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A DAY IN THE LIFE OF
A SUICIDE GEOMANCER


star


Weston Ochse



0335. The alarms shriek like an avalanche of the dead, causing everyone in the bunkhouse to leap and fall from their dreams of how things used to be. Many groggy, most fearful, they jerk on what clothes they can and grab weapons before heading outside. I bolt out of bed. I don’t even pause to dress as I hurl myself through the door and into the cool early morning hours of the South Dakota plains, the moon long since set and the North Star still glittering like a bright unruly fist in the sky. I stand naked to the universe, seeing a sight that makes me wish my universe wasn’t my own.

Little Tree, face bloody, hair ripped out by her hands and tumbling to the ground, crouches like a rabid animal, her eyes black, wide, and thoughtless. Where her teeth had been so bright and white the day before, her mouth was now a maw of red and green pus, molars littering the ground behind her as they escaped the necrotic thing she’d become. Her tongue was like a leech, quivering and black and wanting something, anything, so it might survive despite those it must kill to do so.

Two scouts hold her at bay, wooden two-pronged pitchforks designed to keep a Golden Ager away as she scratches at the rough lengths. The scouts work in concert, one on each side, denying her an escape or an opportunity to bite and rend the flesh of others. Their feet move in assured precision, like the dances of old around a fire, only this fire is a dead thing, once alive, once part of us, now transformed.

Little Tree had been too eager to understand the ways of the GAgers. They’d sent their propaganda leaflets over our camp to be read, but most knew better. They were always trying, always tempting. The necromancy used in the word-making was enough to transform the living to the undead if one didn’t take the necessary precautions. Little Tree knew of these measures, she knew how to read them backward to save her sanity, but her urge to know was much greater than her desire to be safe.

I shake my head.

Little Tree is but another reason I need to do what I will do this day. She is yet another example of what GAgers are willing to do in order to create their own Golden Age. But we’ve long since known that a Golden Age for one tribe is not so for the other, especially when they insist on a single tribe ruled by the philosophies of a long dead megalomaniac.


0400. To say I wasn’t influenced by Octavia E. Butler and her book The Parable of the Sower, is to say that my grandmother wasn’t influenced by Donald Trump’s The Golden Age of New Reason, published in 2030—better known as the Gold King’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra, whose dictums had precipitated the Big War. Although Octavia’s book is about climate change, or so it presumes, it is more about the social dissolution of America—or the Trumpian Golden Age. And it describes the classic case of the individual and what responsibility they have for being born. There are moments when I wish that I was less enlightened and I was able to make it through a day without becoming violently ill. After all, was it my fault I was born? Of course, the answer is no, so then the follow up question becomes is it my fault what I do with my life? And for that, the answer is yes, the choices were laid out before me, and I chose to allow them to influence me.

That there are still so many who hope for a Golden Age angers me, which is why I have decided to do what I am doing. And to think that my grandmother was so beguiled by a cult of personality both baffled and shamed me. After all, shouldn’t we have taken the time to explain to her that because of the color of her skin she wasn’t going to be invited to the After-the-War Victory Party.

By letting her down, we’d let us all down.


0420. The Sun Dance of the Lakota had once been outlawed. The idea of one giving personal sacrifice to their people and community was not accepted by non–First Nation peoples. They insisted there must be something for everyone. Democracy and socialism existed based on the idea of everyone sharing. But the Sun Dance promised different. A man or a woman might fast for days and then consecrate themselves in order to reach a higher power, to achieve a higher purpose.

You may call me the Higher Purpose, but I prefer the name that was given me, Peter No Flesh Adams. I am of American ancestry, which means that I am a mutt. My DNA is derived of Sioux, French, and English nucleotides, all stirred into the cocktail that is me. I bet if you added some high-end liquor, I might even taste good.

My goal is to explain the parable.

My ultimate goal is to be the parable.

