25-06-05

By Sam

If you spent long enough on your hands and knees in the rural American soil, sifting through the dirt, you would eventually find an arrowhead.  You would pick it up between thumb and forefinger to inspect a dull surface that barely reflects the sunlight, feel it's roughened, once-sharp edges, and see the story worn upon it.

It had begun its life enwombed in the ruptured heart of a deer.  A mighty stag, whose antlers wore the scores and scars of many battles.  He had won many prizes, such as true happiness, and the healthiest doe in the herd.  A good life, by the reckoning of a deer.  And a tragedy, from that perspective, that it should leak along such a thin shaft of wood and soak the feathers of a bird that never meant the stag any harm.  Not while it lived, anyway.

But from the perspective of the brave, crouched some distance away, bowstring still quivering beneath his calloused fingers, it is a triumph, and he takes a moment to appreciate the contentment he feels.  Soon he will cut the stag's genitals off and gut it with a knife carved from stone.  The knife was a gift from his father, along with the one hundred thousand ghosts who now gather around him, there beneath the trees.  The ghosts of his ancestors, whose voices may be silent, but he hears them nonetheless, whispering platitudes of positive reinforcement.  The sort of words that might be found on greeting cards he will never live to receive.

The flesh of the stag will be cooked, and served to those he is responsible for.  Its hide torn from its back and draped over one of his children, who will wear it until the day she dies.  During that time she will form a lifelong habit of fingering the little hole where the arrowhead made its mark, but she will never wonder what became of that little chip of stone.  Not once in her entire life.

But you know, and now you can put the arrowhead back into the ground, folding it in a blanket of dirt.  Maybe somebody else will pluck this story from the earth.  And maybe they, too, will review it on the internet.

Four out of five stars: good, but it could have done with a sex scene.  If you enjoyed it, I suggest you look up the the sky, where there are more recent stories by the same author.

-Sam

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25-06-05

By Sam

There's a good reason why we're so late in offering up our latest comic, as one might offer the town bike up in the hopes that an uneducated, pagan god might mistake her for a virgin.  And that reason is, we were waiting.

After the inauguration of our lauded fan club, we decided to sit back and wait for the squanch to appear, spread-eagled, on our porch, and the money to roll in.

I was going to buy a mountain bike.

Slopes, I believe, was planning to sponsor a third world child all the way through to Harvard Law School.  Apparently having a cut-throat defense lawyer in his pocket is part of some diabolical plan I am not yet privy to the full details of.  Something long term, I'm assured, like global warming, or rebuilding Iraq's infrastructure.

But alas, nobody seemed particularly keen to join the ranks of what I've dubbed "The Samites".  Slopes thought we might have more like if we renamed them the "Anti-Samites", at which point I got angry and told him we may as well just call them the "Slopites" and be done with it.  Glory hogger.

It quickly became apparent that we would have take the course of action which we reviled the most: continue making comics.  And so we have done exactly this.  And are now going to take a shower, and scrub ourselves with steel wool.

Not together.  That'd be a little fruity.