Tuesday 11 November 2014

Please allow me to introduce myself



I smiled, oh my brothers, but how I hated him.   He was head honcho, big cheese, grand panjandrum and didn’t he know it just.   He smiled the expansive smile of a perpetual winner and his happiness was sickening to normal, that is to say lesser, types like me.  Not that I let on, oh no.  Foremost of the archangels, and captain of the heavenly host my job was to look magnificent and adoring and to do his bloody will whenever he expressed an opinion.  He had a lot of opinions, cryptic and unknowable, but the ones concerning the physical realm, the human race, the dirtball little planet of water and mud and living clay, those opinions were sweet and smiley and joy joy joy.


He waxed rhetorical about that place, the earth, about humankind and his grand plan for them, until my stomach turned over and it was all I could do not to heave up my dinner down the front of my shiny shiny breastplate.   Oh the plans he had, my brothers, oh the grand schemes.  Glory this, and eternity that, and meanwhile who was it that was doing all the work in going hither and yon with messages and errands and yes-my-lording till my back ached?   I could have spit.    

Heaven was a chore under his smiling, enthusiastic rule and I dreamed of handing in my wings, casting off armour of office and oh so shiny sword and so on, but where would I have gone, oh my chicks and chicklets?  What could I have done?   It was thinking on such lines and in such ways that gave me the idea.  I was musing on it during one of the grand celestial conclaves, cloudy and shiny with voices raised in song and adulation and His-Bloody-Magnificence holding forth in the centre of all things about the World and the Human Race and all its divine potential.   Lots of guff about freedom and joy and each man and woman being filled with eternal spark and shine and eternal happiness and blah and blah and blah.   I tuned it out and I hatched my plan, oh my fellows, and I hatched it well.

Treason was the word, but Revolution and Uprising were words I replaced it with, for treason’s a loser’s word you see.  Succeed and all’s done and polished and forgiven and the name of treason changes.  Fail and you are in deep trouble, the deepest.   Treason against the almighty, oh yes and you heard me right, the deepest there is.

I laid my plans careful, like, shifty and sneaky and whispered in right places.   I found those who felt the same among the shining host and the silver city and made preparations.  Careful, wary and cold as we had to be for his supporters were everywhere and everywhen and watch watch watching.

Captain of the Host I was, foremost among archangels, and not for nothing did I hold those ranks.   I rose up and struck hard, my followers following as their name suggests.    Bitter and bloody the war and oh how they fought, and oh how we fought my brothers and sisters.

Then all was done.   The enemy scattered and broken and depleted in number like ants after giving their hilly home a kicking.   I took the throne for myself and none of my fellow revolutionaries dared say no, for they’d seen hadn’t they what I could do.   Of course they had.   And they were ready to serve and ready to obey.  Suited me it did, comfortable that old seat was, and is to this day.

As for the enemy, the almighty, that smiling tyrant with his talk of freedom and glory and eternal hope for every crawling slithering muddy man and woman on the earth?   Cast down, cast out and all my worthy warriors to hunt him down and blacken his name from here to there and back again.   I was running the show now and always would be.   Order and discipline the order of the day now my children, and for each little thing a right way and a wrong way.   Look up and smile now, little humans, little cheery chappies, and I’ll tell you how to do things right, my way, the true way.    World without bloody end and not a moment too soon.

(a prompt for Light and Shade Challenge - Gunpowder, Treason & Plot and Studio30Plus "you are in deep trouble")

8 comments:

  1. Beautifully crafted and elegantly twisted x

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  2. What a great twist! I assumed it was Lucifer speaking, and was enjoying your take on Lucifer's story. And then... ha! Even better! An excellent example of how history is written by the victors.

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    1. Thanks WH, I was hoping that little twist would be worth it, and the idea that the victor chooses the telling of the story was at the heart of the story (and indeed in the narrator's comments about treason v revolution)

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  3. Hey, I know this story. Your main character's actions are gonna come round and bite him on the ass. Nicely done.

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  4. A tale for our modern politics... well done.

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  5. I may have shivered...what an elegant twist and wow! what an outcome.

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  6. Clever and well-written, as always, and I love a good twisty bit. Nice!

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