Day 212 - Divided Story

Divided Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

They were seditious times. Powers came and went. Leaders came and went. The changes were rapid and often times bloody. The names were always changing. The lines on the maps were always changing. It was chaos where there had once been strength.

There had once been an empire. There had once been a great and powerful nation. Its neighbors trembled at its might. There had been wars, but the great and the powerful had persevered. For ages, the nation had endured. But leaders fell and enemies grew. Great nations came and went. That was the story of history. That was the tale of time. War is a fickle mistress and outcomes can be decided by simple things like miscommunications, natural disasters and the luck of the draw.

Where there had once been a great nation empire, there were now broken lands and a mixture of confederations, assorted allegiances and feuding city-states. They existed at the grace and goodwill of their neighboring nations. Whereas once the great nation had ruled and oppressed them, it was now their turn to act as protectorates over all the lands. There were treaties and agreements after the last of the great wars. No nation was to interfere, no nation was to invade, no nation was to try and gain influence over the remnants of the great nation. In reality none of the remaining city-states could truly defend themselves if some outside force had decided to enforce their will. But everyone agreed to allow the continued existence of the states. There were still spheres of influence and abuses and unfair trade, but all in all, the nations let these broken and weakened states remain.

Malahak had a dream. His ancestors had once carved out a great nation, and he intended to do so again. During the 4^th Great War an army comprised of soldiers had marched through the great nation, dividing it in half as they made their way to the sea. Malahak planned to make the same march, but in the opposite direction. He would reunite the nation by reversing the damage. He would turn back history. He would be known forevermore as the great uniter.

The neighboring nations had made sure the city-states had no effective military. They made sure that the great nation could never rise again to oppress them. Malahak worked in secret. He made allegiances in private meetings. His army was built clandestinely. His men were hand-picked for their loyalty. He knew he was risking his life and the lives of his men by attempting what he attempted. For years there were the plans and preparations and the slow build up, getting ready for impending war. Malahak understood every city-state and confederation would have to fall in line. There could be no great nation without all of its parts.

The march was to begin. Riders rode to announce the procession. With every passing mile their forces would grow. The people remembered. They knew their nation whether or not the nation still existed. Loyalty. Nationalism. The people were ready for a leader. They were ready for a great nation to rise again. Malahak would march from the ocean to the lands of his ancestors. He would reclaim their home and establish it as the new capital of a new great nation. He would move quickly and it would all be over before the surrounding neighboring nations knew what was happening. The plan required everything to be in place before there could be any true retaliation. Once the army was built and the people had rallied, their population and strength would outnumber and overwhelm all of their former enemies and current oppressors.

The outbreak of the plague changed everything. The densely packed city-states were ravaged. The overpopulated and unsanitary military camps were devastated. The plague spread quickly. Thirty-thousand soldiers died. A revolution was ended before it could begin. The only positive came when the surrounding nations, for fear of contracting the plague, did not invade the city-states to punish them for their attempted reunification – their soldiers were unwilling to risk contact and contamination with the diseased enemy.

Malahak for his part was infected and nearly died. He was bedridden for over a year and never regained the strength or drive to try to rebuild his forces and try again. His influence was ruined. His power destroyed. His dream was dead. The former great nation lay in wait, divided, asleep, still waiting to be brought back and have life breathed into its lungs. But the people remembered. Deep down, they remembered. They had to hide it and to wait, but they remembered, and someday, history would tremble again at the might of the great nation.

Day 211 - Dance Story

Dance Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

They danced the ‘Dance of Death.’ It was a battle. It was a religion. It was an art form. They spun and twirled and threw themselves back and forth in the crowd. The music was loud. The celebration had been raging for three days straight. Their bodies were moist, the muscles were sore. The drinking had been plentiful and the drugs had been an experience. The dances had begun and the bodies went in motion.

