text: (Tw: suggestive violence, nightmarish imagery, amoral and wanton displays of greed, necromancy) Throughout a brief notoriety during that heightened forest of chiseled moon dust lay on the brickyard stockades: Weimar: burnt-out. 1923. Small children, holes in their faces, are a cherubim so wan and fragile. Seven days did me and Seleck sit squat in the shinola of the straightway into a puddle of hellwater. It was after many hours mired among the cabaret moribund whereupon we were promenading, penniless, peering for some reprieve among a pauperized downhill street without making ends meet, milling, marooned in the rotten heaps, grasping at every turn around for worthless mark notes findable during the hours where we could not feign sleep; once piled, we inspected the tender tarnished from having a cent for us to claim as honorable payment, but the marks were sometimes still crisp enough to be shredded into imitation lettuce until we ate enough for our throats to swallow what would only stay cooly as our insides would, listless, bleed ink no longer a currency valuable, paled ourselves until our minds grew faster than our thoughts could catch up for a bit, so as to breathe evenly. So, all of the sudden, sprach so suggestively did Seleck surmise a plot, he almost shouted! --and so smiling brighter than the varnished shimmer seen on the empty dark streets at a limitless sprawl ahead from our own placement amid the spirals and moribund, Protestant church tops crooked into facades endless below what shadowy debris was awaiting our blameless greed, did my better devise an impious proposal: there is no wealth richer than the smiles of unmarked children. Seleck then pointed toward the national treasury silhouette domelike, marbled in blemished dimness with vast stone construction that was emptying our sight, nearly an entire kilometer from where we stood at the beginning of our ingenious looting spree; furthering back to our proximity, he then lifted his wiry profile past where the streetwater ran igneous, it seemed, under where even vagrant street lanterns joined alongside his surveying that left me aghast & flummoxed while at his flank, Seleck went about sizing up the districts, finding room in his eyes for looking deeper across steelwork crosses and finally, with a soft howl of fingers freed from a gentle sigh for a fist meant for me to accede deferentially, went ahead & started to fulsomely motion me to follow him under the enormous canopied shade. Beneath the strobe of darkening flem did I see his mouth finish his movements so delayed deliberately were his actions and directions for our heist, whereas never betraying that selfsame smile Seleck shone that was so carefully craven and toothsome, the words he sprach were almost penciled into a newsprint caricature: The teeth of children, a rare form of currency nowadays. Take them away! During the first day of our desperate theft, Seleck would search throughout the abandoned storefronts for any items that could attract our orphaned quarry. Wooden toys, bright tarnished pennants, a tin red wagon to place the previous within. Night sprawled a city. * When sundown fell across the hinterlands, the initial reconnaissance matured into the hunt once our ornamental shadows went dropsical underneath the moonlit rooftops, then canopied inside-out down an itinerant sewer grate alongside the concrete, growing contrasted, spindly while we break down the doors fastened over the mouths mewling before taken out and left carefree. Our shadows, once dogged pursuers, would remain blameless during our expedition. Watch them as twofold they flow away from our flesh, becoming sovereign while the body suffers no shade astride its struggle to suffocate the winds that blew no betterment the way of the flesh, the physical. Seleck was not alarmed to see that his prediction proved to be a demonstrably sound success. The prospect for our enrichment seemed to lay before us in gilded pavement, precipitous, interstices of a crestfallen Germany wherein, luminosity almost alien, our newfound currency was ushered forth between our pockets and the hunt for riches beyond the world's rotten belief: to follow our own intransigence for personal want to supersede our needs. We grinned brightly with beatific greed etching our contoured ligaments round fat smiles. Success was ripe for the taking. With an incontrovertible methodology in place to secure consistency with our new, albeit unconventional, gold mine. Still, we experimented with the remains, some much-needed frivolity for our fetching moods. The children were not very challenging to take from. Seleck looked bored from how easy it was during our daily spree. * Seleck was frugality in its economy of spentthrift rags twilled by stitches he combed