Let’s put it like this: Kalon. Open wound. Clostridium tetani. An Explosive combo that would often result in some hitherto seen exciting stories. This time it resulted in a very funny scene: Kalon. A hay bed. Three nurse cows dressed as cows, so nude. But with hats. With flowers in them, mind you. Different flowers. One of them an orchid. That’s class, people.
He lay there like he was made of pain, wire and a table without a leg. Opistothonos was harder to keep balanced with an arm out of service, and the cows lacked a pit stop for people and/or Valelikevalians.
“If he dies, I have phoenix Down’s ready,” claimed one of the cows, a longhorn that had lost her horns in a bet.
“That has a one in a million chance of reviving someone, Registered Sister Bronzebell,” Said the cow with the orchid, a Holstein that stared the grim reaper in the face with every breath. “Else it just sets everything on fire or prevents everything from being set on fire.”
“I know, Registered Hermana Bronceamorrón. But The Bodiceattva sees promise in him. He may be strong enough to return if tetanus takes his life.”
“Are you strong if you lose against dumb bacteria?”
The cows stared long at each other, ruminated a bit on the subject, and forgot it completely. Then one dropped a cow pie and stank up the tent where they were tending to the injured and ill Kalon, which caused all bovinnel to vaca-te the place.
A bull broke in. He was black and wore a badge that said BLACK, which wasn’t his name, but supposedly helped colorblind patients. “So let me get this straight, Kalon…”
The bull proceeded to stomp on the boy’s chest and tummy, breaking through the muscle tension and setting him a bit more like a proper line. “Mooch better.”
“G-Uh,” Kalon pontificated.
In a rocky cliff he landed after flying on wings made of vines. Plant vines, not the viral videos. This is a serious story, people, get it together. In the darkened night, inland, the thousand lights of a town danced and waited for some serial murderer to come and disturb the tranquil life of the inhabitants. The Labradorca took in the waft of a fish pie placed onto a particular windowsill that would be the first victim, three kilometers away from their opposition. She didn’t smell it — she couldn’t possibly. But her hunger for …well, food, was stronger than her lack of olfactory nerves, and so she echolocated the particular fragrance, making the God of Physics check on the noose he tended to daily, and that, someday soon, planned on using as the God of Nooses, Suicide and Public Romantic Declarations intended.
A lovely little town hanging from a thread of life next to the maw of the sea. Will you raise a Tsunami to swallow them?
“I will try conquest. Maybe it makes me feel something. I don’t yearn to… but it could be nice for a change of pace.”
Oh, you are bored. Wonderful.
“No. But the man I was would be. And you know what would animate him?”
Don’t say it, do not, Lino. Do not!
“A musical,” He announced with his beyond-good-and-evil monotone. “How’s the town called?”
Legrand: as you can see from the abandoned sections surrounding the heart of the settlement, it used to be … bigger.
Lino began walking downslope, inland, and at his applause a thousand creeping ferns manifested all around and behind him. A veritable post-extinction landscape had in a second formed from the mist of his soul, from his vital energy: The Sorus (the vital energy).
“It’s showtime,” He sentenced with the emotion of a rock on the bottom of a particularly very cold and frozen and ice-filled lake who likes being redundant and repeating itself.
Lino’s gaze drifted slightly to the right, half past twelve.
The ferns started whistling a happy tune as he walked downtown, where the abandoned, wooden skeletons of once homes had the peace to rot without giving it a second thought.
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Under a romantic embrace of crumbling posts he walked, found a dead, malnourished pig, and began singing:
“And I am watching a late sow grow flat all alone…”
Oh dear. No. I refuse. Lino, don’t.
“Lino do!” echoed the voice of the Nothoracopteris inside his mind.
Lino’s child erupted from his shoulder, began biting into his neck and eventually dug down his throat. He didn’t mind: he was used to it, and it barely tickled his tortured body.
“How I loathe to spend energy on a frond…”
He turned to this left, towards a wall-less room with a single windown, beyond which a pair of men that looked rather feminine and wore brown-leaves patterned shirts seemed to engage in… suction related acts.
“Autumn twinks!” he pointed at them, and the one whose dick was being sucked turned his head, his skin going pale at the sight of the man and his army of ferns.. “Blowing beyond that window as I stalk around the gloom. And it cannot make me depressed to see this room…”
“Oh no.” The hard-working twink said, abandoning his station as Lino’s plants advanced and tore through the ruined farmhouse where they hid. “A gay eldritch paleobotanist!”
