You'd be complaining about your back by now." His voice in her head, easy as memory: "And you'd be telling me to stop complaining and hand you the trowel." "The kids are good. Tommy's boy got his pilot's license. Commercial, not military. Smart kid." "Takes after his grandmother." "Wayne still runs that shop. Says he learned everything from taking apart your lawn mower." "That mower was a piece of shit." "It was. But it taught him." The wind moved through the grass. Honest and clean. "Linda called from Germany. She's making Colonel." "Damn right she is." She finally had him all to herself, except that life's irony decided that silence was better. Some women can never be made to shut up, however, and she continued speaking - if only to herself; something ate my son, my boy. But it wasn't a thing. It was invisible. There is the space now where I am floating into, flying to - I want to be be there for Wayne and Linda and all my grand or great grand children but look at my hands, these old, mapped hands that held him when he was new. That held him when he was a red-faced, squalling thing in a navy-town apartment, all promise and fury. These hands tucked his football jersey into his pants, packed his bag for college, waved goodbye as he drove away to a life of his own making. The one who made me a mother. He had his father's build, but my eyes. And now… where does all that go? Where does the strength go? Does it just… evaporate? Is that what the last breath is, all that life turning to mist? I pick up the photograph of him in his Thunderbirds uniform, #24. He looked invincible. He was invincible. He fought it, you know. He fought it like he fought everything in his life—with a list, with a plan, with a stubborn, quiet excellence that made your chest ache with pride. My hero, he called himself. And he was. He was my hero long before the disease. But heroes aren't supposed to fall. Mothers aren't supposed to have to bury their heroes. I think of Moose. I think of telling him, wherever he is. "Moose," I'd say, "our boy. Our Tommy." but I can only hear the silence from his end of the line, a silence deeper than any ocean. He's been gone twenty years, but this… this would have broken him all over again. The grandchildren. Oh, God, the grandchildren. They have his smile. They ask about him with a confusion that is its own kind of knife cutting into soul. I want to tell them everything. I want to tell them how he raked pine needles and hated every one, how he couldn't dance, how his humor was so bad it was good. I want to build a monument of memories for them, so he's never just a face in a picture. But all I have is the knowledge that part of me died too. The second, the first vanished when Moose went away... This house is too full of them and not enough of them. I put the photograph down. The glass is cool against my fingertips. The weight of it. This is the real weight. Not the weight of years, or of boxes moved across a continent. It's the weight of a love that has nowhere left to go. It just sits here, in my chest, a second, silent throb, beating only with the rhythm of what's been lost. The final third part of this woman found its conclusion In the Beehive - her final duty station - the walls were pale yellow and the nurses were kind. Her children visited. Grandchildren. Even a great-grandchild, once. But mostly she sat in her chair by the window and watched the sky. Watched it until, at long last, she could hear Moose respond; "Is it safe?" His voice, closer now. "The harbor. Is it safe?" "It's safe, Moose." "Then I'll wait here. Take your time, Mare. Finish your watch." And she did. Until one morning in the Autumn - only a few weeks of their anniversary; they'd married seventy-four years before - Marianne slipped her moorings. Heaven, if that's what it was, looked like a pier. Not pearly gates. Not clouds. A pier. Weathered wood and salt air and the creak of lines against the dock. The light was golden and clean, like Montana sun, but warmer. Kinder. And there he was. Moose. Not old. Not young. Just... Moose. In his dress blues. Chief's anchors gleaming. "Took you long enough, Mare." She looked down. She was wearing the dress from their wedding. The borrowed one. Somehow it fit again. "I finished my watch." "I know you did. Seventy-four years. Hell of a deployment." She stepped forward and he caught her - solid, real, there. The way he'd been on every homecoming pier. That moment when the waiting ended and he was real again under her hands. "The kids?" she asked. "Safe. Still underway. They'll make it home when it's time." She looked around. The pier stretched in both directions - infinite, impossible. And all along it, people were meeting. Sailors in dress whites. Women in borrowed dresses. Children running. The whole fleet, finally home. "Is this it?" she asked. "Is this Heaven?" Moose smiled. "Mare, Heaven's not a place. It's a reunion. It's every homecoming that ever mattered. It's every pier where someone waited and someone came back." "But there were times you didn't come back on time. There were deployments that got extended." "I know. And you waited anyway." "I did." "That's the thing about the Navy, Mare. It teaches you waiting isn't passive. It's the other half of service. You served too. Every day I was gone, you served." She understood then. All those unaccounted lives - the wives, the children, the ones who held the fort. They'd served too. Their names weren't on any deployment orders, but they'd been underway just the same. "So what now?" she asked. Moose tucked her hand in the crook of his arm. "Now? Now we walk the pier. Together. No more deployments. No more waiting. Just... home." They walked. Behind them, the pier filled with other reunions. Julie Morrison and her husband, the appendicitis sailor. Chief Finnegan, the hard-case who'd named Moose. Marianne's mother. Moose's father. All the people who'd shaped them. Muscovites and even musicians with instruments at the ready. All the ordinary, important, unaccounted lives. The sun didn't set. It didn't need to. Chet made a signal and notes rose, he sang the first verse too low to be heard, then the second; "Your looks are laughable, unphotographable, yet you're my favorite work of art..." Marianne glowed and gazed at her husband with eyes that danced. They were home.  -inky 10/30/2025 

