Writing Place 2021

By Alex Edwards

You know, they say the National Anthem of Israel was written by a man with a broken heart. You can’t write a song like that without having one; a woman must do it to you. It was Goddess Diviana, by the way.

And then there was Alex, centuries later, laid on his bed while shuffling tarot cards and holding them to his chest sentimentally. Could he have achieved alien contact through the tarot? Nevertheless, the show must go on, he thought. He picked up his guitar and looked at a plane ticket: 1 seat, two ways, Brisbane, Melbourne, Brisbane.

“Hello,” Goddess Hecate suddenly whispered, in the days when he returned home.

After such a successful performance, he met the 30s-something beautiful woman in a vibrant white toga. It felt like a kind of reward. Simultaneously, all her friends appeared and danced around his house.

That night, at a prominent music bar, as he strummed, she cooed side-stage, “You don’t need your medication. Just play.” Abruptly, before finishing his set, Alex walked off stage, wild-eyed; daemons flew in circles above his head. His show, a disaster.

That week, Alex met Achilles, who teleported to Russia to move around Alex’s girlfriend’s limbs. Alex could see it all from the park bench where he sat with goddess Diviana.

“I love you, Diviana,” he said.

After walking home and laying down on his bed, holding Dionysius and Demeter’s hands, Alex truly began to reverse his emotions; he suddenly started to scream with Dionysius inside his body. Like a cascade of fireworks in Alex’s living room, the Atlantians stormed in as a group, taunting him,

“We assaulted your girlfriend with extreme technology. We all did it together,” they said.

Petrified, Alex ran out the door, and through the streets of his neighbourhood, towards a quiet intersection to try and erase the sick feeling from his abdomen. Casting spell protections with water onto the bitumen, he saw in a flash in his imagination a gunshot – it was towards an American military man.

“Alex, I can explain what’s going on with you -” Boom! The soldier had been shot in the head.

Disoriented, Alex stumbled home and again lay on the bed where the Atlantians reached fists into his chest with their plasma silhouettes, squeezing his heart and stomach. He could see their silvery bodies, when suddenly the god Hercules threw him onto the kitchen linoleum, leaving only his holler… at the lifelong-top of his lungs for help, he yelled, “Diviana!”

Without warning, police and ambulance officers streamed into Alex’s house.

They’ll only get in the road, and won’t understand my struggle against Atlantis, he thought.

Goddess Brigid, and her partner Zander were knelt in Alex’s living room, while dressed in paramedic uniforms, ushering him into the ambulance. Diviana looked at him longingly in the long commute to the hospital, seated next to Alex, and no words were spoken until Goddess Athena met the Hospital Psychiatrist:

“I like crack, and all the hard drugs,” she said to the psychiatrist, thinking the shrink’s question was directed towards her.

Unexpectedly, Alex glowed yellow. Diviana had soul-ported into Alex’s stomach as they walked to the ward. In the mental health wing, she stayed there until breakfast, when she appeared twirling a spoon, seated next to Alex.

Alex would always remember her sullen gaze as she left the ward with the two guards. He was sure they had beat him enough to urinate blood into the toilet. He couldn’t remember what happened. Time was missing. But, he recounted to another psychiatrist that he felt fine, hiding everything, Hecate, Diviana, and Diviana’s spoon.

“You have paranoid schizophrenia,” the psychiatrist intoned, while love hearts danced around the old man’s head.

Driving home from the hospital, the computer voice in his brain wheeled, “You have been selected by Zion for a destiny, notwithstanding the fact that you are deficient.”

Once home, on hundreds of envelopes, Alex dictated the thoughts of Zion. He took breaks to watch movies with Diviana, and they roared laughter together. Quickly, though, things deteriorated as a dimly-lit military office came into view. Had Atlantis come back, in their full force anew? Alex wondered.

“We have a situation,” a general issued.

Gesticulations were exchanged, and a 7-foot tall soldier called Brian (and two other nameless guards) rendezvoused mysteriously in Alex’s house, where they claimed they would now be stationed.

“I’ve locked down the mechanism,” said David, a new character in Alex’s life. David alerted other military personnel, revealing that he was now in “body-share” with Alex, able to move his arms and legs with a visor – all the way from Nevada.

I hate David, Alex thought.

