Orphans on Granite Tides

A Metaphysical Grotesque by Adam S. Cantwell

The German watches the door. White faces rush by like bubbles.

The Russian emerges with the parcel under his arm. Raindrops darken the brown paper.

Inside the parcel, a silk-lined box; inside that, the ragged, stained pages of the Miwok’s manuscript. The cryptic memoir recounts the life and dreams of an obscure mystic—a childhood on the wild coast of America, at the edge of the earth; servitude on the Continent; flights to worlds within the world… It illuminates everything and nothing, it prefigures and obscures the new world forming beneath the fissured crust of 1939.

The German and the Russian have been sent after the manuscript and will judge whether it is authentic, or a late forgery, a hateful slander, or an epochal testament of planetary history. They will chase the dead savage’s words through Paris, to the edge of the precipice, and beyond.

The Miwok’s words would help them, would warn them, if the gulf separating them all could be bridged…