Malachi’s fresh cut hair tugged strange. The back of his neck both itched from the flecks of shorn hair and burned from the rub of an electric razor. He had to get a new shirt or find a bathroom to shake out the current one. For now he crammed his arms into a too small white jacket and held his shoulders aloft in an attempt to shorten his arms. That choreography reduced the gap between his wrists and the cuffs of the borrowed jacket but it made him like as if he had a stick up his ass. He would just stand at the back of the photograph.
The Pig Butcher
A glimpse or calotype of the sunlit Spring-greened courtyard would give the impression a wedding or some other such happy occaision had just taken place and the crisply dressed participants disgorged from the event hall, but we had just slain a man.
In truth, a double-dozen or so men and women hadn’t all slain the man. The court hadn’t judged a capital crime in over a century of years—we had no headsman—so, we hooded up six men from the Livestock Guild and one from the Castle Guard, shuffled them around, and had them draw straws. The hoods did little to protect the anoymity of any of the men. We knew each by his shape or height or boots. Our work fell to a pig butcher. Hooded, the pig butcher, exercised our justice. Hooded, he’d remain above recrimination. Blameless.
In three weeks time no one brought their hogs to Karll. He had to leave The City to find work.
In the minutes following, while we gathered in groups no more numerous than three—you can’t speak of an execution in large numbers, if you can speak of it at all—the hood had worked. It had protected the pig butcher and distributed the blame on us, the judges and hangers on. We had killed the man.
I sat alone on a bench high flower terrace. I might have been sipping iced Chantacleise wine if it were a nuptial. Instead my hands hung empty and limp from the ends of my arms. Later I’d wash the guilt away like the grime gathered on open ride from The City to Sharba, but in that moment that hood and my secret meant my hands were bloody.
A glimpse or calotype of the sunlit Spring-greened courtyard would give the impression a wedding or some other such happy occaision had just taken place and the crisply dressed participants disgorged from the event hall, but we had just slain a man.
In truth, a double-dozen or so men and women hadn’t all slain the man. The court hadn’t judged a capital crime in over a century of years—we had no headsman—so, we hooded up six men from the Livestock Guild and one from the Castle Guard, shuffled them around, and had them draw straws. The hoods did little to protect the anoymity of any of the men. We knew each by his shape or height or boots. Our work fell to a pig butcher. Hooded, the pig butcher, exercised our justice. Hooded, he’d remain above recrimination. Blameless.
In three weeks time no one brought their hogs to Karll. He had to leave The City to find work.
In the minutes following, while we gathered in groups no more numerous than three—you can’t speak of an execution in large numbers, if you can speak of it at all—the hood had worked. It had protected the pig butcher and distributed the blame on us, the judges and hangers on. We had killed the man.
I sat alone on a bench high flower terrace. I might have been sipping iced Chantacleise wine if it were a nuptial. Instead my hands hung empty and limp from the ends of my arms. Later I’d wash the guilt away like the grime gathered on open ride from The City to Sharba, but in that moment that hood and my secret meant my hands were bloody.
The Classic Tête-à-tête
I bought another structure book. I have enough for now.
This latest book takes the Syd Field screenplay 3 act structure and wraps more words around it. Many more than I recall from Syd, too many words ultimately. I needed that. Reading those too many words was like sailing away from the safety of the coast and finding there was nothing more out there to discover. This march defines the limit of what you need to know. Come back. Know it. Exhaust the resources of this land before setting out again to find new things.
All this had the exact same effect as the last book on structure I read: toolbox full of new tools; nothing built.
My head feels full of ideas and yet it’s not. Also, I struggle over taking my current bits and pouring their cement slurry into the rebar framework of my new found structure and just starting afresh with new bits and virgin iron. The classic tête-à-tête between the inertia of the past and the lethargy of the future.