Life on the island stopped. The celebration was all that mattered. For seven days and seven nights, the celebration never stopped. The celebration honored the ancestors. The people remembered where they came from and who had come before. The spirits of the dead supposedly returned to walk amongst the people, to celebrate with them, to dance in revelry. Everyone wore a mask so the dead could hide in plain sight, unexposed. The faceless spirits could watch. The soulless spirits could possess the bodies of the living and rave for one fanciful moment. The dance was for the living and the dance was for the dead. The dance allowed all to become lost and trade places, unaware, unannounced. They intermingled in a grotesque orgy of despair and loss.

The jungle was dark and the music was loud. Island inhabitants were wise and stayed in the fire-lit village. Visitors sometimes wandered off, inebriated, into the jungle. Many of them were never heard from again. Or so the legends went. The fire and the music were supposed to keep the evil forces away. The dancing was supposed to keep evil spirits occupied.

There was an art to the ‘Dance of Death,’ even if the casual observer couldn’t tell. It looked like a flow of constant motion. Men with knives attached to their wrists and feet. Women with blades positioned between their fingers and toes. In some way the dance looked like simulated combat. The men and women swung and charged each other. They took turns attacking and defending. One wrong move and a dancer could end up dead.

There was a passion and a love to the dance. The dance reminded the people of their own mortality, but in that reminder, they were to realize that life must be lived and love fulfilled. The dancers attacked and killed and many of the actors felt as if their lives really had ceased. The remaining dancers embraced and celebrated their life through lust.

The nights were full of perpetual food and drink and intercourse. All vices and satisfactions were on public display. There was no shame. Only the fight against death.

The dead were honored and the dead were given a chance to return and experience joy once more. For seven days they had life again. For seven days they had their indulgences and their pleasures and bodies to use as they saw fit. For seven days.

On the seventh night, the drinking stopped at sunset as the moods began to change. The seventh night was for mourning and sorrow and for the lamenting of regrets. The living showed grief while the dead felt the failures and suffered the pain of death once again. The dancing slowed and lost its frantic desperate energy. The dancing became slow and moody and remorseful and a reminder of that which is painful in life. And then as the sun rose on the eighth day, any remaining alcohol was poured out, food was thrown away, the dancing stopped and the people fasted and repented, and the dead were returned to where they belonged, their graves.

Day 210 - Scuba Story

Scuba Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

Derek gave underwater tours of lost cities. His favorite one was the former subway tunnels tour. There was something fascinating about swimming through the tunnels of what had once been one of the greatest mass transit systems the world had ever known. He liked the grid system. It was orderly. It made sense. He liked to highlight the history and really tried to explain just what an amazing thing it really had been. It was important. He wanted people to understand that it had been important. There had been underground travel of some sort for nearly one hundred fifty years. There had been experimentations in technologies and magnets and even anti-gravity propulsion. The tunnels had seen horses and coal and electricity and pneumatic propulsion. Billions of people had traveled the tunnels over the years. It had been the most important travel link in one of the most important cities in history.

And now it was all underwater.

Derek marveled at its greatness. He marveled at its loss. Something so important, and now it was gone. People didn’t understand that. He wanted them to understand. When he was a young boy he had ridden the trains before they had been lost to the water. He still remembered that ride. Not a lot of the people he gave tours were even alive before the floods. None of them knew what he knew. He had ridden the subway and had fallen in love with the system. It went under the city, under the ocean. It was a symbol of all human achievement. It was what was great about man. Man dug holes under their cities and turned the dirt into something marvelous. Derek knew he could never do something so marvelous, but he knew he could honor it. It might be dead and gone, but its memory could be honored. That’s what he tried to do anyway. He gave tours and tried to show people what man could do.

The hurricanes came and the water had risen and the city had flooded. The tunnels were below sea level. They never stood a chance. Even if the pumps had kept working, there was no way to save them. Even if the city was recovered, the cost of recovery and time it would take was extremely prohibitive. Still, people found a way to make money, even off a bad situation. Derek loved the water. He loved the tunnels. Giving scuba tours seemed like a natural and obvious choice. Plenty of tourists wanted a chance to see a city under the ocean. There was something horrific and romantic about it. It was loss and it was frozen in one spectacular moment. It was a perfect tourist location.

