The Hidden Ranks - A Darling and Mio story

    Darling, traveled under her nom de guerre, wearing the occasional disguise – wigs and glasses. Lifted shoes and invented limps. She was both investigating and investigated. Though not yet defenestrated, the threat was always there. Persistent pursuit. It was adrenaline action without rush. Always professional. Always the cause.

    She carried memos where digital traffic was routinely intercepted. Whispered secrets where phone calls could be overheard. Passed notes in the back of class, backstage, and dead drops out front. They’d given her an implanted electrolarynx to disguise her voice and quiet thumbnail cameras. They’d given her passwords and encryption authentications. But she could not do it alone.

    Milo too, serving in an army without a gun, within the hidden ranks. Constantly pushing back with ink and film and precision knives against despotic force. Unlawful, maybe. But they would not be brought under the power. They would not be enslaved by chaos or corruption. They would not be held in bondage by fascist atrocities or soldiers in the church.

    There were cops on the street and in the air to maintain the deregulated status quo – twenty-four seven drone surveillance. Masked blacked out forces operating with impunity. Between the streetlights, between the taboo, the dangerous, the risky and the public square. Everywhere. There were dead friends too. Murdered and long dead men and women with names unspoken unlisted, dirtied with painful memories. Teenage boys stabbed in jail. Women beaten to death by sidewalk police. Broken down, despised and ostracized by political forces forever beyond their reach.

    But not without a fight. They’d sworn true faith and allegiance to justice, and to love if not to law.

    She saw reflections in the mirror, in the pupils of strangers’ eyes. Reflections in late-night television. The weight and cruelty of the everwatching eye. Flickering screens and shifting positions. Emotion laid low, beneath layers of self-control. Passion suspect beneath purpose.

    House and home. Children. What could not be protected had to be put aside. He had plans. She had opportunities. None of it mattered. Their marriage now, their only safeguard. They’d sacrificed everything but one another.

The Darling and Milo stories: 
1 - Everything’s Back to Normal
2 - One Life and One More
3 - Milo Remembers
4 - Milo Wonders 

Milo Wonders

     This is the fourth installment of what is becoming a series. I like these character, Milo and Darling. I'm curious what will happen to them. 

Milo Wonders

    Milo sat at his drafting table, work lamp off, magnifying loupe put away in its case. Evening was coming and Darling wasn’t home. He wasn’t worried, not just yet. A loving marriage that had earned his trust. Repenting. Forgiving. Never enemies. Trust. Their marriage in this thirty years war had survived.

    Survived her travel, twenty-five thousand, forty-thousand miles, he’d lost count. Survived illness, and bitterness ongoing. Seasick, airsick Fear. Survived apartment fires. Survived dangerous mobs and riots in the streets.

    And through it all she was keeping the record, writing the report through the regular rhythms of bitter conflict and escalating violence – in the city and the nation beyond. The assaults, black and blue, and unlucky blows.

    He checked his watch and went to the kitchen. He’d start the potatoes and wait.

    “My thoughts have been and will be formed and pass away. I know the dust and dwelling place. I know the frailty of this flesh. Every tombstone. And there are times and there are places – still dwelling, being, living now. Thoughts going. Thoughts drift. I wonder. My struggles before, blood, trouble, and trials of love, and strength, and sorrow when the world comes to an end. My thoughts to the very last will be written.”

    Now the sky was dark and blackout conditions in force. Curtains drawn and lamps down low. Dinner dishes for one cleaned and put away. Her portion waiting in the fridge. He checked his watch.

    “I am a man, well pleased. I am a man of conscience, unashamed. But I’m having a hard time finding my thoughts. My mind. Do you think it strange? Do I love and serve? Am I distracted?”

    He imagined not murderers and thieves, but busybodies and gossips. There was the danger. Evildoers. Purloined letters. The private correspondence of critics. Damaging interoffice memos circulated, copied, and passed on by Darling to her handlers. Undermining the State Press – writing the free press, underground. He imagined fiery hell burning away. The fiery judgment of a living hell. The godly and the free suffer persecution. But fire and water purify.

    He checked his watch. “Fire can save us, yeah? Purify? I hope.”

    Hours later, one in the morning, she came through the door. Returning home, she fell into his arms, burning with fever. Ill. One hundred degrees. One hundred one. He rushed her to bed.

    “Can we live a thousand years like this, Darling?”

1 - Everything’s Back to Normal
2 - One Life and One More
3 - Milo Remembers

Milo Remembers

    I remember the radio was playing a slowed-down, strung-out cover version of Get Happy as I entered the neighborhood near the Seattle airport that first night. “Come on, forget your blues, get happy…” I remember the city roads full of bandits and highway men. There were seedy strip clubs, children’s massage parlors, and perfect prostitutes that would walk up, knock on the door, and turn green under the neon and streetlamps– just like that, every night.

    I went to school with serial killers and other uneducated alcoholics, the whole mentally gangrenous generation. I went to church at the chapel of drinks and parties and it was there that I learned to hide

    But you knew where to find me, didn’t you, Darling?

