TWO OF SWORDS

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August 21, 2008

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TWO OF SWORDS

FORREST AGUIRRE

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     You felt, deep down in your heart, that it was an act of faith, a complete surrender to the numinous. But your spent eyeballs don’t give a lick for your unfounded piety, popping off the end of your swords, rolling off the pier and into the ocean like two renegade planets slung out of their mother star’s orbit by forces of chaos that care not one whit about the fate of those worlds’ inhabitants.
     Denouncing the visible through this morbid ritual, you thought yourself a better being, someone above the rabble. Condescension came naturally to you. It was easy to talk down to others, even when they pitied you for your self-inflicted disability.
     You fancy yourself a sagacious two-handed blind fighter, able, by some mystical swordsman’s intuition, to ken your opponent’s position and anticipate her stratagems. A pair of razor-edged sabers whirls about you, arcing through the air in unseen (by you), but not unheard lacerations. Your mind charts these troughs of destruction, replete with matrices and vector derivatives, a mathematical pentagram carved into your enemies’ soft, yielding bodies.
     But you are unwittingly indiscriminate, hewing through friend and foe alike. Your carefully calculated strikes and counterstrikes are a sham. You are killing those you love and giving those who hate you all the more reason to mock your thrashabout silliness, flailing around, as you are, like a broken puppet tossed from a window by a bored child.
     Perhaps you will think you should set your sabers down when you realize that those you love convulse about your feet, wallowing in their own gore. You will remove the blindfold from your face to look again on those whom you have injured or slain, begging forgiveness and seeking reconciliation. Then, reaching your fingers into empty sockets, you will realize that this fate is not a dream. But you will be unable, through the slick heap of bodies, to find the swords and finally make it so.

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Forrest Aguirre is a World Fantasy Award-winning editor who lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with his wife and four children. He recently edited Polyphony 7 with Deborah Layne. His work has appeared in a variety of venues, most recently in Asimov’s, Farrago’s Wainscot, American Letters & Commentary, and the Paper Cities anthology. His work has been collected in Fugue XXIX and his first book-length novella, Swans Over the Moon, was published by Wheatland Press. He is currently working on a forthcoming novel, tentatively titled Archangel Morpheus.

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