Bring your own salt.

"Daddy I want this one." His son stands looking up at him with the picture book held above his head like an offering. Earnest little face. Such trusting eyes. The man knows all about this book. He's read about it, its alleged effect on children. In it are nonsense rhymes and painted images, fantastical creatures worked into everyday scenarios. A surreal cast to it all. Things of shadow behind doors. A lion curled around a little boy's leg under the breakfast table as he eats his eggs. The boy's eyes are glassy, doll-like. A little girl pulled through the slit at the bottom of the door so that she comes out the other side a flat little girl. It's creepy as hell. He looks down at his son. The boy is mesmerized. What has hooked him? What does he see in this, what is it that calls to him? The man can only think of the dark thoughts to which these images lead (to which he is lead), and how all this fantasy can only muddle a developing mind, confuse what is rea...

Men like the immediacy of war. There are no maybes here, there is only the truth of steel and strength of arm. Those dry philosophers do not last a minute on the fields of flying rage, nor do their brains look any different from the stableboy's when dashed on iron and stone.  If there are or ever were any such things as morals, or gods, they are absent. Some men swear they see glimmers of the divine during the heat of battle; an act of heroism, an impossible archer's shot - but afterwards, afterwards the flash does not linger. In the aftermath of armed conflict there is no soft angel-song, nor the hiss of demons in the shadows. Good and evil have no meaning to the corpses, nor to those who afterwards walk the red ruin.  Good and evil do belong here. They  did not make this happen. Nothing belongs, not here where what it means to be mortal hangs from its own bones. Indifference. The survivors nursing spirits crushed. On their faces writ large and disbelieving the e...