Derek was saving up his money to buy a submarine. He was not a rich man, but he wanted to own a submarine. He thought it would help with the travel and the tours and would give him another moneymaking option. He also had friends who had friends that had heard rumors that certain investment groups were interested in building new underground cities for people to live in. They might be pods or biospheres and there was even a plan for an inverted skyscraper. That was Derek’s favorite idea – a reverse skyscraper in a city where the old ones still stuck defiantly out of the water. Derek had a hope that someone soon might see fit to recover some of the tunnels. If there were going to be new underwater buildings, there might be the need for new underwater travel. If so, then Derek wanted to be ready. He wanted to be first in line with his submarines. Perhaps the submarine would be the new taxi. If so, then he was ready to be rich. Derek knew it was a pipe dream. He knew it was a long shot. But he had his dream. For now, he gave scuba tours. But tomorrow? Tomorrow the whole world could be open again and he would have so much more.

Day 209 - Seven Story

Seven Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

They called it ‘Living the Seven.’ It was a club with a highly exclusive membership. They made a commitment. They took an oath. They took the Seven Deadly Sins to heart and agreed to live by them through and through. They each belonged to a particular sect and embraced one more than the other six, but still they agreed to abide by them all.

Originally it was an experiment among friends, just to see if it could be done. There was some debate as to which seven sins to use. There were several variations throughout history and the words and the meanings changed a little bit each time. The ancient Greeks had eight. For a brief moment they considered making it more of a pagan experiment and embracing an entirely different set of stands, but finally decided it would probably be best to use the modern Christian definitions.

A study showed that the most commonly admitted sins were pride and lust. Whether or not that was really the case was up for debate, but they were what people would admit to. It was agreed to therefore spend more time focused on the other five, just to make sure those got their just due.

‘Living the Seven’ proved to be a more difficult task that expected. On the surface it seemed like a simple idea. All one had to do was embrace their darker evil thoughts and more base desires. Or at least that was what they thought would happen. They thought it would be liberating. They thought they would be free. Free to do anything and try anything they wanted. It seemed as if it would be one grand experiment of excess and indulgence.

There were difficulties deciding just what ‘Living the Seven’ really meant. Did someone have to be angry all the time? Lustful all day long? How would it even be possible to perform some of the sins on a continual basis? It seemed physically impossible to do. It was agreed upon that they would simply indulge their desires when any situation presented itself where their instincts told them not to. In that way it became a challenge to defeat oneself. Their head would tell them one thing, reason would tell them one thing, and they would have to ignore it. They would have to force themselves into doing the opposite. That is quite the challenge and not all that easy a task to perform. ‘Living the Seven’ basically created a state of constant conflict within. Living in a state of constant struggle didn’t create the sense of freedom or hedonistic pleasures that had been expected or desired. It created a lot of anxiety and ulcers and psychiatric bills.

‘Living the Seven’ became a trap. It was addictive at first because everything was a rush and full of excitement. It became a mess later once the energy wore off and they were left with a cold and empty reality. They lost their ability to relate to each other. They lost their ability to relate to strangers. They lost their ability to relate to themselves. But once they had ruined themselves and their lives, they seemed to have lost the ability to go back. There was so much psychological dehumanizing damage done, it was hard to find their way back. So most of them remained on the other side. Most of them became this new and strange thing, full of hate and envy and spite. They hated and loved and loved and hated. There was a great deal of disgust for themselves and for other people. Instead of being able to have unlimited freedom to do anything, they had found themselves without the ability to do anything at all. Their worlds got smaller and smaller as they lost all interest in their own lives or improving themselves. There was no hope and without hope there was nothing done or created or tried. They were lazy and horrible people.

‘Living the Seven’ was the worst choice they could make and it wasn’t really living. It was more like a slow painful dying. But calling it dying just didn’t sound like very much fun at all. Nobody really wants to think about slow painful dying or terrible addictions to the world’s worst behaviors. There was no point in reminding them what they had chosen to do. They found no point at all. They had nothing except their own emptiness.

