STRANGELUV'S PROFILE

Idk. People reported me. But I didn't even show my dick or anything.

The Last Musician tells the rhyming story of the collapse of six musical brothers. I dunno what else I could really say about this but I hope you guys give it a read and enjoy it. It's rather short and told in the form of a nursery rhyme so it's not anything taxing to peruse. I did all of the illustrations myself and took less than two weeks to do this whole thing, I believe. So I hope you all get something out of it :)

You can download the file here: http://rpgmaker.net/media/content/users/8763/locker/LastMusician1.pdf

Here are a few illustrations from it:

Part 3

THE SILENCING
A short story by K. Jared Hosein

Gyasi woke up on the shore of the solitary island, the dying fingers of the waves twiddling over his soles. The island sat in a silent realm, surrounded by an unending expanse of deep, deep ocean water. The starless sky lapped over itself, animated like reflux of water, and the Moon appeared as if it would on a pond's ebb. It was as if there were a second ocean suspended in the celestial heights.

This had been part of the operation.
You'll fix everything here, the physician had told him, You'll get a chance to do it all over.

Gyasi recalled the physician, aged and attired in a khaki cardigan, relating to him the risks and benefits of the operation. "This is so you could believe something you didn't before," the old physician said, "Whatever you do on the island, it will be hardwired into your neural pathways and you will believe it was real. That it really happened. The island will become part of your network. But I guess the risk is that outlandish things may occur on the island. Nightmarish, if I may."

"And I doh want to wake up believing in a nightmare," Gyasi said, nodding, tracing her fingers over his chin. But he didn't care. He brushed his palm over his hair and shook the physician's hand and asked for the earliest date.

A shuddering gale swooped over Gyasi's forehead, dragging a spiral of sand into his eyes. This prompted him to gasp and grunt, getting to his feet and rubbing his eyes with vigorous clenched fists. Wind chimes clinked in the distance but when Gyasi turned to look, he could see none, nor any domicile, quarters or even filament which a chime would dangle from. There had been no trees along the shore. Not one coconut frond. Not one coast dune thistle or fan flower.

Behind Gyasi was just an impoverished stretch of untilled sandy wasteland, working into furrows and folds all the way to a craggy slope. At the edge of the slope stood a monument, tapering to the tip, slanted and silhouetted. It had been the emblematic effigy of a lighthouse he had seen in films and book covers. The lighthouse at the edge of a forlorn sea cliff, with waves clawing at the base of the precipice.

Gyasi began walking to the lighthouse. He brushed sand out of his hair and elbows. He did not hurry. The physician had told him that there was no time limit. He would awaken when he felt satisfied with his new memory. He would open his eyes, bright with euphoria, laden with fulfillment. One world transcending into another. The island would join the archipelagoes in his mind and all unite into the complete Pangaea he paid his money for.

But what if I am never satisfied, Gyasi pondered as he meandered along the shore, What if I get stuck in this place forever?

But he tried not to think about it. He hung his head and looked at the coast. Back in Mayaro and Manzanilla, he would observe the waves washing over the tiny chip-chip shells, fissioned to look like calcified butterfly wings. As the waves would retract, the water would be pulled over the shells to look like two tiny jet streams. Myriads of chip-chip shells along the seashore would look like they were soaring in flight against a russet sky backdrop.

But there were no shells on this beach. Just like there was no fronds. Or grass. The waves pushed and retracted in almost an artificial way, as if propelled by some tidal mechanism in the distance, the winds by gigantic fans, oscillating and whirring from beyond the horizon. Gyasi suddenly felt despair, thinking about this. This all was artificial. He had known this, but being here on the island was a constant reminder of it. He came here to find a means of escape. The longer he stayed here, the longer he would realize how artificial this is. He needed to fix everything, so he could wake up with bright eyes once again.

So he could scratch his fingers against an early morning grin beneath the tussled blankets.

The sound of the wind chimes continued. He peered out again, but he could see none. They were growing louder. A swirl of sea breeze swept up some sand in a corkscrew motion. He was almost at the lighthouse now. Its white granite exterior had become apparent now as the darkness began to recede around its corners, like the last moments of a lunar eclipse. He breathed a sigh of relief when he noticed the stairway leading up to it. Though it was slippery and cracked and sandwiched by moistened salt and sediment, he was glad he did not need to climb up those rocks.

Cold, acid winds circled the top of the precipice. At the doorstep of the light house hung a tintinnabulum that rotated like a cradle's mobile. From it hung three little bells suspended from old twine leading up to a rusted silver trifecta of crescent moons welded together, clumps of metal banding together at their meeting position. The bells produced a soft jingling but nothing like the perpetual reverberations of the wind chimes. Even with the winds churning about his ear lobes, making muffled fluttering noises like an albatoss' wings, the chiming was still lucid and amplified.

To the right of the doorway stood a circular slab of marble. There had been a small heart-shaped groove carved into the centre of the slab and it was only until closer inspection that Gyasi noticed they resembled two footprints. A plaque rested on the back of the slab with a stanza Gyasi recalled reading from an old poetry collection:

"THERE is a silence where hath been no sound,
There is a silence where no sound may be,
In the cold grave—under the deep, deep sea."

Gyasi traced his fingers over the fine lettering, over each carefully chiselled word. Chiselled just for him, for this experience. He lifted his chin and stared out at the sea. The black waters, washing over itself. Dark rumbling undines of the deep, growling and grimacing and swallowing and regurgitating themselves over and over.

"It'll be like it never happened," the physician had told him, nudging his spectacles, "You would have silenced that memory and all the pain associated with it. You'll wake up a free man. You've suffered yourself enough over it."

