Logorrhea: Vivesepulture

David Prill is one of those writers that I wish more people knew about, like Howard Waldrop. Like Howard, he writes his own thing. It doesn't sound like anyone else. Take David's story about vivesepulture:

Vivisepulture
by David Prill

“Hey, where the heck is that music comin’ from?”

This was Big Jim McDiffie at a Memorial Day backyard barbecue, circa 1974, back when you knew exactly where pretty much all music came from, that was the appeal--you can’t hum along to the Unknown. Penny loafer jingles, tinny children’s songs from the ding-dong man’s truck (according to moms everywhere the music meant the truck had run out of ice cream), the mailman whistling an old Johnny Mercer standard, side A of the soundtrack of the suburbs.

And most importantly, his school song:
Wave the flag for Hillmont High School
Her colors black and gold.
Marching always on to victory,
No matter who the foe.
So, we’ll forever praise and cheer you,
Our Gobblers brave and true.
Wave again the dear old banner,
Hillmont High we’re all for you.

Brought a tear to Big Jim’s eye. Used to, anyway.

Big Jim had been a star athlete at Hillmont High, lettering in football, baseball, basketball and cheerleader-chasing. He was the missile-firing quarterback in football, pitcher and cleanup hitter in baseball, and all-city forward in basketball. Until a back condition knocked him out of his roost. His spinal column was twisted like a snake on hot blacktop. The doctors said his athletic career was over and out. It was too frustrating to attend the games as a spectator, so began the isolation with occasional detours into alienation. Almost felt like he had already graduated, especially since he didn’t spend much time in class anyway. He spent less time hanging out at the Red Barn with the gang, tough guys with french fries dangling from their mouths, more time wandering alone down the paneled station wagon-lined streets. His coaches had always admired him for his ability to see the whole playing field, to anticipate what was to come, to be one step ahead of the other players. But now Big Jim, as he wandered, was trying to see the whole field, the future, but he couldn’t see much at all, the field was too big now, and there were too many unknowns.

Like the music, today.

*****
Jeff VanderMeer also doesn't write like anyone else. And not surprisingly, David and Jeff's vivesepulture stories are quite different:

VIVISEPULTURE

And the Turk came down upon Smaragdine like a storm of plagues and breached the city gates and slew the defenders on the walls with arrows and their horsemen, led by their captain Baryut Aquelus, outstripped their infantry and so came unto the great Lyceum where the priests had hidden the Green Tablet, and Baryut took the heart of Smaragdine from that place, leaving the priests dead upon the steps as they rode out again.

And in the streets beyond they came upon the din of fierce battle, for the Smaragdineans had recovered from their surprise and now fought like demons for their city and men fell in great numbers on both sides as the city began to burn.

Raising his sword, Baryut led the way for the Turk, cutting down any who opposed them.

But when he rode under the shadow of the city gates and looked back, Baryut saw that the Smaragdinean prince Farid, upon a black charger, had come up behind and slain his riders and would soon overtake him.

Safety lay at the semaphore tower by the river, but Farid outstripped the Turk and forced him up into the hills and ravines and the coffeehouse beyond.

Farid was only a few paces behind him, driven by righteous conviction.

The Tablet became heavier and heavier in the Turk’s hands and the prince shouted at him now, sword slicing the sky into jagged pieces.

“Bring it back or I’ll feed you to my dogs!” Farid shouted. “You are very brave, although I don’t know if you understand that!”

“And here I took you for a bit of a sycophant, Farid,” Baryut shouted back. “A bit of a hanger-on.”

“Not in the least. You believe too little and know too much.”

Soon Baryut was trapped at the edge of a ravine. In a coffeehouse. A ravine. The prince would kill him now and the Tablet would go back to Smaragdine and he would never write another book. Or perhaps even another sentence.

Baryut wheeled around and drew his sword to make his stand at the edge of the ravine.

“Sacrilege!” Farid screamed, galloping forward. Their horses came together and they were now so close that he could smell the betel nut on Farid’s breath, could see the design on the green T-shirt he wore under the blazer.

The force of their swords clashing shuddered up and down his arm and the ground beneath their horses’ hooves caved away and they fell headlong into the ravine, still in their stirrups.

The horses were dead by the time they reached the bottom, necks snapped. The tablet had cracked into a hundred pieces.

Baryut and Farid were buried alive under the pebbles and rocks and boulders dislodged by their descent. Their mouths filled with dirt. Their bones broke.

Then, because Farid could not reach his sword, he shot Baryut in the stomach.

Baryut looked up at the ceiling fan and could hear a slow pounding that he knew was his blood abandoning his body.

As Baryut died, he had the satisfaction of knowing Farid would die, too, soon enough.

Within a month, the flesh decayed from the bodies of the two men, leaving only bones. In four months, the shifting of earth confused the collapsed skeletons of the horses and the men until there was no difference between the two.

That spring, the rains came and water trickled through the ravine, loosening the stones, picking through the bones and the pieces of the Green Tablet. Every year, the water dislodged more and more fragments until over time the Tablet became not a hundred pieces but two hundred and then a thousand, until no one piece was any larger than a Smaragdine coin.

Beyond the ravine, more wars were fought. Some the Turk won, some the Smaragdineans won. Men died searching for the Tablet. Smaragdine became a backwater held together by the weight of dead ritual and then, eventually, broken by a mad dictator who fancied himself an architect on a grand scale.

Pieces of the Tablet were carried away by the rainwater and entered the river. Fish ate them and became strange with the knowledge, uttering sentences in a language no one understood. Herons ate the fish and fishermen noticed how mournful and heavy their eyes became.

In a hundred ways, the Green Tablet reentered the world, but like the men, it had been buried alive and its knowledge with it. Reborn, it became a hidden thing, seen in glimpses from the corner of the eye. Sometimes things happened because of the Tablet that no one could understand because no one knew what the Tablet said anymore. Perhaps they never had.

And still people searched for it, never realizing it was all around them and in them, and that they could search their whole lives, die because of it, and yet it was there all the time, in front of them, even in the pattern of green mold across a dirty floor in a Tashkent coffeehouse or somewhere in the blood leaking from my body or in the patient whir of the ceiling fan overhead or in anything in the world that received love or hate or some lingering attention or...anything always forever.