Creed

"Amy was screaming again. She climbed the decibel mountain with all the enthusiasm that pain could muster."

They were more than clay and river. Chaos raced in their bones and was subdued. They were the self- appointed in a stormy age of pain and fear.

Creation had rebelled. Adults sank into victims or sinners. Children bled children. Minds spat disease into begging minds. Violence begot unreasoning. The earth hurt and the sky cried pestilence.

A secret history. A shame made forgotten. Healing desires lies and sacrifice. And that’s how it was. A world that forgot itself.

But they were believers, of weakened earth and hopeful magic, and they anchored their sanity into the pain of remembrance so that the world would be guided to a safer place; a protection from future humanity.

They named themselves after belief and the laws that would birth that. They were the Creeders, intended protectors of the next day, but they failed to understand that chaos upholds no law, and gains no quenching from the redemption of reason.

The killings breathed again. Now it was the Creeders who were dying.

* * * * * *

Amy was screaming again.

She climbed the decibel mountain with all the enthusiasm that pain could muster. Not to be outdone, the slap of the pigskin belt competed but was occasionally interrupted by glass ending its shelf life on a concrete floor.

Her cries sprang desperate from the second floor of the weather-eaten apartment block and joined the throb of corroded life that jostled for existence on the darker street below. Strides never faltered. Nor did heads turn in care or question. There’s no distraction in normality. Each mind smoked its own burden.

Dusk beheld a wicked sun, oily clouds eye-lashing a bloody orb so that the light that filtered through was family to the black sea that crawled to the deformed city of Salvation. Between the broken buildings, humans like rats caricatured life with survival as a degraded synonym for purpose.

Amy found Creed, as she knew that she would, on the crumbling steps of City Hall, listening to the gravel baritone and finger play of old Stuyve.

Stuyve sat on a plastic crate, feet flat on the concrete so that his knees were slightly higher than his waist, his body a cradle for the guitar. At least twenty people had gathered but Amy knew that that figure would double within the hour. It was the same each evening. Stuyve would appear to tell a story or play music, sometimes both. And the people would be drawn, refugees from their daily battle. Barrels would be stuffed with garbage and lit to ward off the winter chill.

For many, this was their only escape...

Note: Another of my childhood imaginations, the beginning of a book that only began,and then most of what was got lost with the changes that accompany an interesting life. I forgot that self, creating new versions of me... but it’s interesting looking back at this snippet.