writing crit thread

From the first wail of the sirens, the man resolved to die by the close of the year. A second war, by its very nature, meant the end of most sentient beings walking the galaxy at that time along with a much less daunting number of vegetables. The timing, for one thing, was something to be mourned; with the population finally evening out after the first war, science and mathematics were picking themselves back up and onto the rails with gradually increasing expedience: all for naught. With this in mind, the man took care of what few material belongings he had – burning, donation, and various other exports – and curled into an infantile posture on his gray goose-down quilt. He wept himself to sleep and woke each morning to the retching of his wife as she crouched before the porcelain god giving what she could of her past meals in the place of sacrificing her zygote. She did not love him, and he did not love her. They married in praise of the old fables that taught the young to replenish the earth, and they stayed together those six years because they were the only two sapiens left on their peninsula who understood each other’s eczema and inner turbulence. The invasion occurred on the twentieth of December. In chance accordance with the man’s wishes, the three of them were properly disemboweled by a small squadron of infidels just before high noon. For the fetus, they used a pen knife.

The child’s uncle was a second-rank captain for His Royal Rodentine. A covetous and quick-tempered bat of fifty-eight, the brother of the man’s wife had been all but excommunicated from the family for deviating from the patriarchy’s longstanding pacifistic policies. The captain thought this was a feat worth canonizing and made no attempt to once more sew the threads snipped by the captain’s father, patriarch of the southern island of Kelish.

Kelish was comprised of fields upon fields of tomatoes and greens and children in cream-colored linens saying their 3:00 prayers, prostrate on the impeccably-kept lawns of the central theatre. The elders observe, with the patriarch himself brooding among them. From his balcony, he was able to see not only the whole of the small, igneous village but also the entirety of the channel separating them from the peninsula. He watched the sun rise every morning. He turned his back toward the sunset. He longed to ascend to godhood, to have absolution over his disciples, to have absolution over what dwelt beneath the sea and beneath the silt and stone and sky. He wanted to cast aside the shadow of his prodigal daughter and be recognized not for expelling her forth into their midst, but for his benevolence and omnipotence and omnipresence and boundlessness endlessness existence. He was only a man. He was a miserable and spiteful man. Magpie hated him.

Her escape came in the form of a chemist. She married young – at the age of fifteen. She married near the horizon of the war, a date coinciding, unfortunately, with that of her uncle’s murder and cousin’s stillbirth. She married into a polygamic union with the chemist and herself, though she did not become aware of this until the birth of her third son.

The boy had his mother’s rubicund complexion and his father’s jagged nose, but his hair was tarnish grey and tinselly, as though made of fine wires of old silver.

Yes, Morio was there. Morio had always been, and would always be there. She was present for their nuptials, and she played voyeur to their first night. She trailed behind them when they went to market. She wept for their first child’s passing, and held the hands of the second and third as they took their simultaneous first steps. The fifth child, she decided, would be hers to keep. Having -- long since adolescence – banished any remnant of Morio from her consciousness, Magpie lived in a blissful ignorance for those seven years until the son was born. Morio was there, acting in spirit as one of the midwives.

They named him Caelum, after the outer atmosphere in which Maggie pursued her third soul.