Squid left early. It was the Spring equinox after all and all the responsible creatures had already swooshed home to their nestlebanks, covering their holes until the star laser passed by the cosmic keyhole on top of the Mezzar Snatch building on 2nd Avenue. The light was delicious. There was no denying any of that but one crispy wisp of luminous fat would sizzle your antenna off your exoskeleton like a grand weed whacking disintegrator. A goddess of toned zeal and brisk carriage, Squid's brother Kelpo learned the hard way.
It wasn't long after Kelpo's twelfth birthday when he got a letter from the Farm, saying they had found him a soulmate. Some lovely hybrid corn duster from the hills, some say they just made her up and she was actually a fully custom built automabombshell sport hose model like the kind we had back in '68 near the Muskeg Mallow Estuary bogs. There was nothing better for entertaining the workers there than a little of the old rusty two boots and a chainsaw relish cabaret.
Happy to finally and potentially find love, Kelpo packed his shit and took the train west to Candleback Hills (where the orangellas grow). His head was full of fluff, staring out the window forgetting everything that ever came before. Forgetting Stellar, his dogpig, Nacatak, his best ditch buddy, and of course Ma and Pa Gristlemax, his adopted mentorial monochromatic metariarchs
Squid didn't miss him much until she found the tattered cloth near the helium reserves behind Ruth's hardware and mech supply store. She had ducked into the alley to take a piss when she heard a cat behind the building. A sucker for kitty bits, she did her business and tip tentacled around the building only to see the black and white morsel flip jump over the steel fencing and into the next lot. That's when she noticed the bluey grey veil waving like a flag off the tip of an old satellite dish. On closer inspection she noticed the initials. B.V.
Boncharelle Voynich was Kelpo's first love. They were to be married last Winter until she wandered away during whale rut and we lost her in the exploding midnight surf. This veil washed up a few days later. A macabre wedding momento, I had forgotten Kelpo kept it.
I'm not sure why it was here. Did he give it away, only to be discarded by someone else. Did he make a pitstop here and hang it up as some kind of letting go ritual? Maybe but why here? Either way, it made Squid miss her sibling. She missed the company and hoped he'd be back soon with his new companion and they could all enter that new relationship dynamic. We'll figure it out, she thought.
And they might've been one happy family again but Kelpo, fool pod that he was, didn't take the ol Cosmic Hag into account when he got off the train a town early thinking he would walk and enjoy the country before the robo-rendezvous.
Out here, it gets country dark fast and if you didn't bring a torch and some common orienteering skills you'd get lost awful quick, which is what happened to poor Kelpo. To his credit he did find an abandoned barn to hole up in for the night but this shelter was a facade of swiss cheese and wasn't going to keep him from the zing of first light radiation and an inescapable doom.
There he was, Squid imagines, feeling the light creep up over the horizon, feeling the tension in his ribcage. So he reflexively, but uselessly, grabs a nearby pitchfork like he's going to ward off the Gamma Goddess with four pointy tines and a bolt of courage. And that's how she imagines his last moments.
They found his ashes and the pitchfork later that day, after the Farm sent out a search party. Squid told them to save her the remains, she had a plan.
The Farm asked her if she would be interested in Kelpo's assigned mate to which she agreed and delivered the doll the following day.
Squid named her Witchcork because it reminded her of the pitchfork and she made Kelpo's ashes into a paste and painted a mustache on his would be mate. She taught her all the secret moves and how to avoid getting zapped, charred or smoked by the grim prism of death that circles our otherwise, bucolic, little planetoid.
Squid, Veil and Pitchfork