The Man Whose Role it Was to Travel Far and Wide to Every Location of Beauty and Wonder in Order to Stand in its Midst and Be a Piece of Crap

By Daniel Otto Jack Petersen

Approximately twenty-four hours after each of his crappy appearances Silas Strange found himself profoundly relieved to sink beneath the billows of a book’s pages. Reading was the only thing he did that came close to being done as it should be, though with him it was not necessarily worthwhile. The silent and inward appreciation of the written word was his proper work, but even that he did muddily. And you couldn’t see a difference in him for all his appreciation.

His wife Sylvia tried to love him. That is, she tried to choose to give herself to Silas and to provide a home for him. But each time, when she heard the news that he’d just gone there (any of the wondrous places) to be crap, she felt cold toward him. The only warmth was irritation, for which spark of emotion he came to yearn. It took all her will to fight off the backward-longing to have chosen a different husband. There was nothing left for the one she had.
At each locale the amazing natives spoke kindly to him at first, sometimes even mistaking him for something other than a piece of crap. Say, for example, a lump of mud. But these impressions faded presently, for something would churn in him and he would open his mouth in utterance.

It was always the breathtaking loveliness that churned up speech in him; or what he attempted to pass for speech. The mud floor at the bottom of his heart’s depth would be kicked up into a watery haze by a sudden down-fluxing current brought on by some sublime sight or event. From this breaking up of the deep burst forth a fountain of words like an onslaught of rough and rude combatants trying frantically to issue from the midnight hatch of a wide and wooden horse in Troy; but these ‘strong-grieved’ word-warriors, finding their exit obstructed by one another, would only pile up in a claustrophobic clatter and settle for throwing a few ill-aimed spears from the crowded opening. So came forth his words from hot within him—furiously ridiculous and self-defeating.
On such bloodied homecomings from the gutted gift-horse Mrs. Strange would observe him—as empty-handed as he seemed to be empty-headed. No spoil did Silas bring home to her, no heroic honour won for a wife’s glory. He had gone far away, amazingly (it was his only act of wonderment), merely to be a piece of crap.

For example, there was the centennial surfacing of the mermaids off the coast of Oslo, to which he duly travelled and which astounding event he predictably squandered. The onlookers were on a very low cliff just outside the city proper, a dirty bit of land from where they were standing, but beautifully stark seen from the water’s direction. When the heads and torsos of a hundred female forms almost simultaneously broke the surface of the gentle waves for the first time in a hundred years, each with a flourish of white spray, the sight was answered from the rock by a hundred gasps and exclamations, each in variation. Several people were crossing themselves. One man’s legs gave way into a faltering kneel. Some were sobbing gently. Names were called and profanities whispered in a hundred languages, all together in an overlapping unison of awe.

‘Nasty, nasty, naughty, don’t touch!’ erupted Silas. ‘No… No, I mean not to touch is tantamount to tearing into such “otherly” flesh. You see? Don’t see! Don’t look like that! Feel, feel, but don’t fondle, eh?’

The skin was crawling on all of those near Silas who could understand him. Thier moment was already blasted to havoc. He gibbered on, heedless, his head full of the words his heart heaved up, his mouth powerless to disgorge them in anything but verbal spittle. ‘Nakedness is normal beneath their waves, isn’t it? As natural as scales!’ He squeaked a laugh, pointed a shaky finger vaguely in the direction of the wondrous sight. ‘But scales guard against piercings and prickings, don’t they? Heh, but we’ll be weighed in them nonetheless and all the more! Here… above the waves in the deep of their heaven we do well to get our own clothes off instead of everyone else’s, huh! Our eyes are so good at the peeling off on others, but the purest of sight-daggers’ll pierce our own hearts also, eh?’

Silas was not a speaker. Not in intonation, gesture, or choice of words could he hold a crowd in sway. Many of the onlookers that day had turned away from the ocean view even before the mermaids submerged again beneath the undulating surface of the water for yet another hundred years. Whether or not they shared Silas’s language (not to speak of his oblique viewpoint!), his fellow sightseers’ disgust was obvious. For most of them the day had gone sour. Some did not even know why. Silas himself did not know why. His own heart sank with the mermaids. The disturbance of its waters was over. He was going home to Mrs. Strange, to the comfort of her rebuke.