so finely, the seams were almost fused into the motley skin and bones bent on his sinuous figure, proportions inside his threads rictused thinly whereupon walked a small, lean and high-shouldered man who was, to my recollection, shown to be less and less so spartan when his lips would swipe wetly until twofold, both rows of petite, prawnlike teeth inching as though the edges had bitten into a landmark seeming before his outsized mouth was chewing at some tantalizing part of the city's arterial periphery; only once the scenery was minced into his rhetorical meat, did my dearest fiend go manifest a voice, ventriloquistic, a terrible & cunning possession that faintly shone within his two opalescent eyes. Eyes that were so darkly luminous behind his furrowing pair of silver-rimmed spectacles, artificially enclosed his ravenous intelligence beneath a coinage he adorned often as he would breathe, seeming ready for his closed lid entry into the ferry's subterranean admission fee. Meticulous was his makeup: for any monster who has designs from a gentle swelling of the heart's wayward breeze such as Seleck was noteworthy since his behavior did not appear consistent with the unreflecting subjectivity of a narcissistic twerp. Psychiatric infirmary: where we were paired together, initially. His wicked desires were altogether unique, something the whole pauperized world therein could never diagnostically make ends meet with a comfortable appellate to merit his becalmed viscosity, free from moral vexation or any other poisonous privy: a maverick, worldly. * The next morning, we were going onward with the second day with expectations for our easy killing in fortune withdrawing our sibling surfeiting, aplomb, took every molar and incisor and sanded filament that our witless quality could grab and pilfer, always cackling during our getaway sprints alongside the concrete pillars without seepage, scurrying stealthily with the sewage when there was no one to take umbrage at what gleaming dentistry did we collect for seven days, our crime against the defenseless: savored with vehement simplicity. Each day when we awoke successively, sent ourselves jumping into pure jouissance, as though each end of our tour's exploits was so crude in shambles it shot us shameless, agog gleefully, bouncing from burglary again without ends in this tattered trampoline of our pillage, our evenings never less than what our pockets showered underneath where once again, our two shapes sat in a storefront vestibule, the glass beside us sieves bloodless when reflecting our sleeping heaps, sheepskin did dreams leave us entirely. Soundly, albeit slowly, did our sentences mobilize beneath the forms from where our acrimony took out without the children to have the slightest inkling to speak against our leave, seeing as we sprang and somersault routinely away, speedily to form a full blooming wraith, convex and darkly luminous in tenebrae long and impenetrable above the abandoned beer garden. Avalanches of vermin near starved to death and occasional sounds of crashing objects inside the townhouses poured out amply from habitations either by daytime visits, or shrouded indigo forever underneath the rills of the unconditional nightmare, the celebrants alike and prancing; maecdemic. Smashed windows refracted the oilskin dimness outside the similarly dismal constellation that shone dripping the entrails of extinguished shouts across the galaxy from their anguished sources that are only bloodless flickers in a cobalt-blue pitch engulfing the horizon with the unreflecting gorge of a celestial autopsy left festering after a defect of intelligent error cannot be stitched back from the depleted masses siphoning matter and hot gas cooly until death is smiling without the glint of death in a supernal lattice masking every living particle in a flash of a torn eye splayed over the awareness of pain that continues even in our falsely dreamt similitudes of catafalque recumbency where no body has a need except for glamorized cremation of the zeitgeist, a monkier for our foibles open-ended like a abdominal wound lacerated identical into dozens of slaughtered children stray among the strata varnished by street lamps bombarded with pamphlets of manifestos, illegitimate by the scandals their revolts will burn alive without a single dime to their heartless insurrection against themself, then occluded across every avenue as the message of paper becomes another rancid, coarse color selected to make the earlier years of decadence be pauperized until houses too are broken at our calling, then wickedly head over shouldered over quartered parts thrown toward ransacked salons and public monuments belying ancestral line of atomistic ethnic disenfranchisement. Alps shudder when I