Story five

Story six

Story seven

Century 2.1

c.2005 adf

"Ahedonism," she said. She said ahedonism, but she meant to merely describe something rather than permit it. In fact, remanding such terminology to the verbal slag heap beyond non-existence, it joined such other illustrious utterances such as disoperation and manatoit, as having been spoken without first existing. Was it a first-time event, a burst of originalism scarped from the outermost possible reaches? Only time will tell.

Conflation and emollient once subsumed, she could bitter go on yet only humbly continue. She, as a prismatic and all-inclusive crucible of infighting - tug and give, push and pull, recriminating forgiveness - in one person, sheltered a nether-knowing brood of five sisters and one brother from all that could harm and otherwise protect them. Such were they adrift in a void of experience. In many ways she was so much more than was required or necessary, though her name was merely Abel.

The five sisters, who were they? While similar to easy, a thirst for definition of person without experience would reveal an infantile disposition, unhinged of consequences, petty to an extreme, and these five are no different. Ranging in age from precious to ineluctable. Jesu, the oldest behind her, was a battering ram of a young woman filled with the fritteringly arbitrary combativeness of at least three score and twelve years crammed into her twenty-seven. Her combative streak had earned her two husbands and a not-so-slender file of domestic abuse calls to the crosstown police station; once her unexplained presence at Abel's breakfast table reached an equilibrium with the need to ask about any new bruises, it was a known fact that her once-youthful nature had expired.

Their young sibling, Knewter, had been the baby for just long enough to espouse a general distrust of insiders that coalesced into the rather dynamic tendency toward openness to anything foreign. The suffering she withstood at the hands of her elder sisters - though whatever she was had not survived it in tact - had prepared her well to assume the role of passive oppressor to the three girls who would come after her. Not to mention the boy.

The karmadharaya Flat Head was only still approaching its zenith.

Abel found herself with the self-imposed other three, Tiene, Piras and Maya, in a woodsy floor of wandering Carolina jasmine when she had the pronouncement, which was quickly ignored by her teenage charges. So she repeated it.

"Ahedonism," she said. Their heads whirled around.

"We heard you," Piras announced, somewhat past her sister. Her seldom not-delinquent attention had been taken away by the puncture of their isolation with the stealth approach of a man unknown to them.

"You're un-happy," the stranger said toward Abel with a particular emphasis on something beyond the immediate syllabic frankness. She felt herself nod even before doing so and the telemetric pathways of feeling tightened like slack suddenly pulled from drooping power lines.

"And you're a nickel-mouth tramp. Now go on, get-y out of here and leave us alone," Abel instructed the stranger, a man in a vamp's waistcoat with nothing fine about his lower regions to expose or cover, such as was the case.

"I ain't gonna do it," he said. Then Abel turned toward her charges carelessly, stood up from the wooded quarter-acre where they had installed themselves and gathered the tattered quilt on which she had been sitting.

"Fine," she said like a last word, not to be bothered. Ahedonism indeed, but the intruder had skunked her thoughts away and before she could re-affirm this suspicion before her sibling brood, another had taken its place. As she turned after Piras passed, forming their line back toward the path out of the woodsy corner, Abel shot a glare at the stranger which half-spoke of the fear by which she sought to banish him with more than her made-up descriptions of time-lapsed indulgences repackaged for minors. The mélange of quiet rage and distrust lingered in the chlorophylled air behind them as the young woman and the three girls tromped along the overgrown paths to a chorus of flattening weeds and breaking sticks. The sun poked through a lion-bearded cumulous, bathing the woods in a harsh noon-break. Abel pulled back her head scarf, which she had fashioned herself, as sweat formed on her brow and the three in front of her on the path formed a disjointed regiment - two walking too slow and one too fast - behind which she loped like a hapless, horseless Longstreet. A hedonism indeed.