These instances of phenomenal failure were punctuations in the steady stream of Silas’s otherwise unmitigated habit of reading. Scanning page after page in inarticulate ecstasy he filled the time between. The reading time was the real time to him, the other events being unfortunate obligations he must fulfil to monetarily support his ‘family’. Sylvia had income also, but Silas was paid handsomely for his ‘appearances’. Sub-marginal though they were, certain companies and private individuals found it worthwhile to employ Silas for them. He made no report on his trips, nor conducted any business. For their purposes his employers needed only to be able to say that they had sent their man. The money kept Sylvia Strange attached to Silas. The money and two children, whose remarkable births (as any births are) he was able to attend, but in crappy form.

‘Everything is established by the testimony of two or three witnesses’ and another example of the peculiar plight of Silas Strange is in order. The eye of a tornado in the Midwest of the United States of America will usually contain certain remarkable and dangerous beasts. All our knowledge of the creatures is machine-based. The few persons who survive in the eye of a tornado do not survive their encounter with the beasts. Silas Strange remained alive, in his way, through both. It was not a wonder, though, for, of course, he survived crappily.

Only Silas would incessantly chat at a chimera. He did. He was tethered to the ground in soft and unbreakable ropes, whipped by the whirlwind for only seconds before his meteorologically precise location, chosen by professionals, was enclosed by the eye of the tornado. The black-limbed creatures, each with a distinct face protruding from its fire-red cortex, came concentrically sliding down the cyclone’s inside radial lining. For a moment, for just a moment, at the sight of the brutal beauty of such a horror and a wonder descending upon him, the words inside Silas’s heart, though cramming wildly into his mouth, very nearly defeated themselves altogether. For just a moment, Silas was dumbfounded.

But no, even here, even now, the ill-aimed shafts came flying pathetically from the dark hot hatch. The great belly of the wooden horse grunted and hollered its spear-speech, comically and tragically waking the city of its would-be capture. ‘Like a snow! It’s like a snow!’ Silas chittered. ‘Each crystalline form unique! All so blinding in massive unison that you forget its individual loveliness, don’t you?’ He looked from one to another of the monsters as if seeking their agreement. ‘From stormy lands come stormy things, eh? Stormy times demand stormy solutions! Or at least, tranquillity storming the chaos could stay the travesty for a…’ The beasts slashed him. His blood ran out with his words.

‘Maelstrom monsters are the ugliness we need! Isn’t it so?’ he sputtered. They gashed him and bit into him. He gasped and choked out his words, which were mere loose gravel now, all the farther from a strategically executed surprise military manoeuvre. ‘Smash… pretty plastic… dollies…’ A white mist was tingling on the edges of his vision and wind was beginning to toss his hair again. ‘…not pretty in here, nope…’ Silas’s spent and ribboned frame collapsed as the funnel cloud lifted. The beasts did not care for the taste of him.

While the medical team rescued and repaired Silas for his employers, the audio/video unit erased their recordings of the event. The meteorological instruments similarly measured no new data.

Some wonders come round again, offering second, even third, chances. Silas and Sylvia made love perforce and two children were born to them by the not so fertile Sylvia. A third chance overtook them when Sylvia became pregnant with their third child. The birth of the child provides the third and final witness to establish the matter of Silas Strange, the man whose role it was to travel far and wide to every location of beauty and wonder in order to stand in its midst and be a piece of crap.

Click here to read Dan's A Letter From Epiktistes

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Daniel Otto Jack Petersen lives in Glasgow, Scotland with his wife and children where he attends a really neat looking university. He and his wife are the editors/creators/writers/designers/masterminds of a zine called Glasgow's Best Nightmare. Daniel is the only writer on TES whose work has required footnotes (which can be tricky with online publications) and a preface, whose authorship has been claimed by a computer that may or may not exist, or has had 'crap' in the title. In addition to all these things, Daniel was a member of the original Edward Society, from which came our name and which really was a society that required some sort of membership. Dan knows how easily these things can be destroyed.