It is not so difficult. So many look at the various soils Jesus spoke of, but miss the idea that he was trying to train his disciples in the idea of parable, a distinct story that illustrates a lesson and not necessarily a tale based on fact. Also important is that a parable is based on human characters, and a fable is based on nonhuman ones.

With the Sun Dance, one can both be parable and fable.


0435. “You’re up early this morning,” said the Far Ocean Woman, shredding the pecans into a facsimile of coffee.

“Today is my Sun Day. I would like to hear your story,” I say, following the traditional speak of those who bloomed before me.

I’m only the seventh of my kind so perhaps she doesn’t know how to deal with me. She gives me a long stare, then it softens, a mother to a possible son who himself might one day bloom. Then she pours me a cup and gives me a chunk of unleavened bread with hard cheese.

“My story is like any other’s,” she says. “I was a school teacher and I taught students the best I could.”

“What did you teach?” I ask.

“I taught English literature and about how the people of England and their colonies changed from being ruled to ruling themselves through the eyes of Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens, and Charlotte Brontë.”

I didn’t know Hardy, but I did know Dickens and his Tale of Two Cities, Oliver Twist, and the quizzical Martin Chuzzlewit. “Wasn’t Brontë the one who wrote Little Women?” I ask.

“No, an American named Louisa May Alcott wrote that one. It was a tale of duty to family versus personal growth. How much does one exist outside of oneself? The book was important in that way.”

So much like the Sun Dance. So much like sacrifice. How was it that a stuffy ancient Americans understood what the Lakota and the people of Islam have felt for too long?

“Were you told to teach these this way or did you choose to?” I ask.

“I was given a curriculum. I followed it, but as any good teacher will do, I stressed what was important,” she says. “I felt that the other literature children were being forced to read was too conforming. I wanted to demonstrate that there was a difference. That there could be a challenge to the norm, no matter how delicate and subtle.”

I think about this for a moment, then say, “I think it suffers from the title—Little Women. It’s diminutive and makes women seem less than they are.” I add, “Which is not at all the theme of the novel.”

She nods this time, agreeing with the negative. “But isn’t that how the world has always seen us?”

“The world often sees itself in the way it is told to see it. Women being little. It makes men comfortable.”

She appraises me and chuckles, then says, “Big Women.” And then she says it again, just to taste the sound.

I chuckle with her. “That’s enough to scare some away.”

She gives me a knowing look. “Which is perhaps why Louisa May Alcott stressed the littleness of them.”


0500. I enter the tactical center where maps are plastered everywhere. The commanders of Camp Red Cloud have been busy. All of the locations of the Army of New Custer have been marked and labeled, from their far-off outposts in the southern Rockies to the Black Hills. Somehow, they’d been able to capture the middle ground and hold it.

Nuevo Mexico had their Aztecs and the flying beasts that went with them.

The Canadians saw the return of legions of Sasquatch, their strength and cunning unimaginable.

The west found the Mermaids of California and the Pacifists of the PNW.

And then there were the remaining tribes, the Lakota and the Cheyenne and the Apache and the Navajo. All that was left after the wars and the magic and the terrible days of thunder and lightning that was the battle for the conscience of what had been America.

The GAgers have lookouts in the obvious locations, and checkpoints at all roads into the Black Hills. Their necrophages have made it as far as the Badlands, where they live in the shadows, ready to attack anything with a pulse. Reports have surfaced that we have been fighting our own and we’ve become demoralized for it. That’s one of the problems with an army that can make its own. Necromancers are the worst. Their very abilities to co-opt the dead are reason enough for us to attack them. But ours is a war of peace, and any attack we make is to protect the land, which was why I’d spent the last ten years giving into the alchemy of geomancy.


0600. A wave of 570 undead crossed the White River near the town of Interior, New Dakota, at 0545 hours local time. We’d long since lost our ability to retaliate using conventional weapons, but because of our excellent planning, those geomancers who’d been working on divining the magma tubes had found their hard work had paid off. It only took a little encouraging to entice the incandescent rock to spew forth upon the undead. They both had no way to retreat or retaliate and melted in place. This had been the third time in as many weeks that Custer’s necrophages had targeted that location. Where they got the bodies, we never knew, but we believed it had to be from the battles waged along the Western Front of the Rockies where the Pacifists of PNW were removed a hundred at a pop—easy pickings because of their unwillingness to fight.

