In the bowels of the valleys where I live the smell of anger comes in bouts. The smell rides down from the mountain sides on great horses wearing heavy armor and large blades; the smell drives at us with the sound of hooves pounding on soft valley soil. My father could scent this smell twenty-four hours before it came, but when he was hungry for something angry, to him the smell of war was everywhere. The day he left to find the source of the scent was the day he left me all alone.

I told them that the good graces gave me whatever I had.

I told him I was only a callow youth with two foolish feet. “I’m old and half blind, and couldn’t care for eating the likes of you. But in exchange for your shoes and satchel I’ll tell you how to avoid the people who smell the anger running down the mountainside. Didn’t your father tell you? The people who run down the mountain to the valley only come to eat youths with foolish feet like your own.”

All of the people’s voices came prying into me, digging through the hairs of my scalp to find answers to their questions. They sifted through my body like water sifts through rice. I felt their presence probing through the deep recesses of my head until they discovered what they longed to know. I told them how I was searching for my father. I told them that his shoes brought me here. I told them about his satchel and the magic that was inside. That magic would take me back home whenever I needed to leave.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the man from the mountain open his razored jaw and draw a poisoned needle from underneath his tongue. I watched the needle fly from his finger through my father’s ear and out the other, turning all his fluids into ones of pure jade and stone. Then the foreigner strapped my jaded father to his back and continued to ride into forbidding wastelands.

I left with these things, the only things left in a house barren. I left wearing the leather-bottomed shoes grandmother blessed before she died. I left mother nibbling on her fingers in want of food.

I saw the devilish look in the serpent’s eye as his spiny tongue wrapped around my body. My legs felt as if they were being stabbed with a thousand tiny needles.

After I took the needle from its place, I pryed my father’s bones from the floor and put them in my satchel.

When I placed the needle I had taken on my palm, it moved in the direction where I needed to go. The bones taken from the ground shielded me from any harm.

So I began my journey home.

The sound of pattering steps quickly nipped at my heels as I ran. Looking behind me, I saw that the wolf-girl had grown larger. She carried on her back her sister, a lady wearing dragon scales whose white hair trailed in the wind.

My false neighbor kowtowed to the floor in mercy. Father and the man in robes let him do so until his forehead bled from its meetings with the hard stone floor.

I was offered a place in the palace, but I could not accept. I wanted to be with the mountain; I felt it move under my skin as I knew part of me was in the mountain too.

Today I am dead. I’ve been dead for nearly two thousand years.
It’s boring being dead so long- there is nothing to do but lie here at the bottom of the peat and rot into nothing and I finished doing that after only a few years. So I was thinking that maybe I’d try and pass the rest of eternity by surfing the net and keeping a blog. Beats watching bacteria divide- I always know how that turns out- two identical bacteria. So unimaginative.

More later.