Blitzkrieg Blue: Winner of the Next Shakespearre Award

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Created Dec 2, 2007


FUCK YEAH!




Blitzkrieg Blue by Amber Linskey

They called her Raggedy Anthem.
It wasn’t so much of a stage personality,
but a goddamn mutation of her personality.

And when it was her time: She was the Worlds Darling. There were thirteen of them as a group, and each one loved the other like a lover, like a child, like an appendage, a much used limb.

Anthem had a made a section for herself near the rear entrance of the tent. She’d roped it off with the left over cargo fabrics of war. Numbers were emblazoned in puffy, fading black ink. They were cryptic. Occasionally small patches, insignias of time spent lined the billowing walls. She draped the small room with the assistance of ropes, and buckles. This was hers. After each show the troupe converged upon her space. Tonight she held a bundle of black netting in her lap, and with the marred scar tissue device of her left hand, she pushed thin metal tubbing through the inky black holes. This was her wind down. Creation kept her sane, cooled her off, slowed her heartbeat back into that methodical, melodical rythmn it so relied upon. Tonight she was creating wings.

They were for Felix.

Felix Fix was quite the figure of ill repute. He held himself on jaunty limbs across the padded collapse of crates, and wood. Their furniture, their tent, it was all make shift, created from the leftovers of a civilization depleted. He found the cavernous hand holding him remarkably comfortable. "I think perhaps we should expand the troupe..." he brooded, the ivory spires of his fingers extended, lazily rolling the thick black dread locks of the boy on the floor before him.

"No. No we have enough," murmured Anthem.

"Lucky 13." said the boy on the floor. He wore the smudges of day-glow paint about his Asian eyes. He had been the last one accepted into the troupe. He specialized in fire play, and the scars across his torso looked as though they’d been painted onto his flesh by the divine hands of an impressionist. Starry Nite ran rampant across his chest. Because of this, Felix demanded that boy was forever topless. On angsty nights they took turns rubbing the puckered skin with fistfuls of ash, and when the excess was blown away the boy seemed to wear a two toned suit of dimension. He was lovely. But they all were.

They were of the ilk that slit their wrists, not to take their lives, but to pull the codes of confirmation from beneath the skin. It had been ten years since the start of the Blue Age. Blitzkrieg Blue, as Anthem would say. She saw the world in a polyphonic wave of violence and color.

Nuclear Red.

Atomic Pink.

Ten years since the start, and in that time the horde had managed to segregate themselves from the bondage of new society.

"Besides..." said Anthem, the netting between her teeth, stretching and stretching the black holes, "Where would we put them?"



Felix’s face shifted. His smile often sucked the light from his features, caused him to look cavernous, and emaciated. There were twin smudges of black beneath his eyes, soft eyes, dirty eyes, the color of a bruise. "Why, they would sleep with you."



"You tart." And the group erupted in a trill of laughter.


It was true, their space was minimal. They’d set up their tent on the foundation of what may have once been the capitol building. It was hard to tell because none of them could remember the before time in clear detail. They had all been very young. But the area was one of the few full pieces of concrete left in the city. There had been more structures, occasionally the three sided chunks of buildings had existed, but these were all smashed and raped by a group of people desperate to recreate.

The troupe had expatriated themselves from martial law.
It was named New Society, and it was a band of the religious right who saw their survival as being the Chosen Ones. All of them, who lasted were the Chosen Ones. They’d rounded up the survivors, bulled them into the freshly created pens of wreckage and the Chosen Ones, the Divine Ones, were treated like famed souls of Dachau.

Their survival became their suffering became their Auschwitz.

Money was not an issue, but manpower was. They had the power. They worked in troops to rebuild their section of the city. They pummeled through the remainders of old standings, smashed the concrete crumble of what had once been a cherub fountain, to have a crippled staircase leading up to their building. These people disowned the technologies they’d once known. There were no telephones, there were no televisions. Who would you talk to? Who would you listen to? Instead, they developed higher forms of technology. The first to implemented were small stitches of metal they inserted beneath the skin of the wrist. It could track, but more importantly, it could test. One button set off could puncture, and draw blood from every person left. The computers would then test the intricacies of the blood, and determine whether or not the survivor was affected. They were very afraid, and they test very often.

In the beginning of the Blue Age, what had initially sparked the revolt... New Society let those who wished to segregate go of their own will. They were children, outcast into the wasteland. They could fend for themselves, after all... He had left them for a reason. And, New Society could follow them with the push of a button.

