Smoke rises from the horizon, hundreds of thin black tendrils in every direction cut the golden skin sky to pieces on the morning of my wedding. Shelling in the distance pounds out a four on the floor beat to dance along with, but the front is malleable, a bendy snake of exploding rain dancing across the trashlands, the 210mm mortar fire that showered us yesterday and the day before and all the days before back to how you can’t remember when something started moved south overnight. We dug our way from under the compacted strata of reinforced tunnels we’d burrowed beneath the trench mazes because of the neverending shell fall. We dug our way out of the trash planet we live on up into the shit air. This floating orb of plastic and industrial waste in the null yawning void, nothing floating in nothing.
Why would you fight over this?
Ask a question about it and you’ll get smacked, or worse, shot, or even worse, sent over the trench side, over the wire with the next wave of mutant child soldiers.
It’s not a war, it’s a life. Go down far enough in the tunnels we emerged from this morning, to where they’re old and older, all the way maybe from generation 1 even, and you’ll see the cave painting graffiti. The guns on every side have never laid silent. The shells never raining. Goat, he told once them paintings was so old they was made with real oil paint, is the only reason still they were extant. Lean close to smell the paintings though, and they smell like birdshit and tar. Go down and look at the things regular scheduled and you see, like, they look newer every few weeks. And it makes me think maybe everything is a lie.
I can’t stop the lie, and the lie is big as the firma we tread and die upon, but still, lies are wrong.
Ask how old I am.
Nine. Yeah, nine, and getting wedded in the classical Roman Catholic tradition, Goat says. Now Goat, you gotta get, is older than all of us by at least four years. Goat may make it all the way to twenty, is his goal, before he gets fragged by a mortar shell or sent over the wire for asking some commandant, capitan, or officer the wrong question, only he wouldn’t know it was the wrong question.
Goat, because his head is a Goat’s been grafted onto the body of an Armatics model 3030 combat efficient life support body frame for quadruped to biped transplantations. So for Goat to be older than me, an actual person, born from a sack womb after being egg set in a plate and implanted by white coats, that’s a big ass deal. He’s livestock. There’s ten thousand thousand just same as him with their animal consciousness and their square eyes and this rope dope drool falls from the corner of his mouth when he spaces out and needs a slap. The ratio of livestock to sack womb humans is 1000:1. Animal Husbandry, recycled robotics, and cloning is more expensive than egg gathering and implantation I guess. Even if they tend to glitch, repeat themselves, suffer from absence seizures. One time a Lieutenant was pissing on the trench wall next to me and said all the drawbacks set forth previously were more than worth their inattentive lack of curiosity and proclivity towards doing as they’re told.
Maybe Goat ain’t gone over no wire because he’s dumb as shit. Bein’ dumb as shit is some sort of magic power here. Dumber you are, less likely you are to ask something worth a quick call for a run out the trench, over that wire. Heard someone with stars on their epaulets visiting the front once say they’d call it no man’s land, but more appropriate to the forever situation it was more now no one’s land.
Now here we are in back of a 6 wheel halftrack bumping over from the very front to the less very front. Back here they have to launch suicide drones or waste precious long range rockets if they want to do any damage. And the ‘lectric components for them drones and m’other rockets they say is running out since that sleek silver ship blew up orbital from some errant projectile some months back, because neither side would dare on purpose blow up the analog for god on this trash planet, and lit the sky bright phosphorus from midnight straight to daylight and fireworks, burnt blue, green, yellow, red, all slow riding down from a highlow orbit. No smoke in the vacuum though, so now that ship’s corpse pieces is in an orbit that someone told me is decaying and started a monologue explaining the ramifications of when and where pieces of it would land while I zoned out because like everything isn’t decaying around here?
Who the fuck funds all this shit anyway? I just know the ship, bright glance of it I got in the brief daylight flicker when it took a hit on the opposite side, before it started to firework shred into the vacuum of beyond GOD, did not look like it was first, second, third, thirteenth generation tech. It was expensive, nothing shaped with curves and shine isn’t expensive around here. Ship may have been chromed out. Thing looked sexy, all curves and bulges. My night dreams of girls and their soft, exploding in that flicker.
They come at night. They drop payload. They burn out of orbit headed for heaven or hell or wherever else. You wake up with new toys to break from crates and pray to Mother Mary, God and the Pope you will murder opps with.
Goat says God’s just got us all on this ball of refuse playing RISK with us. Asked him after what the fuck RISK was. Goat said never fuckin’ mind.
The halftrack is uncomfortable. A commissar in all blacks with a rose gold chain around his neck with our lord Jesus holding a Rocket Propelled Grenade Launcher covered in diamonds and standing six inches tall, so it looks to be standing godlike on his crotch guarding his trousered cock accompanies me and Goat, my best man, apparently. One of the commisars, or a sergeant, or an officer of some sort of commission having come up the other day while slop was being eaten and asked with static voice behind his mask who my best man was.
