The old man sat, and brooded. Brief glimpses of days gone by flooded his mind, one after another in a seemingly never ending procession. The women, the fights, the battles, the lonely dark silent nights - all paraded past eyes that could not see the present at the moment for the raging flood of the past.
Every year it happened this way, starting a few weeks before the main event. Memories came unbidden, gradually intensifying for the next few weeks until the veil, ever thinning, managed to rip open on that grand night, and all the battles were fought again, all in a single night.
It always started with the little things. The recall of the flash of a whore's wink, the laugh at a long gone joke told by a long dead comrade, the sudden sound of an angry hornet passing his ear, then gone - never really there to begin with. Only a distant visceral memory of an event that he almost didn't live long enough to remember. Gradually, the faces came over time leading up to the big night, the big fight. Moving faces in his dreams, fleeting past... then, later on, flashes of them in his waking hours, peripheral visions as they got stronger, The veil wearing thinner as the time grew nearer.
The faces... goddammit the faces! Some grinned, some sneered, some friends, some foes, some only half there, ragged edges and gaping holes completing the missing portions. Occasionally, he felt the brush of a feather against his cheek, but try as he might he could not recall whatever memory it was that spawned the sensation... yet it happened with some regularity as the time drew near.
Occasionally, he picked up a rifle and hit the woods, seeking the solace of solitude. There was no rhyme or reason for taking the rifle, he never hunted anything, just took it along as an old comfortable companion. Sometimes he found the solace he sought, but never for long. As the day grew nearer, he'd notice fleeting glimpses of moving... things... behind the trees, hiding and exposing themselves only briefly. Fleeting ghosts of days gone by, seeking, he presumed, only to startle.
When the night came, the night of the main event, he always, always found himself unprepared. How does one prepare for an assault by the ethereal, anyhow? His trusty rifle did him no good at all - you can't shoot the bastards again - bullets took no effect in the wispy forms, passing right through unlike the first time, the shot that created them. He didn't even bother trying any more. You couldn't grasp and grapple them, either. Solid hands simply sailed right through misty nothingness, and lord, how that nothingness laughed and cackled when they did!
Eventually, after the few weeks passed by, the veil thinning almost imperceptibly by the hour, the time came when it rent asunder... and allowed screaming hordes of former antagonists to pass through, once again able to antagonize, Swirling around him and attacking, with the old man unable to put up any defense at all against the smoky, shadowy insubstantial forms of bygone battles. Those battles were fought all over again on that night - the screams, the sight of the wounds, the smell of blood and spilled entrails, cordite, and burning corpses, all of it as if it were fresh again, and no escape for the old man.
All he could do was endure, and endure he did, until the rising of the sun banished the specters back to where they came from. He supposed they licked their insubstantial wounds and waited for the next year, to assault him again.
On the morning after, he always had the same thoughts. Which world was really the real one? Theirs? His? Either way, he knew this, right down in his core: they might have the upper hand now, they might be able to attack against a defense that was as insubstantial to them as they were to it, but one day, ONE DAY, that old man would die too. And then, yes THEN. He'd be able to fight the bastards on their own terms, in their own world, with their own weapons...
... and he'd kick their goddamned asses all over again, once and for all!
.
Diogenes was eating bread and lentils for supper. He was seen by the philosopher Aristippus, who lived comfortably by flattering the king.
Said Aristippus, ‘If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.’ Said Diogenes, ‘Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.’
Said Aristippus, ‘If you would learn to be subservient to the king you would not have to live on lentils.’ Said Diogenes, ‘Learn to live on lentils and you will not have to be subservient to the king.’
