Looking out the window right now, you’d almost think it hadn’t snowed at all yesterday. The sun came out, the temperature rose, and almost all of it melted. It’s true, there wasn’t a whole lot of snow to begin with — despite all the hand-wringing of “but it never snows in October!” (Which, even here on Long Island, I don’t think is remotely true. It’s just that it’s been so unseasonably warm right up til now.) But just about all of it’s already gone.
I didn’t do a whole lot today, though I prepped several more copies of Kaleidotrope for mailing — next Saturday, almost certainly — and I joined my weekly writing group for our regular free-writing exercise. Here’s what I came up with:
Lu Chen was crazy, a rabid dog, and he would have brought not only dishonor but destruction upon us all if Fei Yu had not stepped in and killed him. Those of us who had trained with Chen in the beginning — and especially our classmates who had sided with him in his early, more innocent insubordination or laughed off the chaos he routinely introduced into our sessions — worried we too might face reprisal at the swift steel blade of Fei Yu’s sword.
But Yu knew, even better than us, that there had already been too much bloodshed, too much of that blood spilled on the great temple’s floors. If he blamed us for Lu Chen’s actions, or at least for failing to take action against him ourselves, he said so only with his silence. If he thought we did not mourn the loss of Master Pai Mei, or weep at the sight of the Old Dragon’s charred and broken body amidst the rubble that Lu Chen had left behind, he did not say so, nor did the blade against the throat that so many of us expected — and, in truth, might have welcomed — come in the night. Fei Yu had acted where the rest of us would not, put down Lu Chen with no more effort than he might have wasted on cutting the chaff from the grain, and in doing so he had saved the temple where we could not.
The common quarters, the dormitories where we and Pai Mei had lived during our training — and where Fei Yu would have been our honored guest had he not returned from his travels to the capital a day late and in the middle of Lu Chen’s destructive spree — these buildings had burned in the fire, had been reduced to ash just as Lu Chen’s body soon would be. There would be no burial for him, no funeral rites, as we were allowed with Pai Mei or the others who Lu Chen had killed. On this one thing was Fei Yu insistent.
“Let the fires have him,” he said of Lu Chen’s body. “Let his evil deeds be burned from this earth.”
It was not always this way. Once, Lu Chen was just a farmer’s son, and the anger in him was no more or less than in any of us who had come to study with Master Pai Mei. Had the demon showed its true face back then, I do not think that anyone, much less the Old Dragon himself, would have opened his door or heart to Lu Chen.
I have never been a diligent student — eager to please, perhaps, and adept enough to parrot the movements and lessons taught to me, but too lazy to put in the real work required. I recognize this shortcoming, and admit it freely, knowing that it is possibly the only thing that saved my life. I was a friend to Lu Chen, in the beginning and even through his more recent troubles, but I was neither an ally nor a threat of any value. I could do little but watch in horror as he tore through the temple, set fire to the outlaying buildings, and gutted three of our fellow students.
No idea if there’s actually a story in there, but I had fun writing it.
Aside from the weekly free-writes, I’ve done practically no writing since returning from Banff at the beginning of September. Part of that’s been me being sick, my mother being sick, working on editing this and future issues of Kaleidotrope. And part of that’s just being thrown out of the groove of writing that I’d somehow managed to get into while I was there. I miss writing at Banff, and I miss the Centre there, but I need to get back in the regular habit of writing, working on stories, here at home. I’d like to go back to Canada some day, but I also need to apply what I worked on there to my everyday writing.
