Fossiloctopus by Forrest Aguirre Read Free Book Online Page A

The silk veil caught him full in the face, dazzling his eyes and jarring loose a tenuously-connected string of facts and mnemons.
    Silk,
    rumored to be discovered in China by lady His-Ling-Shih, wife of the Yellow Emperor and, later, Goddess of Silk.
    Ann Francis Robbins,
    screen name Nancy Davis, a bit actress of no great fame. She had come to "Ron" in his capacity as President of the Screen Actors’ Guild. He helped her clear her name from the communist blacklist in 1951, and the couple was married soon thereafter.
    Hellcats of the Navy,
    English with Japanese and English subtitles, 1957, starring Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis.
    Japan,
    the world's second leading producer of silk.
    China,
    the world's leading producer of silk. Also the first communist country that Ronald Reagan ever visited. Before the Iran-Contra scandal. Before the fall of the Soviet Union.
    Before the fall of a shoebox, gifted to Nancy by Imelda Marcos, onto his head.
    The veil slipped from his face.
    A strange old woman with a familiar voice called out "Ron? Where have you gotten to now? Are you alright?"
    Down the hall, someone turned on a light.
     
     
     
    The Seven Tattoos of Inisto Cantaglia
     
    You won’t find his name.  Your search is over before it has begun despite long hours at a microfiche table, stamp-licking yourself nauseous, and a hundred paper cuts caught writing out checks to the world’s most respected genealogists and private investigators.  Your dreams corrode in the witching hour with distant whispered echoes from unseen mouths, his name muffled and cowled in inky cerements.  “Inisto Cantaglia, Inisto Cantaglia, Inisto Cantaglia . . .” until the words explode like flame into morning and you are left grasping for the fast fading dream that is being eclipsed by the darkness of your waking consciousness.
    Though perhaps lonely, you are not alone.  Alongside you, the crowd watches, hypnotized.
    The manta-ray night is his canvas.  Nyx’s indigo cloak is punctured only feebly by stars and sparklers, like lighthouse flashes from the neutron universe, briefly flashing with relativistic lensing, only to be engulfed in strands of nebulae and cloudbanks.  His audience are everymen, the drabness of their clothes throbbing with sameness and mediocrity.  Their eyes occasionally light up as the celebration passes them, but it is only a reflection of someone else’s festivity.  They are incapable of self-illumination.  They are there to be entertained.  And Inisto Cantaglia is happy to bring light and entertainment to these beer-soaked streets where the buildings loom, leaning over the everyman mob like MacBeth’s witches peering down into their soot-charred cauldrons, seeking the essence of prophetic apparitions.
    He moves like a dynamo through the molasses masses, a man alive, animated, sharply aware of the mind-numbed insensates that surround him.  His bare skin glistens, as if the black cowls and misshapen shawls of the onlookers serve to insulate his naked torso from the frosted night air.  But the heat that causes his perspiration comes from within – from within turned without in magma and white fireballs flared past the pair of burning sticks that he wields in a frenzied dance, trying to keep his spectators at bay.  His is the only true illumination.  Bright clouds, fiery jets, burning ovoids burst beyond his lips.  He is the Cassanova of Vulcan.  Prometheus’ Lover.  The Tongue of Flame.
    And in the light of the performance they see – you see – the seven tattoos of Inisto Cantaglia:
     
    THE SALAMANDER  - Over his left breast – over the region of the heart – writhes the salamander.  The demonic serpentine bottom half undulates in the glow of the flames, reaching out to escape its epidermic prison and return home to the plane of fire.  Atop the fire-adder’s hocks are a trunk, a head, and two arms of human appearance, but devilish provenance.  The mustachio face might be that of Saint Pol-Roux or