Tag Archives: fiction

Cinnamon, Synonyms, Arsenic and Old Lace

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She couldn’t explain, even to herself why she did it, only that perhaps, it had something to do with the fact that it was really his fault for enabling her, for confiding in her and trusting her and believing in her and for his incoherent faith in human decency.  She knew that it was possible, perhaps even probable that at some point he’d discover what she’d been doing.  No one could be so gullible, so naïve and so blind as to remain forever in the dark unless he volitionally chose to do so, perhaps to protect her from the consequences of her betrayals but also to protect himself.  Life is strange and has its own rhythms, its own purposes, its own unfathomable reasons.

He almost subliminally suspected something was not as it should be but, then again, the world was so screwed up, evil loudly proclaiming itself to be virtuous as murder and mayhem and corruption continued their millennial reign.  For some inexplicable reason he somehow felt that it was his responsibility to fight against the whirlwind and do something, however slight and ineffective, to at least try to stem the awful tide.  So he continued in that relationship which superficially seemed so positive to others and to her as well, but from his heart, not in the night but during odd times during the day, unpleasant echoes seemed to seek out shadows into which they whispered Cassandric warnings.

Odd how the personal and the global seemed to resonate while the universe looked on, or perhaps just infrequently shared a glance, disinterested, concerned only with the gravity of maintaining its own harmonics.  Life was a pest, an invader, a virus that squeaked and squealed unheard amidst the music of the spheres and if it continuously harmed itself, the universe, or perhaps the multiverse or maybe even the omniverse really couldn’t care less.  Not that it was totally indifferent, it just had an infinite number of higher priorities.

And divinity?  Well, divinity mainly slept and dreamt, tossing and turning in nightmares that too often became reality, or perhaps which merely mirrored and reflected possible realities, blissfully unaware of truth or justice or equity or other intangible dragon flies flitting among the hummingbirds and lightning tangled in the monads of its nonexistent soul.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution. Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

Aspirational Sanguinity

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He’d thrown caution to the wind, gambling again against the future and the past, willingly offering them up in exchange for the possible enchantment that appeared to be within his grasp, fleeting though it might be, hoping that one single triumph would make everything else, all the past failures, irrelevant.

It was not a unique situation. 

In the past, similar circumstances had failed to fulfill his expectations.  But they’d always extracted the full price he’d been willing to pay.  He’d been left emotionally, physically and materially drained but, he’d just start anew, never learning and hoping that he never would.

His past infatuations had rarely matured into even meaningful relationships and certainly not into “the” special relationship he’d always optimistically intuited.  Yet “rarely” had always seemed, at least momentarily, enough.  And despite his past failures, not that many but not that few, he remained optimistic.  After all, the unique experience he hoped for could only really occur, in its most profound sense, once.  And only one person out of all the people who had ever been born or would ever be born could fulfill it.  The person who, as to him, would prove to be the single source of complete resonance: amorous, intellectual, spiritual and physical, melding their individual vibrancies into a single perfect wave, one between and among them and no one else.

Or so he understood. 

Others wondered what sort of wave might coalesce through the joinder of more than just two, perhaps even many vibrancies, and the more spiritual aspired to join the ultimate wave that might be formed joining us all.

The possibility of artificial intelligence encapsulated in the verisimilitude of human form might soon complicate the premises involved.

But, as to him, at that moment, at that instant, he wondered what she, the latest catalyst for his obsession, was thinking.  Or of what, perhaps, she was dreaming.  Which raised the issue of which was the real world, the waking or the dreaming.  And then, whether the objects in a dream, the beings who seemed to populate it, had their own realities, their own dreams.  And finally, the eternal speculation as to whether we might not all just be objects in the perpetual dream of the most primordial of all denizens of the vegetable kingdom, as so many plants and flowers and shrubs and trees, especially giant redwoods, seem to hope.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2025; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, The Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.