Where we might harvest wheat, the GAgers harvest the dead, gifting them arcane sparks of false life, so that they might follow a false Gold King who spouts false witness against his fellow man. But the loss of conventional weapons saved us, really. Had the Army of New Custer and other GAgers had pre–Sun God weapons to use, then we all might be dead already. The Lakota would be barely a memory—and if that—a warning to others not to confront the GAger reality.

It was just after midnight in November of 2043 when magic returned to the world. The Lakota and other First Nation peoples had always known it was here and wondered where it had gone, always trying to entice it through ritual and prayer. Then Comet 12672-MH hurtled past—what the People of the First Nations called the Sun God—and the Earth was never the same. Just as we renew its flight by blooming at night, it turned night into day, a singular EMP pulse encompassing the planet and inviting back that which had been in hiding since the advent of the Industrial Age.

Some called this return, Magic.

We acknowledged it as the proof of our own Sun Dance ritual and found a way to weaponize it.


0927: “You know it really should be me,” says Flat Elk.

I nod and grin, knowing that there would be no winner from such an argument.

“You are Wágluȟe,” he says. “You are ones who live with relatives. Of the seven bands of Oglala, you were the loafers. You are also Wašíču. You are a Third Nation and not First Nation People.”

I shake my head. “I am Wágluȟe Wazaza also. Shred into strips. My mother was Wágluȟe, but she was also Third Nation and from France. She named me Peter after her father.”

“Which makes you not pure,” Flat Elk says, acting as if it is an aha moment.

“Would you make me a GAger?” I counter. “Who we are on the outside means far less than who we are on the inside. My ancestor, No Flesh, proved this. Not only was he a great warrior, but he was also a scout and fought for the Great Chief from the East.”

Flat Elk spat. “He was the first GAger.”

“He was a Sun Dancer, just as I shall be. He fought, and when asked to kill Crazy Horse, refused. He knew the difference between the People’s Law and GAger rule. He knew the value of life.” I gesture toward the Black Hills that rise like scars in the sky. “They KNOW no value. Their hearts are necrotic, and their souls are long dead.” I approach and grip him by the shoulder. “Look at me, Flat Elk. Am I not alive? Am I not ready to dance?”

For a moment, he seems ready to argue, then he lowers his gaze. “You are alive, No Flesh. You are ready to dance.”

“Then will you be my second? Will you join me in preparation?”

His face brightens as his eyes search my own. “I will join you. I will help you.”

He says this, knowing he will be the next after me.

“Then let us prepare.”


Noon. Those not on watch gather for the ceremony.

Flat Elk stands beside me, the lengths of Buffalo Bone polished and sharp in his hands.

Tall Sage holds the sun machine, keeping it tame, speaking to it, not letting it leave earth without its promised purchase.

The shaman sings a song that began as someone else’s but became ours, words of rebellion, of suffrage, of loss, and of pride. Words first sung by a Wašíču who’d been displaced as First Nations People in their own land. Once called the Irish, who’d been victims of their own GAgers.


’Twas hard the woeful words to frame

To break the ties that bound us

’Twas harder still to bear the shame

Of foreign chains around us

And so I said, “The mountain glen

I’ll seek next morning early

And join the brave United Men!”

While soft winds shook the barley


The shaman’s final rite is something that always makes me cry. As a witness, it was because I knew I’d never see a member of my tribe again. When they left, they were never coming back, but the shaman ensured that once gone, they would return, if not in the spirits on the winds, in the great fields in the sky.

I’m not alone.

My mother, along with the mothers who have gone before and the mothers who will give their children after, also lament, beating themselves across the chests and face with hands raw and calloused from working in the earth.

