Tourist 1

They would have said they had found him in a White Castle but it would not be true. He wore an oversized t-shirt and a beanie hat. He was short, maybe five feet tall. He had thin, shaking limbs and impossibly pale skin. They might have remembered that he was deformed, but that would not be true. He was formed exactly like he was meant to be. They would not have been able to describe his face to you. 

Lang very often came off to others as intimidating. He was 6’1, and built like Arthur Conan Doyle. He had long hair and facial piercings. He lived in a two story house. It was one of those houses you could watch for a year and see people come and leave every week, very rarely repeating. In one week in October it was a young woman from Tai Pei, and a few months later it was a tall swede and a priest from texas. There was no ulterior motive beyond a wish for company and a desire to care for people who needed it. You would enter the house and see Lang, always, and probably also Alice, who had come to the house as so many others had, and stayed, as nobody else would. And you would also find a good dozen people on air mattresses, and in chairs, and lying on couches.

The Tourist was thin and strange. He did not speak, and when people stopped looking at his face they would forget what it had looked like. He sat in a chair, twitching periodically. Also in the room was a man named Chris, who was terribly scarred, and had dyed black hair and sunglasses. He wore those glasses along with a baseball cap, as if attempting to blend in with a crowd, something he could not possibly do. He was coming from the northwest, following someone “All the way to Florida.” As far as he possibly could have gone without leaving the country. 

Alice slept, curled on a couch. She slept with her glasses and shoes still on, collapsed from exhaustion. It wasn’t dark yet, but it was slipping into that area, slowly. Clouds gathered above the house. Chris looked at the Tourist, and he looked at Chris. He smiled, probably, and Chris smiled back, absentmindedly, though it didn’t look much like a smile. Thunder shook the house, and The Tourist stood up, moving shakily toward a window. Rain began to fall, and Alice woke up, blinking blearily at the light in the room. The television prattled on, making almost incoherent noises. Every tile in the house was gray, and Alice was suddenly aware of that fact, just as she was suddenly made aware of the fact that her body had clothing on it, and that every part of her skin was a receptor, receiving signals from everything it touched. Just as she was made eminently aware of the fact that her bones were damp. It was one of those deeply banal existential panic attacks normally reserved for the dark hours of the morning, when you feel very small. But it was happening again, it was happening now, in a house in Iowa, at 6:15. 

And Lang was returning home from a long day, with takeout. He was wealthy, as his parents had been wealthy, but his habit of picking people up off of curbs was eating into that. He worked now, it made him feel honest, somehow, and he was pulling into the driveway when the front door slammed open, and The Tourist ran out, into the front yard, mud slicking his boots, looking up at the sky. 

This cannot happen, but here is what happened.

The sky rolled back like a curtain at the beginning of a puppet show. The two puppets, our players for the night, appeared. Here it is then. Two siblings appeared in the sky, two sisters. One clothed in meat and red, the other in black and rot. If they appeared to be human, it was in an act of divine consideration.

These siblings happen to be gods, and they fight, as siblings do. The sky is rent apart, of course. Hands, fists, “red in tooth and claw,” everything. Man, God, Animal, smaller things, all become something else when they are punched in the face. Time warps and roars, like air around a passenger plane about to brush the black waters of the Pacific with its nose. Like the vacuum in the vacuum-sealed can. If they appeared to be human it was out of the generosity of their hearts. It was out of the goodwill they held. It was an act of kindness.

And Alice looked up, and she saw it, and Lang looked up, and he saw it, and Chris looked up, but he had seen it before, in a miracle at Christmastime, and he had tasted it, and it had been a single snowflake melting on his tongue. So Chris smiled, and took it as a sign. 

Certain peoples of the world believed the world had been vomited up by the divine. These divine figures vomited and devoured, to use that metaphor. They created and destroyed. Alice witnessed the power of the gods, greater than any human could truly understand, and she saw how it was wielded with all the grace of children smacking each other with sticks.

All of this happened in moments, and then it ended. The Tourist stood up, and smiled. He waved to Lang, who nervously waved back. There was a small copse of trees behind the house, and The Tourist walked toward it, through the slick grass. He did this until he reached the trees, and then he disappeared into them. 

Lang noticed that he had dropped the takeout. Lo Mein and brown rice mingled with cracked styrofoam on a cracked concrete driveway, and Lang licked his lips, which had become very dry, and he looked to Alice, and to Chris, and up to a gray, flat sky. 

uhh, did you delete my post? i didn't have it backed up, and it didn't have anything objectionable in it, far as I can think. just myths and world building stuff...

The submission was deleted because we understood the guild title to be referencing a different online group beyond the limits of the CB. If we made a mistake, you can resubmit for further review. Sometimes posts get cut (or swallowed by the glitch), so we do reccomend backing them up. We know it is painful to lose your work! - Admin