Didn’t mean to say goat, said Goat because it was me starting a question, but the man in black said “Noted” heel turned and walked off. So goat sits drooling in the between space where he goes off to sometimes and you gotta knock him out of it, and we bump along in enough silence it makes me nervous.
The commissar doesn’t look at me for three hrs, 60 kliks, and at the end we come to a jerking stop, he looks over at me and says from behind bulging bug eye goggles set deep in his mask, so one doesn’t breathe no trash air or whatever, “congratulations on your wedding day son.” Slaps goat and steps his way out the back of the halftrack through the canvas exit. Goat bleats, livestock noise, ancestral, eyes rolling in circles, and coughs. Goat says we’re here a second later, but it’s a question.
I don’t fuckin’ know. This is my first rodeo.
Goat has on a blue sort of formal wear I’ve never seen before, light baby blue pants and jacket, a coat much same, and his body armor, a darker shade of blue, has a gold cross on it.
It only ever dawns on me that my life might be strange when I take two seconds to look at any of the things around me and realize that somehow, all of this has to be fuckin’ insane. Some sort of terminal velocity of wrong my cognition wasn’t grown to handle.
I ask Goat what we do now and he says we wait. Says he’s been best man at three weddings, and it’s such an exciting thing. That voice is fucking annoying. Flat, droning, robotic, sounds like it should be giving directions to your destination. But got used to his talk months ago.
Memory is a curse because yes, for some reason I can remember my birth, my very short education, my fittings for the new but now tatters of uniform I still wear every day but tody, and when they put a rifle in my hand and said congratulations you get to fight for your company, then shunted me up a fancy tube in a red and blue capsule looked like a pill and had instructions written on the inside door for me to read during my ride.
“When the capsule opens, do not be alarmed. You will be recovered shortly.”
“If your capsule crashes and you are lost, know that you were not the first of you or the last of you. You are eternal, and you will fight again.”
There was more but it was all the same sort of riddle gibberish. Impossible to understand with no context and no context given so understood not by one nine year old with a vocabulary and syntax as broad but confused as mine.
My capsule landed skin touch soft and when the red top hissed and popped off like a cork the first thing I saw was Goat in front of me. Aimed my rifle at him and he yelled that he was on my fuckin’ side of this thing. Three rounds went wide, my ears rang, he gave me a hug, cried, and said welcome to life my friend.
In that creepy fucking voice.
The wait in the back of the half track to get married never ends until it does.
When the never ending wait collapses it’s another commissioned officer type, burly, adult, many years my senior, stepping through the canvas flaps at the back of the halftrack wearing an ornate mask carved from metals you’d never find but in circuit boards crushed between strata of compacted trash on firma, something better than gold somehow, and the face of the mask is beautiful. Robes crisp white. Red and gold fabric hangs down around his shoulders embroidered with gold guns and crosses, bullets and angels holding ancient grenade launchers with wheels that held their 40mm rounds instead of magazines.
So I’m Roman Catholic, I think, but I don’t know anything about being Roman Catholic. My education having been brief and mostly geared towards the concept versus the reality of static trench warfare and weapons of war from generation one to shoved into my head as new and present. Like, so everything about life until now, the best thing to do is always just mimic, mime, follow, and ask as few questions as possible.
“I’m the Priest,” says the fancy officer. “You’re so lucky to be getting married today,” and I’m only nine? “I will officiate the wedding.” He’s still a commissioned officer so don’t dare fuck this up. “And I know you’re ignorant, so sadly ignorant in so many ways of the lord, but that means so very little in his eyes, tantamount to nothing” Says the last part and tilts his head up to the canvas roof of the covered halftrack. I look up too like, because is there a stain or an incoming shell, and if so, why is there no whistle?
He looks back at me, and me at him. “How blessed we are to have someone who knows when to look up getting married today.” No idea what he means. “Your commanding officer was right, you deserved the privilege and honor of the sanctity of holy communion and marriage.” What the ever that means. I know all of these words, not that stupid yeah, but in the configuration coming from his mouth it’s something never to be understood it feels. People say things over and over again because they get used to saying them and then there’s no meaning left in what they say and it’s just like this is.
I don’t talk much ‘cept to Goat, because Goat isn’t the smartest and will never tell anyone you asked a question, and won’t tell anyone your question was dumb, and will give you an answer even if it’s one made up on the spot, or completely tellable is shit as turd on your shoe after you walk away from the toilet pits. Smell it for a day and a half, but it’s an answer.
Answers are a currency all their own and in such short supply, so almost any answer will do.
“You will follow me into the Parish Church,” says Mr. Fancy Whites. He follows up saying this by like if you can call it having some sort of shaking absence seizure going on for long enough to take six deep shaky breaths before getting up and going out the back of the halftrack. “Christ,” he says as he steps to the ground “was upon me”
Goat follows and I follow Goat.
