fiction

Heirs of Cain: Venus in Labor

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

Severin Molochi is in love with a goddess.  She’s not the kind found in a church, or that you can take with you to church for that matter.  She’s of the old, muddy, animal line of Cain: those who gained power in the world’s first murder.  Just as Severin and his goddess Wanda are settling in their new home, setting up her future dominion, her jealous siblings come calling, but they’re not after her.  They want every gods’ most valuable asset, the mortal chosen as the conduit between them and the people, who in this case happens to share her bed.

Heirs of Cain, a gothic horror fantasy erotic thriller novelette series, continues here.

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 30 minutes)

Heirs of Cain

Venus in Labor

Accepting their compliments proved difficult, and I had no way of explaining myself either. You see, I, Severin Pelts, still had not informed anyone in Quarantown that my wife, Wanda Blasphemer Pelts, was secretly a bloodthirsty goddess from a smudged and misinterpreted age long before any notions of a Christ child or contemplative Buddha.

One day they would all know, the shock bending them into kneeling prayer, where they would no doubt stay for the remainder of their lives. They’d be fools not to. Already they knew the magnetic draw of her company, knowing it just then at the dinner party I’d arranged, the guest list made up of several early pilgrims to Quarantown who seemed like good candidates for lesser disciples than myself when the time came: Miss Giselle Ulterrine the duck farmer, Giggles Terroir our town sommelier, Doppler Burstyn the mining magnate, and the freshest of them, Godwin Hammerstein, a playwright looking to be heard of. Continue reading →

Mysterious Americana Catalog: ‘Firebird’

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 3 Comments

M-A-C (13): ‘Firebird’

Category: varmint

Collection Date: November 25th, 1999

Collection Location: (REDACTED), New Mexico

Collection Report: A seemingly ordinary frozen turkey was purchased at (REDACTED) Foods and stored in preparation for the (REDACTED) family’s third annual hybrid Mexican-Thanksgiving dinner, where they cooked both traditional holiday dishes and cultural hybrids like pumpkin pie churros and hot pepper stuffing.

When the bird carcass was removed from its opaque bag, in the presence of seven witnesses, it immediately thrashed. It was dropped, but brought itself to its nub feet and aimed at the nearby open door of the oven. The oven was not yet heated, but the turkey ran for it, launched itself inside, and continued to flail.

After some seconds, multiple bystanders witnessed it ‘realize something’ and extract itself before fleeing.

Four individuals pursued it out of the kitchen, out of the house, and through a neighbor’s backyard where it created a dangerous situation by leaping into a vat of boiling oil the neighbor was about to use to deep fry their own turkey. The resulting splash dissuaded all but one pursuer.

Seemingly dissatisfied with the overturned oil as its secondary suicide method, the M-A-C proceeded through the doggy door of the next house over and attempted to insert itself into their oven.

This house belonged to a then-member of the catalog, and they acted quickly in turning away the last pursuer on the grounds of trespassing. After wrangling and registration by catalog varmint control truck 4, it was observed that the carcass, nicknamed ‘Firebird’, would perpetually try to cook itself by any methods available. It could only be contained by keeping it in a pit lined with aluminum foil, where it then ambled perpetually and aimlessly.

Current Collector: (REDACTED) Alvarez, junior rank, expelled

Notes from Collector: “In my defense, I didn’t know my family expected me to host Thanksgiving that year. They showed up and I had nothing… except for a bird begging to be cooked. If anything, it should have counted as research; we now know it tasted normal and didn’t make us run for any open graves.”

Current Status: inactive (consumed), skeleton displays no unusual properties

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Mysterious Americana Catalog: ‘Hon’

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 2 Comments

M-A-C (12): ‘Hon’

Category: doohickey

Collection Date: (REDACTED), 1986

Collection Location: (REDACTED), North Carolina

Collection Report: M-A-C (12) has a recorded collection date, but no associated report, despite it being the most well-known of the Catalog’s myriad items. That is due to it being featured on the cover of five consecutive issues, just prior to the discontinuation of all cover images.

Picked up from the entryway of one of our collectors’ facilities, and always stored in such a place to discourage it from fleeing, ‘Hon’, as it is called, is a tawny welcome mat three feet and five inches across. It bears the phrase ‘Come on in Hon!’

When insufficient foot traffic passes over Hon it will move about on its own, seeking affection, a state in which it has been witnessed running, jumping, crawling, and placing itself in laps in an apparent demand to be stroked.

This behavior cannot be recorded, as any attempt to move it by force while under surveillance results in a tide of insects emitted instead (those typically living under welcome mats like millipedes, (REDACTED), and wood lice), despite there being no possible source for them.

Current Collector: ‘Brigadoon’: The MAC private museum, gallery, and war room, senior rank

Notes from Collector: “Hon is the mascot of the Catalog, insofar as there can be one. As such his only home is Brigadoon, the largest collection in existence. Visiting hours are never. Get used to it. You want to meet the mat? Get senior rank, get the scars to match, then give us a call. Don’t forget to lose the phone number.”