Lino would have been impressed, had he been able to, but he didn’t comment on it.
The immortalized man took his hands to his chest, around the green veins that bulged out where his heart had to be. “There’s not a soul in here. No one will hear your prayers…”
Gods, I know I have not been a [system] of faith but…
Lino stepped up a platform made from a tangle of adventitious roots, trilete spores, and polycyclic-dyctiosteled stems. Because that last datum gives tons of information to the average reader, I am sure. “Gimme, gimme, gimme a town after Mirtha.”
Literally nobody in this universe knows Mirtha Legrand, fool!
The plants curled around the extremities of the fear-paralyzed men and began controlling them
“Won’t somebody help me cast these faggots away?”
“Hey, that’s a slur! aren’t you gay too?” The twink that did not need a mint candy complained.
Lino shrugged. “I underwent conversion therapy. Otherworldly, not Mormon, if you were wondering.” He harrumphed and kept on singing as he marched into the heart of the settlement, frightened people running, a single guard screeching in pleasure for being taken by a creeping hell of ferns was his fetish, “Gimme, gimme, gimme a town after Mirtha!”
Jagger entered the Barn where they had wheelbarrowed Kalon with quick step, and let the cloth covered, high domed item he carried rest over the hay scattered across the floor. The caretaking bull, Sweet Potato, muscled his way down to Jagger, the waft of protein escaping from his predatory body as if he wasn’t made of it. “What did you bring, Jagger? Will it help Kalon?”
“It’s a friend, He’s a visionary!” Jagger bit down on the cloth and pulled, revealing a neat parcel of air inside a cage.
“The cage is empty.”
“No, he’s a visionary, he told me so!” Jagger stared intently at a yellow bird only he could see.
“I am a side effect of your excessive consumption of tramadol, Jagger.” Didn’t say the Visionary.
“You are always so cryptic and wise.”
A grey bull came stomping and leaped over Jagger, landed in front of the puppy raising a curtain of dust and foul-smelling aerosols, and spoke. “Blubf, U bub ubbub!”
“Stop mewing while talking, bro.”
The grey bull relaxed his tongue and lost his prominent, manly chin in an instant. “Bloduf, I bubb bubuf!” It clarified.
“You said you brought someone?”
The grey one shook his head up and down with an energy often unseen in beef. “Biobabbu, bobib”
“Oh, a visionary too? Let him in alright.”
The colorful cane clanked against every item in the way of the shades-wearing old man. Including Jagger, that got poked and whacked relentlessly, as his torturer didn’t see him worthy of mercy. “Stop that, can’t you see it hurts me?”
“As a matter of fact, I cannot,” said the blind man, before tripping on a bucket of shit, hitting his head and embracing the colorless world of blind unconsciousness.
Jagger blinked twice, staring at the inexistent canary.
“Vision-nary,” explained the defeated but undefeated bird, who wasn’t paid enough for this.
“Ha! Brilliant!” Jagger said, and then noticed how the bulls stared at him with concerned eyes. “Be honest you trio of beefmounds: Am I hallucinating?”
The two bulls shook their heads in unison. The rainbow colored one dispersed into a fine, shit colored mist.
“I may need to cut down on the opioids.”
The ghost of pains past, a dachshund-sized pill of tramadol, manifested in front of Jagger. “No, you don’t. We make you invincible.”
“I thought it was my nature as a cultivator’s chosen weapon that granted me that status.”
“NO!” The voice of the pill reverberated fauxly through the barn. “It’s the drugs! It’s always the drugs! We are the one true path to power. Discipline and practice are nothing without painkillers.”
“You are so wise, master.” Jagger bowed, butt up, in front of the ethereal vision. The bulls proceeded to scratch each other’s head with their horns. Kalon continued suffering in his exhausted sleep whilst his caretakers forgot they were meant to care for him.
A gust of wind howled through the barn. The local veterinary, a man in his thirty-nines tired of dealing with the sick members of the sect, rushed in holding a syringe filled with pink juice, and, catching the mass of air by the tail, he caressed her trembling form. “Shhhh, it’s all over, that bad pollen-based rabies won’t hurt you no more, shhhh…” he said as he put the wind down with a gracile injection, causing a small amount of damage to the sanity of everyone present in both body and mind: This is, excluding Kalon, who remained lost in cheap, imported fever dreams.