“Welcome to the first human pilot experiment in modern history, Alex,” said David.

The fan spun on Alex’s ceiling. It was as if the air circulated only to mimic the ambience of the psychic excruciation that never left, like a radio station always blaring in the mind.

“We might be the evilest military group in the world,” two new plain-clothes military women admitted, after spontaneously appearing in his basement where he rapped on the typewriter machine.

“We cut people, and then we flog them, and brain-wipe their memories. We already got you. We’ll get you forever.”

Alex wanted to smash her reading glasses. He was so injured by their experiment.

Weeks went by before Diviana returned to help Alex to purchase a chessboard so that they could conduct the “Judgment” project together. The Judgment project was Alex’s attempt to run a Biblical Judgment on Earth from his house. The good Atlantians still stood up for him.

Archangel Jophiel bounced up and down, while Claire and Christina (the two military women that he had met before) faced off against Brian, the 7-foot tall soldier. Brian was assigned a knight piece to show that he was the devil. He had killed and eaten a lot of people. Goddess Athena reminded Alex, he was not excluded from playing chess, “You’re the pawn that controls the world. You still have to carry on our quest, to vanquish the evil of Earth – just like Hecate told you.”

Timed passed, and Alex went to bed. I can defeat Satanism forever, he thought.

Merertha, a sixth-dimensional being, introduced herself to him in soul-share. Quickly thereafter, her consciousness was ported to the NSA to a biosynthetic mannequin. It had been invented to trap souls within it. Alex could hear Merertha seething at the torturers (who were fiddling with scalpels, drills, pliers, and worse). He fell asleep horrified and awoke to the smell of human flesh. Unsurprisingly, it was the odour of Claire.

“You can hold your cardigan and think of me,” she said.

It was a legitimate consolation, not because Claire was beautiful, but because she was a buoy in an ocean of Satanists. Sad, then, that she was replacing herself with two new employees in the programming project. Still, one last time, she walked alongside him to meet the new psychiatrist.

“You’re a good guy, with a good heart – you can live a decent life,” he harmonised.

“They gave me my anti-depressants back, Apollo,” Alex cheered after leaving – hoping no one would overhear him talking to the Greek god.

Diviana was working at the pharmacy and oddly didn’t pay any attention to Alex.

That evening, he escorted Brigid and Zander to a theme park, and caught the wrong bus home, ending up at the beach. As he sat with Ajax in the sand under the stars, who confessed his long-held dream to “god guide” Alex, Aphrodite marched in the Olympics, continents apart.

The famous goddess, hidden in plain sight. Freedom or Death, she thought, to spite the C.I.A. fracking operation to locate and pacify Atlantis.

The next day with Merertha, Aphrodite said, “Come and get us,” and sunk a basket with the ball Alex had carried for them.

They commenced a game with two soldiers from the installation and then blinked into nothingness upon its ending. The girls had won.

But it was a short triumph for Claire’s new co-workers, who were beginning to discover how evil the military installation was. Indeed… they had been assaulted. Wipe-recovery technology confirmed it.

Having tried to solace them, but discovering the footage of her mistreatment, another soldier, Julie, sped away into the desert in her van. The African-American, roughly in her 40’s, got as far as halfway to the perimeter before her tyres were shot out from a jeep. Achilles, behind the wheel. She was dragged by her hair back to the installation.

It would be years before the voices would finally quieten. The medication would work, and only ambivalent characters would remain. They still occasionally torture him.

Forevermore, they continued to have a staunch affinity for Israel.

Alex will always wonder where Diviana had gone. Did this gorgeous woman inspire the national anthem of Judea?

About Alex Edwards

Reputed “Sting of Oz” (FAQ Café, Moscow) in Russia, novelist and singer-songwriter Alex had returned home for further touring in 2015 before yielding to a creative sabbatical in 2016. Here he composed his debut novel “Maradha’s Game”, a legendary science-fiction classic, which at nearly 300,000 words is still being edited in 2021! Before these adventures, his successful east coast tours late 2015 helped cement his debut 20-track release “Flight Frost”. Personifying “one man and his guitar” (Tapio Ylinen, Eclipse Music), the tunesmith’s journey to “Fealty Fjords” (The 8-track sophomore 2021 EP release) continues, alongside many literary projects!

Back to Writing Place