A six wheel covered Halftrack got no windows, yeah? So step through the flaps at the back and find yourself on ground paved brown and even, see green shit all over, trees outside, trees that didn’t grow out of trash and get blown up thirty thousand times over and another universe inside my tiny deranged world has opened. The priest in his white jackboots is already halfway in the actual real painted brick ass building with six hundred steeples and towers, a dome, everything gold and more gold, to blind me I guess. Expected wherever we were going to be bigger. It’s just the most fancy shack on the planet with some real Bradford Pear trees standing outside and a circle drive on a mowed lawn, probably parking in back where I can’t see, a postage stamp surrounded by one and a half lane wide roads bordered with walls of yellowed dry and dying corn stalks on all sides.
Goat is prancing and laughing his way in and I follow all regular stepping it.
The doors to the chapel, I think it’s what this is, even if he called it a church, whatever, are red. I pass through them and the paint smells fresh.
Inside the main space of it is large enough to stuff one large Mark 4 battle tank and a piss jug comfortably, which is to say thorough in its mediocrity of size. There’s a little half moon stage, some more black robed holy soldiers with more fancy masks stationed at doors, windows, against walls, and an aisle with two rows and three by three equals nine chairs on each side. In front of me is a little catgirl with no eyes holding a pair of rings on a velvet purple pillow, and in front of her dancing down the six step short aisle to the half circle stage stuffed with clergy soldiers or whatever, already, is a dancing naked kid throwing flowers everywhere from a basket. There’s others like him doing the same about the suffocating space, thin as a month without rations. Cherubs, one thing I know from bits of religious iconography I have managed to see, should be chubby, their smiles less like a gun you can’t see is pointed at the back of their heads.
Look up and the ceiling is painted or printed or has some I’m supposed to know famous chapel ceiling on it where God with his enormous erect cock out, or something like him is reaching out to touch Man with his smaller but more purple, maybe angry lookin’ cock out, or something like him, and hand him a grenade, surrounded by proper fed cherubs with their thick erect cocks out, men of antiquity half clothed, saints and apostles all up on the ceiling with their cocks out, and every sort of missile throwing mechanical projectile shooter from antiquity. I recognize like, five of them.
Organ music starts as soon as I look back to the scene I’m living inside of and the little cat girl with no eyes tugs at me to follow her.
“Ladies and gentlemen” the fancy white priest from the halftrack says, voice cracking the ceiling and sky in half above, all thunder and love, “we are gathered here today for a wedding between 3838383BC2094J and his soon to be wife, Dulcinea.” On one side of the aisle in the nine chairs is some family dressed up in bright colored clothes that I’ve only seen in implanted memories from digital textbooks shoved into my brain permanently before I was shunted to the surface, and on the other side are two science officers in lab coats of vague reptile recognition one with crossed arms, one with one leg crossed over the other, both in those blank sheer masks with the emojis projected on them. Both their projected emoji stand in faces are huge yellow pixelated smiles, but walking past them to the stage, well I’ve been around long enough it’s easy to read boredom in body language learned in the trenches.
Goat is already on stage and drooling. Across from him is a thin woman in an ugly dress made of sewn together blue bags that look made of plastic and fiber weave who doesn’t have a single curve, certainly none from my dreams that leave me dripping morning gross.
I follow, slow, tepid, what the fuck is happening, behind the eyeless catgirl carrying the pillow with the rings.
“Dulcinea” the priest bellows too loud for the small chapel, and in walks a beautiful woman in a white wedding dress that I recognize as being of the sort of provenance that it was made to be sculpted to her by some sort of artisan whose only job in life is to make those sorts of dresses and I didn’t know that was even a thing on trasha firma. I didn’t even know that women who has beautiful curves like the sort they put in my mind at night so I wake up limp dicked with cum soaked into my official A6998 night sock and don’t get an erection all day lest I forget that war over trash is what I was born to do. Her face says she’s a royal. I’ve never even seen my face in a puddle and they have no mirrors on the front so you know, I like, doubt a hyper verbal vat grown nine year old is what she’s looking for in a virile man of the house husband.
Dulcinea has on a lace veil, but it doesn’t cover up the fact that she’s some sort of sexy demon or maybe worse somehow. So the eyeless catgirl takes the stage and waves for me to stand on the other side of her, across from this Dulcinea thing, hiding my stiffy as well as can be had.
“And now for the ceremony” the whole time there was some weird fucking organ music playing and it stops, air gasp jerking, wheezes into silence.
“As it is his duty to become your husband as a soldier I shall not ask 383838BC2094J whether or not he assents to the marriage.” Says the fancy white priest. And I’m a prop. “But Dulcinea, do you find him to be acceptable?”
