City of Saints and Madmen

Wrede, Christopher, “The Chronic Squidanthropist, the Doctor, and the Play of Medical Power,”

Journal of Squid-RelatedPsychological Diseases, Vol. 377, No. 2, Recluse Press.

Wrede, Christopher, Institutions of Confinement, Hospitals, Asylums, and Prisons in the Southern Cities, Recluse Press.

Wrede, Christopher, Squidologist Quackery Unmasked, Recluse Press.

Xyskander, Melanie, The Hoegbotton Guide to Nosomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.

Yit,Florence, The Hoegbotton Guide to Nudomania, Hoegbotton & Sons Press.

Yowler, John, The Beaten Child: The Essential Iniquity of Physical Abuse, Mother’s Milk Publishing.

(The noted writer Sirin once said, “Every unhappy family is the same. Every happy family is unique.” The beatings could be bad, but not as bad as the ones here.)

Yowler, John, The Present-Absent Father, Mushroom Studies Press.

(The old grandfather clock dolling out my doom. The nightly “calls to prayer” that he could not protect me from.)

Zeel, George H., The Book of Squidanthropy, Frankwrithe & Lewden.

(It is coming sooner than I thought — the transformation they wish to deny me. One night, although it is forbidden, I shall sneak past the guards and slide out into the yard, sidle up to the fence, and flow through and over it as suits my new self…)

Zenith, C. N., E fective Techniques for Building Suspense, Frankwrithe & Lewden.

Zither, Marianne, The Triumph of Madness Over Guilt, Frankwrithe & Lewden.

(… under the light of the moon, with sweet, sweet longing, I make for the River Moth. Through the tangle of branches and moon-bright leaves, I surge toward the river. I can smell it, mad with silt, and hear its gurgling roar. Finally, the mud of the riverbank is under my tentacles, firm yet soft, and the grass can no longer lacerate my arms. For a moment, I remain on the river bank, looking out across the black waters reflecting the clouds above, and just watch the slow current, the way the water wavers and flows.

I remember my mother, my father, the squid mills of my youth, the vast, silent library…) Zonn, Crathputt, How to Hold Your Audience in Thrall to the Very End, Frankwrithe & Lewden.

Zzy, Veriand, Satisfying Conclusions: Epiphanies in Squid Transformations, Frankwrithe & Lewden.

(…then, with the strobing lights of my fellow squid to guide me, I baptize myself in the water, let it take me down into the silt, the sodden leaves, my lungs filling with the essence of life, my mantle full, my third eye already raking through the darkness, filling it with luminescence. The water smells of a thousand wonderful things. I am feather-light in its embrace. I want to cry for the joy of it. Slowly, slowly, I head for my brothers and sisters, disappearing from the sight of the doctors and the attendants, impervious to their recriminations, once more what I was always meant to be…)

THE HOEGBOTTON FAMILY HISTORY by Orem Hoegbotton

Nine souls we were in the old city. Now, there remain of us only two: myself and my brother Myon. Our father and mother knew what it meant to have a homeland, but lived to see it taken from them by the Kalif. Once, we were a united people living in Yakuda — a long, wide valley through which ran theDalquinRiver. It was hilly territory and my ancestors liked nothing better than to ride through the thick forests on our sturdy horses. Before we settled in the valley, we had come from a place farther to the west where, for a time, we had been members of a mighty empire, much greater than that of the Kalif.

Some even breathed the word “Saphant.” We were also known for our rug weaving and the elaborate ceremonies, lasting for weeks, by which we said farewell to our dead. But by the time I was born, the Kalif’s armies had driven us from our homes and we had become refugees. We lost our valley first. Then we lost our horses to the ice and cold as we circled far to the north to avoid death at the hands of the Kalif. As we entered the eastern lands, we lost our very name, “Hyggboutten” become “Hoegbotton” because this sounded less like the names of our distant cousins, the warlike Haragck.

I have tried in this account to tell what our daily lives were like and how we came to survive and to prosper.

THE EARLY DAYS

My brothers and sisters and I were all brought up in Urlskinder, south of the lands of the Skamoo, but far north of Morrow. Urlskinder lay upon the southeast bank of theGeberniaRiver, in that territory claimed by the Kalif’s Empire but rarely taxed or visited by his men. The city had been built on unending plains, with no escape from the cold winds that blew in from the river.

Our house stood on a street that stretched from the Gebernia itself up to the market square and eventually to the larger city ofOrsha, some seventeen miles to the north. My father would add rooms onto the house whenever we had the money. Behind the house, we made a very large garden, and in the front of the house a small garden with two cherry trees.

I do not know the number of people who lived in Urlskinder, but I do know that we had one high church surrounded by five lesser buildings, all devoted to the northern-most outposts of the Truffidian faith. We had ten shops for supplies, 250 houses, and three schools. Everywhere, even with the muffling snow that caused such hardship, we could hear the students reciting from their texts through the late afternoon.

The greatest majority of our people at that time were workers; very few merchants, although we would grow strong in that line. Most of them wove prayer shawls, shirts, and curtains. Some made the religious icons that the Truffidians used in their church and often exported to greater areas of worship in the south.

Yet others learned to write the sacred words that were inserted into the icons.

The best weavers were the artists who could weave as many as 60, 70, or even 80 threads into each inch of material. These weaver-artists were sought out by the wealthy buyers, and they were always busy. Everything they produced was bought. At the market, there would often be traders from far away, their ships anchored in the middle of the Gebernia and their longboats a common sight on the riverbank.

We had five or six weaver stools in our house. Every adult wove, and even some girls were hired to work with us, but we were not of those who had steady work. There was a fixed price for the raw material, and every store would buy it in exchange for merchandise, but when we put our hard work into them and made the prayer shawls, few would buy them. They looked like the other shawls to us, but the people knew that we were not Truffidians.

As I grew older, I could see that our father was a sick man. He could not work. In the summer, he would sit in our front garden trying to catch his breath. In the winter, he stayed in the house. His ambition was that at least one child of his should leave behind the old ways and become learned in the ways of the Truffidian priests, so as to advance the family. The old ways, tied more to the earth and the sky than to the idea of a God, marked us as different from the others. But, as insult added to injury, my father had to pay a fee for such teachings. I know this pained him since food was always scarce. An aura of poverty existed in our house. Sometimes I was sent away to the nearby town, to a hostel for the poor, and there I ate “days.” (This meant I was supposed to be given a meal in a different wealthy family’s house each day of the week. This was a customary way of seeing to it that students —