Lovecraft eZine Contributor
Number Two (not identified as yet): In the Village.
Six: What do you want?
Two: Information.
Two: That would be telling. We want information…information… information!!!
Six: You won’t get it!
Two: By hook or by crook, we will.
Six: Who are you?
Six: Who is Number One?
Two: You are Number Six.
Six (running on the Village’s beach): I am not a number; I am a free man!!!
Two: [Laughter]” (1).
What is the measure of genius?
One lies in the enduring nature of their great works. The mediums vary, to the artist, it might be a canvas, to the composer, a sheet of music, to Einstein, a chalkboard. The memorable, the iconic, the piece that lives on in people’s conversations and cultural references; literarily, the great works of genius take on lives of their own.
Sun Jul 29 2012 at 7:22:41
He had to pee. Mr. Jayden Lewis, age eighteen, of Los Angeles County, California had to take a piss. A simple act complicated by location and distance. He had sat down near the front of the bus, the toilet was in the back. He had taken a window seat and a woman had taken the aisle seat boxing him in. The bus was crowded. he didn’t want to go back. Maybe he could have a few hours ago when the sleek gray Greyhound had just pulled out of LA, but by now every one of the twenty passengers had probably crapped back there. The smell would be awful and as the bus bounced along the road he kept having visions of the toilet being frothy like a well-mixed milkshake.
If you want to truly embrace the terror and beauty of winter, a Russian-inflected modern folktale should do the trick. In Katherine Arden’s
The Bear and the Nightingale we meet Vasilisa Petrovna, who has no wish to marry. She grew up on tales of Frost Demons, rusalka, all that is wild and magical in the dark and frozen forests including the great Bear, who is gathering his power in the darkness beyond the village. Enter the stepmother, who agrees with the village priests that following the ancient ways will lead to Hell; she wants to see her new daughters packed off to convents, where devotion to God will cure them, or wed, where lives as wives will keep them too busy to bother with uncanny spirits and old lore. When a blizzard freezes the village, everyone Vasya loves faces certain starvation. The young woman will have to defy her stepmother and the priest to ally with every “demonic” force who’s willing to help her before the Bear destroys them all.