Current Status: active

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Invoke the Bloody Mouth (finale)

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(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 37 minutes)

When the Year is not Kept

And the Clutch of the Sig-neagle Shreds an Old Wrong

Shortly after the Battle of Lore Extraction came to a disappointing close, peace settled into the surrounding lands. To many it seemed the situation could grow no more extreme than the Trojan Horse laying siege to the fear-full lion’s city, fangs and claws crossed with metal weapons utterly forbidden elsewhere.

No matter which way it went, there would be no repercussions afterward, for there was one corner of the Wild Trinity on each side of the conflict, once again demonstrating its structural stability. There had been times where Vissovis the Golden Fleece had been involved in minor conflicts along with his siblings, and those had not stressed the grand relationships either. Continue reading →

Invoke the Bloody Mouth (part nine)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 2 hours)

When the Year is not Kept

And the Details are Hammered out with Veteran Hammers and Baboon Nails

She does not arrive without her procession. She does not arrive without her elite foot soldiers. She does not arrive without their support beities. She does not arrive without her support beities’ human slaves.

This brings with her a great many creatures, big and small, and necessitates quite the space for them to make and break camp. When considering Staircase, the front of Staircase since it could not be approached from any other angle, the nearest such space was a bowl in the Earth, into which the flesh-dense vines had grown and blanketed. Now they would serve as natural bedding for the forces of the arriving Assaulquus, the Trojan Horse, the Wild Trinitarian of war. Continue reading →

Invoke the Bloody Mouth (part eight)

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(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 3 minutes)

When the Year is not Kept

And the Rainbow Climbs Color by Color

Finally the marmoset Ellapock came of use to the travelers, after it became apparent that Hygenis’s general knowledge of the layout of the land would not be sufficient to find Staircase. Both humans had pictured a towering city, with Loric imagining all the more aggressively thanks to images from the bottomless book of places with names like Dubai, New York, and Tokyo.

Instead they were met with forests taller than anticipated, and uneven rocky paths that often dropped into pits, which did little to stop the trees from taking root but much to stop their feet from finding comfortable traction. Hygenis’s mental map had kept everything flattened in two dimensions, and she grimly revised their time of arrival by several days once they encountered the hazards, meaning the Babeloons, or the Sig-neagle, or even the Scion, whose fate remained unknown, might catch up with them. Continue reading →

Invoke the Bloody Mouth (part seven)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 45 minutes)

2036 is the Kept Year

And the Ducks Expand Immeasurably in Dignity

Yes, they walked into the sky. To parcel their daily trip out more than that, they walked from their frolicking fountain across a red carpet, with many onlookers, and into an elevator that then closed its doors and escorted them gently to their penthouse in the sky where they would disembark and wait to do the whole thing again the following day.

This was the march of the Peabody ducks, as they had marched since the year 1933. It consisted of one male, a drake as they are called, and his five accompanying hens of drabber color. While the feathers upon his crown were a bright, nearly iridescent, green, like the felt on a billiards table spruced up for its first date, he was sometimes not the center of attention. Continue reading →

Invoke the Bloody Mouth (part six)

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(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 19 minutes)

When the Year is not Kept

And the Best Strategy is Blind

Compassleaf was in tumult when its latest visitor arrived on the wing. He’d seen such chaos in a supposedly civilized place before, but only when the lord of the town had decided to disband it in light of his own approaching death. The end result had been a raid of all its shelters by wild beities: a cascade of blood and competing theft that shredded what it stole more often than it didn’t.

Things in the Scion’s city weren’t as bad as all that, but the air was squirming with short tempers and frustration. So many birds came and went with urgent perpendicular paths that they were colliding midair and fighting. Local songbirds suddenly possessed of fierce pride and determination, despite their cargo rarely being anything more consequential than love ballads between blossoming romances, fought claw to claw with much heartier crows. Continue reading →

Invoke the Bloody Mouth (part five)

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(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 31 minutes)

…

“I didn’t understand much of that, but I take it that man had some insight into the Forbidden Thumbs,” Hygenis said once Loric had finished telling one of the bottomless book’s countless tales. The trio was still ambling away from Compassleaf, led by the mongrel who decided to tolerate them anew every time he heard them speak, looked back, and realized they were not imaginary.

“What’s the internet?” he asked to check if he was real enough to speak as well.

“A network of information powered by electricity,” Loric explained. Being the first time he’d said such a thing out loud, he realized how much his dark learning under the pillows had silently shifted his foundation. What had crumbled on stage under the baboon’s gaze was just the standing husk, like the world of old in its dying days. “It could move any information across the world in seconds, including moving images.” Continue reading →

Invoke the Bloody Mouth (part four)

~ Blaine Arcade ~ 1 Comment

(back to part one)

(estimated reading time: 1 hour, 22 minutes)

When the Year is not Kept

And a Shave is Stolen while the Darkness is Borrowed

Robbed of her sight, Beret Chamberhand did her best to keep her words and her breath to herself. It didn’t feel like much of a robbery, as they were kept from her much of the time anyway by her marmoset masters, and she’d grown accustomed to having her view be nothing but white cloth, the only variety ever being the color of the trim.

Her surname was foreign to Compassleaf, as only tiny beities with enough wealth to own humans ever had need of her services. Marmosets were melodramatic and emotional creatures, and sometimes in their interactions they wished for the immediate architecture to reflect their emotional states. Continue reading →