Yesteryear Fiction

Into the Wizard
By William C. Burns, Jr.


"Metaphors reveal a deeper truth about ourselves and hence the Universe . . ."
Her favorite quote and yet today he was ill. He was suffering and she could see it. Suffering on the Metaphoric plane . . .
She brought the tea, set the resonance of the room, and sat quietly; nothing helped.
Sera reached through the gloom, moved metaphorically into his mind.
Turbulence beneath the calm and something was wrong. It was frightening. His was a powerful mind and the Tempest within him was . . .Armageddon on a local scale .
Danger, real palpable danger, she wanted to run but something within the maelstrom asked her for help. Something in the wind. . .She turned into the wind, turned to face it.
Through pounding storms, tsunamis filled with dead sea things, tsunamis high enough to drown the World, through firetroms and the nine levels of Cerburis, she fought kicked and crawled. She was filthy, cut and mad with fatigue.
And at the eye of the storm, in the center of this Hell she saw the memory of a woman made of snowflakes, a woman made of ice.
Wherever the memory touched his mind, something bad was happening. The memory was parasitic. It was rewriting the other memories, perverting them into parasitic clones, growing exponentially in number.
The storms were his mind's immune system trying to help him survive and it wasn't working. He was dying inside . . .Oh dear God . . .
She wasn't even aware that something inside her was changing, mutating . . .into . . . How do you say what can't be said . . .? Her hands were becoming, something . . . There was something about her hands. Her hands were becoming anti~parasites. And she within her grew a need. She wanted to touch the parasites. She could feel the correctness in this.
The first thought parasite she touched withered and died. The good memory could not be recovered but it would not destroy any of the others. She touched another and another and . . .
She extended her hands, for now she had many, like a Hindu goddess, hands in all directions. She caressed all the parts of his mind and where her hands touched him a healing began.
And he smiled.


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Bill is an artist, poet, electrical engineering educator. He has placed stories and poetry allover the web since the early Al Gore days. When asked, he replied, “My life?. . . throw in a few flying zombies and you'd have an episode of Dr. Who.”