The men of the tribe raise their heads and give cry to the Great Spirit, warrior calls that would send a herd of Buffalo thundering or a company of soldiers scampering. Each of their shouts merging into one fiercely sad dissonance that crosses time and space and the pain of other people’s attempts to classify us.

And now, as the shaman sings the ancient words of a song once meant to lament a land of lost rebels, I cry yet again. Like the winds that shake the barley, our own winds shake the wheatgrass, wine cups, and purple cornflowers. We are like those weeds and will grow for a season until we are wiped away. But the winds and the rains that make the enemy who hides in the shadowy glens of the Black Hills will nurture our memories, and we shall grow again. Just as those who went before me, I will be replaced by another’s growth, our perpetual existence a raised obstinate fist against those who would promulgate the new Golden Age.


1245. The first pierce is pain incarnate, but I do not cry out. Still, my legs threaten to buckle, and Flat Elk keeps me from falling. The second piece pierces my left breast and is worse than the first, the thrum of agony like the bass line to a song of suffering. Once secured, they let out the rope, the wind catching the wings of the Sun Bird, once used as a hang glider. Once used to propel people through the silent sky for entertainment, now it is a vector for my blooming.

During the day, the wind blows east. It catches the air foils and lifts me from the ground. The strands of wheat beneath me become a single Van Gogh brush stroke. The faces of those watching, each an image I shall bring with me.

Higher and higher I soar.

I’m surprised the pain doesn’t increase.

I’m fascinated that I don’t fall to the earth, gravity ripping me free from the bones piercing my flesh, the only things affixing me to the unnatural flying machine. Like my ancestors before me, I perform a Sun Dance, hanging high in the air. My legs twist in a Spandau ballet as the Earth calls for my return, despite the winds assuring my rise.

I ignore the calls to fall.

I need the sun.

I need to charge.

To become power.

Midnight. I’ve been part of the sky for half a day. The winds changed an hour ago, and they let me loose. I am like an eagle, soaring the winds, catching updrafts and nighttime thermals that propel me toward the GAgers’ stronghold. Inextricably, I feel the power of the stars and the billion suns in the system. Blood has been seeping from me, whipped away with the wind. I am in and out of consciousness, but each time I awake, I revel in being alive. I imagine myself as the Silver Surfer, arcing my way across a dark wave of night dreams toward a certain destiny, weaving the power cosmic.

Galactus cannot stop me, nor can the denizens of the Army of New Custer. The sky has become the new Little Bighorn. Beneath me squirms a mass of the necrotized, dead but focused on the single task to make everyone else dead. But here I am, out of reach. Above their ken.

Flares light the sky in front of me.

The Army of the New Custer sees me coming.

I am not the first.

I am the eighth of my kind.

And I will not be the last.

I feel myself brighten and brighten, soaking in every ounce of light within my view. The flares die, the stars diminish, the suns go dark, leaving me alone and brilliant in a Stygian sky. I become the sun in the middle of night, so dazzling that one must shield their eyes, lest they go blind.

Paha Sapa had once been the center of our universe and now it is the center of the GAgers. Since gold was discovered and the mountains were hollowed, it has been theirs. They think that by living on it, it will accept them.

But they don’t know the truth of it.

The trees are black because of them.

The land is dying because of them.

The world is lost because of them.

Their Golden Age is a pyrite of time.

And then I bloom.

I explode into a million incandescent pieces, each with individual will, powered by practiced and assured geomancy. Like a sudden blizzard of kamikaze fireflies, I light the sky, each piece descending and landing atop a necrophage. Where I land, my energy flows, turning death into life, rot into rule, and must into wheat. They become the barley of the song, the fronds of us all, no longer caught in their Dunning-Kruger OODA loops, but freed to learn the truth, just as they become one with the lands.

And I can almost hear them whisper, Paha Sapa, as I became fable and soft winds shake the barley and the grasses of the plains.

And the shaking and the wind will one day be enough.

Because the barley and the grasses will live far longer than any idea of domination.


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