Out there, he had to go. To get her back. To reverse this moment, this wrong.But where? Which spot? In this deep, deep sea. Did he need to traverse this blighted Panthalassa in this permanent nightfall? He looked up at the Moon, still swishing as if it were its own reflection, tattooed on a lake crest.

The door to the lighthouse flung open and flailed violently against the wind, splintering its corners. Its dampened wood chafed against the lighthouse granite. Flakes of paint flitted off like white insects. Gyasi walked to the door and held it steady with one arm outstretched as he entered the lighthouse. In the lighthouse was a spiralling staircase leading up to a deck.

No wind here. And the air was dry. His skin felt itchy. He could hear the chimes again. But this time he could hear them coming from above. From the deck. They were not loud but he felt them giving him a headache. He also heard laughing. Chattering. Voices rinsed with that liming tone. They all made his head hurt. Gyasi clamped his palms over his ears but the sounds were just as clear. He could see the noon sun. Cards flipping over, aces, jacks, spades. A bottle of puncheon as a table centrepiece. The talking, the usual gibberish.

He began climbing the spiral staircase, his heart beating faster and faster. He could feel a wind now. A warm, sweet wind that could sway any salsa siren's skirt. He imagined her whispering in his ear, "Is a good day." He remembered his feet clasping onto his tough leather sandals as they walked into the old, dilapidated beach house. A relic of a past he knew nothing about, and imagined a kitchen, a bedroom, a living room amongst the old rubble and beer bottle shards. Even as its portico was falling apart.

"What is the memory you want erased?" the physician had asked.

Gyasi replied without pause, "My eight year old daughter drown a few years back."

The physician swiveled in his chair. "They found the body?"

"No," Gyasi said, hanging his head low, "She wash away."

Gyasi's heart beat viciously. He was almost at the deck. And he could hear the woman. "Oh, God," she moaned as she did not even know his name. They posed beer bottles against each other's lips, licking the dripping alcohol off each other's tongues. They put the bottles at their feet and he hoisted her skirt. His daughter would be okay, he had thought. He gritted his teeth. Ten minutes. Someone would watch her. The thoughts skipped in his head, making his eyes well up. Making his cheeks swell.

Gyasi got to the deck. And there he saw himself against the woman, just as he had been in the desolate ramshackle beach house. Her neck arching in dissipated bliss, oblivious to anything but her own nerve endings. Their feet shuffled as they moved. The beer bottles clinked, hitting each other, rolling back and forth, back and forth against her toes. Back and forth. Clink. Chime. Chime. Louder. Chime.

No sound left.

Just the wind chimes. At her toes.

Over and over again.

"Is a good day," he could hear the woman again.

Gyasi roared and grabbed the woman by her shoulders. She turned to him and now she had no face. Her features melted off. He bellowed at her. Bellowed like a madman in the street. And with one strong plunge, pushed her down the platform. She had no mouth. She could not scream. He turned around to see if his doppelganger was still there but it had vanished. Now he was alone. He peered down the deck and her body was gone. His face grew hot.

The chimes stopped. They were replaced by a low electrical humming. And it was only when Gyasi peered out the lighthouse deck window, he noticed the spotlight blaring on the ocean, forming an eddying orb of light on the tumbling rip tides. That's where she is, Gyasi thought. He knew it.

He rushed out of the lighthouse, peeling his shirt off his back as he scampered to the shore and dove into the water. He thrashed his body against the oncoming waves, floundering over them, his muscles sore as he fought the currents. But the spotlight was ahead. He looked at the lighthouse and its apex which discharged the gleam. Baby, I comin, he said to himself, I almost there. Daddy comin, baby girl. The salt burned his eyes, but he also had been crying. Tears lost in the silent ocean deep.

He swam to the spotlight and looked back up at the lighthouse. The golden light bathed him. Manna from heaven, he thought. A lone ethereal sun ray piercing through the looming shroud. But she had not been there. He swam the perimeter of the spotlight. His baby was not there. He then felt something clutching to his feet. Grassy tendrils binding his ankles and pulling him down.

But he did not fight. It was as if he was being chaperoned into the deep. Slowly, it dragged him through the waters. He could not breathe. But he found that he did not need to. As soon as his soles touched the bed, the tendrils loosened and lied flat against the lower stratum. There he gazed upon a statue sculpted from the neatest alabaster. He sighed, bubbles coming out of his nostrils, the only sound he could hear in the solemn stillness. Even through the turbidity, her tiny features fashioned against the compact gypsum were unmistakable. This was his little girl.

His Giselle.

He wrapped one of his arms around the statue and tucked it against the crook of his shoulder. He swam with the tides this time and getting back to shore had not been a struggle like before. He whimpered as he lied on the shore, the statue of the little girl lying rigid and horizontal next to him on the sand. She was here again. He could see her again. Her countenance set in stone. Her almond-sliver eyes, her button nose, even the tiny scar on her chin she had gotten while learning to cycle without the training wheels. He reached out and kissed the scar.

Gyasi got up and took her under his arm again, making sure not to drag her against the sand. She did not deserve that. He took her back to the lighthouse, to the pedestal and fit her tiny feet against the groove there. He kissed her nose and said to her, "Seeing you again make me so happy, Giselle."

He looked at the sky and saw that the night was ending.

Looking out at the horizon once again, he squinted his eyes just to see the sunrise in the milky lavender sky.

author=Killer Wolf
I enjoyed this, but the jackass aspect of my personality wants to ask where the "Tried to write a novel from the perspective of a black woman..." slide was.

Haha, you remembered that. I finished that, actually, but changed it to an Indian Muslim girl.