About I Have Asked To Be Where No Storms Come:
Excerpt:
PART I: HELL
CHAPTER 1
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail,
And a few lilies blow.
And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.
“Heaven-Haven” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Domino learned he had to be adaptable.
He may have died sometime in the twentieth century, but the world still spun on above. New-fangled ideas, technology, and culture leaked into Hell’s subterranean world. He’d noticed it before: the women sporting blue jeans, the short leather jackets, the abandoned picket signs with painted mantras calling to burn the bra alongside frack the Bloody, but it didn’t truly hit him until he found a contained black box of glass. Something from the Brightside—the East-side. Nothing so fancy would be found in the West, on his side of the Dark and Bloody, no matter how much time passed.
That was the problem with adaptability. If you didn’t do it, refused to, you ended up stranded in your own time. Locked in a whirlwind of denial, because life had moved on without you and you weren’t ready to be forgotten.
It fractured his heart when he found people like that, like the young thing before him, sitting crossed-legged in the desert with her fleshless fingers curled in boned zen. His throat cracked as he called out to her, too long silent on this never-ending peregrination. Her long bleached hair swept across a face blistered and peeling from the sun. He snapped his fingers inches from her nose, but she didn’t blink. Didn’t move. Returned to dust.
He eyed her ripped jeans, her canvas tennis shoes worn through the soles, and the square black metal brick balanced on her bent knee. He took it, steadily working through the mechanics of a touch screen. Hellish burble cooed through the earpiece, but he ignored it. This was damnation, after all. What did you expect? This was how you survived. Stealing, hijacking, and fast-talking just to get what you needed.
His face remained passive as applications opened brightly colored hieroglyphic bubbles. He sat, hoping this wasn’t a laid trap and mimicked her crossed legs. Their kneecaps brushed.
It might’ve been minutes or a whole year that he sat next to her, figuring out the black box. Time had conditioned him to approach things with childish glee, instead of like a frustrated fogey. Puzzles kept him sane, taught him to accept new appliances that were only science fiction pulp in his time.
He tapped the glass with his fingernail and scrolled through her pictures: three smiling friends, a chocolate-colored puppy, and a rainbow cutting through the gray from far away. He stared at the picture until the screen blacked out. He thought about centuries of black skies full of peace like the good book said. He thought about a horizon that wasn’t red-lit with hellfire. He looked up. No rainbows here.
Pocketing the device, he patted the girl gently on her shoulder and wished her well on her journey.
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About Gwendolyn N. Nix:
producer, to shark researcher, to evolutionary biologist, and is currently an Entertainment
Editor with Aconyte Books. Her novels include the Celestial Scripts series (The Falling
Dawn and Seams of Shadow), Sharks of the Wasteland, and the soon-to-be-released I Have
Asked to Be Where No Storms Come. Her short fiction has appeared in a variety of
anthologies, such as Pileaus Symphony No. 1, Where the Veil Is Thin, and Apex: Worlds of
Dinosaurs. She lives in Missoula, MT.
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