But it was sort of what they wanted. It was sort of what they had been after. Deep down they should have known just how much they hated life and been honest about it. They knew what path they were embracing. They knew the depths that path could lead to. They shouldn’t have been surprised. And yet, people always are. They never see, until it is too late, and sometimes not even then.

Day 208 - Ladders Story

Ladders Story

Matthew Ryan Fischer

The mystery ladders were a bit like crop circles inasmuch that they were strange and out of place and there were a million different stories as to who made them, how they did it and why they were there. The ladders were one part prank and one part performance art. They were set up and put in place and there was no obvious reason for why. There was a graffiti element as the ladders were placed illegally on public and private property and usually at all hours of the night when no one else what around.

It was one of those things that inexplicably happened and should have had an easy explanation, except no one knew what it was. People had theories. People had rumors. People always seemed to know someone that knew something, and yet no one really knew anything.

What was happening was ladders were just showing up – in the middle of parking lots, at construction sites, in the middle of the road, out in open parks and fields. There were ladders. A lot of ladders. Wood, metal, fiberglass, plastic. Various heights. Various styles and builds. Ladders, ladders, ladders, and more ladders. And as far as anyone could tell, they weren’t set up to go anywhere or reach anything in particular. A person could climb up them and take a look around and enjoy the view, but they weren’t getting anywhere.

No one was seen setting the ladders up. Not even security cameras. One day everything was normal, the next day, suddenly there was an abandoned ladder set up. It could have been a joke or a prank. It was an oddity that local news stations liked to talk about and it would have stayed that way, except that there were too many ladders in too many different locations. Of course these could have been copycats out there or perhaps some sort of conspiracy or joint effort. But no record was found. No logical pattern. There were no legitimate trails to be tracked. There were chat rooms and blogs dedicated to the subject, but no one had any credible evidence or leads as to who or why or what was really going on.

And so people talked and people theorized. Conspiracists picked up on it and the story grew and spread. Talk show hosts made jokes. People wrote books. And then the copycats really did start. The teenagers pulling pranks. The bored. The strange. Extra ladders started appearing more and more often. Some cynically supposed that someone in the ladder building business had concocted the whole thing as a way to sell more ladders. It was true that ladder sales were up, but that was about as far as that idea got.

Niall watched as the strange man with the jet black hair set up a ladder in the middle of a fenced off construction site. There were no obvious breaks in the fence. Niall wondered how the man got the ladder into the site. Certainly he wasn’t strong enough to have done it on his own. But the answer wasn’t obvious.

Niall hopped the fence and approached the man.

“I was wondering when you’d arrive.”

“You were expecting me?”

“Someone. Not you. I don’t know. Maybe you. I figured someone would see me eventually.”

“So the ladders are you?”

“Some. This one.”

“You want to elaborate further?”

“What if I did? What would you do with the information? Post it on the internet? Have me arrested for trespassing?”

“I don’t know. I think I’d just like to know. But if you’re going to be a dick about it, I don’t have to stick around. I don’t care that much.”

“I like the idea of giving people hope.”

“Hope? The ladder equals hope?”

“I think so. What is hope? Something you strive for. Something you seek. Something you dream about. The ladder makes people think. It makes them wonder. What does a ladder do? It lifts people up off the ground, raises them up. It gives them a chance to do something, fulfill their work, reach something higher. I put this out here, I’m reminding people of that ideal. Reminding them that it’s possible. I’ve giving them a chance to reach for their hopes, their dreams. Whether they do it or not is up to them, but I’m giving them the symbol. They see the ladder, they know they can reach for something higher.”

“You think a lot about ladders. Way too much about ladders.”

“Nobody asked you to come over here. I’m just telling you what I’m doing.”

“God, you must be bored.”

“I have seven more to set up tonight. You gonna mock me all night? How about you put up or shut up? You want to help me out?”

Niall did. And that was how he got started buying ladders and leaving them in random locations. He liked the rush of breaking in somewhere he wasn’t supposed to be. He liked the idea of leaving something behind for people to wonder about. He found he liked the afterglow. He liked the idea that he was influencing strangers’ lives somehow. It made him feel special, significant. It was a very addictive hobby. Addictive and expensive.