moved my glance, glaceous and generously soft when the following mornings came without a cinch, since as a scandal, there was no authority around, and all currency paled in this period of history when our own worthiness perennially would make us bachelors fetching enough for our legacy to be kept under matchbook streaks- discretion matching the laudable standard of excellence none other than Seleck delivered without having a single minute of his ploy be exposed to reproach, let alone opposition that would force us to leave earlier than our final stop inbound: the Treasury. So we drank imperturbable to the broad zenith, day after daybreak into benighted fall, our voices screeching sardonically many moons for each successive victory amid robbing the victims blind, all porcelain smashed and sunken beneath Fortune's glancing reprisal. Faintly above our surfeiting sleeves raised over our heads in vainglorious displays of our desperate happiness umpteenth reach below the horizon's crenellated debriefing: beyond us, every dawning brought a gigantic, fuming sky's orangish-pale furloughed counterfeit, a celestial acceptage moist long after the dark had finished what incriminating nightgown remains true enough to explode all this efficaciousness into smithereens, amply. * All went beautifully, with not a care for destiny or opposition for us to flinch a second along the swift means that will permit riches vaster than any nation on the face this sundry Earth. That was true until we encountered Kane. Kane despoiled what we had done during that desperate time. The outcry of our once unyielding killings, the jalouised orphanage of children who cried without comeuppance, who once were loamy as fleece-lined angels promising glory without having guts to spare among the guilty, swore fealty to Kane for revenge beyond where they lay bottommost graveyard proscenium stagework that was riotous six days without cessation in sight: here they returned, raised insurrection against our almost flawless relay toward the Treasury, requisitioned at the swift behest of Kane's interception, until the children were elongate, spidery undead so hideous that the children emerge behind us as the seventh day's monstratum: diaphanous, hollow and wrathful, slithering where we once sat and sifting the night until Kane could catch us right as we could taste wealth beyond any molestation it was belonging to, insipid though it would seem. And so our minds, doubled until both of us were some kind of desperate, panting beast with the power of two lesser shapes making a break against the weather and the pugilist glares of the city destroying all attempts at us getting out of this mess clean and saintly... Undoubtedly, neither of us felt that the spree could pan out as normal any longer, seeing as the conditions were not right for repeated attempts due to certain forces underway against Seleck's premonition of faultless minted disposal into the Treasury: his smile faded until it went sallow overnight, the cheekbones a suddenlink sorrow that had destroyed his clairvoyance until anger was visible, making him useless and clumsy as we fled, both now fledgling escapees. The vulcanized children whispering warnings, sweetly these oppressive sounds became the flotsam to our sleepless terror, inexhaustible infantry under the control of Kane's karmic concrete vertigo. Kane sent his newly fashioned toy boys into a sudden death burlesque flotilla across the nightsoil of the city, and for the longest day of the week at the end of the world's worst case was unloaded in their sweet angel heads, bent sideways where temples were coldly kissed by the wet, crushed seraphim bolt-iron rose that gave each unfeeling child their menagerie a litter of bloody eyes and welted butterflies fly away. It appears today is not the first warning of the nightmare having no end outside. The outcome was not so cleanly ameliorated, however. The fates, everso engulfed from their original larkspur- under wizened wide and glyphlike cut eyes almost faint to the point of translucency inside time worn veil of portendfinetwilled on profiles all cloak hooded. Always mutable by force, the deeds done versus victories unwon were released until impossibly, raised for future rectification right under our aquiline noses, all of our spoils were smelted in w shower that rained down whereupon we were reduced into penniless, appearances a sheet slick with our late penalties bringing liquid heat, it would seem safe to say for the sake of Seleck & company against Kane's manipulation of the dead. * The next day, we surrendered into hellwater so voluminous that our enrichment was not immediate, but thrown over the end of our infamy, oilskins that the great and late job gave as a little token for our easy sleep.