The Steppe (Neo-Victorian Dream)

John Russell Herbert

    He dreamt that there were two males between whom no love was lost. He was sometimes the underdog, and he was sometimes a film-watcher, viewing that beautiful and endearing underdog.
    The alpha wanted to demonstrate some store product, something that was not in fact a javelin but which could be thrown like one, and there were many of these.
    Ianto volunteered, and got into a right-handed Tae Kwon Do stance, ready to sweep the light javelins away with his left arm.
    He did reasonably well at this, and the egomaniac-hero-asshole-of-society was angry.
    Ianto also had legal (?) and family troubles, by the way.
    He dreamt of some Neo-Victorian (or Alter-Victorian) society, in which Northern or English belles strolled along the sidewalks of great aqueducts.
    Fecal matter was found in this water.
    Ianto had nothing to do with that, of course, and I don't think he was even so accused, but, on a tan horse, he fled.
    He had taken finite note of something like The Pony Express (but this was not The Old West, and neither was it the Khanate of Genghis, though, as always, The Steppe was near).
    The low land was the campus of St. Mary's College of Maryland, and it was urban modernity, and it was some alternative to the Victorian Era, and . . . The Steppe was ever near.
    Ianto saw a messenger, on that Steppe, trade his mottled white horse for another, and he, Ianto, thought that the route, and those stations of fresh horses, would play a later role in his escape.
    However, he rode low on his tan horse, not up to The Steppe, but round-about back to town, to tie loose ends that needed to be tied.
    Turning left, away from the rising Steppe, he saw the dead trees of late autumn that surrounded and were behind the old Charles Hall (of St. Mary's College). Behind that building was the path that led to the great city and its aqueducts and the store that contained those javelin things, and his family home, all the places of loose ends to be tied, of honors to be paid and collected, of reconciliations to be made.
    For his loving sister, and for some less loving relative, he played a tape he'd made. He played it as a means of soul communication, but that tape with its mad layers of organist frills, interwoven with claps of recorded thunder, of course did nothing to bridge the gaps between any souls.