The Emperor Wants Results

by Gabriel Moseley

You must learn to take the auspices like a Roman soothsayer whose life depends on effectual gut readings. You must master the omens of the organs. The Emperor wants results.

Listen to the whispered wisdom of light as it slices through water and the screeching portents of the birds. Get to know your sky quadrants. Get real familiar with all taxonomies of grief.

Without these most basic skills, you will be doomed to wander this world forever like a lost child perpetually surprised that everything it loves will one day die.

But maybe this is too much pressure, like building a vast skyscraper out of ash? Then at least bear witness to your remaining days like a druid walking through a snowy forest on a quiet, moonlit night.

Indeed, the pale moon is most astounding. And yes, each footstep makes a most lovely crunch. But please observe that red glow on the horizon. That is not dawn. No. That is your burning village.

Watch the choking black smoke gush into the sky!

Watch those twirling embers dance like snowflakes made of fire.

Gabriel Moseley is a writer from Seattle, Washington. His short story “A Man Stands Tall” was awarded The Masters Review Anthology Prize, selected by Roxane Gay. He received the General Motors’ Future Fiction Scholarship to attend Aspen Summer Words and was named as a finalist for LitMag’s Virginia Woolf Award for Short Fiction and as a semi-finalist for L. Ron Hubbard’s Writers of the Future Contest. He holds an MFA from the University of North Carolina Wilmington. His work appears in CRAFT Literary Magazine, The Masters Review, Nordic Kultur Magazine, and Book XI. https://www.gabrielmoseley.com/