The Peregrine Adventurine of Gingivitis McKillerothers

The Peregrine Adventurine of Gingivitis McKillerothers

I.

The implacable evil covered the land and dusted even the quiet corners of mens souls in that scrum brambled-over concrete. The evil could not be placked. All men could do was beseech other more benign powers for their placking. And the benign only placked in quantities picayune according to their whims.

So much was the evil implacable in that place. It was Sinitic in its inscrutability. The evil could not be placked or scruted.

Gingivitis McKillerothers knew this. He picked at his abcessed tooth and grumbled about his docile possibilities in the face of such evil. As he pulled his dick out of his sister, he said. ‘Rain’s a comin’. His wretched necromance waned efficacy by the day. He had ciphered the spell to last the season, but had not included the heat in the realities material. His sister grimaced and smiled. Her eyes lolled about as only a holler golem can.

But they didn’t know.

Gingivitis — His mother had given him that name. She had bestowed it lovingly upon the newborn in honor of her brother, Palmyrean, who had used bootlegging money to pay for the infant’s birth. Gingivitis — She had thought it meant “Gin gives life” but in Latin.

She did not know.

In fact nearly everyone in their valley did not know. Including most certainly not of Latin. McThomas Olber, the town notary and varmint trapper, had a sense of events, could quote Tacitus and fragments of Pelagius, but even he remained focused on local renown as he dipped into his erudition and drew out vellums flourished and inscribed with dots and slashes of the Arcane for weddings, anniversaries and untimely funerals. However, beyond that occasionally liminal spellworkery, Latin was rare as whale meat in that Hill-Forest, Knowledge even rarer, and Perspicacity of the Soul drifted in single molecules.

Shaking off the old hauntings, Gingivitis ran a hand through hair cropped short as the grass of a penal colony. The petrichor wafted across the asphalt while the first yammering of the storm pattered increasingly up to dusk’s edge. They had sought comfort for the day beneath an overpass. At night, the Farm to Market road was only occasioned by desolate F-250s and battered wanderers. In the three evenings he smuggled the two of them down the road, there was little else but travellers in shame, sharing squalor, eyes hunched over, shoulders downcast. He joyed at the insight that The Demiurge would not distinguish them huddled under the overpass from dust below a table cast aside in a house left for ruin. A dead stench joined them in shelter as the downpour devoured the remnant light of the day star.