Fresh Ink: "A Stranger at the Bochinche" by Daniel José Older

These were days of revelry and masquerades burning through the wide-open nights, when we were flickering shadows burgeoning along the dawn streets.

These were days of revelry and masquerades burning through the wide-open nights, when we were flickering shadows burgeoning along the dawn streets.

There was a different face amid the revelers this night...

The stranger wore a rumpled pin-striped suit, and an ascot that seemed to clamp the folds of his fleshy throat.

She had her quill out and was jotting down sketches in a leather-bound tome.

He bolted toward the stranger just as a billow of smoke unfurled from the ground.

They recruited their brotherhood from the upper echelons of Manhattan’s elite, and met in a high-rise downtown that they’d gutted and turned into a shadowy temple.

It was four a.m., almost no one out but the night watch and a few straggling drunks.

Ramses landed on a buttress and waited beside the snarling ’goyles and gnarled saints.

The stranger ran into a tenement and slammed the door.

A single filth-covered window looked out on the dark sky over the river, the construction lights’ glum miasmas in the night.

Stacks of parchment lay on the desk, messy, ink-blotched writing splattered across page after page.

’Twas two-fold, the insult, Ramses read, and soon Frederick took it upon himself to find the blasted monstrosity and destroy it, but alas it lurked deep in the Morgath Woods, where its villainous acolytes patrolled and genuflected alongside the hulking, tentaculous mass, inventing stories and casting shells with trembling brown hands.

’Twas two-fold, the insult, Ramses read, and soon Frederick took it upon himself to find the blasted monstrosity and destroy it, but alas it lurked deep in the Morgath Woods, where its villainous acolytes patrolled and genuflected alongside the hulking, tentaculous mass, inventing stories and casting shells with trembling brown hands.

...Frederick huddled in the bushes as the devilish acolytes prepared their sacrifice, grabbing its horns and subjugating it swiftly upon the killing floor.

Ramses nodded, barely suppressing his smile.

Flames danced along the wall of the tenement. He caught a glimpse of the stranger’s bulging eyes staring out at him before smoke engulfed the whole facade.

She held tight to him with one hand, and with the other she hacked once, twice, then three times at the seething tentacle.

The still-dark world around them seemed to be quietly careening toward some unknown catastrophe.

There would be turmoil and strife ahead, but there would also be stories and music; many long, joyful nights at the Bochinche awaited them, and there were still so many new machines to invent.