There were thirty of them, before there were thirteen. From a distance, the event may have been viewed as a suicide pact. Raggedy Anthem at the head of the horde. She preached the gospel from her vantage point, far above them. But he was farther still. Felix Fix on his stilts of glass, he wore his skin like a gift. His hair was twisted, and braided tight to his head. Cords of blonde and beads laced his neck, nestled in the cavern of his lower back. Felix, "Fee Fee" as they loved to say, jaunted like a marionette, jiving his way across the foundation.

Anthem had pulled herself from the cargo jacket, and now she was bare armed before a passionate audience. There was no melodrama, it was pure and requited desperation that brought the knife to skin. Metal to ivory, and the white split like the peeling of foreign fruit. It was pink inside, very pink, with the angry red rivulets of blood running to her elbow. She shoved the marred fingers of her left hand into the wound, and in a moment of self inflicted chaos, before she blacked out, her fingers caught the metal tab and wrenched it out.

Each and every one of them did this.

Fifteen died that night.

Two died in the days following.

The troupe stripped them of their clothing, cut their hair and stored it. Maximilian, a boy with a penchant for goggles, pressed his knees into the chest of his brother, and with all his weight on the handle of makeshift pliers, he pulled each and every tooth from the dead boys mouth. Some of them were gold, and these he coveted, feigning a belief that some day they would again have value.

The dead were then pulled across the open streets of their old city, and placed on a massive circle of soft dirt. There were occasional spots of sand as soft as velvet, and these areas were used as sacred places. The bodies were entwined one on top of the other, into a perfect pyramid of flesh.

When the fire was lit, Persephone, nearly fifteen at the time, stood back and cried. She had never thought of herself as a survivor. She was the kind that would willingly give in. In the face of atrocity she would throw down her arms, "I give up." She’d say, and offer herself to death. It wasn’t fair. She felt like a fraud. Like a tourist. As the bodies of her brethren burned, she tried desperately to understand the conditions she’d endured. Her right arm was puffy, and wrapped in muslin. She’d had tied off for her a tourniquet of cobwebbing. She had done nothing to save herself. Lay motionless on the concrete ground, in a pool of her own red, and she was ready to die. But something, something had pulled her back into life. Perhaps it was Felix, who she watched with a quiet fascination. He of no substance was the most substantial. The fire lit the sky, and for the first time the sting in her nostrils was not of dust and dirt, it was humanity. It was the red hot rind of those who tried, it was liquid love.

Anthem bowed her head, said a prayer behind chapped and rounded lips.
Then placed her arm around Felix, and the group followed them home. Home. For what it was.

The horde, very nomadic, trudged through the broken streets, each one in silence.

This was something of a decade ago. The group had managed to build their own haphazard refuge at the far end of the city. They too pillaged what was left, of what was left. Mecca was the moment the roof caved in on a two sided building, and Maximilian, who all thought was lost, cackled from inside the shaky structure. They found him lying nestled in a pile of army cargo. He was in the molding green kiss of clothing, and weaponry. They snapped up each and every item in the room, and when they left, the north side wall caved in.
It was with these tools, the icons of what they had so rejected in their previous lives, that they rebuilt what they must accept in their new ones. Over time new people arrived. They were being pumped out of New Society for their inability to believe that this life was Divine Justice. Those that found their way to the tent were accepted with open arms as guest, and no matter how long they stayed, or how passionately they gave of their bodies and minds for labor, and progression, they were always held at a distance. There were thirteen. There would remain only thirteen, at least.... if Anthem had anything to say about it.

In her small space in the back of the tent, with the lounging body of the carved boy slipping into sleep on the floor, Anthem placed her webwork of wing beside her, and left the room. There was a small hallway of crates that worked as walls, taller than her head, and partially see through. They lined both sides of her, and made a tunnel towards the door.
She stepped out into the night. In her other life she would have a lit a cigarette. In her other life, she would have shaved her legs. Here, under the sallow milk skin of a pregnant moon, she spoke to the sky.

"Please exercise your restraint," she whispered, "Fee Fee, he is wild. He is decadent. Don’t let them crumble under his regime. Please do not allow a revolt. We must live in harmony here, for we are all that is good, and beautiful in this world." There were no stars. But the moon, as always, made herself known in the black velvet sky.

The air was stifling, but Anthem was very cold. She held her own hand, lightly rubbing the ball of skin that she had come to terms with.
Raggedy Anthem was infected. She knew this. The incubation period was seven to ten years, and then the disease would cripple her. She had made it her point to not tell the others. In ten years she’d kept herself from them. Her lips would not touch anothers, her blood was her own to deal with. When the day came, and she did die, she’d beg to be burned.

Let there be nothing left.

Let not her heart continue to throb.

Mother moon did her own motion of pulsing jaundiced in the sky, and before she walked inside,
Anthem pressed her face into the crook of her elbow, and let out a little cry.

Copyright Amber Linskey 2008