She looks me over from head to toe and back. She raises one hand and twirls a finger around like, spin around for me bitch, so I do, and looks me over one more time, up and down.
Nothing, mind you, has ever been right.
She nods. Smells too self satisfied from my side of the stage.
“Lovely,” the priest says and the other clergy, towering gods in black and gold and all this finery come to me and handle me manly, stripping me fucking naked for the first time since I was thrown capsule ways and topside. I’m dirty. I’m nine. I’m I don’t know what. I’m a soldier in a world made from the trash discarded by other worlds. But I’m grabbed arms and legs, iron hands under black gloves, and the priest is speaking Latin.
“Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius”
And I don’t know this is what some crazy priest said ten million years ago during a Crusade to justify killing everyone whether they were Catholics or not because some Christians looked like the opps or whatever.
Dulcinea, he says that magic phrase I don’t know is some incantation, and she pulls the veil from over her face, back, and lower case god she is so pretty. She smiles. And tells me she loves me. I know from my time on this trash rock, in the trenches, all the shit I’ve been fed in my ears from the mouths of men and boys, fuck. She means it.
“Ut comedas carnes viri tui” the priest bellows louder than the organ noise or the shells pounding the ground during a mortar rain ringing my ears until time freezes in one ice block second. And I don’t know he just said, you may eat the flesh of your husband.
She’s beautiful, taking small practiced steps to me, one foot slanted this way, the next step the foot slanted otherwise, a ritual, a court dance, performance art, something above my pay grade. She’s almost twice my size. She’s two heads taller than me, not fed on rations and recycled piss water, or so goes rumor, gleaming skin smooth and pore free. Dulcinea wiggles her jaw and there’s a crack. I know the sound of a bone cracking. Not breaking though, you know, just cracking.
“longissimus dies cito conditur” The priest again.
You come slopping out of a bag, grow up, don’t ask questions, don’t die at the front, and you’re me, naked, dirty, and unable to have a fast heartbeat or grow any fear that you just turned into your new wife’s dinner, but your dick can get hard with these beautiful breasts in a low cut wedding gown sewn to her skin tight swaying up to you.
Problem being, with Goat drooling on the sidelines, Dulcinea’s mouth opens, and she has canine teeth that you’d textbook read are fangs, the rest of her teeth sharp as a shark’s mouth, looking like they grow forever forward, falling out as they go too, all hid behind thick adult wet dream lips.
Comes up.
Standing right in front of me, leans down, over me. Not like there’s movement to be made with all the hands gripping me in place now anyway, no use, but tears, tears still happen down my face even if I can’t be scared, the emotion is not one my brain can produce in any meaningful way. She slips one shoulder with a shiver shimmy and out of the dress falls her perfect breast, and even if it wasn’t there’s no way for me to know. And puts her nipple to my mouth. I suck it, never having been breast fed mother real, suck it long as she lets me, silent, priest saying Latin shit in the jet engine ringing through my ears into my head. My tears run onto her breast, and she pulls it away.
Time happens again.
Just another kind of mortar rain. Just different shells falling and the frontline is my entire body.
Lupus non mordet lupum
Now I get it, they were tears of joy. Irony, you bitch.
That mouth full of fangs and shark’s tooth buzzsaws, she bites into my neck with it and blood goes spraying arterial everywhere. Don’t feel a thing. She doesn’t stop, she bites again, chews, flesh of my flesh, chews and bites me. Hands let me go and she mounts me, pushing me to the ground, digging her fangs and teeth and her too big to be people like me mouth into my neck and chest.
Blood splatters in my eye, the only pain is the irritation from that one thing, a bit of my own personal vital fluid outsides on my ocular orb. My ribs crack under her jaw.
Goat is laughing and clapping, rousted from his drooling vacation. He’s been to three of these? Did they all end like this?
I should have asked enough questions to go over the wire and get turned into less than memory by a mortar shell big as me or any of the hundred other kids who’d go over the wire with me. Fighting over a line God drew in the sand for both sides, for his own amusement maybe, and we don’t even know what god is.
The bells ring. Some fancy song by some dead composer a million years unknown to me plays, but somehow I know it has to do with weddings. And I start to forget things because she’s cracked my skull open wide, a pressure past the skull is all, with her teeth hitting my grey matter, and she’s eating-I’m singin’ in the rain, just singin’ in the rain
What a glorious feelin’, I’m happy again
I’m laughin’ at clouds so dark up above
The sun’s in my heart and I’m ready for love
Let the stormy clouds chase everyone from the place
Come on with the rain, I’ve a smile on my face
I walk down the lane with a happy refrain
Just singin’, singin’ in the rain
Dancing in the rain
I’m happy again
I’m singin’ and dancin’ in the rain
I’m dancin’ and singin’ in the rainnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn
I always loved this horrific piece.
How old are you really though?”