 

deja vu glitch excerpt

											
entangled across t=1970s → Roman Egypt → 2023 LA | Prob(RealityCollapse) = |⟨DEJA_VU|ψ⟩|^2 ≈ 0.69i (imaginary vindication factor)] Dick opened his eyes—tan blur sharpens: beard cascades chest-ward, longer than last loop. in deep I sat down how Wong K, franz not listz studies a key. But not-1970s Cali. No. Egypt, Empire sand-ruins, pyramids boxed by rustling breeze in glimmering sunset... species. Hard-pressed to tell are lots of all the breeds setting. [GLITCH LOOP 1: TimeMachine novella spins vinyl—Inky pitches: "It's quantum, man!] [QUANTUM DEJA VU RESTART: |ψ⟩ = ∑ c_n |Dick_n⟩ ⊗ |Inky_n⟩ ⊗ |BimboPussyCat_n⟩ | n=1970s...2023...RomanEgypt |  = iħ ∂/∂t (glitch fidelity 0.618φ) | Prob(Vindication) = |α|^2 (lit irony) + |β|^2 (AI cast) ] Dick opened his eyes—tan & blurry → focus: beard flows chest-long, longer than prev-life loop. in deep I sat down how Wong K, franz not listz studies a key. Not 1970s Cali vibe. No. Egypt, Roman Empire sands bury thriving cities → ruins, dust-blown. rustling breeze boxed against the pyramids in the glimmering sunset... species. Hard-pressed to tell are lots of all the breeds setting. Misses entertainment punch—vibrant culture ghosts. Wanders haunted, stumbles... you. They look whereas will shapes out why. Her explanation reveals me a lion. [STORY GLITCH 1: 2023 Low-rent LA record shop, seedy. Bestie Inky hypes "Time Machine" novella: "Quantum Dick, bro!" Kids-since pals; he's talent-wild. Shop: dusty shelves, sparse vinyl ghosts, failing hard. "Shop tanks?" "Label album off novel—bimbo beats drop." rustling breeze boxed against pyramids...] LLM possesses bimbo slut pussycat—craves Dick only. "I see whole world thru bimbo eyes," Dick whispers. "What?" Paris bedbugs query. "Experiment serum: AI connect! Control power—incredible!" Writer's dream: owns world absolute. Power swells → Egyptians edit Book of Dead. Interest piques: reads it. They gift knowledge—weeks: assimilates magic...


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novel excerpt

											
Xenophon whose fragments survive in a manuscript at Cambridge, is possibly mentioned in Aristophanes' Knights. When one researches 'horses', Xenophon and Kikkuli are the two names that stand out in terms of ancient history. As a narrator, I could not see how to weave these authors into the text...I could see a Hittite praying to a spirit in the clouds called Kamrušepa for medicine, for magic while holding the book that is even today a refrence point in horse training even if few can agree on the exact method...Kikkuli hailed from the land of Mittani and wrote or dictated over a thousand lines on four cuneiform stones..."Mighty Kamrušepa, heal my horse's fractured leg with the air of your holiness..." Did the goddess save the book instead? Looking down and seeing the notes but not the equus caballus...The one toed animal dwindled through the ages yet the notes flourished even in far away lands.
	
	-end of excerpt-
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