    I went to work straight away. I sold liquor and fireworks for five years, condoms, porn, and beer for slightly longer. How long those awkward years – waiting for an opportunity to prove myself by asking inopportune questions about guns, and gangs, and alcoholic crime, and the women’s prison beatings – all of which occurred without the interference of the local police.

    What were you doing there, Darling? Surely it was no coincidence?

    I knew how to run and ruin the virgins then, when we first met. I didn’t burn them all, nor their contact information. I knew the voyeur struggle, alone. I knew the critic thinking. I knew the empty home that cost Jesus his life. Faking a porn addiction as a way to overcome the bad times. Often sorry. Acting out, like a script, dark and dangerous in dangerous positions. I could have died and scorned the shame.

    You read it all, yourself, once we were married, Darling. Why do I revisit this?

    We walk on and work through the mess, the specks, the planks, and piles of stones. Death and life. Life and death. But now? Now, how does it end? The two of us together, Darling. With Sibelius on the phonograph and dinner on the stove. Life and death. Death and life. We walk on through the mess.

Everything’s Back to Normal
One Life and One More

    I don't quite know who these two people are just yet - where they live, or what they're doing. They just started showing up in my writing and I've enjoyed finding them. I expect that I'll see a bit more from them. 

One Life and One More

    A lush tone poem by Sibelius played upon the phonograph as Darling sliced vegetables in the apartment kitchenette. The light of a hazy sunset filtered through the flag that hung in the window. She could feel the lush orchestration and soaring melody thrumming inside her.

    “Darling, are you okay?” Milo asked from the door. She was standing at the counter, with peppers and onions on the cutting board and knife held loosely in her hand, but she wasn’t moving. “You seem distracted.”

    “Yes, Milo” she said and then, “No, my love.”

    “You are distracted,” Milo said. He said aside the drafts and drawings he carried and, stepping into the kitchen, relieved her of the knife.

    She clenched her teeth and, looking silently about the room, shook her head. She saw her reflection in the window and again in the cracked mirror on the wall in the living room. “Not distracted,” she whispered.

    “You’re shivering,” Milo said. “Cold too. What is it?”

    “The death of so many. I could not. We couldn’t.”

    Milo led her to the couch at the center of the living room. “Sit, Darling. Sit. Please. Let me get you something.”

    “No,” she said clutching his arm. “I want nothing.” She looked into his eyes. “Just sit with me a while.”

    He sat on the couch with her, and it was a comfort. To them both. A comfort to know that she belonged to him and he to her, in equal measure. They sat that way, together, until the sun was set and the room was dark.

    "We don’t know what we’re doing, do we?” She said later, during dinner. Not really. Your art and my travel. And yet we cannot do nothing. How can these little motions stand against so many lives?”

“If we can save but one,” Milo said.

    She’d fallen in love with him years before, slowly, over occasional conversations and walks to the market. He was patient. Always patient.

    “One life,” he said again. “And one more.”

    Gunshots erupted in the night – as they had most every night that month. These were not so close as some of the others. Perhaps at the train station down the street.

    “One life,” she whispered back.

    “And one more.”

Everything’s Back to Normal

    I don't quite know who these two people are just yet - where they live, or what they're doing - but I've enjoyed finding them and expect that I'll see a bit more from them.

Everything’s Back to Normal

    She arrived home a few minutes early, before the shouting, before the gunfire. She came back to their apartment to relax. To rest before the next trip to the other side, across town. To Kyiv, Belfast, Beit Lahia, Chicago, Des Moines… She knew she would need to sleep in the meantime of memory. She was tired. More than tired, really. She was worn thin by the constant pressure of disaster, the rapid cycling of bad news. The listed names of the dead mispronounced on the radio.

    “Is that you, Darling? I’ve been waiting for you.” Her husband, the artist. The insurgent.

    She smiled flatly at his voice. “It’s me. I’m home.” She tossed her keys into a small dish on the table beside the door, hung her coat on a hook and closed the door. She saw her reflection in the windows staring back at her years apart. Remembering. Hoping. Some things can’t be clear. Some things can’t be returned. She wondered if it were a question or an exclamation. She had no response either way. “Working late?” she called out to him.

    “Just trying to finish up before…”

    Then came the explosion and the fire. The gunshots. The sirens. The roar and shout. The oppressive heat of rising fire. Ringing alarums in the air.

    Weightless and unreal, she fell to the floor. Her eyes were closed but she knew his weight when he covered her with his own body. His skin, his flesh, his scent. She could feel his heart pounding against her back. The screams were hers and his together in the dark. One.

    Later, when the smoke had thinned, the glass swept up and the bodies removed – little more than the diluted nightmares of social polish – she went into the cramped kitchenette. “Coffee?” she asked as she watched him spread their beloved flag across the cracked window. Another reminder of danger.

    The coffee pot rattled in her trembling hand. Another cup of coffee? We can’t go back to the way things were. Everything’s back to normal. And things will never be normal.